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Climate change will also make us more stupid

31 08 2021

Most people are at least vaguely aware that climate change isn’t good for us.

Let’s consider the obvious direct health effects, like heat exhaustion and stroke, dehydration, increased inhalation of particulate matter from bushfires and other pollutant sources, greater expression of allergies, higher incidence of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, greater injury rates, and higher probability of disease transmission from flooding events (see review here).

Let’s not forget the rising incidence of mental illness either.

Then there are the climatic events that increase the probability of dying violently like in a bushfire or a flood, getting caned in a major storm by debris, personal injury from storm surges exacerbated by rising sea levels, or dying slowly due to undernutrition from crop failures.

Some of the more indirect, yet just-as-insidious repercussions are those climate-driven events that worsen all of the above, such as increasing poverty, rising violent interactions (both individual-level and full-on warfare), loss of healthcare capability (less infrastructure, fewer doctors), and increased likelihood of becoming a refugee.

Watts *et al*. 2015 *The Lancet* 386:1861-1914

So, when someone says increased warming at the pace we’re witnessing now isn’t a problem, tell them they’re full of shit.

But wait! There’s more!

Yes, climate change will also make us more stupid. Perhaps one of the lesser-appreciated byproducts of an increasingly warmer world driven by rising greenhouse-gas concentrations is the direct effects of carbon dioxide on a variety of physiological functions.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Carbon dioxide, climate change, CO2, cognitive capacity, death, disease, health, human health
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, carbon, climate change, coasts, disease, education, Endarkenment, extremism, famine, flood, food, health, human overpopulation, poverty, societies

Mapping the ‘super-highways’ the First Australians used to cross the ancient land

4 05 2021

Author provided/The Conversation, Author provided

There are many hypotheses about where the Indigenous ancestors first settled in Australia tens of thousands of years ago, but evidence is scarce.

Few archaeological sites date to these early times. Sea levels were much lower and Australia was connected to New Guinea and Tasmania in a land known as Sahul that was 30% bigger than Australia is today.

Our latest research advances our knowledge about the most likely routes those early Australians travelled as they peopled this giant continent.

We are beginning to get a picture not only of where those first people landed in Sahul, but how they moved throughout the continent.

Navigating the landscape

Modelling human movement requires understanding how people navigate new terrain. Computers facilitate building models, but they are still far from easy. We reasoned we needed four pieces of information: (1) topography; (2) the visibility of tall landscape features; (3) the presence of freshwater; and (4) demographics of the travellers.

We think people navigated in new territories — much as people do today — by focusing on prominent land features protruding above the relative flatness of the Australian continent. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Aboriginal, connection, culture, human ecology, indigenous, Indigenous Australians, movement
Categories : Australia, coasts, mathematics, modelling

Population of First Australians grew to millions, much more than previous estimates

30 04 2021

We know it is more than 60,000 years since the first people entered the continent of Sahul — the giant landmass that connected New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania when sea levels were lower than today.

But where the earliest people moved across the landscape, how fast they moved, and how many were involved, have been shrouded in mystery.

Our latest research, published today shows the establishment of populations in every part of this giant continent could have occurred in as little as 5,000 years. And the entire population of Sahul could have been as high as 6.4 million people.

This translates to more than 3 million people in the area that is now modern-day Australia, far more than any previous estimate.

The first people could have entered through what is now western New Guinea or from the now-submerged Sahul Shelf off the modern-day Kimberley (or both).

But whichever the route, entire communities of people arrived, adapted to and established deep cultural connections with Country over 11 million square kilometres of land, from northwestern Sahul to Tasmania.

A map showing a much larger landmass as Australia is joined to both Tasmania and New Guinea due to lower sea levels

This equals a rate of population establishment of about 1km per year (based on a maximum straight-line distance of about 5,000km from the introduction point to the farthest point).

That’s doubly impressive when you consider the harshness of the Australian landscape in which people both survived and thrived.

Previous estimates of Indigenous population

Various attempts have been made to calculate the number of people living in Australia before European invasion. Estimates vary from 300,000 to more than 1,200,000 people. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Aboriginal, anthropology, archaeology, Australia, first nations, human ecology, indigenous, Indigenous knowledge, Late Pleistocene, Pleistocene, population dynamics, Sahul, spatial ecology
Categories : Australia, climate change, coasts, connectivity, demography, drought, ecology, Flinders University, modelling, population dynamics, statistics

Successful movers responding to climate change

16 06 2020

tropical fishes range shifts Ecologists often rely on measuring certain elements of a species’ characteristics, behaviour, or morphology to determine if these — what we call ‘traits’ — give them certain capacities to exploit their natural environments. While sometimes a bit arbitrarily defined, the traits that can be measured are many indeed, and sometimes they reveal rather interesting elements of a species’ resilience in the face of environmental change.

As we know, climate change is changing the way species are distributed around the planet, for the main (and highly simplified) reason that the environments in which they’ve evolved and to which they have adapted are changing.

In the simplest case, a warming climate means that there is a higher and higher chance you’ll experience temperatures that really don’t suit you that well (think of a koala or a flying fox baking in a tree when the thermometer reads +45° in the shade). Just like you seeking those nice, air-conditioned spaces on a scorcher of a day, species like to move to where conditions are more acceptable to their particular physiologies and behaviours.

When they can’t change fast enough, they go extinct.

Ecologists use life-history traits to predict which species have the highest probability of moving to new areas in response to climate change. Most studies into this phenomenon have largely ignored that range shifts in fact occur in sequential stages: (1) the species arrives in a new place for the first time, (2) its population increases in size (and extent), and (3) it can continue to persist in the new spot. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Biogeography, climate change, Fish, marine fishes, native invasive species, range shifts, species' traits, traits, tropical fish
Categories : alien species, Australia, behaviour, bioclimatic envelope, biogeography, climate change, climate shift, coasts, community ecology, coral reefs, ecology, ecosystem, extinction, fish, food, function, invasive species, marine, monitoring, southern Australia, tropical

Penguins cheated by ecosystem change

13 03 2018

Jorge Drexler sings “… I was committed not to see what I saw, but sometimes life is more complex than what it looks like …”*. This excerpt by the Oscar-winning Uruguayan singer seems to foretell the theme of this blog: how the ecological complexity of marine ecosystems can elicit false signals to their predators. Indeed, the fidelity of marine predators to certain feeding areas can turn demographically detrimental to themselves when the amount of available food shrinks. A study of jackass penguins illustrates the phenomenon in a context of overfishing and ocean warming.

Adult of jackass penguin (Spheniscus demersus) from Robben Island (South Africa) — in the inset, one of the first juveniles released with a satellite transmitter on its back. The species is ‘Endangered’ under IUCN’s criteria (28), following a recent halving of the total population currently estimated at ~ 80,000 adults. Jackass penguins are the only penguins living in Africa, and owe their common name to their vocalisations (you can hear their braying sounds here); adults are ~ 50 cm tall and weigh ~ 3 kg. Photos courtesy of Richard Sherley.

Surface temperature, dissolved oxygen, acidity and primary productivity are, by and large, the top four environmental factors driving the functionality of marine ecosystems (1). Growing scientific evidence supports the idea that anthropogenic warming of the atmosphere and the oceans correlates with this quartet (2). For instance, marine primary productivity is enhanced by increased temperatures (3), but a warmer sea surface intensifies stratification, i.e., stacked layers of seawater with contrasting physical and chemical properties.

In coastal areas experiencing ‘upwelling’ (where winds displace surface water, allowing deep water laden with nutrients to reach the euphotic zone where plankton communities feast), stratification weakens upwelling currents and, in turn, limits the growth of plankton (4) that fuels the entire trophic web, including our fisheries. The study of these complex trophic cascades is particularly cumbersome from the perspective of large marine predators because of their capacity to move long distances, from hundreds to thousands of kilometres (5), with strong implications for their conservation (6).

With those caveats in mind, Richard Sherley and colleagues satellite-tracked the movement of 54 post-fledged, juvenile jackass penguins (Spheniscus demersus) for 2-3 years (7). All individuals had been hatched in eight colonies (accounting for 80% of the global population), and were equipped with platform terminal transmitters. Jackass penguins currently nest in 28 island and mainland locations between South Africa and Namibia. Juveniles swim up to 2000 km in search of food and, when approaching adulthood, return to their native colonies where they reproduce and reside for the remainder of their lives (watch individuals swimming here).

The natural history of this species is linked to the Southern Hemisphere’s trade winds (‘alisios’ for Spanish speakers), which blow from the southeast to the tropics. In the South Atlantic, trade winds sustain the Benguela Current, the waters of which surface from some 300 m of depth and fertilise the marine ecosystems stretching from the Western coasts of South Africa to Angola (8). Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: anchovy, Benguela, climate change, fisheries, food web, Global warming, jellies, jellyfication, Namibia, Overfishing, penguin, penguins, pilchard, South Africa, upwelling
Categories : Africa, behaviour, birds, climate change, climate shift, coasts, decline, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, fish, fisheries, food, function, harvest, impact, research, science, trophic cascades

Protecting one of the world’s marine wonders

17 06 2017

While I’m in transit (yet a-bloody-gain) to Helsinki, I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on one of the most inspiring eco-tourism experiences I recently had in South Australia.

If you are South Australian and have even the slightest interest in wildlife, you will have of course at least heard of the awe-inspiring mass breeding aggregation of giant cuttlefish (Sepia apama) that occur in May-July every year in upper Spencer Gulf near the small town of Whyalla. If you have been lucky enough to go there and see these amazing creatures themselves, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t yet been there, take it from me that it is so very much worth it to attempt the voyage.

Father-daughter giant-cuttlefish-snorkelling selfie. © CJA Bradshaw

Despite having lived in South Australia for nearly a decade now, I only got my chance to see these wonderful creatures when a father at my daughter’s school organised a school trip. After driving for five hours from Adelaide to Whyalla, we hired our snorkelling gear and got into the water the very next morning. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Australia, cephalopod, cuttlefish, giant cuttlefish, Point Lowly, Sepia apama, South Australia, Spencer Gulf
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, coasts, conservation, decline, exploitation, genetics, marine, marine protected area, protected area, PVA, South Australia

Grim tale of global shark declines

25 06 2015

Please don’t eat me

How do you prevent declines of species you cannot even see? This is (and has always been) the dilemma for fisheries because, well, humans don’t live underwater. Even when we strap on a metal tank full of air and a pair of fins, we’re still more or less like wounded astronauts peering through a narrow window of glass at the huge, largely empty, ocean space. It’s little wonder then that we have a fairly crap system of estimating fish abundance, and an even worse track record of managing them sustainably.

But humans love to eat fish – the total world estimate of legal fisheries landings is something in the vicinity of 190 million tonnes in 2013, up from 18 million tonnes in 1950 (according to FAO). We’re probably familiar with some of the losers of that massive harvest, with species like tunas, bill fishes and orange roughy making the news for catastrophic declines in abundance over the last 30-40 years. And we’re not even talking about the estimated tragedy that is illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

Back in 1999, the FAO started to report that sharks – the new-ish target of many world fisheries resulting from the commercial extinction of many other fin fish fisheries – we’re starting to take the hit. Once generally ignored by fishing industries, sharks soon became popular target species. Then in 2003, Julia Baum and colleagues famously (and somewhat controversially) sounded the alarm for sharks in the Gulf of Mexico by some claims of major and catastrophic declines of large, predatory sharks. While some of the subsequent to-ing and fro-ing in the literature challenged these claims, Baum’s excellent work was ultimately vindicated.

Since then, more and more evidence that sharks are in trouble has surfaced, including the assessment of the reported (again, only legal) catch indicated heavy depletion of coastal sharks even by 1975, and the estimate that 25% of all shark and ray species have an elevated extinction risk, mainly resulting from overfishing. Now even the direct fisheries landings statistics are confirming this grim tale. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: chondrichthyans, declines, extinction, FAO, fisheries, fishing, management, rays, sharks
Categories : coasts, fish, fisheries, marine, ocean

Western Australia’s moronic shark cull

4 07 2014

A major media release today coordinated by Jessica Meeuwig in Western Australia makes the (obvious) point that there’s no biological justification to cull sharks.

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301 Australian and International Scientists experts have today provided their submission to the Western Australia Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), rejecting the scientific grounds for the proposed three-year drum-line programme.

Coordinating scientist, Professor Jessica Meeuwig from the University of Western Australia said:

“To have over 300 researchers, including some of the world’s top shark specialists and marine ecologists, all strongly agreeing that there is no scientific basis for the lethal drum-line programme, tells you how unjustified the government’s proposal is. If the EPA and the Federal Minister for the Environment are using science for decisions, the drum-line proposal should not be approved.”

The experts agree that the proposal presents no evidence that the lethal drum-line programme, as implemented, will improve ocean safety. It ignores evidence from other hook-based programs in Hawaii and Queensland that have been shown to be ineffective in reducing shark attacks on humans.

Dr. Christopher Neff from the University of Sydney stated:

“There is no evidence that drum lines reduce shark bites. The Western Australia EPA now faces a question of science versus politics with global implications because it is considering establishing a new international norm that would allow for the killing of protected white sharks.”

The drum lines are ineffective and indiscriminate, with 78% of the sharks captured not considered ‘threatening’ to humans. Yet, scientifically supported, non-lethal alternatives such as the South African ‘Shark Spotter’ and Brazil’s ‘Tag and Remove’ programmes are not adequately assessed as viable options for Western Australia. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Apex predator, culling, environment, human-wildlife conflict, lethal, marine, policy, shark, top predator, WA, Western Australia
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, coasts, connectivity, conservation, decline, demography, environmental policy, extinction, fish, fisheries, harvest, impact, management, marine, minimum viable population, modelling, population dynamics

South Australia’s tattered environmental remains

16 04 2014

South Australia State budget percentage expenditures for health, education and environment

Yesterday I gave the second keynote address at the South Australia Natural Resource Management (NRM) Science Conference at the University of Adelaide (see also a brief synopsis of Day 1 here). Unfortunately, I’m missing today’s talks because of an acute case of man cold, but at least I can stay at home and work while sipping cups of hot tea.

Many people came up afterwards and congratulated me for “being brave enough to tell the truth”, which both encouraged and distressed me – I am encouraged by the positive feedback, but distressed by the lack of action on the part of our natural resource management leaders.

The simple truth is that South Australia’s biodiversity and ecosystems are in shambles, yet few seem to appreciate this.

So for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend, I’ve uploaded the podcast of my slideshow for general viewing here. I’ve also highlighted some key points from the talk below: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 10 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, degradation, environment, loss, native vegetation clearing, South Australia, State of the Environment
Categories : alien species, Australia, biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, coasts, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, fragmentation, function, habitat loss, invasive species, kelp, logging, mammal, management, marine, marine protected area, monitoring, planning, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reforestation, reserve, restoration, South Australia, The University of Adelaide, threatened species, water

Biodiversity needs more than just unwanted leftovers

28 02 2014

The real measure of conservation progress, on land or in the sea, is how much biodiversity we save from threatening processes.

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A new paper co-authored by Memorial University’s Dr Rodolphe Devillers and an international group of researchers argues that established global marine protected areas are too often a case of all show with no substance and do not adequately protect the most vulnerable areas of the world’s oceans.

“There is a big pressure internationally to expand global MPA coverage from around 3 % of the oceans to 10 %, resulting in a race from countries to protect large and often unused portions of their territorial waters for a minimal political cost,” said Mr. Devillers. “Marine protected areas are the cornerstone of marine conservation, but we are asking whether picking low-hanging fruit really makes a difference in the long-term, or if smaller areas currently under threat should be protected before, or at the same time as, those larger areas that are relatively inaccessible and therefore less used by people.

“We need to stop measuring conservation success in terms of square kilometres,” he added. “The real measure of conservation progress, on land or in the sea, is how much biodiversity we save from threatening processes. Metrics such as square kilometres or percentages of jurisdictions are notoriously unreliable in telling us about the true purpose of protected areas.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, map, marine, marine protected area, marine reserves, reserve design, selection
Categories : Australia, coasts, conservation, conservation biology, exploitation, fish, fisheries, harvest, marine, marine protected area, MPA, protected area, reserve

Noisy oceans

20 01 2014

Killer whales are social animals that navigate all oceans and seas between the Arctic and Antarctica – they can be regarded eusocial since reproduction ceases around 40 years of age and menopausal females help care for offspring: like humans [13, 14]. Group cohesion in killer whales relies on a complex repertoire of vocalisations including clicks, whistles and calls. Sounds are instrumental for prey searching, orientation and communication. Foote [5] focused on calls, which are made up of series of discrete sounds that resemble squeaks, screams, and squawks to the human ear. It has been postulated that individuals learn to vocalise by imitation of peers of the same pod, and that only the base structure has a genetic, hence heritable, component [15]. Regardless, pods develop regional dialects. Those dialects, along with aspects of diet, genetics, morphology and behaviour, differentiate the three main lineages of killer whales (resident, transient and open sea) that might have been genetically isolated for ~ 150 to 700 thousand years and, potentially represent different taxa [16, 17]. The species might abandon the IUCN conservation category of ‘Data Deficient’ as soon its taxonomic uncertainty is resolved.Resident killer whales form matrilineal groups of 2 to 15 individuals (the matriarch and her offspring) – known as pods, in turn subdivided into subpods centred around grandmothers and great-grandmothers. The Southern Resident population is regarded as an acoustic clan comprising 3 pods currently numbering 81 individuals = 26 (J pod) + 19 (K pod) + 36 (L pod) (2013 survey), among whom the matriarch Granny is the oldest at 103 years! This clan feeds mainly on fish, and dwells in the coastal waters between British Columbia (Canada) and Washington State (USA), particularly south of Vancouver Island – nothing is known about where they spend the winter. The clan lost 20 % of its members between 1995 & 2001, and 13 more by 2013, and now faces the decline of its main prey: Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) [18]. The two pics show two sub pods of this clan swimming close to a whale-watching boat near Friday Harbour (San Juan Island) and a Chinese ship at Puget Sound (Seatle, USA). Photo credits: Marla Holt, NOAA/NMFS Northwest Fisheries Sciences Center.

Acoustic pollution has become a transnational issue, particularly in marine ecosystems [1] by virtue of the physical fact that sounds travel in water farther and faster than in air. In our noisy, modern world, many species are now forced to modify their vocal repertoire in response to noise. The pivotal social role that vocalisations play in all cetacean species makes these predators and filter feeders particularly vulnerable to this environmental problem.

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Last night, an ambulance siren woke me, only seconds before the neighbour’s washing machine started spinning, and a good friend of mine rang from overseas. Gradually more and more people are living in societies plugged in to noisy mechanical and electronic devices 24 hours a day, 356 days a year.

Engine-powered vehicles are the main source of anthropogenic noise, and their numbers can grow even at a higher rate than the human population – so spreading not only diseases [2] but also decibels over a global network of travelling routes. In an ecological context, we refer to noise as a kind of sound (= energy wave detected by an auditory system) that is not considered a biologically meaningful cue by wildlife (including us) and might also cause physiological stress. Experts refer to ‘masking’ as those situations in which noise interferes the perception or emission of sounds that matter to the life history of species – a global concern in both terrestrial [3] and aquatic [4] ecosystems.

Andy Foote [5] has assessed the effect of vessel traffic on the vocal behaviour of the three pods forming the Southern Resident population of killer whales (Orcinus orca¸ see video). He recorded calls from these cetaceans from a ship, and through an array of submarine microphones in Haro Straight, between San Juan Island (Washington State, USA) and Vancouver Island (British Columbia, Canada). Between the 1990s and the 2000s, local traffic density had multiplied by a factor of 5 and currently, > 20 whale-watching vessels follow these killer whales daily among an active fleet of > 70 commercial vessels. Foote compared call length through 35 hours of underwater killer whale recordings over three periods (1977-1981, 1989-1992, 2001-2003), each comprising situations in which the pods were exposed to both noisy and quiet environments. Over the study, call length varied between 0.3 and 2.0 seconds; while on average, L-pod calls were the shortest (0.6-0.8 seconds), and J-pod calls the longest (0.9-1.0 seconds). Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: disturbance, noise, ocean, physiology, strandings
Categories : coasts, conservation, environmental policy, marine

More species = more resilience

8 01 2014

While still ostensibly ‘on leave’ (side note: Does any scientist really ever take a proper holiday? Perhaps a subject for a future blog post), I cannot resist the temptation to blog about our lab’s latest paper that just came online today. In particular, I am particularly proud of Dr Camille Mellin, lead author of the study and all-round kick-arse quantitative ecologist, who has outdone herself on this one.

Today’s subject is one I’ve touched on before, but to my knowledge, the relationship between ‘diversity’ (simply put, ‘more species’) and ecosystem resilience (i.e., resisting extinction) has never been demonstrated so elegantly. Not only is the study elegant (admission: I am a co-author and therefore my opinion is likely to be biased toward the positive), it demonstrates the biodiversity-stability hypothesis in a natural setting (not experimental) over a range of thousands of kilometres. Finally, there’s an interesting little twist at the end demonstrating yet again that ecology is more complex than rocket science.

Despite a legacy of debate, the so-called diversity-stability hypothesis is now a widely used rule of thumb, and its even implicit in most conservation planning tools (i.e., set aside areas with more species because we assume more is better). Why should ‘more’ be ‘better’? Well, when a lot of species are interacting and competing in an ecosystem, the ‘average’ interactions that any one species experiences are likely to be weaker than in a simpler, less diverse system. When there are a lot of different niches occupied by different species, we also expect different responses to environmental fluctuations among the community, meaning that some species inherently do better than others depending on the specific disturbance. Species-rich systems also tend to have more of what we call ‘functional redundancy‘, meaning that if one species providing an essential ecosystem function (e.g., like predation) goes extinct, there’s another, similar species ready to take its place. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: beta diversity, coral reef, diversity-stability, ecology, fluctuation, metacommunity, metapopulation, portfolio effect, reef fish, resilience
Categories : algae, alien species, Australia, biodiversity, climate change, coasts, connectivity, conservation, coral reefs, disease, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, endemic, endemism, extinction, fish, function, invasive species, marine, marine protected area, metapopulation, planning, predator, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reserve, shark, tropical

Essential predators

21 11 2012

Here at ConservationBytes.com, My contributors and I have highlighted the important regulating role of predators in myriad systems. We have written extensively on the mesopredator release concept applied to dingos, sharks and coyotes, but we haven’t really expanded on the broader role of predators in more complex systems.

This week comes an elegant experimental study (and how I love good experimental evidence of complex ecological processes and how they affect population persistence and ecosystem stability, resilience and productivity) demonstrating, once again, just how important predators are for healthy ecosystems. Long story short – if your predators are not doing well, chances are the rest of the ecosystem is performing poorly.

Today’s latest evidence comes from on an inshore marine system in Ireland involving crabs (Carcinus maenas), whelks (Nucella lapillus), gastropd grazers (Patella vulgata, Littorina littorea and Gibbula umbilicalis), mussels (Mytilus edulis) and macroalgae. Published in Journal of Animal Ecology, O’Connor and colleagues’ paper (Distinguishing between direct and indirect effects of predators in complex ecosystems) explains how their controlled experimental removals of different combinations of predators (crabs & whelks) and their herbivore prey (mussels & gastropods) affected primary producer (macroalgae) diversity and cover (see Figure below and caption from O’Connor et al.). Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 11 Comments »
Tags: Complex system, Ecosystem, macroalgae, predator, productivity, resilience, Seaweed, stability
Categories : algae, biodiversity, coasts, conservation, function, kelp, marine

No more ecology

9 05 2012

To all ecology people who read this blog (students, post-docs, academics), this is an intriguing, provocative and slightly worrying title. As ecology has matured into a full-fledged, hard-core, mathematical science on par with physics, chemistry and genetics (and is arguably today one of the most important sciences given how badly we’ve trashed our own home), its sophistication now threatens to render many of the traditional aspects of ecology redundant.

Let me explain.

As a person who cut his teeth in field ecology (with all the associated dirt, dangers, bites, stings, discomfort, thrills, headaches and disasters), I’ve had my fair share of fun and excitement collecting ecological data. There’s something quaintly Victorian (no, I am not referring to the state next door) about the romantic and obsessive naturalist collecting data to the exclusion of nearly all other aspects of civilised life; the intrepid adventurer in some of us takes over (likely influenced by the likes of David Attenborough) and we convince ourselves that our quest for the lonely datum will heal all of the Earth’s ailments.

Bollocks.

As I’ve matured in ecology and embraced its mathematical complexity and beauty, the recurring dilemma is that there are never enough data to answer the really big questions. We have sampled only a fraction of extant species, we know embarrassingly little about how ecosystems respond to disturbance, and we know next to nothing about the complexities of ecosystem services. And let’s not forget our infancy in understanding the synergies of extinctions in the past and projections into the future. Multiply this uncertainty by several orders of magnitude for ocean ecosystems.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, coral reef, ecology, Great Barrier Reef, Hugh Possingham, photographic analysis, Species richness, surrogate
Categories : Australia, coasts, conservation, coral reefs, fish, marine, marine protected area, modelling, tropical

More than leftovers: getting marine parks right in Australia

7 08 2011

Image via Wikipedia

A few weeks back I cosigned a ‘statement of concern’ about the proposal for Australia’s South West Marine Region organised by Hugh Possingham. The support has been overwhelming by Australia’s marine science community (see list of supporting scientists below). I’ve reproduced the letter addressed to the Australian government – distribute far and wide if you give more than a shit about the state of our marine environment (and the economies it supports). Basically, the proposed parks are merely a settlement between government and industry where nothing of importance is really being protected. The parks are just the leftovers industry doesn’t want. No way to ensure the long-term viability of our seas.

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On 5 May 2011 the Australian Government released a draft proposal for a network of marine reserves in the Commonwealth waters of the South West bioregional marine planning region.

Australia’s South West is of global significance for marine life because it is a temperate region with an exceptionally high proportion of endemic species – species found nowhere else in the world.

Important industries, such as tourism and fisheries, depend on healthy marine ecosystems and the services they provide. Networks of protected areas, with large fully protected core zones, are essential to maintain healthy ecosystems over the long-term – complemented by responsible fisheries management¹.

The selection and establishment of marine reserves should rest on a strong scientific foundation. We are greatly concerned that what is currently proposed in the Draft South West Plan is not based on the three core science principles of reserve network design: comprehensiveness, adequacy and representation. These principles have been adopted by Australia for establishing our National Reserve System and are recognized internationally².

Specifically, the draft plan fails on the most basic test of protecting a representative selection of habitats within the bioregions of the south-west. There are no highly protected areas proposed at all in three of the seven marine bioregions lying on the continental shelf³. Overall less than 3.5% of the shelf, where resource use and biodiversity values are most intense, is highly protected. Further, six of the seven highly protected areas that are proposed on the shelf are small (< 20 km in width)⁴ and all are separated by large distances (> 200 km)⁵. The ability of such small isolated areas to maintain connectivity and fulfil the goal of protecting Australia’s marine biodiversity is limited. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Australia, biodiversity, environment, Hugh Possingham, marine protected area, National Reserve System
Categories : Australia, biogeography, coasts, conservation, conservation biology, coral reefs, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, marine, marine protected area, MPA, protected area, southern Australia

Disaster coming to a coastline near you

24 02 2011

Many of you already know that against all better judgement, the spectacularly audacious Australian Commonwealth government has granted BP offshore drilling rights in our southern waters.

You’d think that with all the evidence that BP is a company that cannot be trusted with this particular form of resource exploitation, we’d be a little bit more discerning when granting exploration permits to them. Apparently not.

In protest and within my rights as an Australian citizen, I wrote to the Minister responsible for the decision, MP Martin Ferguson (Federal Minister for Resources and Energy) to register my protest:

Dear Minister Ferguson,

As an ecologist, academic and citizen, I find it rather astounding that Australia has permitted the deep-sea exploration of oil by BP in our own back garden. The unreasonable environmental risk aside, it simply equates to poor economics – the very real probability of a disaster on the same scale (or larger) than the Gulf of Mexico’s fiasco last year will effectively destroy the commercial fishing and aquaculture industry of our southern coastline overnight. The loss of tourism dollars could arguably exceed even that.

This is most definitely not in Australia’s best interest, and will represent yet another blight on our already poor environmental record (see http://wp.me/phhT4-1cf and http://wp.me/phhT4-Zt). I urge you to reconsider your permission and revoke the licence to drill in our waters. It is a mistake you and your government will regret for decades, and will make the recent flooding disaster in Queensland appear mild in comparison.

Sincerely,

Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw

I certainly wasn’t expecting the Minister to say suddenly “Oh my. You are right, Prof. Bradshaw. It is a bad decision. I’ll revoke that permission forthwith”, but I was expecting a little bit more than the jumbled form letter I received in reply: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: Australia, BP, deep-sea drilling, Deepwater Horizon, Martin Ferguson, Offshore drilling, oil spill
Categories : biodiversity, coasts, conservation, corruption, marine

Global erosion of ecosystem services

14 09 2010

A few months ago I was asked to give a lecture about erosion of ecosystem services to students in the University of Adelaide‘s Issues in Sustainable Environments unit. I gave that lecture last week and just uploaded a slidecast of the presentation (with audio) today.

I’ve reproduced the lecture here for your viewing pleasure. I hope you find the 45-minute presentation useful. Note that the first few minutes cover me referring to the Biodiversity film short that I posted not too long ago.

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CJA Bradshaw

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Tags: ecosystem services, Education, environment, University of Adelaide, webinar
Categories : anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, coasts, coral reefs, deforestation, disease, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, fire, fisheries, flood, fragmentation, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, illegal fishing, kelp, logging, marine protected area, MPA, pollination, predator, protected area, Red List, seagrass, shark, The University of Adelaide, threatened species, water

February Issue of Conservation Letters

13 02 2010

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.

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

CJA Bradshaw

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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, conservation letters, science
Categories : coasts, conservation, coral reefs, deforestation, environmental policy, invasive species, logging, planning, prioritisation, protected area, REDD, research, reserve, tourism, tropical

Breaking the waves – conservation conundrum of bioshields

9 12 2009

Today’s post covers a neat little review just published online in Conservation Letters by Feagin and colleagues entitled Shelter from the storm? Use and misuse of coastal vegetation bioshields for managing natural disasters. I’m covering this for three reasons: (1) it’s a great summary and wake-up call for those contemplating changing coastal ecosystems in the name of disaster management, (2) I have a professional interest in the ecosystem integrity-disaster interface and (3) I had the pleasure of editing this article.

I’ve blogged about quite a few papers on ecosystem services (including some of my own) because I think making the link between ecosystem integrity and human health, wealth and well-being are some of the best ways to convince Joe Bloggs that saving species he’ll never probably see are in his and his family’s best (and selfish) interests. Convincing the poverty-stricken, the greedy and the downright stupid of biodiversity’s inherent value will never, ever work (at least, it hasn’t worked yet).

Today’s feature paper discusses an increasingly relevant policy conundrum in conservation – altering coastal ecosystems such that planted/restored/conserved vegetation minimises the negative impacts of extreme weather events (e.g., tsunamis, cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes): the so-called ‘bioshield’ effect. The idea is attractive – coastal vegetation acts to buffer human development and other land features from intense wave action, so maintain/restore it at all costs.

The problem is, as Feagin and colleagues point out in their poignant review, ‘bioshields’ don’t really seem to have much effect in attenuating the big waves resulting from the extreme events, the very reason they were planted in the first place. Don’t misunderstand them – keeping ecosystems like mangroves and other coastal communities intact has enormous benefits in terms of biodiversity conservation, minimised coastal erosion and human livelihoods. However, with massive coastal development in many parts of the world, the knee-jerk reaction has been to plant up coasts with any sort of tree/shrub going without heeding these species’ real effects. Indeed, many countries have active policies now to plant invasive species along coastal margins, which not only displace native species, they can displace humans and likely play little part in any wave attenuation.

This sleeping giant of a conservation issue needs some serious re-thinking, argue the authors, especially in light of predicted increases in extreme storm events resulting from climate change. I hope policy makers listen to that plea. I highly recommend the read.

CJA Bradshaw

Feagin, R., Mukherjee, N., Shanker, K., Baird, A., Cinner, J., Kerr, A., Koedam, N., Sridhar, A., Arthur, R., Jayatissa, L., Lo Seen, D., Menon, M., Rodriguez, S., Shamsuddoha, M., & Dahdouh-Guebas, F. (2009). Shelter from the storm? Use and misuse of coastal vegetation bioshields for managing natural disasters Conservation Letters DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2009.00087.x

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Tags: biodiversity, bioshields, conservation, cyclone, hurricane, science, tsunami
Categories : Asia, coasts, conservation, ecosystem services, flood, habitat loss, marine, restoration, South East Asia

Sleuthing the Chinese green slime monster

21 10 2009

greenslimemonster 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.

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).

CJA Bradshaw

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