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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.

More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas — … document[s] the devastating loss of flying insects in Germany … show[ing] that total flying insect biomass has been reduced by three quarters during the last three decades, irrespective of habitat type, weather variation, and the protected status of their sampling sites … (see also related blog post on CB.com)
Decline in global oceanic oxygen content during the past five decades — … report a decline [in oceanic oxygen content] over several decades in almost all ocean basins … consistent with what is anticipated from anthropogenic global warming. Far-reaching implications for biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem function, and fisheries are foreseen …
Soil networks become more connected and take up more carbon as nature restoration progresses — … This study … showed that shifts in the composition, network structure, and connectivity of soil food webs can alter the rates of … important ecosystem processes …
Applying network theory to prioritize multispecies habitat networks that are robust to climate and land-use change — … an excellent example of how to integrate multiple data sets and future uncertainty into conservation planning around a major urban area …
An Amazonian rainforest and its fragments as a laboratory of global change — Essential reading for all habitat fragmentation readers … (see also related blog post on CB.com)

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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

Keeping lions from livestock — building fences can save lives

23 06 2017

Seeing majestic lions strolling along the Maasai Mara at sunset — a dream vision for many conservationists, but a nightmare for pastoralists trying to keep their cattle safe at night. Fortunately a conservation success story from Kenya, published today in the journal Conservation Evidence, shows that predation of cattle can be reduced by almost 75% by constructing chain-link livestock fences.

The Anne K. Taylor Fund (AKTF) subsidises over 70% of the cost of building a fully fortified chain-link livestock enclosure (‘boma’) to keep cattle safe from predators at night, in the hope that this will lessen the retaliatory killings of lions by frustrated farmers. While lions, leopards and cheetahs draw in crowds of tourists who marvel at their strength and beauty, living alongside big predators can be tough. Traditionally, local people keep their animals overnight in bomas made of acacia thorns — but depredation by lions and other large carnivores cause losses of on average more than nine head of cattle per year, or US$1870 that farmers see disappear down the throat of big, hairy animals. Building a solid fortification of chain-link fence costs just $890, of which the AKTF paid $638, helping to make this an affordable option for hard-pressed locals. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: farming, human-wildlife conflict, lion, lions, Maasai Mara, Panthera leo, pastoralism, predator, prey, protection
Categories : Africa, agriculture, cattle, conservation, livestock, management, predator

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.

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Tags: biodiversity, community, ecology, Ecosystem, John Terborgh, neutral theory, niche compression, predator, prey, temperate, Trophic cascade, tropical
Categories : bottom-up ecology, meso-predator release, predation, top-down ecology

Using ecological theory to make more money

1 12 2014

Let’s face it: Australia doesn’t have the best international reputation for good ecological management. We’ve been particularly loathsome in our protection of forests, we have an appalling record of mammal extinctions, we’re degenerate water wasters and carbon emitters, our country is overrun with feral animals and weeds, and we have a long-term love affair with archaic, deadly, cruel, counter-productive and xenophobic predator management. To top it all off, we have a government hell-bent on screwing our already screwed environment even more.

Still, we soldier on and try to fix the damages already done or convince people that archaic policies should be scrapped and redrawn. One such policy that I’ve written about extensively is the idiocy and cruelty of the dingo fence.

The ecological evidence that dingoes are good for Australian wildlife and that they pose less threat to livestock than purported by some evidence-less graziers is becoming too big to ignore any longer. Poisoning and fencing are not only counter-productive, they are cruel, ineffective and costly.

So just when ecologists thought that dingoes couldn’t get any cooler, out comes our latest paper demonstrating that letting dingoes do their thing results in a net profit for cattle graziers.

Come again? Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Australia, cattle, cattle station, community, dingo, Ecosystem, graziers, Kangaroo, Predation, predator, prey
Categories : agriculture, Australia, biodiversity, cattle, conservation, ecological literacy, ecology, economics, ecosystem function, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, food, harvest, kangaroo, livestock, mammal, management, modelling, population dynamics, predator

No need for disease

7 01 2013

It’s human nature to abhor admitting an error, and I’d wager that it’s even harder for the average person (psycho- and sociopaths perhaps excepted) to admit being a bastard responsible for the demise of someone, or something else. Examples abound. Think of much of society’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for global climate disruption (how could my trips to work and occasional holiday flight be killing people on the other side of the planet?). Or, how about fishers refusing to believe that they could be responsible for reductions in fish stocks? After all, killing fish couldn’t possibly …er, kill fish? Another one is that bastion of reverse racism maintaining that ancient or traditionally living peoples (‘noble savages’) could never have wiped out other species.

If you’re a rational person driven by evidence rather than hearsay, vested interest or faith, then the above examples probably sound ridiculous. But rest assured, millions of people adhere to these points of view because of the phenomenon mentioned in the first sentence above. With this background then, I introduce a paper that’s almost available online (i.e., we have the DOI, but the online version is yet to appear). Produced by our extremely clever post-doc, Tom Prowse, the paper is entitled: No need for disease: testing extinction hypotheses for the thylacine using multispecies metamodels, and will soon appear in Journal of Animal Ecology.

Of course, I am biased being a co-author, but I think this paper really demonstrates the amazing power of retrospective multi-species systems modelling to provide insight into phenomena that are impossible to test empirically – i.e., questions of prehistoric (and in some cases, even data-poor historic) ecological change. The megafauna die-off controversy is one we’ve covered before here on ConservationBytes.com, and this is a related issue with respect to a charismatic extinction in Australia’s recent history – the loss of the Tasmanian thylacine (‘tiger’, ‘wolf’ or whatever inappropriate eutherian epithet one unfortunately chooses to apply). Read the rest of this entry »