restoration | ConservationBytes.com

Assessing Conservation Actions

3 09 2008

A good post from Tim Bean (Berkeley) over at ConsBlog.org – one for the Potential list:

—

This paper in press at Conservation Letters by Haines et al. presents a novel method for assessing conservation actions. There’s been quite a bit of work done in the past decade, particularly by NGOs, to develop methods to assess whether their actions have actually succeeded; this work was spear-headed in particular by Nick Salafsky and his Foundations of Success. This paper suggests that many of conservation biggest problems can be monitored with spatial datasets and proposes using the Human Footprint as a basis for such monitoring. The Human Footprint is, in essence, a collection of spatial datasets that holistically represent the collective anthropogenic impact on the land. In their paper, Haines et al. suggest that by tracking these spatial datasets through time in a paired way – conservation action site randomly paired with a control – we can get a better handle on whether the particular action was successful. The nice thing about the paper is how clear-eyed it is about what is and is not possible using this approach:

The human footprint is a spatially explicit approach to conservation planning that may serve as an effective visual medium to public audiences and stakeholders worldwide by simplifying the presentation of complex information.

(This is always the last, best resort for spatial analysts: even if the model isn’t perfect, it’s a great communication tool. ) But they also warn:

Spatial data rarely produce a complete picture of what negative impacts are occurring because human footprint data are not well-suited to track anthropogenic impacts that lack a spatial signature…[e.g.] the spread of some chemical pollutants, invasive species, diseases, and impacts of poaching…

Although I have to disagree partially with these particulars – presence of roads is often a very good correlative of poaching – their main point is an important one to consider. How well does a spatial model of human influence catch these hidden factors? A few years ago I did an informal (and sadly never completed) analysis of invasive plants and the Human Footprint and found that they were actually fairly well correlated. You could also argue that disease may be higher amongst individuals that are negatively impacted by the presence of humans. There’s plenty of opportunity here for further exploration.

Thanks, Tim.

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, environmental policy, impact, investment, planning, recovery, restoration

Show me the (conservation) evidence

29 08 2008

Guest post from Professor William J. Sutherland, Miriam Rothschild Chair in Conservation Biology, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, United Kingdom:

—

We carry out research in conservation largely under the belief that this is making a difference to the planet. However, research (e.g., Sutherland et al. 2004) shows that little of this research is used in practice. There are many good reasons why practitioners only use a small fraction of the available science: most do not have access to the scientific search engines, they usually have very limited access to scientific journals and most importantly, they usually do not have the time or training to search the literature. Another important problem is that the most important source of information is the experience of practitioners, but this is rarely quantified or documented.

To help overcome these problems the website ConservationEvidence.com has been established. It has two main objectives: (1) providing a means for practitioners to document their experience through the online journal Conservation Evidence and (2) summarising the global literature including unpublished report and papers in languages other than English. Currently (August 2008), this has details of over 1200 interventions but the aim is to increase this to 10,000 interventions. The next stage, which is currently being worked on, is then to provide summaries of the consequences of different interventions.

The ambitious objective is to change the way in which global conservation practice is carried out so that practitioners have ready access to information on the effectiveness of interventions including the experience of other practitioners.

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, environmental science, recovery, restoration, threatened species

Australian Wet Tropics Biosequestration Project

28 08 2008

Guest post from Penny van Oosterzee, Degree Celsius:

—

: © P. van Oosterzee

The Wet Tropics Regional Biosequestration Project Development Document was launched last week on the global stage, for public scrutiny, via the Climate Community and Biodiversity (CCB) website. There are only a dozen other cases in the world that have managed to reach this level of scrutiny.

The CCB standards are used in both the voluntary global markets and also for CDM (clean development mechanism) projects (only afforestation and reforestation) that have significant biodiversity outcomes. It is well known that land use, land use change, and forestry provides the most cost-effective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally, and we believe the Wet Tropics project is at the leading edge of showing how.

The Wet Tropics Project is the world’s first regional biocarbon verification case based on community NRM (Natural Resource Management) activities, aggregating different bio-sequestration activities (reforestation, assisted natural regeneration, avoided deforestation, grazing land management, reduced use of fertiliser in agriculture) of myriad landholders in one verification case.

The initiative of using NRM Regional Plan’s as a basis for biosequestration project design is an innovation that can be rolled out across the state and nationally. Using Regional Plans ensures scientifically robust monitoring outcomes because of the adoption of systems already in place for monitoring. Economically the approach allows trading to occur at the regional and landholder level, and sets the stage for new livelihoods in regional Australia in a climate constrained world.

The Wet Tropics Project is itself a pilot for the NRM regions comprising the catchments of the Great Barrier Reef which are pivotal for its the survival. The Wet Tropics Project also helps to inform national policy debates since both Garnaut and the Federal Government’s Green Paper point out the importance of forestry and agriculture but fail to provide any way forward, and are on a watching brief for solutions.

The Wet Tropics initiative with its link to regional plans immediately enables entry into other global developments such as water quality credits and biodiversity credits.

See also the Degree Celsius website for more information.

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, ghg, greenhouse gas emissions, investment
Categories : biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, investment, restoration

Cost, not biodiversity, dictates decision to conserve

26 08 2008

One for the Potential list:

—

I’ve just read a great new paper by Bode et al. (2008) entitled Cost-effective global conservation spending is robust to taxonomic group.

After the hugely influential biodiversity ‘hotspot‘ concept hit the global stage, there was a series of subsequent research papers examining just how we should measure the ‘biodiversity’ component of areas needing to be conserved (and invested in). The problem was that depending on which taxa you looked at, and what measure of ‘biodiversity’ you used (e.g., species richness, endemism, latent threat, evolutionary potential, functional redundancy), the priority list of where, how much and when to invest in conservation differed quite a lot. In other words, the congruency among listed areas was rather low (summarised nicely in Thomas Brooks‘ paper in Science Global biodiversity conservation priorities and examined also by Orme et al. 2005). This causes all sorts of problems for conservation investment planners – what to invest in and where?

Bode and colleagues’ newest paper demonstrates at least for endemism, the taxon on which you base your assessment is much less important for maximising species conservation than factors such as land cost and the degree of threat (e.g., as measured by the IUCN Red List).

Of course, their findings could be considered too simplistic because they don’t (couldn’t) evaluate other potentially more important components of ‘biodiversity’ such as genetic history (evolutionary potential) or ecological functional redundancy (the idea that a species becomes more important to conserve if no other species provide the same ecosystem functions); however, I think this paper is something of a landmark in that it shows that ‘socio-economic’ uncertainty generally outweighs uncertainty due to biodiversity measures. The long and short of this is that planners should start investing if there is evidence of heightened threat and land is cheap.

A few other missing bits means that the paper is more heuristic than prescriptive (something the authors state right up front). There is no attempt to take biodiversity, threat or land cost changes arising from climate change into account (see relevant post here), so some of the priorities are questionable. Related to this is the idea of latent risk (see relevant paper by Cardillo et al. 2006) – what’s not necessarily threatened now but likely will be in the very near future. Also, only a small percentage of species are listed in the IUCN Red List (see relevant post here), so perhaps we’re missing some important trends. Finally, I had to note that almost all the priority areas outlined in the paper happened to be in the tropics, which stands to reason given the current and ongoing extinction crisis occurring in this realm. See a more detailed post on ‘tropical turmoil‘.

Despite the caveats, I think this could provide a way forward to the conservation planning stalemate.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : biodiversity, conservation biology, ecological triage, endemic, endemism, environmental policy, extinction, governance, hotspot, planning, recovery, restoration, threatened species

Classics: Biodiversity Hotspots

25 08 2008

‘Classics’ is a category of posts highlighting research that has made a real difference to biodiversity conservation. All posts in this category will be permanently displayed on the Classics page of ConservationBytes.com

—

Myers, N., Mittermeier, R.A., Mittermeier, C.G., da Fonseca, G.A.B. & Kent, J. (2000). Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature, 403, 853-858

According to Google Scholar, this paper has over 2500 citations. Even though it was published less than a decade ago, already Myers and colleagues’ ‘hotspots’ concept has become the classic lexicon for, as they defined it, areas with high species endemism and degradation by humans. In other words, these are places on the planet (originally only terrestrial, but the concept has been extended to the marine realm) where at the current rates of habitat loss, exploitation, etc., we stand to lose far more irreplaceable species. The concept has been criticised for various incapacities to account for all types of threats – indeed, many other prioritisation criteria have been proposed (assessed nicely by Brooks et al. 2006 and Orme et al. 2005), but it’s the general idea proposed by Myers and colleagues that has set the conservation policy stage for most countries. One little gripe here – although the concept ostensibly means areas of high endemic species richness AND associated threat, people often take the term ‘hotspot’ to mean just a place with lots of species. Not so. Ah, the intangible concept of biodiversity!

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, ecological triage, endemism, environmental policy, extinction, hotspot, population dynamics, recovery, restoration, threatened species

Native forests reduce the risk of catastrophic floods

20 08 2008

Each year extreme floods kill or displace hundreds of thousands of people and cause billions of dollars in damage to property. The consequences of floods are particularly catastrophic in developing countries generally lacking the infrastructure to deal adequately with above-average water levels.

For centuries it has been believed that native forest cover reduced the risk and severity of catastrophic flooding, but there has been strong scientific debate over the role of forests in flood mitigation.

Forest loss is currently estimated at 13 million hectares each year, with 6 million hectares of that being primary forest previously untouched by human activities. These primary forests are considered the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, but this realisation has not halted their immense rate of loss.

Last year my colleagues and I published a paper entitled Global evidence that deforestation amplifies flood risk and severity in the developing world in Global Change Biology (highlighted in Nature and Faculty of 1000) that has finally provided tangible evidence that there is a strong link between deforestation and flood risk. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 15 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : Africa, Asia, carbon, Central America, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, flood, governance, habitat loss, impact, planning, restoration, tropical

Tropical turmoil – a biodiversity tragedy in progress

18 08 2008

We recently published (online) a major review showing that the world is losing the battle over tropical habitat loss with potentially disastrous implications for biodiversity and human well-being.

Published online in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, our review Tropical turmoil – a biodiversity crisis in progress concludes that we are “on a trajectory towards disaster” and calls for an immediate global, multi-pronged conservation approach to avert the worst outcomes.

Tropical forests support more than 60 % of all known species, but represent only about 7 % of the Earth’s land surface. But up to 15 million hectares of tropical rainforest are being lost every year and species are being lost at a rate of up to 10000 times higher than would happen randomly without humans present.

This is not just a tragedy for tropical biodiversity, this is a crisis that will directly affect human livelihoods. This is not just about losing tiny species found in the canopies of big rain forest trees few people will ever see, this is about a complete change in ecosystem services that directly benefit human life. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 16 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : Africa, alien species, anthropocene, Asia, biodiversity, bushmeat, Central America, conservation, corruption, deforestation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, governance, habitat loss, human overpopulation, invasive species, restoration, science, South America, tropical

Realistic conservation investment

18 07 2008

I’m currently attending the Society for Conservation Biology‘s Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA and blogging on presentations I think are worth mentioning.

In a surprise shift from the previously planned final plenary talk, Prof. Helene Marsh of James Cook University gave a nice example of how good research can be melded with non-technical opinion to weight threatened species for recovery investment. Using a north Queensland example, she described how technical assessments of relative threat risk combined with weightings from non-technical policy makers can provide the most realistic and relevant conservation investment when used simultaneously. Based on their paper in 2007 (‘Optimizing allocation of management resources for wildlife‘), Prof. Marsh outlined a quantitative approach to meld these decision-making components with real-world outcomes. I’d like to see some of the real outcomes in terms of recovery of north Queensland threatened species, but at least the State appears to be on the right track by using this tool.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, decline, environmental policy, extinction, governance, planning, recovery, restoration, science

IUCN Chief Scientist & Asia

15 07 2008

I’m currently attending the Society for Conservation Biology‘s Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA and blogging on presentations I think are worth mentioning.

The first plenary talk was given by the IUCN’s Chief Scientist, Jeffrey McNeely, about the issues surrounding biodiversity conservation in Asia. Dr. McNeely gave an interesting background to the human cultural history and diversity of the region, followed by a brief exposé of the conservation issues there (habitat loss, over-exploitation, invasive species, etc). Overall, however, I was disappointed by his lack of emphasis on the magnitude of the conservation crisis Asia is undergoing. There was no mention of the perverse subsidies buffering unsustainable forestry and fishing, the corruption driving habitat loss and habitat degradation, or the massive problems driven by human over-population.

We recently published (currently online) a paper regarding the conservation crisis facing this (and similar regions) in the tropics Tropical turmoil – a biodiversity crisis in progress (see related post), and several of my colleagues have recently outlined just how badly biodiversity is faring in Asia (e.g., see Brook et al. 2003; Sodhi et al. 2004). While I was happy to see Dr. McNeely mention the need for more research on these issues, his statement that he had “depressed [us] with the problems” was a major understatement. He did not nearly go far enough to ‘depress’ his audience of conservation scientists. We are squarely within a crisis in the region, and if the Chief Scientist of the IUCN who has intimate knowledge of Asia is not singing that song loudly and clearly, I fear it will get far worse before we see any real positive change.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : alien species, Asia, biodiversity, bushmeat, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, decline, deforestation, ecosystem, environmental policy, exploitation, governance, habitat loss, impact, invasive species, IUCN, research, restoration, science, tropical

‘Conservation for the people’

11 07 2008

This, the title of Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier’s paper in Scientific American, embodies in some ways, what this website is all about. Certainly not the first researchers to conclude that people will only value biodiversity if it has direct implications for their own well-being (economic prosperity, health, longevity, etc.), Kareiva and Marvier’s paper nicely summarises, however, the extent to which conservation research MUST quantify these links. The corollary is that if we don’t, conservation research will pass into oblivion (along with the species we are attempting to protect from extinction). Nice paper, and certainly one to watch.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, decline, deforestation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, function, governance, impact, research, restoration, science

Conservation Letters – a scientific journal with a difference?

5 07 2008

I’d like to introduce the latest scientific conservation journal – Conservation Letters (Wiley-Blackwell). If you are a publishing conservation scientist then you will have undoubtedly heard about this already. I must admit my biased opinion up front – I have the role of Senior Editor for the journal under the auspices of the venerable Editors-in-Chief, Professor Richard Cowling, Professor Hugh Possingham, Professor Bill Sutherland and Dr. Michael Mascia.

We’ve been doing conservation science now for well over 50 years, and there has been some fantastic, hard-hitting, brilliant research done. However, extinction rates continue to soar, habitat loss and fragmentation abound, bushmeat hunting and other forms of direct over-exploitation show no signs of slowing and invasive species are penetrating into the most ‘pristine’ habitats. To top it all off, climate change is exacerbating each and every one of these extinction drivers.

So what have we been doing wrong?

Clearly the best research is going unheeded – this is not to say that some progress has not been made, and I hope to highlight the best examples of the hardest-hitting research on this site – it simply means that we are losing the battle. Enter Conservation Letters – a journal designed to make conservation research more available to policy makers and managers to make true strides forward in biodiversity conservation. I’m not suggesting for a moment that other well-known, respected and established conservation journals have not done their job; without the research those journals publish we’d certainly be much worse off. However, we have recognised that our research isn’t affecting as many people as it should.

With Conservation Letters now well into its first year, I hope that we start to see some changes here, and I hope that the discipline will have a much greater net effect on slowing (and perhaps) reversing the extinction trends we observe today. Climate change is making this much more challenging, as well as the ever-increasing human population. Can we make better progress? – I certainly hope so.

CJA Bradshaw