His main point (as is mine, and that of a growing number of conservation scientists) is that we’ve already failed biodiversity, so it’s time to move into the next phase of disaster mitigation. By ‘failing’ I mean that, love it or loathe it, extinction rates are higher now than they have been for millennia, and we have very little to blame but ourselves. Apart from killing 9 out of 10 people on the planet (something no war or disease will ever be able to do), we’re stuck with the rude realism that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

This post acts mostly an introduction to Peter Kareiva & collaborators’ latest essay on the future of conservation science published in the Breakthrough Institute‘s new journal. While I cannot say I agree with all components (especially the cherry-picked resilience examples), I fundamentally support the central tenet that we have to move on with a new state of play.

In other words, humans aren’t going to go away, ‘pristine’ is as unattainable as ‘infinity’, and reserves alone just aren’t going to cut it.

Let me elaborate. It is plainly naïve, overly simplistic, unrealistic and ultimately criminal even to contemplate the notion that all extant species can be saved from extinction. Not only does this go against everything we know about the turnover of species on the geological time scale (i.e., 99 % of all species that have ever existed are now extinct), it erroneously overestimates our ability to solve the complex interaction between biology, governance, socio-economics, religion and politics (i.e., ‘conservation’).

And I use the word ‘criminal’ with sincerity. If you are naïve enough to embrace the outlook that conservation triage is unnecessary or even offensive, I’ve got news for you – you are (inadvertently or ignorantly) consigning many more species to extinction by wasting precious resources on the doomed. I have little time for climate-change deniers, religious zealots or alternative-’medicine’ quacks, so I have just as little time for so-called conservationists that choose to ignore reality.

But acceptance of the ongoing negative fate of biodiversity is insufficient to move us forward. While I agree with Kareiva and colleagues that a semi-religious attachment to the ideal of ‘pristine’ nature is helping no one (not least of which, biodiversity), we can go a lot further than just accepting the ‘new’ paradigm.

As we discussed in a recent post here on ConservationBytes.com, the greatest strides forward in this matured (but doggedly viscous) discipline will be to:

1. Accept that the biology is more or less well-developed. We can further fine-tune our estimates of loss or minimisations of gain, but the concepts defining how and why species go extinct are firmly established;
2. Get extremely practical about what to save. Adolescent idealism about saving everything on the planet will get us nowhere. Part of this is to determine WHICH species are the most important components of ecosystem resilience (ecosystem function), and part is being hard-core about designing algorithms that quantify this importance.
3. Focus on quantifying ecosystem services – which species complexes provide the highest benefits to humanity. Social revolution thus far (and, I argue, will continue to) eludes us, so convincing the blatantly humanist section of society will require some very well-established relationships between biodiversity and human health, wealth and welfare.
4. Accept that technical fixes are the (perhaps largest) areas of potential gain. Without solving our lust for energy at the expense of dwindling and finite resources, biodiversity will continue down the toilet.

So to all those dedicated and well-meaning environmentalist types out there, if you cannot accept these suggestions, then I have to put you in the same group as the self-interested, myopic, greed hounds that oppose any form of conservation. Get out of the way because you have become part of the problem.

I have some hope, but I remain profoundly pessimistic about our own future as a result of biodiversity erosion. We do not appear, after all, to possess a very strong sense of (long-term) self-preservation.

CJA Bradshaw

© Romulo Fotos http://goo.gl/CrAsE

A little over five years ago, a controversial and spectacularly erroneous paper appeared in the tropical ecology journal Biotropica, the flagship journal of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Now, I’m normally a fan of Biotropica (I have both published there several times and acted as a Subject Editor for several years), but we couldn’t let that paper’s conclusions go unchallenged.

That paper was ‘The future of tropical forest species‘ by Joseph Wright and Helene Muller-Landau, which essentially concluded that the severe deforestation and degradation of tropical forests was not as big a deal as nearly all the rest of the conservation biology community had concluded (remind you of climate change at all?), and that regenerating, degraded and secondary forests would suffice to preserve the enormity and majority of dependent tropical biodiversity.

What rubbish.

Our response, and those of many others (including from Toby Gardner and colleagues and William Laurance), were fast and furious, essentially destroying the argument so utterly that I think most people merely moved on. We know for a fact that tropical biodiversity is waning rapidly, and in many parts of the world, it is absolutely [insert expletive here]. However, the argument has reared its ugly head again and again over the intervening years, so it’s high time we bury this particular nonsense once and for all.

In fact, a few anecdotes are worthy of mention here. Navjot once told me one story about the time when both he and Wright were invited to the same symposium around the time of the initial dust-up in Biotropica. Being Navjot, he tore off strips from Wright in public for his outrageous and unsubstantiated claims – something to which Wright didn’t take too kindly.  On the way home, the two shared the same flight, and apparently Wright refused to acknowledge Navjot’s existence and only glared looks that could kill (hang on – maybe that had something to do with Navjot’s recent and untimely death? Who knows?). Similar public stoushes have been chronicled between Wright and Bill Laurance.

Back to the story. I recall a particular coffee discussion at the National University of Singapore between Navjot Sodhi (may his legacy endure), Barry Brook and me some time later where we planned the idea of a large meta-analysis to compare degraded and ‘primary’ (not overly disturbed) forests. The ideas were fairly fuzzy back then, but Navjot didn’t drop the ball for a moment. He immediately went out and got Tien Ming Lee and his new PhD student, Luke Gibson, to start compiling the necessary studies. It was a thankless job that took several years.

However, the fruits of that labour have now just been published in Nature: ‘Primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining tropical biodiversity‘, led by Luke and Tien Ming, along with Lian Pin Koh, Barry Brook, Toby Gardner, Jos Barlow, Carlos Peres, me, Bill Laurance, Tom Lovejoy and of course, Navjot Sodhi [side note: Navjot died during the review and didn't survive to hear the good news that the paper was finally accepted].

Using data from 138 studies from Asia, South America and Africa comprising 2220 pair-wise comparisons of biodiversity ‘values’ between forests that had undergone some sort of disturbance (everything from selective logging through to regenerating pasture) and adjacent primary forests, we can now hammer the final nails into the coffin containing the putrid remains of Wright and Muller-Landau’s assertion – there is no substitute for primary forest.

Our metrics were fairly straight forward – after standardising effect sizes (i.e., the difference between measured variables) for species richness, species abundance, community structure, forest structure and demographics, degraded forests had without fail lower biodiversity values (perhaps with the exception of demographics which are extremely difficult to measure precisely and accurately for sufficient samples).

Another interesting finding was that birds were by far the most sensitive taxon – once you start to degrade tropical forests, birds start to drop off the perch almost immediately (and yes, we did test for lag effects, before you ask). Arthropods and plants were the next-most sensitive, followed by mammals (there seemed to be in some cases and actual ‘positive’ response by mammals, driven largely by higher abundance of certain species [e.g., rats] in disturbed forests).

Another not-so-surprising finding was that Asia had the worst outcomes – biodiversity is failing faster there than anywhere else in the tropics. We also found, again rather unsurprisingly, that there was a gradient of responses, with the worst effects felt in abandon agricultural plots, and the least in selectively logged forests (although all forms of disturbance constituted some biodiversity loss).

Of course, it must be said that we live in a less-than-perfect world (really?), so even though this evidence is incontrovertible, it doesn’t mean that suddenly everyone will preserve all remaining primary tropical forest on the planet (wouldn’t that be lovely). So we need to consider the secondary and degraded forests in our conservation planning too – even bad forest is better than no forest at all.

However, we cannot dismiss the notion that there is no replacement for primary forests, that we should definitely not being staying stupid shit like ‘oil palm plantations hold just the same amount of biodiversity as primary forests’ [see previous post regarding that shining display of ignorance]. We need to conserve as much remaining primary forest as we can, while striving to regenerate those areas that have already come under the fire of development.

If you’d like a reprint, just email me here (or any other co-author, for that matter) and I’ll send you one.

CJA Bradshaw

The main thrust of the evening was to have both academic (me & Andy Lowe) and on-the-ground, local conservationists (Sarah Lance, Craig Gillespie and Matt Turner) talk about what people can do to stem the tide of biodiversity loss. The video is now available, so I thought I’d reproduce it here. We talked about a lot of issues (from global to local scale), so if you have a spare hour, you might get something out of this. I did, but it certainly wasn’t long enough to discuss such big issues.

Warning – this was supposed to be more of a discussion and less of a talkfest; unfortunately, many of the panel members seemed to forget this and instead dominated the session. We really needed 4 hours to do this properly (but then, who would have watched the video?).

P.S. You can also view a larger version and skip to specific bits by clicking here.

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Biodiversity conservation is about prioritisation – making difficult choices.

With limited money and so many habitats and species in need of protection, deciding where not to expend resources is as important as deciding where to act. Saying ‘no’ will be crucial for ensuring the persistence of biodiversity and ecosystem services, simply because as individuals who value conservation, we will always be tempted to try and save everything.

In the words of Frederick the Great: “He who defends everything, defends nothing.”

As a result, much recent conservation planning research has focused on offering managers general and flexible tools for deciding which conservation features should be the highest priority. Intuitively, we should direct our resources towards areas that have high biodiversity values, and that are likely to be lost if the forces of conservation do not intervene (the most ‘vulnerable’ land parcels). This approach is known as the ‘minimize loss’ approach. Imagine we are worried about the loss of rare native vegetation in the face of ongoing urban expansion (e.g., Melbourne’s western grasslands). To minimize loss, managers would pre-emptively protect sites that are most likely to be developed. But is this decision to race the bulldozers always the best idea? How much does this choice depend on our assumptions about how land is protected, how land developers behave, and the accuracy of our future predictions?

For example, what would happen if protecting vulnerable land doesn’t stop the bulldozers, it simply diverts them towards other unprotected land nearby? What if our model of urban sprawl is incorrect, and people actually will choose to live next to the Werribee waste treatment plant? Or if a new State Government abandon Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary? Essentially, given how little we understand the drivers and dynamics of conservation threats, why not throw away our low-quality predictions about vulnerability, and set priorities using just biodiversity value and cost?

In a recent study that we published in Conservation Letters we asked all these questions, and used simulation models of conservation landscapes to investigate when vulnerability information is worth including. Specifically, we investigated how to choose between these three alternative decisions:

1. Take conservation actions based on available vulnerability data;
2. Improve our information about vulnerability; or
3. Discard our vulnerability data altogether.

Our simulations considered how four different factors might affect our feelings about these alternative decisions:

1. The correlation between biodiversity value and vulnerability. Do threatening processes target the most biodiverse land?
2. The effect of protection on threatening processes. Does protecting the most vulnerable land make the threat disappear, or go elsewhere?
3. The degree of variability in land parcel vulnerability. Is all land equally threatened?
4. Uncertainty in our vulnerability estimates. How good are our models of future conservation threats?

We varied the first factor by populating an imaginary landscape with species that were more common in vulnerable or in safe habitats. We also simulated different landscapes differing on the spatial variation in vulnerability. We then simulated different effects of habitat protection on the threatening process. In one instance, we simulated a displacement effect, that is, protected areas stop the threatening process locally but not regionally, and habitat loss continues at the same pace, eventually destroying everything that is not protected. Real examples of these dynamics in many parts of the world occur with agricultural expansion or timber harvesting. These two land use practices are generally displaced by protected areas and not stopped outright.

In one other instance, we simulated an inhibition effect in which protection stops the threat locally but also reduces its rate of spread. In the real world, this is what happens when treating animals affected by infectious diseases. With inhibition, after the first vulnerable sites are either lost or protected, the rate of loss is reduced and eventually fades to zero.

Finally, we simulated the effect of uncertainty in the vulnerability estimate. That is, we provided our hypothetic conservation managers with maps of vulnerability that were incrementally altered until in an extreme case, the ‘true’ vulnerability which determined biodiversity loss, was totally uncorrelated with the vulnerability estimate used to set priorities.

Based on these different conservation simulations, we compared the achievements of two different managers. One was applying a ‘minimise loss’ approach, using their estimates of vulnerability to protect areas with high expected loss of biodiversity in the future; the other had a ‘maximise gain’ attitude, choosing areas based only on the biodiversity-per-dollar they could protect. We measured how much of the initial biodiversity value in the landscape remained after 10 simulated years of conservation prioritization.

We found that it is best to use existing information on vulnerability only when uncertainty is less than 20-30 %. Once our uncertainty gets larger than this, the risk of error becomes so high that the data must be either ignored or improved. Whether we want to invest scarce resources in this latter option depends on how variable vulnerability is across the conservation landscape. If it is high, any reduction in uncertainty causes an important gain in information about expected biodiversity loss and therefore improves the effectiveness of conservation actions. When it is low, each habitat patch has a similar chance of being lost, so what really matters is how valuable they are and you can ignore vulnerability altogether.

So what should a conservation organization do when it is time to set priorities?  First of all, they have to choose meaningful quantitative conservation objectives; without objectives there is no smart conservation decision-making. Once that is done, conservation managers need to get a feeling for how much the threatening process they are trying to stop varies spatially. For example, if the threat is urbanization, a statistical model of urban sprawl based on satellite images at two different times, together with cadastral data and GIS layers of road and buildings densities can be used to assess the spatial variation on the probability that a new development occurs. If variability is noticeable, it is worth considering vulnerability in the decision-making process. An independent map of recently developed areas and development plans can then be used to validate the model and assess the level of uncertainty (e.g., confidence interval) around our estimates.

This would allow to find where the conservation problem falls in the decision space of Figure 1. But what panel should one pick? It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in term of the choice made, (colour-coding in panels c,d); however, it does make the difference in terms of actual conservation benefit (panels a,b). Racing the bulldozers pays more if you manage to cancel some development plans (inhibition effects in Figure 1a) instead of re-allocating them somewhere else (displacement effects in Figure 1b). This requires one to understand the nature of the threatening process and the future consequences of one’s today’s decision.

Conservation threats are constantly moving and evolving. Effective prioritization – the key to using our scarce resources wisely – will depend on how well we can predict each location’s vulnerability. At the moment, the decision-support tools we have developed for conservation planning assume some knowledge about future threats. The take-home message is that we need to consider the accuracy of our underlying predictions, as well as the efficacy of our tools.

Piero Visconti & Mike Bode

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Visconti, P., Pressey, R., Bode, M., & Segan, D. (2010). Habitat vulnerability in conservation planning-when it matters and how much Conservation Letters 3: 404-414. DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2010.00130.x

This was my first ATBC meeting despite having co-written ‘the book’ on tropical conservation biology (well, one of very, very many). I no longer live in the tropics but am still managing to keep my hand in many different aspects of tropical research. After all, tropical regions represent ground zero for conservation biology – they have the highest biodiversity (no matter which way you measure it), some of the greatest threats (e.g., most people, most rapid development, most corruption) and some of the most pressing human problems (disease, hunger, socio-political instability). Ironically, most of the world’s conservation ecologists work in temperate realms – it should really be the other way around.

As you can probably deduce from that last paragraph, I think the ATBC does some good work, but could do a lot more. In fact, I even proposed to Bill Laurance (former head of the ATBC and now senator-for-life on the board) that perhaps the ATBC and the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) should merge, or at least become sister societies. He thought it was a good idea, but didn’t think it would happen just yet. I’m planting the seed though on CB as well.

On the whole there was an encouraging emphasis on conservation, which from what I’ve heard around the traps is a fairly new development in the ATBC. Clearly conservation is taking over from ‘pure’ ecology in the tropical field, mainly because it’s such an important and rapidly expanding issue.

Back to the conference itself. The talks that I saw were pretty good on average (but with your typical amount of bad speaking, crap [or no] data/analysis and irrelevancy), but as with so many large conferences, too many concurrent sessions means you end up missing most of the talks. The plenaries were also fairly mundane – we as a group of scientists really need to lift our speaking skills to a minimum level, especially if we’re invited to give a plenary! Of the talks I did see, the following stood out:

• Stuart Pimm gave a good presentation (as usual) on the laws of biodiversity and biogeography, with their implications for understanding tropical biodiversity patterns
• Trish Shanley gave a poignant piece on the (ir)relevancy of most conservation research
• Bill Laurance gave a sobering account of the escalating logging occurring in Papua New Guinea. Some of the statistics he cited include: (i) 25 % of forests lost in Papua New Guinea from 1972-2005, (i) 80% of forests destroyed from logging in Papua New Guinea predicted to occur by 2020-2030, (iii) last month, Papua New Guinea government stripped traditional communities of right to sue over environmental degradation, (iv) still no ban on roundlog exports in Papua New Guinea, but … (v) illegal timber trade appears to have declined by ~ 20 % since 2002, (vi) Papua New Guinea is emerging as international leader promoting carbon trading for forest preservation
• Richard Corlett talked about long-term trends in mammal and bird range declines in Asia
• Dan Nepstad gave a fascinating talk about carbon trading under REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Some highlights of which include (i) we need annual reduction of 10 billion tonnes CO2eq arising from land-use change by 2020, (ii) for REDD to work, we need functional government institutes, organised civil society, slow planning processes with meaningful stakeholder participation, (iii) Brazil has already surpassed its deforestation reduction targets for the Amazon (mainly from drop in beef and soy market), (iv) 53 % of Amazonian forest is under some sort of protection, (v) Brazilian amazon worth US$60 trillion under carbon emission reduction schemes
• Reuben Clements gave a really great (and funny) talk about ‘killer roads’ in South East Asia
• Hugh Possingham gave some insights into planning for the future, and suggested that perhaps we can design protected areas in the tropics without collecting any biological data at all (i.e., only inferring biodiversity patterns from physical attributes)

As for the venue, it might sound somewhat attractive to have a conference in a ’5-star’ hotel in Bali (if that was 5-star, I’m a primate’s father’s brother), but it was a little strange. Couple that with badly air-conditioned rooms, a poor sound system and a strange room layout, it was not the best way to get the talks across. One rather interesting thing was that the Vice President of Indonesia popped by with his huge military and police entourage to open the conference (on Day 3, mind). Quite the display of pomp and circumstance, but at least the top brass of Indonesia appears to be paying attention to us.

Overall an enjoyable conference: 7/10.

CJA Bradshaw

“…as a social scientist, I have spent the past decade or so working with ecologists and managers trying to integrate social science better in conservation. There are often calls for the importance of integrating social science in conservation and I thought your blog readers might appreciate some high-level recognition of the importance of this. Additionally, as far as I can tell, this is the first of these profiles that has focused on someone working in conservation.”

So, while fully crediting the source of this article and its author, Helen Fields, here is the entire text reproduced for your reading pleasure.

In the late 1980s, things were not going well for the coral reefs at Jamaica’s Montego Bay Marine Park. Overfishing had taken out a lot of the fish that eat algae, and algae were taking over the reef. “It was a classic case of ecosystem decline,” human geographer Joshua Cinner says. He arrived in Jamaica in 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer after graduating from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a double major in environmental conservation and geography. He was particularly interested in parks and preserves.

He’d landed in the middle of a war. Lobbying by tour operators and others got spearfishing, one of the main culprits in overfishing, banned in the park. The ban did not go over well with local people. “All the park equipment got vandalized. We had park rangers get threatened; their families got threatened at spear point,” Cinner says. Spearfishing equipment is cheap and you don’t need a boat; men who do it are generally poor and are fishing as a last resort. “The cultural lens through which the fishermen viewed this issue was of struggle in a post-slavery society, of the rich, predominantly white expatriates making a law that oppressed the poorest of the poor locals to benefit the wealthy.”

The conflict got Cinner thinking about how conservation really works. “It wasn’t really about the ecology,” he says. “Making conservation work in Jamaica had a lot to do with understanding the local culture and people.” It also opened his eyes to the role oceans play. “The ocean is often viewed as an open-access resource. That extra layer of complexity interested me,” he says. “Land can often be private property,” but “the ocean is typically viewed as free for anyone to fish in, for anyone to swim in and use.”

Now a senior research fellow at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Australia, Cinner studies how coral reefs and people interact in a vast swath of the Southern Hemisphere. “People often have trouble understanding why a social scientist is involved because they think it’s the realm of the marine biologists,” he says. But it makes sense in the context of coral reefs, which are host to dozens of species of fish that provide food and income for nearby villages. “You don’t manage fish. Fish swim and they do their own thing. You manage people. Managing ecosystems is really about managing people and understanding what motivates them and their behaviors.”

Managing fishing and fish

After his stint in the Peace Corps, Cinner followed his interest in oceans at the University of Rhode Island, earning a master’s degree in marine affairs, a combination of anthropology and policy. For his degree, he spent 2 months in a village in the far east of Mexico, near the border with Belize. He hung out on fishing boats, watching how the fishermen worked and pitching in with the work. “I think they liked me because I was free labor,” he says. He designed a questionnaire for the fishermen about their lives and found, unsurprisingly, that local people, many of whom struggled for basics such as food and shelter, did not put the state of the environment high on their list of worries.

His work led him next to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Zoologist Tim McClanahan of the Wildlife Conservation Society was hiring a team to look at the ways that villages there have traditionally managed fisheries. For example, some villages keep their coral reef closed to fishing most of the time, then do a lot of fishing at once. “When they actually go in and harvest fish, it’s a madhouse,” McClanahan says. Other villages keep a fishery open for a few years, then close it for 9 months or so. McClanahan set out to determine whether these strategies were good for the fish.

Cinner and the other researchers spent a year travelling across Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, living in coastal villages for weeks at a time to get a first-hand look at the villagers’ fishing practices. In one village in the Manus Province of Papua New Guinea, fishing a particular section of the coral reef is forbidden for all but a few days of the year. The team arranged to be there for one of the rare days when fishing was allowed. Villagers set up nets and drove everything into them, harvesting 210 kilograms of fish.

Cinner’s team measured the fish being caught and found that they were larger than fish caught in other parts of the reef — just what the locals had told them. That suggested that partially closing the area gave fish a chance to grow bigger, one of the benefits marine biologists have suggested for totally banning fishing. “I think there’s a lot of preconceptions that [marine protected areas] that are fully closed are going to work a lot better,” Cinner says. But he thinks managing the way that village does might work better in many places, because villagers will be more likely to follow the rules if they see a benefit. “Limited harvests actually help to get community support for the closure.”

For the village, closing the reef means they have a source of good food whenever they need a feast for some ceremonial purpose, such as patching up relations with a neighbouring clan or, as in this case, to celebrate the opening of a house for young, unmarried men to live in after they leave home. “It was awesome. Great dancing, so much fun,” Cinner says. “Everyone was in these incredible costumes and these beautiful colors. It really blew my mind.”

Adapting to change

Cinner turned the data from that year into a Ph.D., which he completed in 2005 at JCU. After a year away — part of it spent doing research with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Kenya and Madagascar — he is now back at JCU, where the Australian Research Council funds a centre for coral reef studies. He’s trying to move his way up a ladder of research fellowships. His current job is the equivalent of an associate professorship in the United States, with pay equivalent to that of a senior lecturer in Australia. Australia doesn’t have a tenure system, but Cinner’s career track could eventually lead to a steady stream of research fellowships. And it’s a great place to do science. “The intellectual environment where I’m working, I think it’s unparalleled,” he says.

Since finishing his Ph.D., Cinner has been working with McClanahan, studying how climate change affects coral reefs and the people who live with them. They’ve studied how coral bleaching caused by the 1998 El Niño affected communities in the western Indian Ocean. Coral bleaching is a response to stressors, such as higher temperatures. When coral polyps, which are translucent, get upset, they expel the tiny algae that live in their tissues and give coral its color. With the symbionts gone, the hard, white structure below — calcium carbonate deposited by the polyps — shows through. Sometimes the coral bounces back within weeks; sometimes it dies and comes back; and sometimes the reef falls apart. As Earth’s oceans warm, bleaching is expected to increase in frequency.

Cinner and McClanahan have found that different places felt different effects of coral bleaching based on how much people depended on fish and tourism for a living and how flexible the local people were. In Madagascar, rigid taboos govern when people can fish and what gear they can use. “This actually leads to a bit of rigidity and stifles how people are able to adapt,” Cinner says. In Kenya, some people are so desperately poor that when the reefs are in trouble, they just fish harder in the same places. But in the wealthier Seychelles, people have boats that can take them farther out, to target fish that don’t live on the reefs.

These observations have led to ideas about how to protect reefs, and the people who depend on them, during coral-bleaching events. For example, if coral die and algae take over, it’s much harder for coral to get reestablished. But if the reef hosts plenty of parrotfish — which graze on algae and keep the reef clean — the coral will be more likely to come back. Spearfishing particularly targets parrotfish, so one strategy might be to buy back spearfishing gear from Kenyan fishermen to protect parrotfish and make a reef more resilient to climate change, while leaving fishermen with other means to fish.

Cinner wants to extend this work to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, looking for other ways to help people and coral reefs survive climate change. Working in so many cultures is challenging, he says. “I sometimes have to go through four different languages to remember the word. I might say it in Swahili, Portuguese, and Spanish, and then realize I’m trying to speak Malagasy or something.” He says it’s also tough being away from home so much of the time; last year, he was outside of Australia for about 150 days. But all that is outweighed by the excitement of his research. “You never know what’s going to happen when you step off a bus into a dusty place you’ve never been,” Cinner says. “That feeling never really goes away no matter how many times you do it. It’s almost always worked out for me.”

This article coincides with a special issue of Science devoted to the topic of changing oceans.

© CBD

It’s been a good few weeks with many of our papers coming out online early – for example, I highlighted one last week on ecosystem function breakdown from global warming.

Although this has been out for a few weeks, our new paper lead by PhD candidate Xingli Giam (formerly of National University of Singapore, recently completed Australian Endeavour Scholar, now at Princeton University and all-round up-and-coming research star), and with contributions from Hugh “Vascular” Tan and Navjot Sodhi of National University of Singapore and me, is entitled Future habitat loss and the conservation of plant biodiversity (just published online in Biological Conservation).

This one is a bit of a complicated one, so let me walk you through it.

Plants not only represent a huge component of global biodiversity (~320 000 species), they represent the ‘habitats’ in which animals live and provide the major source of nutrients to food webs. They also provide most of our food and other materials essential for human existence. Basically we’d be screwed without them.

Because so many of the world’s biomes are severely threatened now because of massive habitat loss, degradation, over-exploitation, invasive species, extinction synergies and climate change, we need to maximise our efficiency in protecting what’s left. While global prioritisation schemes have a fruitful scientific history since Myers & colleagues’ classic paper (see Biodiversity Hotspots), there are a number of problems that plague the concept and its implementation.

Apart from the most serious problem of the difficulty of convincing governments and the people who elect them that we are losing way too much biodiversity for our own good, there are some other issues with the ‘Hotspot‘ concept. First, there are many, many different ways to prioritise areas for conservation, and most of them give rather different prioritisations (see Brooks and colleagues’ classic paper on the subject). Second, none of the global prioritisation schemes explicitly consider future habitat loss patterns and the rising effects of climate change (although a few studies have predicted future plant extinction patterns based on land-use and climate change projections (Thuiller et al. 2005; Van Vuuren et al. 2006).

Because we expect species already threatened to be more vulnerable to extinction in the future than non-threatened species, future projections of conservation need realistic estimates of threatened species distributions in addition to the predicted magnitude and extent of future habitat loss.

We therefore assessed the exposure of threatened plant biodiversity to land-use and climate change-driven habitat loss up to year 2050 by testing the hypothesis that countries with higher threatened plant species richness are likely to suffer from greater relative habitat loss given recent historical trends in loss.

To do this, we used the number of endemic plant species per country as a proxy for the number of threatened species and then used the residuals in the power-law endemic species-country area relationship as an index of endangerment.

The potential extent of future habitat loss owing to land-use and climate changes in each country was derived from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. We then determined which countries are most prone to plant biodiversity loss by by relating the current degree of plant species endangerment with the amount of projected total habitat loss.

Finally, because poorer countries have limited financial means for conservation projects such as the enforcement and monitoring of protected areas, we hypothesised that these might be at greater risk from habitat loss, direct harvesting, and encroachment of invasive alien species. Poor governance can result in the degradation of biodiversity owing to ineffective management and corruption, so we also identified countries of high conservation need by considering their wealth and quality of governance with the future plant species endangerment ranks.

Whew! Quite a list!

While I won’t focus to heavily on the mathematical side of things, I was particularly proud of our novel approach to fitting species-area relationships to estimate the total number of threatened species per country. We used probably one of the most parsimonious, model-averaged, biome-specific power-law approaches with the appropriate distributions developed to date, and I personally think our approach represents a major leap forward in species-area relationship fitting (with inspiration from Guilhamon and colleagues). But that’s another story.

Given the number of aims, there were quite a few results. I’ll just summarise the salient points:

• endemic species richness data were available for 196 countries
• 143 countries overlap with the network of Biodiversity Hotspots and they contain 206905 endemic plant species
• the remaining 53 non-Hotspot countries contain only 7812 endemic species
• the highest relative index of plant species endangerment was in tropical America, tropical Asia and southern Africa
• the five countries with the highest endangerment are: Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, South Africa, Indonesia, Colombia
• in Hotspot countries, the index of current plant species endangerment was positively correlated with future climate change-driven and climate change-driven habitat loss
• countries with the highest future plant species endangerment are concentrated around the equator
• the following countries were ranked in the category of greatest conservation need based on economic condition: Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Nepal, Tanzania, Tajikistan
• the following countries were classed in the category of greatest conservation need based on quality of governance: Angola, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Tajikistan, Venezuela
• there was a high overlap between the countries prioritised based on economic condition and those prioritised based on quality of governance

I think the major take-home message is that we need to consider an array of factors when prioritising regions for conservation need. It’s not enough to count species, one must also account for the mathematical uncertainty of region-specific endemism patterns, future habitat loss, climate change, and a country’s wealth and governance quality. We’ve come a long way since Biodiversity Hotspots!

CJA Bradshaw

Giam, X., Bradshaw, C.J.A., Tan, H., & Sodhi, N.S. (2010). Future habitat loss and the conservation of plant biodiversity Biological Conservation DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2010.04.019

Diver at Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Hard to believe we’re already at Volume 3 – introducing the latest issue of Conservation Letters (Volume 3, Issue 1, February 2010). For full access, click here.

• Shelter from the storm? Use and misuse of coastal vegetation bioshields for managing natural disasters (see also related post)
• Over-harvesting driven by consumer demand leads to population decline: big-leaf mahogany in South America
• Local economic impact of different forms of nature-based tourism
• Temporal patterns in the size of conservation land transactions
• Coral reef quality and recreation fees in marine protected areas
• Assisted colonization under the U.S. Endangered Species Act
• Opportunities for achieving biodiversity conservation through REDD

Note too we’ve jumped from 5 to 6 papers per issue. Congratulations to all our authors. Keep those submissions coming!

CJA Bradshaw

© cagiecartoons.com

A little bit of conservation wisdom for you this weekend.

In last week’s issue of Nature, well-known conservation planner and all-round smart bloke, Reed Noss (who just happens to be an editor for Conservation Letters and Conservation Biology), provided some words of extreme wisdom. Not pulling any punches in his Correspondence piece entitled Local priorities can be too parochial for biodiversity, Noss essentially says ‘don’t leave the important biodiversity decisions to the locals’.

He argues rather strongly in his response to Smith and colleagues’ opinion piece (Let the locals lead) that local administrators just can’t be trusted to make good conservation decisions given their focus on local economic development and other political imperatives. He basically says that the big planning decisions should be made at grander scales that over-ride local concerns because, well, the big fish in their little ponds can’t be trusted (nor do they have the training) to do what’s best for regional biodiversity conservation.

I couldn’t agree more – he states:

“Academic researchers, conservation non-governmental organizations and other ‘foreign’ interests tend to be better informed, less subject to local political influence and more experienced in conservation planning than local agencies.”

Of course, being part of the first group, I’m probably a little biased, but I dare say that we’ve got a lot better handle on the science beyond saving biodiversity, as well as a better understanding of why that’s important, than your average regional representative, village council, chief, Lord Mayor or state member. Sure, ‘engage your stakeholders’ (I have images of shooting missiles at people holding star pickets with this gem of business jargon wankery, but there you go), but please base the decision on science first. I think Smith and colleagues have some good points, but I am more in favour of a broad-scale benevolent dictatorship in conservation planning than fine-scale democracy. Granted, the best formula is likely to be very context-specific, and of course, you need some people with local implementation power to make it happen.

Dear Honourable Minister, you may sign on the dotted line to make policy real, but please, please listen to us before you do. Your very life and those of your children depend on it.

CJA Bradshaw

Noss, R. (2010). Local priorities can be too parochial for biodiversity Nature, 463 (7280), 424-424 DOI: 10.1038/463424a

Smith, R., Veríssimo, D., Leader-Williams, N., Cowling, R., & Knight, A. (2009). Let the locals lead Nature, 462 (7271), 280-281 DOI: 10.1038/462280a

The book strives to “…provide cutting-edge but basic conservation science to a global readership”. In short, it’s written to bring the forefront of conservation science to the general public, with OUP promising to make it freely available online within about a year from its release in early 2010 (or so the rumour goes). The main idea here is that those in most need of such a book – the conservationists in developing nations – can access the wealth of information therein without having to sacrifice the village cow to buy it.

I won’t go into any great detail about the book’s contents (mainly because I have yet to receive my own copy and read most of the chapters!), but I have perused early versions of Kevin Gaston‘s excellent chapter on biodiversity, and Tom Brook‘s overview of conservation planning and prioritisation. Our chapter (Chapter 16 by Barry Brook and me), is an overview of statistical and modelling philosophy and application with emphasis on conservation mathematics. It’s by no means a complete treatment, but it’s something we want to develop further down the track. I do hope many people find it useful.

I’ve reproduced the chapter title line-up below, with links to each of the authors websites.

1. Conservation Biology: Past and Present (C. Meine)
2. Biodiversity (K. Gaston)
3. Ecosystem Functions and Services (C. Sekercioglu)
4. Habitat Destruction: Death of a Thousand Cuts (W. Laurance)
5. Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change (A. Bennett & D. Saunders)
6. Overharvesting (C. Peres)
7. Invasive Species (D. Simberloff)
8. Climate Change (T. Lovejoy)
9. Fire and Biodiversity (D. Bowman & B. Murphy)
10. Extinctions and the Practice of Preventing Them (S. Pimm & C. Jenkins)
11. Conservation Planning and Priorities (T. Brooks)
12. Endangered Species Management: The US Experience (D. Wilcove)
13. Conservation in Human-Modified Landscapes (L.P. Koh & T. Gardner)
14. The Roles of People in Conservation (A. Claus, K. Chan & T. Satterfield)
15. From Conservation Theory to Practice: Crossing the Divide (M. Rao & J. Ginsberg)
16. The Conservation Biologist’s Toolbox – Principles for the Design and Analysis of Conservation Studies (C. Bradshaw & B. Brook)

As you can see, it’s a pretty impressive collection of conservation stars and hard-hitting topics. Can’t wait to get my own copy! I will probably blog individual chapters down the track, so stay tuned.

CJA Bradshaw