Tag Archives: Biodiversity

The proof we needed

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Dryas octopetala

Originally posted on ‘On top of the world’

Good news for those ecologists studying species distributions: it turns out that the climatic niche of mountain plants is fairly conserved in space (Wasof et al. 2015).

Dryas octopetala

Mountain avens, Dryas octopetala

These results come from a study on the distribution of alpine species in the European Alps and the northern Scandes, two mountain regions with very different characteristics but a significant overlap in species composition.

Orchid

Orchid in the northern Scandes (Dactilorhiza majalis?)

The researchers compared the climatic niche of a large set of plant species that occurred in both mountain regions, and found that only a small percentage of these species experienced a regional effect on their niche. Especially species with disjunct populations (populations that are truly separated in space) showed high niche overlap, and the same was true for arctic-alpine species.

Betula nana

Dwarf birch, Betula nana

Although niches are in general surprisingly well conserved between the two regions, species occupy a wider range in the Alps than in the northern Scandes. More on the latter unexpected pattern in this informative post from Jonathan Lenoir, one of the authors.

Rubus chamaemorus

Cloudberry, Rubus chamaemorus

Why do we care? Because the large and growing field of species distribution modelling has as one of its main assumptions that climatic niches are conservative. If they are not, any extrapolation of a limited geographic dataset to the total global distribution of a species would be invalid.

Eriophorum vaginatum

Hair’s tale cottongrass, Eriophorum vaginatum

Reference

Wasof et al. (2015) Disjunct populations of European vascular plant species keep the same climatic niches, Global Ecology and Biogeography, 24: 1401-1412.

Pyrola minor

Snowline wintergreen, Pyrola minor

November 17, 2015

Why Conservation? Communicating Applied Biodiversity Science

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ABS_2color_web

Applied Biodiversity Science Program – Texas A&M University

You might have a favorite science writer. Mine are David Quammen, Bill Bryson, Carl Sagan, and Tim Flannery. Others may be more inclined to read Pulitzer Prize-winning and nominated authors like Jonathan Weiner, Siddhartha Mukherjee, or James Gleick, MacArthur-fellow Atul Gawande, or consummate greats like E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen J. Gould, and Oliver Sacks. Or perhaps books aren’t all you’re interested in. In that case you may be a fan of Carl Zimmer’s blogging or the stories and editorials from journalists/authors Malcolm Gladwell or Stephen J. Dubner.

It’s likely you’ve read at least one of these authors. Like most readers you were probably impressed by how well they articulated the complexities and subtleties of their topic: everything from astrophysics to evolution, cancer, neurology, chaos theory, economics, and psychology. If you find an author who draws you into a topic that wouldn’t otherwise gain your attention, particularly an unfamiliar scientific discipline, take notice. Take stock of what they have accomplished by gaining your interest and curiosity. As George Gopen and Judith Swan stated in their 1990 for American Scientific, “the fundamental purpose of scientific discourse is not the mere presentation of information and thought, but rather its actual communication.” Good communication requires gaining the reader’s attention. Attention requires garnering interest and curiosity.

In our ever-connected world with vast communication and social networking ability, we have the ability to do just that. We possess the tools to communicate science to a diversity of people in a diversity of ways.

As a member of the Applied Biodiversity Science Program (ABS) at Texas A&M University I find myself in a position where communicating science is an imperative for success. The ABS program is graduate program originally funded by the National Science Foundation as part of their Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. The principle mission of ABS at Texas A&M is to achieve integration between biodiversity research in the social and natural sciences with on-the-ground conservation practices and stakeholders.

To that end, a foundational component of ABS is to communicate across scientific disciplines with various institutional actors to facilitate broader impacts across the realm of conservation. In essence, the ABS Program seeks to produce applied scientists who can communicate effectively across disciplines. A natural corollary of this goal is the ability to communicate science outside the realm of science. In this respect, our ABS Perspectives Series is intended to communicate more broadly and inclusively who applied biodiversity conservationists are, what we study, where we conduct research, how we conduct research, and why we are doing it. The current issue of the ABS Perspectives Series, features experiences from the Caribbean, the United States, Sénégal, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Contributions cover topics ranging from captive parrot re-wilding with pirates to blogging in the Nicaraguan forest with limited Internet access.

Perhaps more importantly, the ABS Perspective Series wants to reach out and share ABS student and faculty experiences with a diverse readership to raise awareness of biodiversity conservation issues. Outreach is an important axiom of actionable science, especially outreach that informs, improves and influences management and policy. I consider both the ABS Perspectives Series and BioDiverse Perspectives outreach initiatives to communicate the biodiversity conservation mission to the general public, communities where our research has been conducted, fellow academics and practitioners, and institutions that can provide logistics, infrastructure, and support. We must intend to make and practice making our research accessible and intriguing to everyone.

November 18, 2014

Clarifying “biodiversity,” but is it enough?

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9780226500812

Cover of “What is Biodiversity?”

Below is the another installment on the philosophical and ecological values of biodiversity motivated by the University of Oregon lecture series titled “Biodiversity at Twenty-Five: The Problem of Ecological Proxy Values”. In the first set of posts, Tim Christion Myers investigated the value of biodiversity conservation through the eyes of a philosopher, while Lorien Reynolds reflected on the value of biodiversity through the eyes of an ecologist. The next set of posts was motivated by Dr. David Hooper’s presentation and interdisciplinary workshop on biodiversity and compared the views of biology grad student Lucas Nebert and environmental studies grad student Shane Hall. Here, philosophy student Jon LaRochelle reflects on a presentation by Kim Sterelny, asking whether biodiversity is a an appropriate conceptual framework for conservation.

 

If conservation biology is triage, how are we to make intelligent decisions about what to save and what to let go?  “How do we do something to stem the tide of human resource consumption in a targeted and principled way?”

This is the question Kim Sterelny used to frame his philosophical work on biodiversity during his visit to the University of Oregon’s “Biodiversity at Twenty-Five” seminar series.  Six years after the publication of his book with James Maclaurin, What is Biodiversity?, Sterelny came to Eugene to reflect on that project and his current thinking on the concept of biodiversity.  Was their attempt to conceptually clarify “biodiversity” successful?  Does biodiversity continue to be a viable metric for decisions in conservation biology?

According to Sterelny, “biodiversity” should be both 1) theoretically principled and 2) empirically tractable if it is to effectively guide conservation triage.

1) Theoretically principled — “Biodiversity” should identify an aspect of a system that is a robust and causal driver of that system.  This stands in contrast to explicitly normative accounts of biodiversity (i.e., “Biodiversity is intrinsically valuable”), and conventionalist accounts (see, for instance, Sahotra Sarkar’s “Defining ‘Biodiversity’; Assessing Biodiversity”).  The diversity stability hypothesis is one such theoretically principled account, which ties the value of biodiversity to the stability of an ecosystem.  Sterelny and Maclaurin (2008) see this as a plausible account, though not yet fully demonstrable (see especially pp. 119-123).

2) Empirically tractable — Biodiversity should be a measurable property of a system.  Practically, we should be able to look at an ecosystem and measure biodiversity well enough that the measurements can guide conservation decisions.  This is a severely limiting condition, since measures of biodiversity will almost always be indirect, partial, or both.  Sterelny stresses the importance of surrogates.  Rather than measure biodiversity itself—a daunting task—we might hope to identify viable surrogates, easier to measure but reliable enough for making choices about conservation.  Two such surrogates are species richness and phylogenetic variation.  Sterelny and Maclaurin advocate a pluralist approach to biodiversity, which sees it as varying both across and within systems depending on one’s purposes.

To meet these two conditions, Sterelny and Maclaurin argue for a conception of biodiversity that stresses species richness supplemented by consideration of phylogenetic and phenotypic diversity.  Using this specification of “biodiversity,” conservation decisions can be made based on option value—barring definitive knowledge about the species’ relative value, we should hedge our bets and conserve as diverse a swath of the history of evolution as we can, so as to keep our options open for future crises.

Revisiting the project six years later, Sterelny still stands by their account of species richness as the best candidate for a framework concept to guide the inescapable work of conservation triage.  However, he expressed some hesitation about whether the development of such a framework concept is possible.  In the Q&A, biologists and philosophers alike pressed him on the continued viability of “biodiversity.”

Listening to the talk and ensuing discussion, I was left wanting a further discussion of value.  What values should guide our thinking about the human relation to the natural world?  Is biodiversity up to the task we’ve set for it?  Conceptual clarity aside, is biodiversity the right value for guiding the human relation to the natural world?  Is it the right value from the perspective of the natural world itself?  Sterelny’s work nicely articulates the conditions that must be met for biodiversity to do what we ask of it, but he himself expresses doubts about its continued normative viability.

What is called for is further reflection on the values that guide conservation.  “Biodiversity” is theoretically fraught but intuitively appealing.  The Tuatara is a fascinating animal which has intuitive conservation appeal, but may not have very high option value.  Should we conserve it anyway, because it is a fascinating relic of the evolutionary past?  Could conservation resources be better spent? To what extent does the perspective of the tuatara, or some other endangered species, count as a matter for consideration.  Sterelny does good conceptual work on “biodiversity” while leaving these value questions largely unanswered.  However, it is precisely these questions that call for consideration.

October 15, 2014

FLUMP- stochasticity and biodiversity, Lotka-Volterra apps, SARs, Conservation and more

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WileeCoyote

Predator (red) -prey (blue) dynamics generated when predator’s capture rate is 0. Sorry Wile E.

It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

A good friend of ours,  Dave Armitage, created a couple of free apps to simulate Lotka-Voltera and Predator-Prey dynamics.

Rafael Loyola discusses the inconsistent environmental actions taken by Brazilian policy makers  (I recently wrote a post about some of these problems here), and  their consequences for conservation and in the international political arena, in a new article titled “Brazil cannot risk its environmental leadership“.

A  preprint in arXiv used different methods in order to estimate the size of Google Scholar (unlike other bibliographic databases, Google Scholar does not offer tools for bibliometric analyses). Although all the methods used by the authors showed “great inconsistencies”, they estimated that Google Scholar harbors ~ 160 million documents, including journal articles, meeting abstracts, books, case law, etc. If you are interested in that matter, see also a good article published last week in Science reviewing this paper and some of the issues associated with using Google Scholar.

David Warton, an associated editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution, recently interviewed professors Alix Gitelman, Geof Givens, and Janine Illian, whom organized a conference called “Modern Statistical Methods for Ecology”. Among other things, they discussed the current trends in statistical ecology. Here is a link to the video.

At last, here are a couple of very interesting articles about stochasticity in community ecology:

 – Vinicius Bastazini

  • A really cool article on maximising the phylogenetic diversity of seed banks.
  • An interesting study on how the degree of species’ specialism affects the species-area relationship.
  • An article from Conservation Magazine on how people’s climate change attitudes vary with the local weather they are experiencing.

– Benno Simmons

Jason Fridley and Dov Sax propose a new use for the beleaguered phylogenetic diversity as indicator of genetic potential in their early view GEB paper that formulates an ‘evolutionary imbalance hypothesis’ to explain global patterns of species invasions. I look forward to the ensuing commentary and discussion.

-Jes Coyle

-Emily Grason

ScienceWatch posted their predictions for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine, Economics, Physics, and Chemistry, which will be announced next week.  Though I’m still debating whether to start James Darnell or Michael Wigler in the Medicine group, my Nobel fantasy team is looking sharp for Tuesday’s announcements. – Nate Johnson

 

October 3, 2014

FLUMP – Sargasso Sea biodiversity, penguin citizen science, criticism and more!

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This place isn't doing so well

It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

A study by Huffard et al. published this month in Marine Biology gives evidence for declining biodiversity within the Sargasso Sea.  The authors compared samples from 2011 and 2012 with those taken back in the 1970s, and found declines in species richness, diversity, and evenness.  It is unclear whether these community shifts are inherent to the Sargasso Sea’s ecosystem or if they are driven by changes in sea surface temperature and pH.

A new citizen science project called Penguin Watch lets you look at images taken by researchers in the Antarctic and count how many adult penguins, chicks, and eggs are in each photo.  This data will be used to better monitor and protect penguin populations against anthropogenic threats such as climate change and human stressors.  I’d like to think Bruce Wayne has a Penguin Watch as well, making all who contribute to this research a little more like Batman.

An interesting article on Science Careers details the uphill climb a lot of doctoral graduates face when seeking employment outside of academia, and the drawbacks of taking a job you are overqualified for.  – Nate Johnson

For those of you who enjoy watching the IDH tennis match, Michael Huston offered a critique of some recent critiques (how meta) of the IDH, and its cousin the intermediate productivity hypothesis, in the context of ecological logic vs. ecological theory. It’s here in this week’s Ecology.

How much evidence is there really that co-evolution promotes diversification? Hembry et al. in last week’s AmNat.

And because I’m on a roll (in a rut?) of reading papers that offer primarily criticism: “A critique of the ‘novel ecosystem’ concept” by Murcia et al. in the most recent TrEE. -Emily Grason

Here is a couple of interesting special issues that came out recently; the first is a special issue dedicated to Functional Biogeography, published in PNAS and the second one is an Oikos’ edition dedicated to soil food webs. – Vinicius Bastazini. 

What are the 71 important questions for the conservation of marine biodiversity? You can read it here in the latest issue of Conservation Biology. – Kylla Benes

 

September 26, 2014

Missive from ESA2014: BBB – Better Biodiversity Business?

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tesoroBaker1

The March Point Refinery in Anacortes, WA, which must be one of the most beautifully situated refineries on earth. I do research just behind it at the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Reserve, in the shadow of Mt. Baker. Photo: Tesoro

Paraphrasing Jill Baron, ESA President, we, as ecologists, might all feel a … certain way about oil companies, but then we get in our cars and drive away. Or fly to ESA.

So, at what point, or on what level, do we, again, as ecologists, directly engage businesses, including huge multinational corporations that are typically blamed for the environmental destruction we research, in a constructive conversation about maintaining biodiversity? One that doesn’t involve picket signs, or legalese, or inherent distrust?

I fully acknowledge my own visceral sense of distrust, evoked during last Monday’s special session on Biodiversity in Businesses, on the introduction of Maria Hartley, who works on implementing the environmental mission (who knew?) of Chevron (see Inevitable Caveat 1 below). Joining Ms. Hartley on the panel were Albert Straus (of Straus Family Creameries – HUGE fan of the European Style yogurt, totally changed my outlook on yogurt!), and Robbert Snep, who is both an academic and a consultant to businesses seeking to green up and improve sustainability and biodiversity in their practices. The panel benefitted from the experience of a range of company approaches – a huge multinational corporation seemingly anathema to the idea of conservation, a local/regional agricultural operation, where we are much more comfortable thinking about biodiversity and business coexisting, as well as a consultant who works with a range of business entities and has a landscape-level perspective.

One of the species that Chevron works to protect is the Desert Tortoise in the Mojave.

One of the species that Chevron works to protect is the Desert Tortoise in the Mojave. Find out more here. Photo: “DesertTortoise” by Wilson44691 – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I latched onto the theme of motivation in each of these scenarios: Who are the parties that are motivated to build biodiversity into the business architecture and why? Who wants the business to consider environmental welfare and conservation? The shareholders? The consumers? The executives? The employees? The Public Relations office? What is their relation to the decision-making apparatus for the company? Is the business built in a way that protects sustainability as a priority, even when competing prioritie$ might emerge.

The answers to these questions determine how each business approaches biodiversity, and there is a range of structural solutions. For instance, on the flight (Inevitable Caveat 2) here, I read a short piece in the New Yorker about “B-corporations”, for-profit companies that are certified for high standards in “social and environmental practice” by B-Lab, a non-profit. B-corporations are, evidently, not to be confused with Benefit Corporations, which is hard, because they are both called “B-corps”. A B Corporation is a business incorporation status offered by about half of the states in the country. In both cases, there is an explicit commitment to social or environmental goals and objectives, that are variously controlled or evaluated by outside entities.

Straus was the first non-GMO verified creamery in the country. Find out more here.

Straus was the first non-GMO verified creamery in the country. Find out more here.

Neither Straus nor Chevron is a B-corp, in either sense of the colloquial term, though perhaps the latter goes without saying. Yet they both manage, in their way, to pursue environmental objectives. I got the sense that these objectives were both determined and executed in a very top-down way at Straus, reflecting the vision and mission of the company’s family founders. On the other hand, Chevron states environmental goals, but hires ecologists and lawyers to keep them in compliance. I do wonder whether either of those approaches is structured to protect these values when/if “Corporate Social Responsibility” ever becomes less fashionable.

So, the good news is that there are jobs out there for us ecologists who don’t see the allure in the current unstable academic funding environment. Companies are seeking out science and finding it worth their investment to ask ecologists how to do their business environmentally. How do we get those jobs? Snep noted that, as students, we spend very little time thinking about businesses (except perhaps as a funding opportunity, or an obstacle to our research). He suggests that it would benefit us to wear a businesses hat from time to time, to develop the ability to communicate with business and find ways to apply ecology, to their landscaping, to their sourcing, to their marketing. Straus added that their company is really looking for leaders and managers first, as the content and skills can be added. I have been told that a dual PhD(or MS)/MBA is a formidable combination. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for X years more school, given my current financial situation, and it seems almost laughable how fish-out-of-water I would look in a business school (she says as she looks around the room at ESA).

 

Inevitable Caveats:

(1)  On a personal note, the distrust was, of course, my own baggage. Ms. Hartley convinced me that she does work from a science-first perspective and believes the role she plays can make a difference in the world of biodiversity.

(2)  Presumably, this plane flew on petroleum – read here for more about conservation biologists and carbon footprint, an irony of which I am fully aware.

August 19, 2014