• In the past few weeks, two California condors have been shot with lead pellets (not fatally, they’re both recovering). The Center for Biological Diversity has hired a private investigator to capture the ne’re-do-well. I have to admit, the wacky aspects of conservation are part of what make the field so appealing. Somebody at CBD came into work a few days ago and was instructed to find a PI in Los Angeles. I’m sure they never expected to be doing such a thing.
• WCS researchers have discovered a huge population of Irrawaddy river dolphins. (More from DotEarth). It’s always interesting to see how conservation organizations spin good news (usually awkwardly). This is exciting — BUT THEY’RE STILL AT RISK! While I think that’s definitely true, it goes back to that problem of messaging. It’s hard to get people to care more than they do, while simultaneously saying that things aren’t as bad as we thought.
• In defense of the Red List. “Really, we’re getting better!!!”
• Rare shark found, eaten.
• New work on fossilized coral reefs is suggesting that sea levels can rise rapidly. Okay, so sea levels rose rapidly 100,000 years ago. But we still have coral… maybe this paradox is address in a new book by (Cal’s own) Tony Barnosky called Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming. Worth checking out.

As we approach next year’s CBD meeting, people are beginning to speak up about the quality of the IUCN Red List. My basic philosophy is, yeah, it’s not great, and it’s definitely not scientific, and people shouldn’t be publishing papers about extinction risk using the Red List, but we just aren’t in a position to assess every species on earth comprehensively, and this is our first, best attempt. And the architects of it are aware it’s not perfect, and they’re trying to improve it. That said, there are a couple of good, fairly even-handed articles and editorials from The New Scientist (+editorial) and the Telegraph. Given that climate change appears to be undergoing a small (hopefully dead cat bounce) renaissance of non-believers (“Rising View that Climate Risk Exaggerated“), it’s easier to recognize that it’s important not to over-state the case for endangered species. I know I’ve argued for an over-statement of climate change dangers — well, to be more nuanced, I want scientists to present their knowledge within the framework of public discourse, not the framework of scientific discourse — but if doing so has increasingly led to a fear of exaggeration, I might have to re-think that. Unfortunately, it’s unclear who’s causing that fear of exaggeration: maybe people are reading big, scary headlines, but then mis-hearing scientists as saying it’s no big deal*. In that case, the problem would be scientists not being hysterical enough.

Since I’m more familiar with the IUCN Red List and its problems, it’s easier for me to say that we shouldn’t depend too heavily on it. Nevertheless, as in most things conservation, if used properly and with the correct understanding, and so long as people are working to improve it, it’s a good start. As far as I can tell, that’s becoming my conservation mantra: a good start.

*Recall that, while the IPCC report has a specific definition of “very likely” as >90% of happening, most people view that as a less than 66% chance of happening.

(Also see: Framing and climate change).

• A bunch of groups have signed on to a letter supporting Rep. Raul Grijalva for Interior Secretary.
• The UN has released an atlas of carbon-wildlife hotspots, where protection would save biodiversity and carbon sinks. (Atlas PDF)
• More species downgraded (upgraded? So confusing being a conservation biologist) on the IUCN Red List.
• In terms of carbon reduction, palm oil plantations do better planted in grasslands than forest. Meanwhile, HSBC is cutting ties with palm oil companies in Indonesia and Malaysia. Also, Sime Darby (big palm oil co.) is devoting some cash to protecting orangutan habitat.
• Some thoughts on science reporting in the Washington Post.
• It might seem like I’m sharing this story (thanks, Em) because it’s got a money quote from our fearless leader. No, it’s because I can relate this anecdote: at the Lawrence Berkeley campus up in the hills, they have cops on Segways. They also have aggressive turkeys. I have a source who has seen the turkeys chasing the cops on Segways. Just FYI, they have almost identical land speeds.
• This story came up in my feed reader of conservation news. Not really sure why, but it really is a huge potato. 2008 is the Year of the Potato, apparently, which makes this whole thing smell kind of fishy. Or, potato-y.

• One-horned rhino “demoted” from IUCN list. Weird choice of words — are there any other cases where being demoted is a good thing?
• Check out this very cool animation of the botanical collection of California, in time and space. It almost looks like the lights at night maps, but the pattern of collection isn’t actually correlated with human density. So while you can kind of pick out that necklace of Central Valley cities, SF barely registers. And does Humboldt County have some kind of ban on specimen collection? Are they paranoid about researchers finding the wrong, ahem, plant? [Thanks Brian H!]

I may have been a bit snarky about the new Red List for mammals earlier in the week, but I have to admit the new paper in Science covering the major findings is rather impressive (maybe it’s just that fresh Science smell that has me convinced, or maybe I should just stop reading press releases). Lots of good stuff here:

Phylogenetic diversity is … is arguably a more relevant currency of diversity and less affected by variations in taxonomic classification than species richness. Species richness and phylogenetic diversity are very closely related for land species (r² = 0.98), but less so in the marine environment (r² = 0.73).

The size of land species’ ranges varies from a few hundred square meters (Bramble Cay Melomys, Melomys rubicola; Australia), to 64.7 million km² (Red Fox, Vulpes vulpes; Eurasia and North America). For marine species, ranges vary from 16,500 km² (Vaquita, Phocoena sinus; Gulf of California), to 350 million km² (Killer Whale, Orcinus orca; all oceans). [Good trivia question, that Red Fox bit! --ed.]

For land species, there is a strong association between landmass width and median range size: The largest ranges tend to be found across the widest part of each continent, particularly in northern Eurasia, whereas islands (e.g., in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean) and narrow continental areas (e.g., southern North and South America) tend to have narrowly distributed species. Superimposed on this general pattern, ranges also tend to be small in topographically complex areas (e.g., the Rockies, Andes, and Himalayas). These results agree with those for birds, which suggest that range sizes are constrained by the availability of land area within the climatic zones to which species are adapted.

Very, very, neat stuff.

Okay, what the hell, I’ll take issue with this:

One hundred and fifty-five species were deleted from the original tree: 138 corresponding to taxa no longer recognized as separate species (lumped to another species already on the tree); four for which no match was found; 12 that are Extinct or Extinct in the Wild; and Homo sapiens.

Really? No humans? Why not? I would love to read the IUCN Red List assessment of Homo sapiens:

The Red Fox Man has the widest geographical range of any member of the order Carnivora Primata, being distributed across the entire northern hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to North Africa, Central America, and the Asiatic steppes, and pretty much anywhere else that’s not underwater… okay, and a couple of places that are. Red Foxes Humans are adaptable and opportunistic omnivores and are capable of successfully occupying urban areas (unless your name is Joe SixPack and you are a True American, in which case you are willing to check out urban areas to see a show and go to the Met, aka the “It’s a nice place to visit, but I would never want to live there” theory of range limitation). In many habitats, foxes humans appear to be closely associated with man, even thriving in intensive agricultural areas. The species currently is — barring a serious turnaround in the polls — not under threat.

Schipper, Jan + over 100 others. The Status of the World’s Land and Marine Mammals: Diversity, Threat, and Knowledge. Science, 322:5899. (doi: 10.1126/science.1165115)

• Some captive Black rhinos have been released in an undisclosed location in Kenya.
• Huh? … Oh, there’s a meeting happening right now in Barcelona, the World Conservation Congress. Here’s a statement (pdf) from Dr Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the CBD.
• Ted Turner and some other bigwigs have announced a set of criteria for sustainable tourism (“Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria“) so you can tell the difference between green and greenwashed.
• The mammals, they are dooooooomed. One in four are facing extinction now Red Listed as vulnerable or endangered.
• The UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre has relaunched its database of protected areas. The press release focuses on making all their data available on-line, though it doesn’t touch on whether they’ve actually updated the database or not. There’s a book to go along with it, with pretty pictures (okay, okay, those pictures aren’t in the book. But they’re nice).
• “Indigenous forest dwellers in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, have rejected a proposal to turn 80,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of the land into an oil palm plantation.”

Heck, that was good timing. In the in press issue of Conservation Biology, Georgina Mace and colleagues give a great overview of the IUCN Red List — its origins, history, and current status; its methods and pitfalls (especially good discussion of the issues concerning “Data Deficient” species). The more I think about it, the less I value efforts to use the Red List to assess ecological traits that might pre-condition species for endangerment: many of those traits are highly correlated with the conditions for being Red Listed (e.g. habitat specificity and Criterion B: Small Range Area and Decline). The Red List isn’t a list of species that will go extinct; it’s a list of species that very smart and concerned scientists believe might go extinct based on a number of factors that they believe would pre-condition a species for extinction. So any study using the Red List is inevitably analyzing what those traits are, as defined by the Red List.

And since I mentioned genetic uniqueness in that post about the Red List, here’s a paper by Daniel Faith from the very same issue of Cons Bio discussing the EDGE of existence program: an effort to combine extinction probability with phylogenetic risk. Heavenly.

Mace, G. et al. Quantification of Extinction Risk: IUCN’s System for Classifying Threatened Species. Conservation Biology, in press. (doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01044.x)

Faith, D. Threatened Species and the Potential Loss of Phylogenetic Diversity: Conservation Scenarios Based on Estimated Extinction Probabilities and Phylogenetic Risk Analysis. Conservation Biology, in press. (doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01068.x)