In keeping with a certain whinge of mine over the last week (see Greenwash, blackwash: two faces of conservation evil), here’s a brilliant pictorial comment from Pile Higher and Deeper on the way reporters try to sex up (i.e., sensationalise) science results. Is it really necessary to dumb it down to such an extent? Surely there must be a few punters that could do without the ooohs! and aaaahs! (or am I just being naïvely hopeful?).
© J. Cham
The Conservation Scholars series highlights leaders in conservation science and includes a small biography, a list of major scientific publications and a Q & A on each person’s particular area of expertise.
Our sixteenth Conservation Scholar needs little introduction because, well, he’s so famous (especially in Australia)! I cannot estimate how many times I’ve covered Professor Hugh Possingham’s and his colleagues’ research here on ConservationBytes, but suffice it to say it probably dominates the coverage (ok, I could have, but I couldn’t find the time). Affectionately known as the ‘Huge Possum’ for his brilliance, his effect on wide-reaching environmental policy and his no-bullshit approach to science, Hugh was awarded a coveted Federation Fellow by the Australian Research Council in 2007. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and one of the founding Editors-in-Chief of Conservation Letters (for which I have the honour of editing alongside him).
Biography
Born in 1962, Hugh accidentally completed Applied Mathematics at The University of Adelaide in 1984 (top of honours class of 20 students). After attaining a Rhodes Scholarship Hugh completed his DPhil at Oxford University in 1987. An ARC QEII Fellowship ANU in 1989 followed, then a postdoc with Jonathan Roughgarden at Stanford modeling barnacles. In 1990 he took a tenure-track position in Applied Mathematics. He became a Professor and Chair in 1995 and moves to become Head of the Ecology Centre at The University of Queensland in 2000. Hugh has been awarded: the POL Eureka Prize for Environmental Research, 1999, the inaugural Fenner medal for plant and animal biology from the Australian Academy of Sciences, 2000, the Australian Mathematical Society Medal, 2001, ARC Professorial Fellow, 2003, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, 2005, ARC Federation Fellow, 2006, Sherman Eureka Prize for Environmental Research, 2009. Hugh has over 290 publications, 4900 Web of Science citations and currently a lab of 32 students and staff. Work from his lab helped stop land clearing in Queensland and NSW securing at least 1 billion tonnes of CO2. Hugh has a variety of broader public roles advising policy makers and managers as he sits of 16 committees and boards including: The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists (founding member), Queensland Smart State Council, Chief Editor of Conservation letters, Council of the Australian Academy of Science, member of three NGO scientific advisory committees. The Possingham lab developed the most widely used conservation planning software in the world. Marxan was used to underpin the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef and is currently used in over 100 countries by over 2000 users – from the UK to Brazil. Australia is using Marxan to help it rezone its entire Exclusive Economic Zone (2% of planet). Hugh gave a plenary at the first Marxan conference in Vancouver in April 2007. A recent international plenary was at The Society for Conservation Biology meeting in Port Elizabeth, Sth Africa 2007 – decision theory to conservation scientists – and locally the Australian Society for Operations Research, 2009 – conservation theory to decision theorists. Recent media includes discussions of: triage, assisted colonization (Science policy forum), national biodiversity policy, declining woodland birds and the conservation of travelling stock routes in Australia. He suffers from obsessive bird watching.
Major Publications
Questions & Answers
1. You were recently quoted saying “If you don’t know what a differential equation is, you are not a scientist”. Can you describe the importance of mathematics in conservation biology and recommend what subjects in mathematics young conservationists should pursue?
All disciplines of science eventually get consumed by mathematics. This is a natural progression as they strive for prediction and utility. In 1994 it dawned on me that conservation research would remain fairly useless in practice unless it was embedded in a decision science framework with objectives, constraints, things we control and predictive models affected by those things we control. I have not changed my view since then. After a knowledge of decision sciences (optimisation mathematics and economics) a credible conservation researcher needs some differential equations, algebra, statistics (preferably Bayesian) and maybe something flashy things like graph theory. Conservation research without decision theory is pure conservation research, which is an oxymoron.
2. You’ve certainly tackled a lot of issues in your illustrious career, but you are probably best known for your work on reserve design algorithms and the software Marxan. Can you explain what reserve design algorithms are, why they’re needed, and how Marxan works?
That may be the most useful area of the lab’s research, however intellectually it is very straightforward – what is interesting is not always useful and what is useful is not always interesting. Marxan can be summarised in one sentence – get me a set of reasonably clumped sites that reserves a reasonable amount of a whole heap of biodiversity features (or surrogates of features) that we have data on while annoying as few people as possible. That is it – and it may ultimately alter the face of ten percent of the world. As for illustrious career … there are a few intellectual giants that aren’t so big I can still clamber over them to steal some ephemeral glory.
3. While most Australians might say they value biodiversity, our poor conservation record invalidates this assertion. What do you think are some practical (and realistic) ways we can encourage Joe Bloggs to invest in and protect biodiversity?
There seem to be two sorts of people that care for nature for its own sake. First there are those that love wilderness and large natural spaces, even if they don’t go there. These are the people who believe the Amazon is worth preserving because it is so huge, wild and diverse and that is all we need to know. Then there are the people interested in natural history. I think this a less fickle constituency, however their numbers in Australia are remarkably small. I would like to build on the latter – the love of nature for its own sake. It doesn’t matter how many media interviews I do extolling my love of nature, that doesn’t work. This probably requires activities that give more people a “hand-on” experience with nature; we probably need to get more people doing things like feeding birds. I used to say that bird feeding in Australia was stupid – I think I was wrong.
4. Effective conservation requires a lot more than science because it needs to alter human behaviour. One aspect here you’ve championed is effective allocation of conservation funds. How does one do this?
If you can shop you can wisely allocate conservation funds. All you need to know is price (usually well known), benefit to you (only you can determine that), and product reliability (read a consumer magazine). Combine the three and you are 90% there. Of course we delight in making it a lot more complex, sometimes with justification, but it is just shopping.
5. You’re a member of the well-known Wentworth Group. What do you do as a group?
The Wentworth Group has successfully championed major environmental policy reforms in Australia over the past few years. Some work is highly visible (work on water reform and land clearing), but other stuff is behind the scenes. I think it is a remarkable revolution in the way science can influence policy at a huge scale, and I can claim no credit for any of it.
6. If conservation triage was a corporation, you’d probably be its CEO. What is conservation triage to you, and how should it be approached?
Conservation triage is the same as resource allocation. Haven’t you read Madeleine’s 2008 TREE paper, Corey? If conservation planning and triage is just resource allocation, which is just prudent shopping, then my entire career boils down to six words: “the smart guide to biodiversity shopping”. And 90% was done by my lab members – it is all fairly embarrassing really.
[CJAB - I did, Hugh, I promise! I'm trying to bring my readers up to speed though ;-)]
7. Happiest greenie moments.
Playing a role in stopping broad-scale land clearing in Australia (= saving about 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere) and getting all of Australia’s waters rezoned (including the Great Barrier Reef).
8. Future aspirations.
End tropical deforestation. Stop over-grazing in much of Australia. Get the people of Australia to love biodiversity. See every family of bird.
Amen, brother.
Beware false prophets, and especially those masquerading as conservationists (or at least ‘green’) when they are not, in fact, doing anything for conservation at all. But this blog site isn’t about typical greenie evil-corporation-making-a-mess-of-the-Earth sermons (there are plenty of those); it’s instead about real conservation science that has/should/could have a real biodiversity benefits. This is why I highlight the bitey and the toothless together.
With the slow (painfully, inadequately, insufficiently slow) maturation of environmental awareness and the rising plight of biodiversity in general (including our own health and prosperity), it has become almost chic to embrace a so-called ‘green’ perspective. This approach has blown out into a full-scale business model where in many wealthier nations especially, it’s just plain good business to attract the green-conscious consumer to buy more ‘environmentally friendly’ products. Problem is, so many of these products are the farthest thing from green you can imagine (see examples here, here & here). This stimulated the environmentalist Jay Westerveld to coin the term greenwashing in 1986. Greenwashing is basically defined as activities that misleadingly give the impression of environmentally sound management that thereby deflect attention away from the continued pursuit of environmentally destructive activities.
Well, not that the problem has disappeared, or even dissipated (if anything, it’s growing), but I don’t want to focus on that here. Instead, I want to highlight a recent paper in which I was involved that outlines too how environmental groups can be guilty of almost the same sin – claiming businesses, practices, individuals, corporations, etc. are far more environmentally destructive than they really are. This, we termed blackwashing.
The paper by Koh and colleagues entitled Wash and spin cycle threats to tropical biodiversity just came out online in the journal Biotropica, and therein we describe the greenwashing-blackwashing twin conservation evils using the oil palm controversy as an excellent example case. Just in case you didn’t know, much of the tropical world (especially South East Asia) is undergoing massive conversion of native forests to oil palm plantations, to the overwhelming detriment of biodiversity. I’ve covered the issue in several posts on ConservationBytes.com before (see for example Tropical forests worth more standing, Indonesia’s precious peatlands under oil palm fire & More greenwashing from the Malaysian oil palm industry).
Briefly, we demonstrate how the palm oil industry is guilty of the following greenwashes:
On the either side, various environmental groups such as Greenpeace, have promoted the following blackwashes:
For details, see the paper online.
Now, I’d probably tend to believe some of the less outrageous claims made by some environmental groups because if anything, the state of biodiversity is probably overall worse than what most people realise. However, when environmental groups are exposed for exaggerations, or worse, lies, then their credibility goes out the window and even those essentially promoting their cause (e.g., conservation biologists like myself) will have nothing to do with them. The quasi-religious zealotry of anti-whaling campaigns is an example of a terrible waste of funds, goodwill and conservation resources that could be otherwise spent on real conservation gains. Instead, political stunts simply alienate people who would otherwise reasonably contribute to improving the state of biodiversity. Incidentally, an environmental advocacy group in Australia emailed me to support their campaign to highlight the plight of sharks. I am a firm supporter of better conservation of sharks (see recent paper and post about this here). However, when I read their campaign propaganda, the first sentence read:
I immediately distanced myself from them. This is a blatant lie and terrible over-exaggeration. Ninety per cent of sharks HAVE NOT been wiped out. Some localised depletions have occurred, and not one single shark species has been recorded going extinct since records began. While I agree the world has a serious shark problem, saying outrageous things like this will only serve to weaken your cause. My advice to any green group is to get your facts straight and avoid the sensationlist game – you won’t win it, and you probably won’t be successful in doing anything beneficial for the species you purport to save.
CJA Bradshaw
Koh, L., Ghazoul, J., Butler, R., Laurance, W., Sodhi, N., Mateo-Vega, J., & Bradshaw, C. (2009). Wash and Spin Cycle Threats to Tropical Biodiversity Biotropica DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2009.00588.x
The Conservation Scholars series highlights leaders in conservation science and includes a small biography, a list of major scientific publications and a Q & A on each person’s particular area of expertise.
Our fifteenth Conservation Scholar is a real stalwart in conservation science and its applications – Georgina Mace. She is famous for many things, although one thing in particular stands out – the IUCN Red List. We’re really lucky to have someone of Georgina’s calibre, highly demanding schedule and international reputation to agree to be highlighted on ConservationBytes.com, so I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did.
Biography
Georgina Mace was born and grew up in London, UK. After an undergraduate degree in Zoology at the University of Liverpool, she moved to do a PhD at the University of Sussex, working with Paul Harvey on comparative ecology in small mammals. After postdoctoral appointments in Washington DC and in Newcastle-upon-Type, she moved back to London where she has worked ever since. From 1986, she was a research fellow at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London and was involved in the earliest scientifically based conservation breeding programmes for rare species, based around genetic and demographic principles from population biology. It was this work that ultimately led to her leading the process to develop, test and document criteria for listing species on IUCN’s Red List of threatened species. This work started in the early 1990s, a first set of criteria were approved in 1994 and, following review and testing, a slightly different set were approved in 2000. These criteria are now used routinely be IUCN and have been increasingly adopted at national level. Subsequently, she was involved in the biodiversity elements of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, in the development of measures for the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010 target, and is now working on the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Her research has interwoven with these processes, involving testing the traits that contribute to threatened status in mammals, examining the impact of different species concepts on conservation planning, devising methods for testing the effectiveness of conservation projects, and most recently, developing trait-based approaches to assessing species vulnerability to climate change.
During the 1990s her work was supported by the Pew Scholars Program (1991-1994) and by a NERC Advanced Fellowship (1995-1999). In 2000 Georgina was appointed Director or Science at the Zoological Society of London where she led the 70+ researchers in the Institute of Zoology. In 2006 she moved to Imperial College London, first as Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology and later as Associate Head of the Division of Biology. She was awarded an OBE in 1998 and a CBE in 2007; elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002, and was the 2007 winner of the international Cosmos prize. She has served in a number of scientific societies having been Vice President of the British Ecological Society (2001-2004), President of the Society for Conservation Biology (2007-2009) and Vice Chair of the international programme on biodiversity science DIVERSITAS (2007-2010).
Georgina is married to Rod Evans and they have three children (Ben, Emma and Kate), all of whom have a healthy respect for the environment and commitment to working towards a better world, but seem to think that doing science is a hard way to go about it!
Major Publications
Questions and Answers
1. You were the architect for the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. This is clearly the world’s authority on threatened species listings. Can you explain how the Red List came about and describe the major challenges along the way?
The Red List had been around for a long time – since the mid 1960s at least. Initially it was a list of species nominated by experts as being at risk. In this way it raised the profile of the growing risks to species, but the way it was compiled meant that the species included were rather subjectively assessed, and species that were not on the list were not necessarily secure. As the Red List started to be used in both legislation and for conservation planning it became important that the listing process was more systematic and objective. This was when I became involved in around 1989. There were many challenges in getting the criteria established and that is why it took us over 10 years before there was a system that was approved by IUCN Council and used consistently for producing the IUCN Red List. I think one of the hardest things to deal with is that this is never going to be a perfect system – we wanted a process that was simple, could be applied even when we know rather little about a species, and would deal fairly with everything from mosses to elephants. Inevitably, some people feel the system gives the wrong answer for their species. All I can say is that we tried really hard to minimise the risk of wrong answers that would be damaging for species conservation. While acknowledging that the system will never be perfect, we think it is effective at sorting the species most likely to be at high risk from those that are not.
2. How do you define ‘biodiversity’, and what should we be focussing on in biodiversity assessments?
I like to use generic definitions for ‘biodiversity’ such as that adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity: the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part. This includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems. I like this because it emphasises the scope of biodiversity and the importance of interactions which gets missed out in some narrower definitions. Of course if you try to use this kind of definitions for assessment it becomes impossible. This is why we have ended up with long, long lists of indicators for the 2010 assessments. My personal preference would be to select a smaller number of measures that reflect what we really care about in biodiversity and use these as the core of our assessments.
3. What, in your opinion, is the biggest research gap in climate change research for biodiversity conservation?
I think that to a large degree the biology is missing! Many approaches to assessing the impacts of climate change tend to treat species and ecosystems as if they were just response variables in an environmental model. Yet we know that populations and communities have their own processes and internal dynamics that will determine how they respond to a changing environment and also make it quite difficult to generalise across systems and species. I fear we are over-estimating some risks, under-estimating others, but most of all forgetting about the biological processes that will allow biological adaptation (or maybe won’t allow it). Another important gap is a recognition in climate models that the biosphere plays a key role in the climate system – one that is not well represented at the moment and that could offer cheap, low-risk techniques for both mitigation and adaptation.
4. How do you mesh the quantification of ecosystem services with biodiversity assessments? Should we be reducing our emphasis on the latter and investing more effort in characterising the former?
I’m sure we have to do both ecosystem services and biodiversity. I don’t think that ecosystem services and biodiversity assessment are the same thing – there are ecosystem services that we need that rely hardly at all on biodiversity, and there are components of biodiversity that we should care about that do not clearly provide ecosystem services. I see ecosystem services at the end of a delivery chain to people from ecosystems and those ecosystems and their features and processes are intimately linked to biodiversity. But it becomes impossible hard and confusing if we don’t separate them out and think about both.
5. Given humanity’s appalling conservation track record to date, do you have an optimistic outlook for the future of biodiversity on which we depend?
Generally it is hard to be optimistic – we are not yet even embarking on doing the right things for the planet. And, as I think the negotiations to Copenhagen show, governments are simply not able to take the bold steps that are necessary. However, all the evidence to date is that when societies put their mind to solving a problem, they can generally do it. People are ingenious and determined and form a creative, problem-solving community, and so I believe that the means exist to solve even some very hard problems. I think the challenge is to break the problems down into manageable chunks and solve them – being careful not to set aside the difficult and important ones, and remembering that ultimately the benefits need to flow to all people and societies.
We do a lot in our lab to get our research results out to a wider community than just scientists – this blog is just one example of how we do that. But of course, we rely on the regular media (television, newspaper, radio) heavily to pick up our media releases (see a list here). I firmly believe it goes well beyond shameless self promotion – it’s a duty of every scientist I think to tell the world (i.e., more than just our colleagues) about what we’re being paid to do. And the masses are hungry for it.
However, the demise of the true ‘journalist’ (one who investigates a story – i.e., does ‘research’) in favour of the automaton ‘reporter’ (one who merely regurgitates, and then sensationalises, what he/she is told or reads) worldwide (and oh, how we are plagued with reporters and deeply in need of journalists in Australia!) means that there is some horrendous stories out there, especially on scientific issues. This is mainly because most reporters have neither the training nor capacity to understand what they’re writing about.
This issue is also particular poignant for the state of the environment, climate change and biodiversity loss – I’ve blogged about this before (see Poor media coverage promotes environmental apathy and untruths).
But after a 30-minute telephone interview with a very friendly American food journalist yesterday, I expected a reasonable report on the issue of frog consumption because, well, I explained many things to her as best I could. What was eventually published was appalling.
Now, in all fairness, I think she was trying to do well, but it’s as though she didn’t even listen to me. The warning bells should have rung loudly when she admitted she hadn’t read my blog “in detail” (i.e., not at all?). You can read the full article here, but let me just point out some of the inconsistencies:
Ah, no. I told her that between 30 and 50 % of frogs could be threatened with extinction (~30 % officially from the IUCN Red List). It could be as much as half given the paucity of information on so many species. A great example of reporter cherry-picking to add sensationalism.
Again, no, I didn’t. I clearly told her that the number one, way-out-in-front cause of frog declines worldwide is habitat loss. I mentioned chytrid fungus as another major contributor, and that climate change exacerbates the lot. Harvesting pressure is a big unknown in terms of relative impact, but I suspect it’s large.
Hmmm. One man? I had a great team of colleagues co-write the original paper in Conservation Biology. I wasn’t even the lead author! Funny how suddenly I’m a lone wolf on a ‘campaign’. Bloody hell.
“Aghast”, was I? I don’t recall being particularly emotional when I told her that I found a photo of Barack Obama eating frog legs during his election campaign. I merely pointed this out to show that the product is readily available in the USA. I also mentioned absolutely nothing about whales or their loins.
So, enough of my little humorous whinge. My point is really that there are plenty of bad journalists out there with little interest in reporting the truth on environmental issues (tell us something we don’t know, Bradshaw). If you want to read a good story about the frog consumption issue, check out a real journalist’s perspective here.
I know I’ve blogged recently about this, but The Adelaidean did a nice little article that I thought I’d reproduce here. The source can be found here.
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© R. Harcourt
Quite some time ago my colleague and (now former) postdoctoral fellow, Iain Field, and I sat down to examine in gory detail the extent of the threat to global populations of sharks, rays and chimaeras (chondrichthyans). I don’t think we quite realised the mammoth task we had set ourselves. Several years and nearly a hundred pages later, we have finally achieved our goal.
Introducing the new paper in Advances in Marine Biology entitled Susceptibility of sharks, rays and chimaeras to global extinction by Iain Field, Mark Meekan, Rik Buckworth and Corey Bradshaw.
The paper covers the following topics:
- Niche breadth
- Age and growth
- Reproduction and survival
- Fishing
- Beach meshing
- Habitat loss
- Pollution and non-indigenous species
- Drivers of threat risk in chondrichthyans and teleosts
- Global distribution of threatened chondrichthyan taxa
- Ecological, life history and human-relationship attributes
- Threat risk analysis
- Relative threat risk of chondrichthyans and teleosts
- Ecosystem roles of predators
- Predator loss in the marine realm
- Ecosystem roles of chondrichthyans
- Role of fisheries in future chondrichthyan extinctions
- Climate change
- Extinction synergies
- Research needs
As mentioned, quite a long analysis of the state of sharks worldwide. Bottom line? Well, as most of you might already know sharks aren’t doing too well worldwide, with around 52 % listed on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. This compares interestingly to bony fishes (teleosts) that, although having only 8 % of all species Red-Listed, are generally in higher-threat Red List categories. We found that body size (positively) and geographic range (negatively) correlated with threat risk in both groups, but Red-Listed bony fishes were still more likely to be categorised as threatened after controlling for these effects.
In some ways this sort of goes against the notion that sharks are inherently more extinction-prone than other fish – a common motherhood statement seen at the beginning of almost all papers dealing with shark threats. What it does say though is that because sharks are on average larger and less fecund than your average fish, they tend to bounce back from declines more slowly, so they are more susceptible to rapid environmental change than your average fish. Guess what? We’re changing the environment pretty rapidly.
We also determined the spatial distribution of threat, and found that Red-Listed species are clustered mainly in (1) south-eastern South America; (2) western Europe and the Mediterranean; (3) western Africa; (4) South China Sea and South East Asia and (5) south-eastern Australia.
© W. White
Now, what are the implications for the loss of these species? As I’ve blogged recently, the reduction in predators in general can be a bad thing for ecosystems, and sharks are probably some of the best examples of ecosystem structural engineers we know (i.e., eating herbivores; ‘controlling’ prey densities, etc.). So, we should be worried when sharks start to disappear. One thing we also discovered is that we still have a rudimentary understanding of how climate change will affect sharks, the ways in which they structure ecosystems, and how they respond to coastal development. Suffice it to say though that generally speaking, things are not rosy if you’re a shark.
We end off with a recommendation we’ve been promoting elsewhere – we should be managing populations using the minimum viable population (MVP) size concept. Making sure that there are a lot of large, well-connected populations around will be the best insurance against extinction.
I.C. Field, M.G. Meekan, R.C. Buckworth, & C.J.A. Bradshaw (2009). Susceptibility of Sharks, Rays and Chimaeras to Global Extinction Advances in Marine Biology, 56, 275-363 : 10.1016/S0065-2881(09)56004-X
Here’s a little story for you about how a casual chat over a glass of wine (or many) can lead to great scientific endeavours.
A few years ago I was sitting in the living room of my good friends Noel Preece and Penny van Oosterzee in Darwin chatting about life, the universe, and everything. They rather casually mentioned that they would be selling their environmental consulting company and their house and moving to the Queensland rain forest. Ok – sounded like a pretty hippy thing to do when you’re thinking about ‘retiring’ (only from the normal grindstone, at least). But it wasn’t about the easy life away from it all (ok, partially, perhaps) – they wanted to do something with their reasonably large (181 ha), partially deforested (51-ha paddock) property investment. By ’something’, I mean science.
So they asked me – how would we go about getting money to investigate the best way to reforest a tropical rain forest? I had no idea. As it turns out, no one really knows how to restore rain forests properly. Sure, planting trees happens a lot, but the random, willy-nilly, unquantified ways in which it is done means that no one can tell you what the biggest biodiversity bang for your buck is, or even if it can compete on the carbon sequestration front.
Why carbon sequestration? Well, in case you’ve had your head up your bum for the last decade, one of the major carbon mitigating schemes going is the offset idea – for every tonne of carbon you emit as a consumer, you (or more commonly, someone else you pay) plant a certain number of trees (because trees need carbon to grow and so suck it out of the atmosphere). Nice idea, but if you deforest native ecosystems just to bash up quick-growing monoculture plantations of (usually) exotic species with little benefit to native biota, biodiversity continues to spiral down the extinction vortex. So, there has to be a happy medium, and there has to be a way to measure it.
So I said to Penny and Noel “Why don’t we bash together a proposal and get some experts in the field involved and submit it to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for funding?” They thought that was a smashing idea, and so we did.
Fast forward a few years and … success! The Thiaki Project was born (‘Thiaki’ is the name of the Creek flowing through the property north of Atherton – seems to be of Greek origin). We were extremely lucky to find a new recruit to the University of Queensland, Dr. Margie Mayfield (who worked previously with Paul Ehrlich), who was not only an expert in the area of tropical reforestation for biodiversity, she also had the time and energy to lead the project. We garnered several other academic and industry partners and came up with a pretty sexy experiment that is just now getting underway thanks to good old Mr. ARC.
The project is fairly ambitious, even though the experiments per se are fairly straight forward. We’re using a randomised block design where we are testing 3 tree diversity treatments (monoculture, 1 species each from 6 families, and 5 species each from those same 6 families) and two planting densities (high and low). The major objective is to see what combination of planting density and native tree species provides the most habitat for the most species. We’re starting small, looking mainly at various insects as they start to use the newly planted blocks, but might expand the assessments (before planting and after) to reptiles, amphibians and possibly birds later on.
But we’re not stopping there – we were fortunate enough to get get a clever soil scientist, Dr. David Chittleborough of the University of Adelaide, involved so we could map the change in soil carbon during the experiment. Our major challenge is to find the right combination of tree species and planting techniques that restore native biodiversity the most effectively, all the while maximising carbon sequestration from the growing forest. And of course, we’re trying to do this as most cost-effectively as we can – measuring the relative costs will give landowners contemplating reforestation the scale of expenditures expected.
I’m pretty proud of what Margie, Noel, Penny and the rest of the team have accomplished so far, and what’s planned. Certainly the really exciting results are years away yet, but stay tuned – Thiaki could become the model for tropical reforestation worldwide. Follow the Thiaki Project website for regular updates.
I’d also love to recreate the Thiaki Project in southern Australia because as it turns out, no one knows how to maximise biodiversity and carbon sequestration for the lowest cost in temperate reforestation projects either. All we need is a few hundred hectares of deforested land (shouldn’t be hard to find), about $1 million to start, and a bit of time. Any takers?
© C. Madden
© ABC 2009
Yesterday I was asked to do a quick interview on ABC television (Midday Report) about the release of the 2009 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. I’ve blogged about the importance of the Red List before, but believe we have a lot more to do with species assessments and getting prioritisation right with respect to minimum viable population size. Have a listen to the interview itself, and read the IUCN’s media release reproduced below.
My basic stance is that we’ve only just started to assess the number of species on the planet (under 50000), yet there are many millions of species still largely under-studied and/or under-described (e.g., extant species richness = > 4 million protists, 16600 protozoa, 75000-300000 helminth parasites, 1.5 million fungi, 320000 plants, 4-6 million arthropods, > 6500 amphibians, 10000 birds and > 5000 mammals – see Bradshaw & Brook 2009 J Cosmol for references). What we’re looking at here is a refinement of knowledge (albeit a small one). We are indeed in the midst of the Anthropocene mass extinction event – there is nothing ‘looming’ about it. We are essentially losing species faster than we can assess them. I believe it’s important to make this clearer to those not working directly in the field of biodiversity conservation.
Extinction crisis continues apace – IUCN
Gland, Switzerland, 3 November, 2009 (IUCN) – The latest update of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ shows that 17,291 species out of the 47,677 assessed species are threatened with extinction.
The results reveal 21 percent of all known mammals, 30 percent of all known amphibians, 12 percent of all known birds, and 28 percent of reptiles, 37 percent of freshwater fishes, 70 percent of plants, 35 percent of invertebrates assessed so far are under threat.
“The scientific evidence of a serious extinction crisis is mounting,” says Jane Smart, Director of IUCN’s Biodiversity Conservation Group. “January sees the launch of the International Year of Biodiversity. The latest analysis of the IUCN Red List shows the 2010 target to reduce biodiversity loss will not be met. It’s time for governments to start getting serious about saving species and make sure it’s high on their agendas for next year, as we’re rapidly running out of time.”
Of the world’s 5,490 mammals, 79 are Extinct or Extinct in the Wild, with 188 Critically Endangered, 449 Endangered and 505 Vulnerable. The Eastern Voalavo (Voalavo antsahabensis) appears on the IUCN Red List for the first time in the Endangered category. This rodent, endemic to Madagascar, is confined to montane tropical forest and is under threat from slash-and-burn farming.
There are now 1,677 reptiles on the IUCN Red List, with 293 added this year. In total, 469 are threatened with extinction and 22 are already Extinct or Extinct in the Wild. The 165 endemic Philippine species new to the IUCN Red List include the Panay Monitor Lizard (Varanus mabitang), which is Endangered. This highly-specialized monitor lizard is threatened by habitat loss due to agriculture and logging and is hunted by humans for food. The Sail-fin Water Lizard (Hydrosaurus pustulatus) enters in the Vulnerable category and is also threatened by habitat loss. Hatchlings are heavily collected both for the pet trade and for local consumption.
“The world’s reptiles are undoubtedly suffering, but the picture may be much worse than it currently looks,” says Simon Stuart, Chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. “We need an assessment of all reptiles to understand the severity of the situation but we don’t have the $2-3 million to carry it out.”
The IUCN Red List shows that 1,895 of the planet’s 6,285 amphibians are in danger of extinction, making them the most threatened group of species known to date. Of these, 39 are already Extinct or Extinct in the Wild, 484 are Critically Endangered, 754 are Endangered and 657 are Vulnerable.
The Kihansi Spray Toad (Nectophrynoides asperginis) has moved from Critically Endangered to Extinct in the Wild. The species was only known from the Kihansi Falls in Tanzania, where it was formerly abundant with a population of at least 17,000. Its decline is due to the construction of a dam upstream of the Kihansi Falls that removed 90 percent of the original water flow to the gorge. The fungal disease chytridiomycosis was probably responsible for the toad’s final population crash.
The fungus also affected the Rabb’s Fringe-limbed Treefrog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum), which enters the Red List as Critically Endangered. It is known only from central Panama. In 2006, the chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) was reported in its habitat and only a single male has been heard calling since. This species has been collected for captive breeding efforts but all attempts have so far failed.
Of the 12,151 plants on the IUCN Red List, 8,500 are threatened with extinction, with 114 already Extinct or Extinct in the Wild. The Queen of the Andes (Puya raimondii) has been reassessed and remains in the Endangered category. Found in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, it only produces seeds once in 80 years before dying. Climate change may already be impairing its ability to flower and cattle roam freely among many colonies, trampling or eating young plants.
There are now 7,615 invertebrates on the IUCN Red List this year, 2,639 of which are threatened with extinction. Scientists added 1,360 dragonflies and damselflies, bringing the total to 1,989, of which 261 are threatened. The Giant Jewel (Chlorocypha centripunctata), classed as Vulnerable, is found in southeast Nigeria and southwest Cameroon and is threatened by forest destruction.
Scientists also added 94 molluscs, bringing the total number assessed to 2,306, of which 1,036 are threatened. Seven freshwater snails from Lake Dianchi in Yunnan Province, China, are new to the IUCN Red List and all are threatened. These join 13 freshwater fishes from the same area, 12 of which are threatened. The main threats are pollution, introduced fish species and overharvesting.
There are now 3,120 freshwater fishes on the IUCN Red List, up 510 species from last year. Although there is still a long way to go before the status all the world’s freshwater fishes is known, 1,147 of those assessed so far are threatened with extinction. The Brown Mudfish (Neochanna apoda), found only in New Zealand, has been moved from Near Threatened to Vulnerable as it has disappeared from many areas in its range. Approximately 85-90 percent of New Zealand’s wetlands have been lost or degraded through drainage schemes, irrigation and land development.
“Creatures living in freshwater have long been neglected. This year we have again added a large number of them to the IUCN Red List and are confirming the high levels of threat to many freshwater animals and plants. This reflects the state of our precious water resources. There is now an urgency to pursue our effort but most importantly to start using this information to move towards a wise use of water resources,” says Jean-Christophe Vié, Deputy Head of the IUCN Species Programme.
“This year’s IUCN Red List makes for sobering reading,” says Craig Hilton-Taylor, Manager of the IUCN Red List Unit. “These results are just the tip of the iceberg. We have only managed to assess 47,663 species so far; there are many more millions out there which could be under serious threat. We do, however, know from experience that conservation action works so let’s not wait until it’s too late and start saving our species now.”
The status of the Australian Grayling (Prototroctes maraena), a freshwater fish, has improved as a result of conservation efforts. Now classed as Near Threatened as opposed to Vulnerable, the population has recovered thanks to fish ladders which have been constructed over dams to allow migration, enhanced riverside vegetation and the education of fishermen, who now face heavy penalties if found with this species.
A quick post to talk about a subject I’m more and more interested in – the direct link between environmental degradation (including biodiversity loss) and human health.
To many conservationists, people are the problem, and so they focus naturally on trying to maintain biodiversity in spite of human development and spread. Well, it’s 60+ years since we’ve been doing ‘conservation biology’ and biodiversity hasn’t been this badly off since the Cretaceous mass extinction event 146-64 million years ago. We now sit squarely within the geological era more and more commonly known as the ‘Anthropocene’, so if we don’t consider people as an integral part of any ecosystem, then we are guaranteed to fail biodiversity.
I haven’t posted in a week because I was in Shanghai attending the rather clumsily entitled “Thematic Reference Group (TRG) on Environment, Agriculture and Infectious Disease’, which is a part of the UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/World Health Organization Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) (what a mouthful that is). What’s this all about and why is a conservation ecologist (i.e., me) taking part in the group?
It’s taken humanity a while to realise that what we do to the planet, we eventually end up doing to ourselves. The concept of ecosystem services1 demonstrates this rather well – our food, weather, wealth and well-being are all derived from healthy, functioning ecosystems. When we start to bugger up the inter-species relationships that define one element of an ecosystem, then we hurt ourselves. I’ve blogged about this topic a few times before with respect to flooding, pollination, disease emergence and carbon sequestration.
Our specific task though on the TRG is to define the links between environmental degradation, agriculture, poverty and infectious disease in humans. Turns out, there are quite a few examples of how we’re rapidly making ourselves more susceptible to killer infectious diseases simply by our modification of the landscape and seascape.
Some examples are required to illustrate the point. Schistosomiasis is a snail-borne fluke that infects millions worldwide, and it is on the rise again from expanding habitat of its host due to poor agricultural practices, bad hygiene, damming of large river systems and climate warming. Malaria too is on the rise, with greater and greater risk in the endemic areas of its mosquito hosts. Chagas (a triatomine bug-borne trypanosome) is also increasing in extent and risk. Some work I’m currently doing under the auspices of the TRG is also showing some rather frightening correlations between the degree of environmental degradation within a country and the incidence of infectious disease (e.g., HIV, malaria, TB), non-infectious disease (e.g., cancer, cardiovascular disease) and indices of life expectancy and child mortality.
I won’t bore you with more details of the group because we are still drafting a major World Health Organization report on the issues and research priorities. Suffice it to say that if we want to convince policy makers that resilient functioning ecosystems with healthy biodiversity are worth saving, we have to show them the link to infectious disease in humans, and how this perpetuates poverty, rights injustices, gender imbalances and ultimately, major conflicts. An absolute pragmatist would say that the value of keeping ecosystems intact for this reason alone makes good economic sense (treating disease is expensive, to say the least). A humanitarian would argue that saving human lives by keeping our ecosystems intact is a moral obligation. As a conservation biologist, I argue that biodiversity, human well-being and economies will all benefit if we get this right. But of course, we have a lot of work to do.
1Although Bruce Wilcox (another of the TRG expert members), who I will be highlighting soon as a Conservation Scholar, challenges the notion of ecosystem services as a tradeable commodity and ’service’ as defined. More on that topic soon.
I love these sorts of experiments. Ecology (and considering conservation ecology a special subset of the larger discipline) is a messy business, mainly because ecosystems are complex, non-linear, emergent, interactive, stochastic and meta-stable entities that are just plain difficult to manipulate experimentally. Therefore, making inference of complex ecological processes tends to be enhanced when the simplest components are isolated.
Enter the ‘mini-ecosystem-in-a-box’ approach to ecological research. I’ve blogged before about some clever experiments to examine the role of connectivity among populations in mitigating (or failing to mitigate) extinction risk, and alluded to others indicating how harvest reserves work to maximise population persistence. This latest microcosm experiment is another little gem and has huge implications for conservation.
A fairly long-standing controversy in conservation biology, and in invasive species biology in particular, is whether intact ecosystems are in any way more ‘resilient’ to invasion by alien species (the latter most often being deliberately or inadvertently introduced by humans – think of Australia’s appalling feral species problems; e.g., buffalo, foxes and cats, weeds). Many believe by default that more ‘pristine’ (i.e., less disturbed by humans) communities will naturally provide more ecological checks against invasives because there are more competitors, more specialists and more predators. However, considering the ubiquity of invasives around the world, this assumption has been challenged vehemently.
The paper I’m highlighting today uses the microcosm experimental approach to show how native predators, when abundant, can reduce the severity of an invasion. Using a system of two mosquito species (one ‘native’ – what’s ‘native’ in a microcosm? [another subject] – and one ‘invasive’) and a native midge predator, Juliano and colleagues demonstrate in their paper Your worst enemy could be your best friend: predator contributions to invasion resistance and persistence of natives that predators are something you want to keep around.
In short, they found little evidence of direct competition between the two mosquitoes in terms of abundance when placed together without predators, but when the midges were added, the persistence of the invasive mosquito was reduced substantially. Of course, the midge predators did do their share of damage on the native mosquitoes in terms of reducing the latter’s abundance, but through a type of competitive release from their invasive counterparts, the midges’ reduction of the invasive species left the native mosquito free to develop faster (i.e., more per capita resources).
Such a seemingly academic result has huge conservation implications. In most systems, predators are some of the largest and slowest-reproducing species, so they are characteristically the first to feel the hammer of human damage. From bears to sharks, and tigers to wolves, big, charismatic predators are on the wane worldwide. Juliano and colleagues’ nice experimental work with insects reminds us that keeping functioning native ecosystems intact from all trophic perspectives is imperative.
Juliano, S., Lounibos, L., Nishimura, N., & Greene, K. (2009). Your worst enemy could be your best friend: predator contributions to invasion resistance and persistence of natives Oecologia DOI: 10.1007/s00442-009-1475-x
I just returned from a week-long scientific mission in China sponsored by the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I was invited to attend a special symposium on Marine and Deltaic Systems where research synergies between Australian and Chinese scientists were to be explored. The respective academies really rolled out the red carpet for the 30 or so Australian scientists on board, so I feel very honoured to have been invited.
During our marine workshop, one of my Chinese counterparts, Dongyan Liu from the Yantai Institute for Coastal Zone Research, presented a brilliant piece of ecological sleuthing that I must share with readers of ConservationBytes.com.
The first time you go to China the thing that strikes you is that everything is big – big population, big cities, big buildings, big projects, big budgets and big, big, big environmental problems. After many years of overt environmental destruction in the name of development, the Chinese government (aided by some very capable scientists) is now starting to address the sins of the past.
Liu and colleagues published their work earlier this year in Marine Pollution Bulletin in a paper entitled World’s largest macroalgal bloom caused by expansion of seaweed aquaculture in China, which describes a bloody massive outbreak of a particularly nasty ‘green tide’.
What’s a ‘green tide’? In late June 2008 in the coastal city of Qingdao not far from Beijing (and just before the 2008 Olympics), a whopping 1 million tonnes of green muck washed up along approximately 400 km2 of coastline. It took 10,000 volunteers 2 weeks to clean up the mess. At the time, many blamed the rising eutrophication of coastal China as the root cause, and a lot of people got their arse kicked over it. However, the reality was that it wasn’t so simple.
The Yellow Sea abutting this part of the Chinese coast is so named because of its relatively high productivity. Warm waters combined with good mixing mean that there are plenty of essential nutrients for green things to grow. So, adding thousands of tonnes of fertilisers from Chinese agricultural run-off seems like a logical explanation for the bloom.
Qingdao green tide 2008 © Elsevier
However, it turns out that the bulk of the green slime was comprised of a species called Enteromorpha prolifera, and it just so happens that this particularly unsavoury seaweed loves to grow on the infrastructure used for the aquaculture of nori (a.k.a. amanori or zicai) seaweed (mainly, Porphyra yezoensis). Problem is, P. yezoensis is grown mainly on the coast hundreds of kilometres to the south.
Liu and colleagues examined both satellite imagery and detailed oceanographic data from the period prior to the green tide and not only spotted green splotches many kilometres long, they also determined that the current flow and wind direction placed the trajectory of any green slime mats straight for Qingdao.
So, how does it happen? Biofouling by E. prolifera on P. yezoensis aquaculture frames is dealt with mainly by manual cleaning and then dumping the unwanted muck on the tidal flats. When the tide comes back in, it washes many thousands of kilos of this stuff back out to sea, which then accumulates in rafts and continues to grow in the warm, rich seas. Subsequent genetic work also confirmed that the muck at sea was the same stock as the stuff growing on the aquaculture frames.
Apart from some lovely sleuthing work, the implications are pretty important from a biodiversity perspective. Massive eutrophication coupled with aquaculture that inadvertently spawns a particularly nasty biofouling species is a good recipe for oxygen depletion in areas where the eventual slime monster starts to decay. This can lead to so-called ‘dead’ zones that can kill off huge numbers of marine species. So, the proper management of aquaculture in the hungry Goliath that is China becomes essential to reduce the incidence of dead zones.
Fortunately, it looks like Liu and colleagues’ work is being taken seriously by the Chinese government who is now contemplating financial support for aquaculturists to clean their infrastructure properly without dumping the sludge to sea. A simple policy shift could save a lot of species, a lot of money, and a lot of embarrassment (not to mention prevent a lot of bad smells).
Liu, D., Keesing, J., Xing, Q., & Shi, P. (2009). World’s largest macroalgal bloom caused by expansion of seaweed aquaculture in China Marine Pollution Bulletin, 58 (6), 888-895 DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2009.01.013
The second-to-last issue in 2009 (October) of Conservation Letters is now out. Click here for full access.
Household goods made of non-timber forest products. © N. Sasaki
Papers in this issue:
Cronus
Bit of a strange one for you today, but here’s a post I hope you’ll enjoy.
My colleague, Barry Brook, and I recently published a paper in the very new and perhaps controversial online journal , the Journal of Cosmology. Cosmology? According to the journal, ‘cosmology’ is:
“the study and understanding of existence in its totality, encompassing the infinite and eternal, and the origins and evolution of the cosmos, galaxies, stars, planets, earth, life, woman and man”.
The journal publishes papers dealing with ‘cosmology’ and is a vehicle for those who wish to publish on subjects devoted to the study of existence in its totality.
Ok. Quite an aim.
Our paper is part of the November (second ever) issue of the journal entitled Asteroids, Meteors, Comets, Climate and Mass Extinctions, and because we were the first to submit, we managed to secure the first paper in the issue.
Our paper, entitled The Cronus hypothesis – extinction as a necessary and dynamic balance to evolutionary diversification, introduces a new idea in the quest to find that perfect analogy for understanding the mechanisms dictating how life on our planet has waxed and waned over the billions of years since it first appeared.
Gaia
In the 1960s, James Lovelock conceived the novel idea of Gaia – that the Earth functions like a single, self-regulating organism where life itself interacts with the physical environment to maintain conditions favourable for life (Gaia was the ancient Greeks’ Earth mother goddess). Embraced, contested, denounced and recently re-invigorated, the idea has evolved substantially since it first appeared. More recently (this year, in fact), Peter Ward countered the Gaia hypothesis with his own Greek metaphor – the Medea hypothesis. Essentially this view holds that life instead ‘seeks’ to destroy itself in an anti-Gaia manner (Medea was the siblicidal wife of Jason of the Argonauts). Ward described his Medea hypothesis as “Gaia’s evil twin”.
One can marvel at the incredible diversity of life on Earth (e.g., conservatively, > 4 million protists, 16600 protozoa, 75000-300000 helminth parasites, 1.5 million fungi, 320000 plants, 4-6 million arthropods, > 6500 amphibians, 10000 birds and > 5000 mammals) and wonder that there might be something in the ‘life makes it easier for life’ idea underlying Gaia. However, when one considers that over 99 % of all species that have ever existed are today extinct, then a Medea perspective might dominate.
Medea
Enter Cronus. Here we posit a new way of looking at the tumultuous history of life and death on Earth that effectively relegates Gaia and Medea to opposite ends of a spectrum. Cronus (patricidal son of Gaia overthrown by his own son, Zeus, and banished to Hades) treats speciation and extinction as birth and death in a ‘metapopulation’ of species assemblages split into biogeographic realms. Catastrophic extinction events can be brought about via species engineering their surroundings by passively modifying the delicate balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane – indeed, humans might be the next species to fall victim to our own Medean tendencies. But extinction opens up new niches that eventually elicit speciation, and under conditions of relative environmental stability, specialists evolve because they are (at least temporarily) competitive under those conditions. When conditions change again, extinction ensues because not all can adapt quickly enough. Just as all individuals born in a population must eventually die, extinction is a necessary termination.
We think the Cronus metaphor has a lot of advantages over Gaia and Medea. The notion of a community of species as a population of selfish individuals retains the Darwinian view of contestation; self-regulation in Cronus occurs naturally as a result of extinction modifying the course of future evolution. Cronus also makes existing mathematical tools developed for metapopulation theory amenable to broader lines of inquiry.
For example, species as individuals with particular ‘mortality’ (extinction) rates, and lineages with particular ‘birth’ (speciation) rates, could interact and disperse among ‘habitats’ (biogeographical realms). ‘Density’ feedback could be represented as competitive exclusion or symbioses. As species dwindle, feedbacks such as reduced community resilience that further exacerbate extinction risk (Medea-like phase), and stochastic fluctuation around a ‘carrying capacity’ (niche saturation) arising when environmental conditions are relatively stable is the Gaia-like phase. Our Cronus framework is also scale-invariant – it could be applied to microbial diversity on another organism right up to inter-planetary exchange of life (panspermia).
What’s the relevance to conservation? We’re struggling to prevent extinction, so understanding how it works is an essential first step. Without the realisation that extinction is necessary (albeit, at rates preferably slower than they are currently), we cannot properly implement conservation triage, i.e., where do we invest in conservation and why?
We had fun with this, and I hope you enjoy it too.
Bradshaw, C.J.A., & Brook, B.W. (2009). The Cronus Hypothesis – extinction as a necessary and dynamic balance to evolutionary diversification Journal of Cosmology, 2, 201-209 Other: http://journalofcosmology.com/Extinction100.html
Ah, it doesn’t go away, does it? Or at least, we won’t let it.
That concept of ‘how many is enough?’ in conservation biology, the so-called ‘minimum viable population size‘, is enough to drive some conservation practitioners batty.
How many times have we heard the (para-) phrase: “It’s simply impractical to bring populations of critically endangered species up into the thousands”?
Well, my friends, if you’re not talking thousands, you’re wasting everyone’s time and money. You are essentially managing for extinction.
Our new paper out online in Biological Conservation entitled Pragmatic population viability targets in a rapidly changing world (Traill et al.) shows that populations of endangered species are unlikely to persist in the face of global climate change and habitat loss unless they number around 5000 mature individuals or more.
After several meta-analytic, time series-based and genetic estimates of the magic minimum number all agreeing, we can be fairly certain now that if a population is much less than several thousands (median = 5000), its likelihood of persisting in the long run in the face of normal random variation is pretty small.
We conclude essentially that many conservation biologists routinely underestimate or ignore the number of animals or plants required to prevent extinction. In fact, aims to maintain tens or hundreds of individuals, when thousands are actually needed, are simply wasting precious and finite conservation resources. Thus, if it is deemed unrealistic to attain such numbers, we essentially advise that in most cases conservation triage should be invoked and the species in question be abandoned for better prospects
A long-standing idea in species restoration programs is the so-called ‘50/500’ rule; this states that at least 50 adults are required to avoid the damaging effects of inbreeding, and 500 to avoid extinctions due to the inability to evolve to cope with environmental change. Our research suggests that the 50/500 rule is at least an order of magnitude too small to stave off extinction.
This does not necessarily imply that populations smaller than 5000 are doomed. But it does highlight the challenge that small populations face in adapting to a rapidly changing world.
We are battling to prevent a mass extinction event in the face of a growing human population and its associated impact on the planet, but the bar needs to be a lot higher. However, we shouldn’t necessarily give up on critically endangered species numbering a few hundred of individuals in the wild. Acceptance that more needs to be done if we are to stop ‘managing for extinction’ should force decision makers to be more explicit about what they are aiming for, and what they are willing to trade off, when allocating conservation funds.
(with thanks to Lochran Traill, Barry Brook and Dick Frankham)
Traill, L.W., Brook, B.W., Frankham, R.R., & Bradshaw, C.J.A. (2009). Pragmatic population viability targets in a rapidly changing world Biological Conservation DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2009.09.001
I’m going to do a double review here of two papers currently online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. I’m lumping them together because they both more or less challenge the pervasive conservation/restoration paradigm that connectivity is the key to reducing extinction risk. It’s just interesting (and slightly amusing) that the two were published in the same journal and at about the same time, but by two different groups.
From our own work looking at the correlates of extinction risk (measured mainly by proxy as threat risk), the range of a population (i.e., the amount of area and number of habitats it covers) is the principal determinant of risk – the smaller your range, the greater your chance of shuffling off this mortal coil (see also here). This is, of course, because a large range usually means that you have some phenotypic plasticity in your habitat requirements, you can probably disperse well, and your not going to succumb to localised ‘catastrophes’ as often. It also probably means (but not always) that your population size increases as your range size increases; as we all know, populations must be beyond their minimum viable population size to have a good chance of persisting random demographic and environmental vagaries.
Well, the two papers in question, ‘Both population size and patch quality affect local extinctions and colonizations‘ by Franzén & Nilssen and ‘Environment, but not migration rate, influences extinction risk in experimental metapopulations‘ by Griffen & Drake, show that connectivity (i.e., the probability that populations are connected via migration) are probably the least important components in the extinction-persistence game.
Using a solitary bee (Andrena hattorfiana) metapopulation in Sweden, Franzén & Nilssen show that population size and food patch quality (measured by number of pollen-producing plants) were directly (but independently) correlated with extinction risk. Bigger populations in stable, high-quality patches persisted more readily. However, connectivity between patches was uncorrelated with risk.
Griffen & Drake took quite a different approach and stacked experimental aquaria full of daphnia (Daphnia magna) on top of one another to influence the amount of light (and hence, amount of food from algal growth) to which the populations had access (it’s interesting to note here that this was unplanned in the experiment – the different algal growth rates related to the changing exposure to light was a serendipitous discovery that allowed them to test the ‘food’ hypothesis!). They also controlled the migration rate between populations by varying the size of holes connecting the aquaria. In short, they found that environmentally influenced (i.e., food-influenced) variation was far more important at dictating population size and fluctuation than migration, showing again that conditions promoting large population size and reducing temporal variability are essential for reducing extinction risk.
So what’s the upshot for conservation? Well, many depressed populations are thought to be recoverable by making existing and fragmented habitat patches more connected via ‘corridors’ of suitable habitat. The research highlighted here suggests that more emphasis should be placed instead on building up existing population sizes and ensuring food availability is relatively constant instead of worrying about how many trickling migrants might be moving back and forth. This essentially means that a few skinny corridors connecting population fragments will probably be insufficient to save our imperilled species.
Franzen, M., & Nilsson, S. (2009). Both population size and patch quality affect local extinctions and colonizations Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1584
Griffen, B., & Drake, J. (2009). Environment, but not migration rate, influences extinction risk in experimental metapopulations Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1153
Today I highlight a new paper just out online in Diversity and Distributions by James Watson and colleagues: Wilderness and future conservation priorities in Australia. It’s certainly one for the Potential list.
Jim Jim Falls, Kakadu National Park
Australia has a pretty bad biodiversity conservation track record – we have some of the worst mammal extinction trends in the world, and we’ve lost at least 50 % of our forested area since European colonisation. Despite our relatively large system of parks and reserves, things aren’t going to well (even in the parks!).
Our rapidly expanding influence means that we have to start protecting larger and larger areas if we want to have any chance of slowing the modern extinction crisis. This means we have to go beyond dedicated biodiversity reserves and sequester more ‘wilderness’ (defined as “…large areas that have experienced minimal habitat loss“). Watson and colleagues therefore used Australia as a good example to determine the extent to which the national protected area network captures ‘wilderness’, and how Australia’s planned expansion of the reserve system will include ‘wilderness’ in the future.
Although there wasn’t much planning involved initially, Australia (like many other countries) started to take biodiversity conservation seriously in the mid-1990s, such that now we have about 11 % of our 7.7 million km2 land area within a National Reserve System. Planning didn’t feature heavily in the early years, but it has been embraced now by nearly all planning bodies within government.
© Wiley-Blackwell
Using estimates of the total wilderness area in Australia (Fig. a), Watson and colleagues determined how much was included in the Reserve System (Fig. b), and how this value changed between 2000 and 2006.
Of the 2.93 million km2 of wilderness (38 % of land area, mostly in northern and western Australia), only 14 % was protected in 2000. This value increased marginally to 19 % by 2006 as the size of the Reserve System itself increased by 37 % (i.e., from 652597 to 895326 km2).
Bottom line – our growth in reserve area didn’t really capture the necessary wilderness; instead, gains were made in areas largely modified by humans. Even where wilderness has been captured, it’s predominately in ‘multiple use’ regions (incorporating mining, forestry and grazing, for example).
This isn’t a bad thing really – by focussing on areas of high biodiversity value that are under relatively high threat embraces the biodiversity hotspot approach to conservation and emphasises restoration. This is, of course, needed. But not incorporating a wider component of the habitats within wilderness could bias conservation toward range-restricted species.
© Wiley-Blackwell
Watson and colleagues therefore make a number of recommendations:
The bottom line is that we need to find a better balance between planning that protects threatened species and ecosystems in already highly fragmented (threatened) landscapes, and planning that protects large areas of wilderness that still contains most of its conservation values (wilderness). We’re getting there, but slowly, and hopefully in time to save our remaining threatened species from extinction.
Watson, J., Fuller, R., Watson, A., Mackey, B., Wilson, K., Grantham, H., Turner, M., Klein, C., Carwardine, J., Joseph, L., & Possingham, H. (2009). Wilderness and future conservation priorities in Australia Diversity and Distributions DOI: 10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00601.x
Just a plug for Richard Dawkins’ new book “The Greatest Show on Earth“. Hard to believe, but there are still billions of people who are blind to how life actually works, mainly from the intellectual blindfold of religion.
For more things Dawkins, visit http://richarddawkins.net/.
Here’s a nice little review from the increasingly impressive Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment which seems to be showcasing a lot of good conservation research lately.
© USGS
As we know, the world’s oceans are under huge threat, with predictions of 70 % loss of coral reefs by 2050, decline in kelp forests, loss of seagrasses, over-fishing, pollution and a rapidly warming and acidifying physical environment. Given all these stressors, it is absolutely imperative we spend a good deal of time thinking about the right way to impose restrictions on damage to marine areas – the simplest way to do this is via marine protected areas (MPA).
The science of MPA network design has matured over the last 10-20 years such that there is a decent body of literature now on what we need to do (now the policy makers just have to listen – some progress there too, but see also here). McLeod and colleagues in the latest issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment have published a review outlining the best, at least for coral reefs, set of recommendations for MPA network design given available information (paper title: Designing marine protected area networks to address the impacts of climate change). Definitely one for the Potential list.
Here’s what they recommend:
Size
Shape
Representation
Replication
Spread
Critical Areas
Connectivity
Ecosystem Function
Ecosystem Management
Of course, this is just a quick-and-dirty list as presented here – I highly recommend reading the review for specifics.
McLeod, E., Salm, R., Green, A., & Almany, J. (2009). Designing marine protected area networks to address the impacts of climate change Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 7 (7), 362-370 DOI: 10.1890/070211
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