Stuart Pimm | ConservationBytes.com

Slicing the second ‘lung of the planet’

12 12 2011

Apologies for the slow-down in postings this past week – as many of you know, I was attending the International Congress for Conservation Biology in Auckland. I’ll blog about the conference later (and the stoush that didn’t really occur), but suffice it to say it was very much worthwhile.

This post doesn’t have a lot to do per se with the conference, but it was stimulated by a talk I attended by Conservation Scholar Stuart Pimm. Now, Stuart is known mainly as a tropical conservation biologist, but as it turns out, he also is a champion of temperate forests – he even sits on the science panel of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

I too have dabbled in boreal issues over my career, and most recently with a review published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on the knife-edge plight of boreal biodiversity and carbon stores. That paper was in fact the result of a brain-storming session Navjot Sodhi and I had one day during my visit to Singapore sometime in 2007. We thought, “It doesn’t really seem that people are focussing their conservation attention on the boreal forest; how bad is it really?”.

Well, it turns out that the boreal forest is still a vast expanse and that there aren’t too many species in imminent danger of extinction; however, that’s where the good news ends. The forest itself is becoming more and more fragmented from industrial development (namely, forestry, mining, petroleum surveying and road-building) and the fire regime has changed irrevocably from a combination of climate change and intensified human presence. You can read all these salient features here.

So, back to my original thread – Stuart gave a great talk on the patterns of deforestation worldwide, with particular emphasis on how satellite imagery hides much of the fine-scale damage that we humans do to the world’s great forests. It was when he said (paraphrased) that “50,000 km² of boreal forest is lost each year, but even that statistic hides a major checkerboard effect” that my interest was peaked. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: boreal forest, conservation, fire, forestry, fragmentation, Ian Warkentin, industrial development, Navjot Sodhi, petroleum exploration, Stuart Pimm
Categories : biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, boreal, cartoon, climate change, conference, conservation, deforestation, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, logging, reforestation, research, temperate

Over-estimating extinction rates

19 05 2011

I meant to get this out yesterday, but was too hamstrung with other commitments. Now the media circus has beat me to the punch. Despite the lateness (in news-time) of my post, my familiarity with the analysis and the people involved gives me a unique insight, I believe.

So a couple of months ago, Fangliang He and I were talking about some new analysis he was working on where he was testing the assumption that back-casted species-area relationships (SAR) gave reasonable estimates of inferred extinction rates. Well, that paper has just been published in today’s issue of Nature by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell entitled: Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss (see also the News & Views piece by Carsten Rahbek and Rob Colwell).

The paper has already stirred up something of a controversy before the ink has barely had time to dry. Predictably, noted conservation biologists like Stuart Pimm and Michael Rosenzweig have already jumped down Fangliang’s throat.

Extinction rates of modern biota in the current biodiversity crisis (Ehrlich & Pringle 2008) are wildly imprecise. Indeed, it has been proposed that extinction rates exceed the deep-time average background rate by 100- to 10000-fold (Lawton & May 2008; May et al. 1995; Pimm & Raven 2000), and no rigorously quantification of these rates globally has ever been accomplished (although there are several taxon- and region-specific estimates of localised extinction rates (Brook et al. 2003; Regan et al. 2001; Hambler et al. 2011; Shaw 2005).

Much of the information used to infer past extinction rate estimates is based on the species-area relationship (e.g., Brook et al. 2003); this method estimates extinction rates by reversing the species-area accumulation curve, extrapolating backward to smaller areas to calculate expected species loss. The concept is relatively simple, even though the underlying mathematics might not be. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, extinction, Fangliang He, Michael Rosenzweig, Nature, species-area relationship, Stephen Hubbell, Stuart Pimm
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, deforestation, extinction, extinction debt, fragmentation, habitat loss, mathematics, modelling, species-area curve

Tropical biology and conservation overview

28 07 2010

Last week I attended the 2010 International Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) in Sanur, Bali (Indonesia). I only managed one post on the real-world relevance of conservation research (that attracted quite a lot of comment) while there, but I did promise to give a conference overview as I did for the International Congress for Conservation Biology earlier this month. So here goes.

This was my first ATBC meeting despite having co-written ‘the book’ on tropical conservation biology (well, one of very, very many). I no longer live in the tropics but am still managing to keep my hand in many different aspects of tropical research. After all, tropical regions represent ground zero for conservation biology – they have the highest biodiversity (no matter which way you measure it), some of the greatest threats (e.g., most people, most rapid development, most corruption) and some of the most pressing human problems (disease, hunger, socio-political instability). Ironically, most of the world’s conservation ecologists work in temperate realms – it should really be the other way around. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, ATBC, biodiversity, biology, conservation, Stuart Pimm, tropics
Categories : Amazon, biodiversity, biogeography, China, conference, conservation, conservation biology, habitat loss, harvest, Indonesia, logging, mammal, planning, prioritisation, REDD, tropical

International Congress for Conservation Biology 2010 overview

18 07 2010

A few posts ago I promised a brief overview of the 2010 International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB) that I attended last week in Edmonton, Canada. Here it is.

While acknowledging that it is impossible for any single individual to attend all talks at a congress of this size given that there were usually around 6-8 concurrent sessions on most days, I can provide only a synopsis of what I saw and what I heard from others.

I’ve been lukewarm about the two SCB conferences I have attended in previous years (Brasilia and Chattanooga), and I expected about this same this time around. However, overall the presentations were generally of a higher quality, the audio-visual was professional and the schedule was humane (I really, really, really like 09.00 starts; I really, really, really hate 08.00 starts).

For me, highlights certainly include Tyrone Hayes‘ plenary on the evils of atrazine, Fangliang He‘s description of the perils of overestimating extinction rates from species-area relationships, Mark Burgman‘s account of the crap performance of ‘experts’ in returning truth, Stuart Pimm‘s advocacy of scientific advocacy, Bastian Bomhard‘s sobering account of our failure to meet the 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity targets, Rob Ewers‘ BioFrag software, Tom Brook‘s account of vertebrate threat patterns, Rob Dietz‘ presentation on the Centre for Advancement of the Steady State Economy, Guy Pe’er‘s review of population viability analyses, and of course, the Conservation Leadership Programme salsa party! Read the rest of this entry »