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Biowealth

24 02 2016

While I’ve blogged about this before in general terms (here and here), I thought it wise to reproduce the (open-access) chapter of the same name published in late 2013 in the unfortunately rather obscure book The Curious Country produced by the Office of the Chief Scientist of Australia. I think it deserves a little more limelight.

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As I stepped off the helicopter’s pontoon and into the swamp’s chest-deep, tepid and opaque water, I experienced for the first time what it must feel like to be some other life form’s dinner. As the helicopter flittered away, the last vestiges of that protective blanket of human technological innovation flew away with it.

Two other similarly susceptible, hairless, clawless and fangless Homo sapiens and I were now in the middle of one of the Northern Territory’s largest swamps at the height of the crocodile-nesting season. We were there to collect crocodile eggs for a local crocodile farm that, ironically, has assisted the amazing recovery of the species since its near-extinction in the 1960s. Removing the commercial incentive to hunt wild crocodiles by flooding the international market with scar-free, farmed skins gave the dwindling population a chance to recover.

Conservation scientists like me rejoice at these rare recoveries, while many of our fellow humans ponder why we want to encourage the proliferation of animals that can easily kill and eat us. The problem is, once people put a value on a species, it is usually consigned to one of two states. It either flourishes as do domestic crops, dogs, cats and livestock, or dwindles towards or to extinction. Consider bison, passenger pigeons, crocodiles and caviar sturgeon.

As a conservation scientist, it’s my job not only to document these declines, but to find ways to prevent them. Through careful measurement and experiments, we provide evidence to support smart policy decisions on land and in the sea. We advise on the best way to protect species in reserves, inform hunters and fishers on how to avoid over-harvesting, and demonstrate the ways in which humans benefit from maintaining healthy ecosystems. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, ecosystem services, extinction
Categories : alien species, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, biosequestration, biowealth, carbon, cattle, caviar, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, extinction, fish, fisheries, food, function, habitat loss, human overpopulation, invasive species, mammal, meso-predator release, predation, predator, research, trophic cascades, water

It’s not always best to be the big fish

3 02 2016

Loosely following the theme of last week’s post, it’s now fairly well established that humans tend to pick on the big species first.

From fewer big trees, declines of big carnivores, elephant & rhino poaching, to fishing down the web, big species tend to cop it hardest when it comes to human-caused ecological disturbance.

While there are a lot of different combinations of traits that make some species more vulnerable to extinction than others (see examples for legumes, amphibians, sharks & teleosts, and mammals), one of the main ones is species size.

Generally speaking, larger species tend to produce fewer offspring and breed later in life than smaller species. This means that despite larger species tending to live longer than their smaller counterparts, their ‘slow’ reproductive output means that they are generally more susceptible to rapid environmental change (mainly via human intervention). In other words, their capacity for self-replacement is often too low to counteract the offtake from direct exploitation or habitat loss.

Despite a reasonable scientific understanding of this extinction-risk principle, the degree to which human disturbance affects species’ distributions is much less well quantified, and this is especially true for marine species.

I’m proud to announce another fascinating paper led by my postdoc, Camille Mellin, that has just come out online in Nature Communications: Humans and seasonal climate variability threaten large-bodied coral reef fish with small ranges.

With the world’s largest combined dataset of coral reef fish surveys for the entire Indo-Pacific (including the coral reef fish biodiversity hotspot — the Coral Triangle), we examined which conditions best described the distribution of fishes over a range of body sizes. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, Biogeography, coral reef, distribution, energy, exploitation, Fish, fishes, human disturbance, Overfishing, range, richness, species' range
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, coral reefs, exploitation, extinction, fish, fisheries, habitat loss, harvest, hotspot, human overpopulation, management, marine protected area, predation, predator

Game bird madness

4 11 2015

I just returned to Paris after a brief visit to the University of Aberdeen over the weekend. My hosts, Xavier Lambin and Beth Scott, were not only marvellously welcoming, I also learned a lot about the travesty that is game bird management in the United Kingdom, and especially in Scotland.

As you might already know, the Great Britons are a little cuckoo for birds — I’d even wager that the country produces more twitchers than any other country on Earth. The plus side is that there are few national taxa better censused and studied that British birds, because so many non-scientists get into the spirit of data collection. Hell, I’ve even had a play with some of their datasets.

The other side of this bird madness is not so good — I’m talking about the massive biomass of game birds reared, released and shot every year in the United Kingdom. It’s not the hunting per se with which I take issue, it’s the insane manipulation of an entire ecosystem for the benefit of a few species. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: game, game birds, grouse, hunting, management, pheasant, red-legged partridge
Categories : alien species, biodiversity, birds, conservation, decline, economics, harvest, management, predation, predator, tourism

What makes all that biodiversity possible?

23 09 2015

Predators.

You can either stop reading now because that’s the answer to the question, or you can continue and find out a little more detail.

I’ve just had an extremely pleasant experience reading John Terborgh‘s latest Perspective in PNAS. You know the kind of paper you read that (a) makes you feel smart, (b) confirms what you already think, yet informs you nonetheless, and (c) doesn’t take three days to digest? That’s one of those.

Toward a trophic theory of species diversity is not only all of those things, it’s also bloody well-written and comes at the question of ‘Why are there so many species on the planet when ecological theory can’t seem to explain how?’ with elegance, style and a lifetime of experience. I just might have to update my essential-ecology-papers list. If I had to introduce someone to 60 years of ecological theory on biodiversity, there’s no better place to start.

Read the rest of this entry »