• 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.

Smith tracked potential shifts in migration due to changing wetlands conditions. He built a mechanistic model of bird migration (i.e. the physics and energetics of flying) and coupled that with the impacts of changing resource availability along flyways. First he defined a “climate space” (based on air temperature and solar radiation) that shows where and when migration can occur; then he added a component based on the energetics of flying to create an individual-based model of daily migration routes that “simulates the migration routes, timing and energy budgets of individuals birds under dynamic weather and land surface conditions.” He also incorporates “evolutionary learning” by including behavioral responses to the landscape, and allowing the top performers to become the breeders at the end of a season.

It surely says something about me that (with reservations) I think this is very cool! It’s always neat to have this sort of cross-disciplinary stuff: modeling the energetics of an individual is such a physicist way of thinking about movement ecology. It also doesn’t hurt to have the computing power of NASA. There’s been plenty said about the coming convergence of computing power, neural networks, and the human brain. As computers become more powerful, and our ability to model evolutionary and ecological processes improves, I think we’ll be provided with incredibly useful tools to study conservation.

Of course, field biologists will be, rightfully, crying foul: nature is incredibly complex and while it may follow certain patterns, the details are nearly impossible to define. Smith’s model doesn’t include multi-species interactions (e.g. competition and predation); it also didn’t appear to predict the fact that his study species, the Pectoral Sandpiper, is a frequent migrant to the UK. No doubt that tug of war between folks in the field and modelers will continue, but there’s a balance to be struck. Models like this, by people removed from the traditions of the field, can help to expose previously-ignored pressure points in ecology. I think the word I’m looking for is “refreshing.”