• The 9th World Wilderness Congress will be held in November in Merida, Mexico.
• Nine thresholds for a safe planet (from Nature)
• Even the most dire predictions from the IPCC were optimistic. It’s already twice as hot as they thought it would be.
• Since it’s getting warmer, kudzu is creeping north to Canada. Hey Toronto, better sleep with your windows closed.

• Hey look, George Will has another column coming out tomorrow on climate change. Guess what, he’s digging in his heels and saying he’s absolutely right. Just like Al Gore!
• Thomas Gillespie, professor of Geography at UCLA, has used a distance-decay model and a little common wisdom to determine Osama Bin Laden’s most likely hiding place. This reminds me of a project that is trying to create a habitat suitability model for marijuana in the Sierra Nevadas, including a viewshed parameter that would model the most difficult places to spot by small aircraft.
• Erik Meijaard on the confusing fact that some species are invasive in one location, and endangered in their native habitat.
• Researchers are now suggesting that all those pelican deaths in California were due to climate change.

• George Church (director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School) reflects on the benefits and pitfalls of biotechnology in solving environmental problems. Unforgivably, no mention of bringing back the woolly mammoth.
• A deeper article from the NY Times on the Macquarie Island debacle (introduce cats, cats decimate island, remove cats, rabbits decimate island) covered earlier this year.
• Environmental groups want federal government to stop paying for wildlife to be slaughtered to protect livestock. Best reason I’ve ever heard: “the use of helicopters and small planes to fly low enough for contracted sharp shooters to pick off the coyotes has resulted in plane crashes killing 10 and injuring 28 from 1979-2007.” But won’t somebody think of the cattle?!? But seriously, beef is really emissions-heavy. Even local, grass-fed beef. (I need to remind myself every once in a while…)
• I will not even try to conservation-spin this in a “they’re getting rid of corn syrup, that’s great” way. I am just psyched that Pepsi will be selling Pepsi made from cane sugar in the United States again (and not just on Kosher-heavy holidays). “Pepsi throwback.”

The Independent covers the latest volley in the spat between conservationists and humanists over just how racist the war on invasives/non-natives/exotics/illegals/three-fifths is. The defensive cry of “Don’t call me Goebbels” hits just the right hysterical note, if you ask me. I do wonder what the ecological equivalent of the Obama election would be…

• Remember how David Hayes might’ve once could’ve been Interior Secretary? He’s going to be Deputy Interior Secretary instead.
• Native plants in your backyard really do increase native diversity of wildlife.
• $93 million has been spent conserving the Mojave desert tortoise. Meanwhile, the Barneby reed-mustard (of the Utah Reed-Mustards) received $6. I know we’ve put a value on a human life. Has anybody estimated the value of a species? Whatever it was, it was too high for the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, which is now genetically extinct.
• It’s fun pretending to read this interview with David Attenborough in his voice. To wit: “I can find you a new species without any problem at all. Take you to the rainforest and spend three or four days just scooping up insects. The difficulty is not finding the species, it’s finding the one man who specialises in thrips or whatever, who can tell you that it’s a different thing. Taxonomy is unfashionable.”
• “Mythical glorification of trees first reached its zenith in the songs, prose and paintings of the Romantic period. The Nazis were likewise obsessed with the concept of the forest.” Uh, Brian? Little help?
• Foreigners appear to be driving demand for snow leopard pelts in Afghanistan.
• From Minnesota Birdnerd, here is a picture of a real live bilateral gynandromorph cardinal: half-male, half-female, down the center:

The Times has picked up the PNAS paper reported on below, which proposed that exotic species in fact increase biodiversity rather than harm it. Note that this article does not touch on extinction debt, but it is a fresher look at invasion, extinctions and biodiversity. In a pop science sort of way.

Another paper from the PNAS colloquium on biodiversity extinction. In this study, the authors (Sax & Gaines) present evidence that despite an explosion of naturalized/invasive plant species on islands across the world, there hasn’t been a commensurate decrease in native flora. In fact, they find an incredibly tight, 1:1 linear relationship between native and non-native species diversity. This, on the face of it, suggests that species invasions may increase the world’s biodiversity (as non-native plants on islands begin to experience allopatric speciation). The one major worry would be that the islands are in a state of “extinction debt” where many of these species still present are going to face extinction sometime in the future, we simply haven’t observed it yet. Needless to say, extinction debt is both an important concept in conservation but also a good way to hand-wave around the fact that we haven’t seen the level of extinctions that we’d expect — yet. Here‘s a write-up on the article from Science Daily.

[edit: More from Corey on Extinction Debt]

Dov F. Sax and Steven D. Gaines. Species invasions and extinction: The future of native biodiversity on islands. PNAS, 105: 11490-11497. (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0802290105)