• Great pictures and story on the banteng, “the most beautiful of all the wild relatives of cattle.” Compared to the Kouprey, banteng are doing pretty well in SE Asia. But then, the Kouprey are probably extinct. That’s probably what happens when you set aside new land for carbon sequestration, and ignore the threats from hunting. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, one woman is hunting the hunters (and by “hunting”, the headline writer meant tracking and trying to carry out legal enforcement against poaching, not killing in cold blood).
• This paper probably marks the end of the pendulum swing against individual actions in the Global War on Climate Change. If everybody worked on cutting household emissions, the U.S. could reduce carbon emissions by about 20% in the next decade. Call this Obama’s vaunted “Check your tire pressure” initiative.
• This is crazy: some migratory birds push out a second brood after migration. “He noted that orchard orioles might raise a first brood in the Midwestern and south-central U.S. and a second on Mexico’s western coast, yet both sets of offspring find the same wintering area in Central America. The question is how both groups find the right place, since they must travel in different directions.”
• Some discussion has arisen about conservation targets due to a recent publication in Conservation Letters. One problem with setting a target may be seen in Britain, where rare species appear to be increasing in abundance (i.e. doing better), while common species are in decline. Sometimes the whole thing feels sort of like the little boy with his finger in the dam. The newly-released IUCN Red List suggests that about 36% of the species analyzed are threatened with extinction (CJB weighs in).
• Interesting profile of the new National Parks head, Jonathan Jarvis. Jarvis is the first trained biologist to head the NPS.

• More on eco-economics, from George Soros and Bill Moyers.
• Lazarus revisited: the Sumatran muntjac is no longer extinct! Re-discovered — I am not making this up — in a poacher’s snare.
• Georgia has joined the IUCN (to go along with its already full deck of CBD, CCC, Ramsar, and CITES). I wonder if anybody more geo-politically minded could comment on how this plays in with its efforts to join NATO.
• The Convention on Migratory Species declares 2009 “Year of the Gorilla”! In other news, the Convention on Non-Migratory Species declares 2009 “Year of the Arctic Tern.” [thanks SS for pointing out the weirdness of this news]
• Translocation of Indian rhinos continues to fail. Er, Indian rhino saved from its own wanderlust. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket… “A young rhino that went on a 14-day trek across India, through villages as well as countryside, was finally persuaded to abandon its wanderlust by conservation specialists and return to where its journey began.” Then this: “It is believed it was trying to find its way to its previous home in Pobitora wildlife sanctuary.” “Officials suspect that the animal might again go on a similar ‘adventure.’” Persuaded. &c. &c.

• Curious about where current theory stands on the origin of the uneven distribution of biodiversity? Here’s some pop science from Seed for you.
• Is the Fish & Wildlife Service discouraging public comments*? ESA Blawg is on the case!
• There are about 30 Amur Leopards left in the world. Somebody got a photograph of one of them with a kill.
• IUCN has released a report (pdf) during the WCC this week that suggests that, out of 17,000 species analyzed, about 7,000 are at risk of extinction from climate change. The report is nice to read, and nice to look at it. It does not appear to address the fact that all the species on earth today have, through their ancestors, survived billions of years of climate change: that is, there’s no room for adaptation/evolution. I’m not, by any means, optimistic about the future of our planet’s biodiversity, but the idea that none of these species will be able to adapt to new environmental conditions is nonsense. We don’t know enough to say how, or which ones, will do so, but it’s just not presented in this report. To paraphrase one noted ecologist at my fair university, “Our ability to predict where and how extinctions will occur is very soon going to be surpassed by our ability to observe them.”
• Government officials in Sumatra have agreed to try to protect its forests. Yeah, those forests, the ones that under current deforestation rates (and subsequent peat burning) are contributing the equivalent of about 50% of Australia’s carbon emissions.

*(Yes)

Commentary from Nature on the IUCN and the Red List.

The UN has agreed to add biodiversity targets to its Millenium Development Goals, specifically reducing the proportion of species threatened with extinction using the IUCN Red List. Here’s a press release from BirdLife.

This is fantastic news. Getting buy-in from the UN will no doubt politicize the process of categorizing species on the Red List. But it should also improve it in a number of ways, by increasing transparency and strengthening guidelines. I’d love to see species weighted by genetic (or functional) uniqueness, but any index is better than none. This is a big step forward.

Wow, lots of stuff happened over the weekend:

• UNEP and UNESCO have proposed listing the Fertile Crescent as a World Heritage Site. There’s a lot to unpack here: first, this would obviously fall under the heading of Warfare Ecology, as much of the wetlands were drained by Saddam Hussein as a means of controlling the Marsh Arabs‘ culture.
  But in addition to that, the wetlands obviously provide important ecosystem services, improving drinking water conditions for thousands of people among other things. There’s a massive restoration project underway for this area of the world, and I hope it succeeds. Good for nature? Check. Good for humans? Check. Symbolism through the roof? This is exciting. It’s the Garden of Eden!
• DRC wildlife authority and the army have negotiated a plan to move thousands of soldiers and their families out of Virunga National Park.
• IUCN has joined forces with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) for the World Conservation Congress. The conference will be the world’s largest meeting ever on biodiversity (Barcelona, Oct 5-14).
• Look, I like to spend a small percentage of my huge salary at Nobu every week, too, but any good conservationist should probably stop: they’re serving the gorilla burgers of the sushi world.
• Do you have a scientific PhD? Are you named Steve (or any variation thereof, I’m looking at you, Stephanie)? Do you believe in the theory of evolution? Please go register at Project Steve, an effort by the National Center for Science Education to get 1,000 Steves to fight creationism as a “science.” [Thanks to Chantal for the tipoff]
  

• “Edwin Sabuhoro, 35, was selected as winner of the [IUCN] 2008 Young Conservationist Award.” The Rwandan developed an ecotourism program to protect gorillas from poaching. Tourism’s up 40% and poaching’s down 60%. Very cool, and congratulations to him. Also congratulations to everyone 35 and under: you are still young!
• Over at ConservationBytes, William Sutherland introduces ConservationEvidence.com, an on-line, peer-reviewed journal covering case studies of effective conservation actions. Also very cool; perhaps Sabuhoro can get a pub?

Mattila et al. propose that many species at risk of extinction may be linked by similar ecological traits. In their discussion, for example, they cite studies that species with high diet or habitat specificity are at greater risk of extinction (surprise!), and that’s true across taxa. Their study looks at moths in Finland and compares their ecological traits with IUCN red list status (clumped into threatened and non-threatened). Of course, this is really comparing ecological traits with the probability of being listed as threatened/endangered under IUCN standards. I’m curious to know if there is something else that pushes a species over the edge from critically endangered to extinct. That is, some species can be quite successful at low densities; others might be endangered due to habitat loss, but at high densities within the remaining habitat. What are the patterns that actually cause extinction, as opposed to the threat of extinction?

Matilla, N., et al. The use of ecological traits in exctinction risk assessments: A case study on gemetrid moths. Biological Conservation, in press. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2008.06.024.