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Influential conservation ecology papers of 2019

24 12 2019

As I’ve done for the last six years, I am publishing a retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of 2019 as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime (in no particular order). See previous years’ lists here: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

Decline of the North American avifauna — … the first comprehensive assessment of population change in the North American avifauna.

Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change — … [highlights] the crucial role of microbial transformations in determining set points for sea temperature, pH and ocean productivity … [identifies] microbial activity as the “life support system of the biosphere”.

(Note: Lots of people hated this one, basically because it appears to be severely flawed; nonetheless, it received several recommendations on F1000): The global tree restoration potential — … illustrates the substantial potential of capturing some of the excess carbon dioxide present in the earth’s atmosphere by planting trees.

Managing the middle: a shift in conservation priorities based on the global human modification gradient — … probably the best global assessment of spatial extent of human modification of natural terrestrial environments published to date.

Five decades of northern land carbon uptake revealed by the interhemispheric CO₂ gradient — … [concludes] that northern hemisphere [sic] vegetation and soil account for the majority of the terrestrial carbon sink, rather than tropical forests (not trying to display too many sour grapes here, but we’ve already reported this for the boreal forest, and they didn’t even bother to cite us — sad panda)

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Tags: agriculture, biodiversity, birds, carbon, carbon uptake, climate change, climate emergency, CO2, conservation, declines, drought, extinction, Fish, fisheries, forests, insects, marine ecology, microorganisms, pesticides, range edges, trees, urban biodiversity, wilderness
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, biogeography, biowealth, birds, carbon, climate change, climate shift, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, deforestation, demography, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fisheries, function, habitat loss, harvest, marine, planning, pollution, protected area

Influential conservation ecology papers of 2017

27 12 2017

As I have done for the last four years (2016, 2015, 2014, 2013), here’s another retrospective list of the top 20 influential conservation papers of 2017 as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime.

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Tags: Africa, Amazon, biodiversity, boundaries, cats, climate change, decline, depression, disturbance, dogs, drowning, elevation, eutrophication, Fish, forests, fragmentation, Genetics, Global warming, green spaces, insects, mental health, networks, nutrient cycling, ocean, oil, oil spill, oxygen, photosynthesis, phytoplankton, Planetary boundaries, Predation, predators, prey, productivity, rainfall, richness, Soil, wildebeest, zooplankton
Categories : Africa, algae, Amazon, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, cat, climate change, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation ecology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, drought, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental science, eutrophication, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fragmentation, function, genetics, habitat loss, marine, pollination, toxicology

You know you’re screwed when the insects disappear

31 10 2017

dead cicada Last Friday, ABC 891 here in Adelaide asked me to comment on a conservation paper doing the news rounds last week. While it has been covered extensively in the media (e.g., The Guardian, CNN, and Science), I think it’s probably going to be one of those things that people unfortunately start to forget right away. But this is decidedly something that no one should be forgetting.

While you can listen to me chat about this with the lovely Sonya Feldhoff on the ABC (I start chin-wagging around the 14:30 mark), I thought it prudent to remind CB.com readers just how devastatingly important this study is.

While anyone with a modicum of conservation science under her belt will know that the Earth’s biodiversity is not doing well, the true extent of the ecological tragedy unfolding before our very eyes really came home to us back in 2014 with the publication of WWF’s Living Planet Report. According to a meta-analysis of 10,380 population trends from over 3000 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and fish, the report concluded that the Earth has lost over 50% of the individuals in vertebrate populations since 1970. Subsequent revisions (and more population trends from more species) place the decline at over 60% by 2020 (that’s only a little over two years away). You can also listen to me speak about this on another radio show.

If that little bit of pleasant news didn’t make the pit of your stomach gurgle and a cold sweat break out on the back of your neck, you’re probably not human. But hang on, boys and girls — it gets so much worse! The publication in PLoS One on 18 October about Germany’s insect declines might be enough to tip you over the edge and into the crevasse of mental instability. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: ecological Armageddon, ecological catastrophe, ecosystem services, entomology, extinction, flying insects, Germany, insects, pollination
Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, community ecology, conservation, conservation ecology, extinction

Boreal forest on the edge of a climate-change tipping point

15 11 2016

As some know, I dabble a bit in the carbon affairs of the boreal zone, and so when writer Christine Ottery interviewed me about the topic, I felt compelled to reproduce her article here (originally published on EnergyDesk).

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A view of the Waswanipi-Broadback Forest in the Abitibi region of Northern Quebec, one of the last remaining intact Boreal Forests in the province (source: EnergyDesk).

A view of the Waswanipi-Broadback forest in the Abitibi region of northern Quebec, one of the last remaining intact boreal forests in the Canadian province (source: EnergyDesk).

The boreal forest encircles the Earth around and just below the Arctic Circle like a big carbon-storing hug. It can mostly be found covering large swathes of Russia, Canada and Alaska, and some Scandinavian countries.

In fact, the boreal – sometimes called by its Russian name ‘taiga’ or ‘Great Northern Forest’ – is perhaps the biggest terrestrial carbon store in the world.

So it’s important to protect in a world where we’re aiming for 1.5 or – at worst – under two degrees celsius of global warming.

“Our capacity to limit average global warming to less than 2 degrees is already highly improbable, so every possible mechanism to reduce emissions must be employed as early as possible. Maintaining and recovering our forests is part of that solution,” Professor Corey Bradshaw, a leading researcher into boreal forests based at the University of Adelaide, told Energydesk.

It’s not that tropical rainforests aren’t important, but recent research led by Bradshaw published in Global and Planetary Change shows that that there is more carbon held in the boreal forests than previously realised.

But there’s a problem. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, boreal, boreal forest, Canada, deforestation, fires, insects, invasion, invasion biology, invasive insects, Russia
Categories : biodiversity, boreal, Canada, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, connectivity, deforestation, development, economics, ecosystem services, Finland, fire, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, invasive species, logging, management, Norway, protected area, REDD, reforestation, Russia, Sweden

Massive yet grossly underestimated global costs of invasive insects

4 10 2016

Portrait of a red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. This species arrived to the southeastern United States from South America in the 1930s. Specimen from Brackenridge Field Laboratory, Austin, Texas, USA. Public domain image by Alex Wild, produced by the University of Texas "Insects Unlocked" program.

Portrait of a red imported fire ant Solenopsis invicta. This species arrived to the southeastern USA from South America in the 1930s. Specimen from Brackenridge Field Laboratory, Austin, Texas, USA. Public domain image by Alex Wild, produced by the University of Texas “Insects Unlocked” program.

As many of you already know, I spent a good deal of time in France last year basking in the hospitality of Franck Courchamp and his vibrant Systematic Ecology & Evolution lab at Université Paris-Sud. Of course, I had a wonderful time and was sad to leave in the end, but now I have some hard evidence that I wasn’t just eating cheese and visiting castles. I was actually doing some pretty cool science too.

Financed by BNP-Paribas and Agence Nationale de Recherche, the project InvaCost was designed to look at the global impact of invasive insects, including projections of range dynamics under climate change and shifting trade patterns. The first of hopefully many papers is now out.

Just published in Nature Communications, I am proud that many months of hard work by a brilliant team of ecologists, epidemiologists and economists has culminated in this article entitled Massive yet grossly underestimated costs of invasive insects, which in my opinion is the first robust analysis of its kind. Despite some previous attempts at estimating the global costs of invasive species^1-4 (which have been largely exposed as guesswork and fantasy^5-10), our paper rigorously treats the economic cost estimates and categorises them into ‘reproducible’ and ‘irreproducible’ categories.

Gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) adult. Dimitri Geystor (France)

What we found was sobering. If we look at just ‘goods and services’ affected by invasive insects, the annual global costs run at about US$70 billion. These include agricultural, forestry and infrastructure damages, as well as many of the direct costs of clean-up and eradication, and the indirect costs of prevention. When you examine that number a little more closely and only include the ‘reproducible’ studies, the total annual costs dip to about US$25 billion, meaning that almost 65% of the costs recorded are without any real empirical support. Scary, especially considering how much credence people put on previously published global ‘estimates’ (for example, see some citation statistics here).

Formosan subterranean termite Coptotermes formosanus by Scott Bauer, US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service

There’s a great example to illustrate this. If you take it at face value, the most expensive invasive insect in the world is the Formosan subterranean termite Coptotermes formosanus estimated at US$30.2 billion/yr globally. However, that irreproducible estimate is based on a single non-sourced value of US$2.2 billion per year for the USA, a personal communication supporting a ratio of 1:4 of control:repair costs in a single US city (New Orleans), and an unvalidated assumption that the US costs represent 50% of the global total.

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Tags: costs, Economics, ecosystem services, goods and services, human health, insects, invasion biology, invasive species
Categories : agriculture, Asia, Canada, Central America, climate change, conservation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, invasive species, investment, management, pollination, USA

InvaCost – estimating the economic damage of invasive insects

7 11 2014

This is a blosh (rehash of someone else’s blog post) of Franck Courchamp‘s posts on an exciting new initiative of which I am excited to be a part. Incidentally, Franck’s spending the week here in Adelaide.

Don’t forgot to vote for the project to receive 50 000 € public-communication grant!

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Climate change will make winters milder and habitats climatically more suitable year-round for cold-blooded animals like insects, but there are many questions remaining regarding whether such insects will be able to invade other regions as the climate shifts. There are many nasty bugs out there.

For example, the Asian predatory wasp is an invasive hornet in Europe that butchers pollinating insects, especially bees, thereby affecting the production of many wild and cultivated plants. I hope that we all remember what Einstein said about pollinators:

If bees were to disappear, humans will disappear within a few years.

(we all should remember that because it’s one of the few things he said that most of us understood). The highly invasive red fire ant is feared for its impacts on biodiversity, agriculture and cattle breeding, and the thousands of anaphylactic shocks inflicted to people by painful stings every year (with hundreds of deaths). Between the USA and Australia, over US$10 billion is spent yearly on the control of this insect alone. Tiger mosquitoes are vectors of pathogens that cause dengue fever, chikungunya virus and of about 30 other viruses. We could go on.

Most of these nasty creatures are now unable to colonise northern regions of Europe or America, or southern regions of Australia, for example, because they cannot survive cold temperatures. But how will this change? Where, when and which species will invade with rising temperatures? What will be the costs in terms of species loss? In terms of agricultural or forestry loss? In terms of diseases to cattle, domestic animals and humans? What will be the death toll if insects that are vectors of malaria can establish in new, highly populated areas?

We’ve proposed to study these and others from a list of 20 of the worst invasive insect species worldwide, and we got selected (i.e., financed!) by the Fondation BNP Paribas. In addition, the Fondation BNP Paribas has selected five scientific programmes on climate change and will give 50,000 € (that’s US$62,000) to the one selected by the public, for a communication project on their scientific programme. This is why we need you to vote for our project: InvaCost. Read the rest of this entry »