• Sorry I missed it on the 12th, but Revkin wrote an elegant piece on Darwin and conservation.
• Shifting baselines are a real problem.
• The stimulus bill has lots of money for protected areas.
• Erik Meijaard writes about what it’s like being a conservationist for TNC in Indonesia: “much of our time is spent in offices and meeting rooms.” One sentence in particular stands out: “…nature conservation has little to do with nature, but a lot to do with people.”
• At least 235 species occur at both the north and south poles.
• The editor of Conservation Letters looks back on its first year (and a succesful year it’s been!).

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.

Haines, A. et al. A theoretical approach to using human footprint data to assess landscape level conservation efforts. Conservation Letters, in press. (doi: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00024.x)

It’s been said, repeatedly, that the single most important advance in environmental science was the development of a global observation system. Through the combination of satellites and regional and locally-scaled observations, environmental scientists are now able to study the earth as a whole, in real time. Any number of metaphors are available, but the power of having that kind of technology should be obvious. At any given time, we can know how much the ice caps have melted this summer; what the air quality is like in Beijing; how big the next hurricane will be. The Global Earth Observatory System of Systems is, quite simply, awesome.

But with the biodiversity crisis, there is no concomitant global observation system. We can’t say, on any given day, how much habitat has been lost; how many insects have gone extinct; where people are hunting. There’s plenty of data available in individual pieces, at different scales, covering different time periods, but it isn’t collected together in one place in a meaningful way. People are trying to change that, however. This piece in the Policy Forum of Science gives a nice introduction at efforts underway to create the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network  (GEO BON) (no doubt located in the Department of Redundancy Department, yuk yuk.) Bad jokes aside, the GEO BON is “a new global partnership to help collect, manage, analyze, and report data relating to the status of the world’s biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, here’s a more nitty-gritty paper in Conservation Letters that details development of the new IUCN Red List Index measuring extinction risk for taxa through time. The authors address

selecting the taxonomic groups to be included in the index, determining the minimum sample size (number of species) necessary to provide robust trends, determing a sampling strategy to ensure sufficient geographic and taxonomic representation, establishing methods for aggregating data and weighting the index, and estimating confidence intervals.

Such an effort is good and necessary. If what I’ve heard about some IUCN Red List groups is true, developing a robust and transparent strategy for determining extinction risk can only improve current efforts. However, one of the things that really stood out to me from the recent SCB conference is that people’s efforts to identify key indicator taxa has sort of stalled. All the talks I attended that addressed this issue concluded that it wasn’t working. I suspect that results from a simple evolutionary / ecological fact: diversity exists because of empty niches. The hope in identifying an indicator group is that there’s some correlation between that particular taxon, but biodiversity is on a very basic level inherently un-correlated. Now, that’s not to say I think developing these methods is a waste of time, merely that as we move forward we must always be cognizant of the fact that focusing on one area of biodiversity, whether it’s at the genetic, species, ecosystem or landscape level, we will necessarily ignore other parts of the whole. I’d like to refer to this as the Whack-a-Mole dilemma.

Scholes, R. et al. Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System. Science, 321: 1044-1045. (doi 10.1126/science.1162055)

Baillie, J. et al. Toward monitoring global biodiversity. Conservation Letters, 1:1, 18-26. (doi: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00009.x)

As a spatial ecologist, I tend to think of biodiversity in terms of things you can easily map: if a bird requires old growth forest to breed, I can tell you where to focus preservation efforts. But there’s a rich literature about all the secondary effects of human influence on wildlife. Take roads, for example. While it’s true that roads are not very good habitat for wildlife, in addition to creating sometimes unpenetrable barriers to movement and increased mortality from car strikes, roads can also degrade living conditions for wildlife by modifying their behavior. There’s a review in press at Biological Conservation that discusses ungulate flight response to human disturbance. Depending on a population’s habituation to humans, cars can increase stress hormone levels in individuals, which is not healthy. Anyone who’s been to Yellowstone will recognize, however, that ungulate behavior is incredibly malleable and many species seem happy to habituate to human activity.

A more distressing report has been published in Conservation Letters that suggests even low levels of human activity can have large effects on sensitive carnivores. Merenlender and Reed found that protected and recreational areas of California are associated with five-fold decreases in carnivore numbers. They conducted paired transects in oak woodlands, comparing areas accessible and inaccesible to humans. That simply walking/jogging/bird-watching could have such an impact on the behavior of wildlife is a sobering — if not entirely surprising — finding.

Stankowich, T. Ungulate flight responses to human disturbance: A review and meta-analysis. Biological Conservation, In Press. (doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2008.06.026)

Reed, S. and A. Merenlender. Quiet, Nonconsumptive Recreation Reduces Protected Area Effectiveness. Conservation Letters, In Press. (doi:10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00019.x)

There’s a paper by Lindenmayer et al. in press at Conservation Letters, and it’s a nice example of why that journal exists. They present evidence that through landscape-level management (in this case pine plantations around native open woodlands), humans have created “novel ecosystems.” Bird communities in the open woodlands have shifted to include species more commonly found in pine plantations (surprise), a novel combination that would not exist without human intervention. They then ask:

When and where are novel ecosystems appropriate? What can we do about changes deem inappropriate? When does the preservation of a novel ecosystem become a conservation concern? If a novel ecosystem is a dynamic entity, at which point might conservation intervention be warranted? How long does an ecosystem have to exist for it to be considered novel?

Good questions. I’d also like to know: how long does it take for a novel ecosystem to reach some type of equilibrium (e.g. is there an inflection point for the rate of change in community composition)? How soon until we recognize sub-species that persist only in these novel ecosystems, and are we obligated to protect them?

So often, conservation focuses on what we think was true in the past, ignoring that fundamental tenet of ecologists and some politicians: change! It’s vital to recognize that novelty in an ecosystem caused by humans might be neither good nor bad, and I think a place like Conservation Letters is a perfect place to present the idea.