A red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) from Barro Colorado Island in Panama. This small island, just 1500 ha (3700 acres) in area, is one of the tropical protected areas evaluated in this study (photo © Christian Ziegler <zieglerphoto@yahoo.co>, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute). Note: It is prohibited for any third party or agency to use or license this image; any use other then described above shall be subject to usage fees as determined solely by the photographer.

Much of conservation science boils down to good decision making: when, where and how we ‘set aside’ terrestrial or marine areas for specific protection against the ravages of human endeavour. This is the basis for the entire sub-discipline of conservation planning and prioritisation, and features prominantly in most aspects of applied conservation and restoration.

In other words, we do all this science to determine where we should emplace protected areas, lobby for getting more land and sea set aside so that we have ‘representative’ amounts (i.e., to prevent extinctions), and argue over the best way to manage these areas once established.

But what if this pinnacle of conservation achievement is itself under threat? What if many of our protected areas are struggling to insure biodiversity against human consumption? Well, it’d be a scary prospect, to say the least.

Think of it this way. We buy insurance policies to buffer our investments against tragedy; this applies to everything from our houses, worldly possessions, cars, livestock, health, to forest carbon stores. We buy the policies to give us peace of mind that in the event of a disaster, we’ll be bailed out of the mess with a much-needed cash injection. But what if following the disaster we learn that the policy is no good? What if there isn’t enough pay-out to fix the mess?

In biodiversity conservation, our ‘insurance’ is largely provided by protected areas. We believe that come what may, at least in these (relatively) rare places, biodiversity will persist despite our relentless consumerism.

Unfortunately, what we believe isn’t necessarily true.

Today I’m both proud and alarmed to present our latest research on the performance of tropical protected areas around the world. Published online in Nature this morning (evening, for you Europeans) is the 216-author (yes, that is correct – 216 of us) paper entitled “Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas” led by Bill Laurance.

Using data derived mainly from exhaustive expert interviews (hence the long co-author list) and validated with real time-series data, we looked at 31 functional groups of species (e.g., big predators, raptors, rodents, dung beetles, lianas & vines, etc.) in 60 tropical protected areas across Asia, Africa and the Americas to see whether they had remained stable, increased or decreased in abundance over the last 20 or 30 years.

With these data, we constructed a ‘reserve-health index’, which showed that about half of the 60 protected areas we examined weren’t doing terribly well (i.e., they were in poor biodiversity ‘health’). Of course, this also means that about half of the reserves were doing reasonably well at protecting their biodiversity.

Perhaps not all that surprisingly for unprotected habitats, the species groups known to be sensitive to change (e.g., big predators and other large-bodied animals, many primates, old-growth trees, and stream-dwelling fish and amphibians) were declining in the ‘poor-health’ reserves (in fact, about 20 of the guilds have been declining), and those known to respond favourably to disturbance (e.g., diseases, lianas & vines, exotic species) have been increasing.

How could all this be happening in so many of our protected areas and parks?

Well, we looked at the drivers, too. Parks with active on-the-ground management over the last 30 years to fight things such as invasive species, fire and deforestation, certainly did better; if there ever was a better justification for investing in protected area management, I’m unaware of it.

More importantly though, we found that the land-use changes outside the protected areas were ultimately responsible for their health. If the region surrounding a protected area had suffered from high deforestation, mining, illegal human colonists and hunting, then the chances were higher that the biodiversity within was declining.

In other words, protected areas do not act as islands buffered from the sea of degradation surrounding them. What we do around them, we do to them to a large degree.

Although we only had only one datum from Australia in our sample (Mt. Spec in Paluma Range National Park, north Queensland), the trends we observed are indeed occurring broadly across our tropics as well. Our largest national park, Kakadu, is a particularly good example of a struggling protected area. The region as a whole is rife with feral animals, the bushfire burning frequency is too high, and the lack of coordinated, regional-scale management is making matters worse.

Now, I know what some of the more spiteful libertarians might think that because so many protected areas are struggling to conserve the biodiversity they were created to protect, we should abandon the idea and let development proceed uninhibited. Of course, that is (as is typical of the libertarian) a monstrously stupid idea.

We showed that with active management and a history of lighter environmental footprints surrounding protected areas, tropical protected areas do just fine. Globally, we still have a huge gap between the areas now protected and what should be protected, and our policies surrounding the interstitial habitats between protected areas is way too lax. If we continue to add protected areas and manage them and their surrounds well, we’ll be successful at protecting a good component of our biodiversity.

Let’s hope we can continue to improve.

I’ve also embedded above a little video interview promo Bill and I did up (thanks to Mike ‘Fang’ Seyfang) a few weeks ago in preparation for the paper’s online appearance. It is a little teaser for the paper, with a full video interview coming online later.

I’m sure Bill will be going guns with the media today, and I’m available for comment too (although I’m overseas at the moment).

CJA Bradshaw

I should have published these ages ago, but like many things I have should have done earlier, I didn’t.

I also apologise for a bit of silence over the past week. After coming back from the ESP Conference in Portland, I’m now back at Stanford University working with Paul Ehrlich trying to finish our book (no sneak peaks yet, I’m afraid). I have to report that we’ve completed about about 75 % it, and I’m starting to feel like the end is in sight. We hope to have it published early in 2013.

So here they are – the latest 9 PhD offerings from us at the Global Ecology Laboratory. If you want to get more information, contact the first person listed as the first supervisor at the end of each project’s description.

–

1. Optimal survey and harvest models for South Australian macropods (I’ve advertised this before, but so far, no takers):

The South Australia Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources (DEWNR) is custodian of a long-term macropod database derived from the State’s management of the commercial kangaroo harvest industry. The dataset entails aerial survey data for most of the State from 1978 to present, annual population estimates, quotas and harvests for three species: red kangaroo (Macropus rufus), western grey kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus), and the euro (Macropus robustus erubescens).

DEWNR wishes to improve the efficiency of surveys and increase the precision of population estimates, as well as provide a more quantitative basis for setting harvest quotas.

We envisage that the PhD candidate will design and construct population models:

• to predict population size/densities with associated uncertainty, linking fluctuations to environmental variability (including future climate change projections)
• to evaluate the efficiency of spatially explicit aerial surveys
• to estimate demographic parameters (e.g., survival rate) from life tables and
• to estimate spatially explicit sustainable harvest quotas

 Supervisors: me, A/Prof. Phill Cassey, Dr Damien Fordham, Dr Brad Page (DEWNR), Professor Michelle Waycott (DEWNR).

2. Correcting for the Signor-Lipps effect

The ‘Signor-Lipps effect’ in palaeontology is the notion that the last organism of a given species will never be recorded as a fossil given the incomplete nature of the fossil record (the mirror problem is the ‘Jaanusson effect’, where the first occurrence is delayed past the true time of origination). This problem makes inference about the timing and speed of mass extinctions (and evolutionary diversification events) elusive. The problem is further complicated by the concept known as the ‘pull of the recent’, which states that the more time since an event occurred, the greater the probability that evidence of that event will have disappeared (e.g., erased by erosion, hidden by deep burial, etc.).

In a deep-time context, these problems confound the patterns of mass extinctions – i.e., the abruptness of extinction and the dynamics of recovery and speciation. This PhD project will apply a simulation approach to marine fossil time series (for genera and families, and some individual species) covering the Phanerozoic Aeon, as well as other taxa straddling the K-T boundary (Cretaceous mass extinction). The project will seek to correct for taphonomic biases and assess the degree to which extinction events for different major taxa were synchronous.

The results will also have implications for the famous Sepkoski curve, which describes the apparent logistic increase in marine species diversity over geological time with an approximate ‘carrying capacity’ reached during the Cenozoic. Despite recent demonstration that this increase is partially a taphonomic artefact, a far greater development and validation/sensitivity analysis of underlying statistical models is needed to resolve the true patterns of extinction and speciation over this period.

The approach will be to develop a series of models describing the interaction of the processes of speciation, local extinction and taphonomic ‘erasure’ (pull of the recent) to simulate how these processes interact to create the appearance of growth in numbers of taxa over time (Sepkoski curve) and the abruptness of mass extinction events. The candidate will estimate key parameters in the model to test whether the taphonomic effect is strong enough to be the sole explanation of the apparent temporal increase in species diversity, or whether true diversification accounts for this.

Supervisors: me, Prof. Barry Brook

3. Genotypic relationships of Australian rabbit populations and consequences for disease dynamics

Historical evidence suggests that there were multiple introduction events of European rabbits into Australia. In non-animal model weed systems it is clear that biocontrol efficacy is strongly influenced by the degree of genetic diversity and number of breed variants in the population.

The PhD candidate will build phylogenetic relationships for Australian rabbit populations and develop landscape genetic models for exploring the influence of myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) on rabbit vital rates (survival, reproduction and dispersal) at regional and local scales. Multi-model synthesis will be used to quantify the relative roles of environment (including climate) and genotype on disease prevalence and virulence in rabbit populations.

Supervisors: A/Prof Phill Cassey, Dr Damien Fordham, Prof Barry Brook

4. Spatio-temporal drivers of rabbit life-history traits and its influence on the efficacy of rabbit control in Australia

Identifying general patterns of how, and in which situations, demographic rates vary across space and time, is necessary to understand the true population dynamics of a species.

The PhD candidate will do a focused meta-analysis of rabbit demographic studies, combined with separate spatial information on climate, land use and disease. The meta-analysis will be supported by a survey of Australian rabbit disease and biology experts, to elicit expert (prior) knowledge of key drivers of rabbit demographic rates and disease dynamics. Bayesian and information-theoretic statistical approaches, informed by expert opinion and controlling for disease, will be used to determine the main environmental predictors of rabbit demographic rates. Data on sensitivity to different demographic traits (e.g., age-specific survival and reproductive rates) and particular environmental conditions (e.g., drought) will be integrated into individual-based, spatially oriented demographic models.

Supervisors: Dr Damien Fordham, Prof Barry Brook, A/Prof Phill Cassey

5. Range dynamics and demographics of spatially structured reptile populations under global change

Distributional range margins, for the majority of species, end at seemingly arbitrary boundaries. We will develop a demographic framework to characterise the edge-of-the-range dynamics of a variety of reptiles by examining combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic factors thought to limit geographic extent.

The PhD candidate will exploit advanced statistical and computational approaches to integrate multiple lines of information on the drivers of range and abundance in turtles, skinks and geckos using detailed long-term data sets. The results will provide generalisations on how geographic range size and structure change through time in response to global change and deliver a new toolbox for exploring trade-offs inherent in conservation planning.

Supervisors: Dr Damien Fordham, Prof Barry Brook, me

6. Determining the influence of global change on turtle biodiversity in Australia

Global warming is forecast to influence turtle fauna through local and regional climate change and synergies with other human-induced drivers of environmental change.

The PhD candidate will use comprehensive occurrence and molecular databases and spatial information on climate and environmental variation to identify how turtle biodiversity changes spatially, and the important drivers of that change. Community composition models will be used to project changes in turtle diversity under future scenarios of climate and land-use change. In particular the student will explore the relationship between increasing demand for water and climate change, and its potential influence on turtle fauna. Results and associated models will provide important insights into future turtle conservation management in Australia and beyond.

Supervisors: Dr Damien Fordham, Prof Barry Brook, Prof Arthur Georges (University of Canberra)

7. Exotic vertebrate risk analysis and invasion pathway modelling

The successful candidate will collect up-to-date datasets on the identities and abundances of exotic vertebrate ornamental fish species in retail, private, and public Australian collections, as well as at large in the environment. The student should have strong statistical and/or mathematical skills and be capable of developing novel computational tools for calculating species incursion risks and constructing invasion pathway networks. The model outputs will be used to predict the specific supply regions, transport modes, user groups, and taxa that pose the greatest risk to the entry and establishment of new pest populations in Australia.

Supervisors: Dr Phillip Cassey (UoA), Biosecurity SA

8. The role of rabbit and virus genetics in the development of resistance to rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV)

The European rabbit is a major pest animal in Australia. The successful PhD candidate will conduct both field and laboratory research to understand resistance to RHDV including age related factors, possible interactions with myxomatosis, and virus and rabbit genetics. The candidate will have access to epidemiological, serological, tissue, genetic, morphological and population dynamics data from an ongoing 16 year research project centred on an isolated rabbit population located 70 kilometres north of the City of Adelaide, South Australia.

Supervisors: Dr Nina Schwensow (UoA), Dr Dave Peacock (Biosecurity SA), Dr Phillip Cassey

9. Rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus: mechanisms of transmission

The aim of this project is to develop a greater understanding of the interactions between rabbits, RHDV and the environment. Topics such as virus persistence, outbreak dynamics, and modes of transmission will be investigated. The student should have broad ecological skills with an epidemiology background. The PhD will be based at both the University of Adelaide and the Vertebrate Pest Research Unit in Orange, NSW.

Supervisors: Dr Phillip Cassey, Dr Tarnya Cox (NSW Primary Industries)

You might remember that I’ve been in California for several weeks now. The principal reason for my visit was to finish a book that Paul Ehrlich and I started last year. So, without the major distractions of everyday university life, I’ve spent much of my time lately at Stanford University in a little office next to Paul’s trying to finish (I also attended a conference in Portland, Oregon).

Yesterday, we wrote the last few paragraphs. A giant gorilla has now lumbered its way off my back.

So. What is the book about, you might ask? I can’t give away too many details, but I will give a few teasers. The book is called, at least for now, ‘Oz & US’, which is a bit of a play of words. In the book we contrast the environmental histories, current state of affairs, and likely futures of our respective nations. It’s written in a popular style so that non-specialists can learn a little something about how bad the environment has become in our two countries.

At first glance, one might wonder why we chose to contrast the U.S. and Australia – they are quite different beasts, indeed. Their histories are immensely different, from the aboriginal populations, through to European colonisation (timing and drivers), biological (including agricultural) productivities, carrying capacities, population sizes and politics. But these differences belie too many convergences in the environmental states of each nation – we now both have increasingly degraded environments, we have both pushed the boundaries of our carrying capacities, and our environmental politics are in a shambles. In other words, despite having started with completely different conditions, our toll on nature’s life-support systems is now remarkably similar.

And anyone who knows Paul and me will appreciate that the book is completely irreverent. We have taken off the gloves in preparation for a bare-knuckle fight with the plutocrats and theocrats now threatening the lives of our grandchildren. We pull no punches here.

But, we’ve also tried to make it as humorous as we can, without relying on that bastion of the witless – overuse of the rhetorical. The book starts off with an explanation of why we wrote the book. Next we follow with a brief history of the two nations when humans enter the scene (aboriginal arrival and the subsequent European invasion). We then contrast the rise of environmentalism in each country, noting how our sustainability consciousnesses developed in strikingly different ways. Then we do a bit of accounting on the current state of environmental damage in each country, covering everything from deforestation, toxification, extinction rates and invasive species.

Following this first account, we get political. We target the plutocrats now threatening our futures by stealing from the poor and hoarding amongst the already rich (the Hood Robin effect), and point out how the rise of theocracy, especially in the U.S., is part and parcel of the destruction of sanity in rational governance of our natural assets.

We finish by placing the two countries’ situation within a global context, and provide a fairly extensive list of ‘solutions’ to some of our biggest environmental problems.

It’s a relatively short book (11 chapters and about 50,000 words), so it should be light reading for most. Needless to say, I’m excited about getting it published and seeing the world’s response – we hope to see it on bookshelves sometime in early 2013.

Many thanks to Paul, the book-writing veteran (he’s published some 30 books of this sort over his amazing career) who mentored me in the process, to Anne Ehrlich, his wife, for fascinating conversations and insights, to Stanford for its hospitality and to many, many others who supported this venture (including The University of Adelaide, my family and my students who endured the absences). Cheers!

CJA Bradshaw

While in transit between tropical and temperate Australia, here’s the latest batch of 6 biodiversity cartoons (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

–

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, and now finally I have been given the opportunity to put my ideas ‘down on paper’ (seems like a bit of an old-fashioned expression these days). Now this post might strike some as overly parochial because it concerns the state in which I live, but the concept applies to every jurisdiction that passes laws designed to protect biodiversity. So please look beyond my navel and place the example within your own specific context.

As CB readers will appreciate, I am firmly in support of the application of conservation triage – that is, the intelligent, objective and realistic way of attributing finite resources to minimise extinctions for the greatest number of (‘important’) species. Note that deciding which species are ‘important’ is the only fly in the unguent here, with ‘importance’ being defined inter alia as having a large range (to encompass many other species simultaneously), having an important ecological function or ecosystem service, representing rare genotypes, or being iconic (such that people become interested in investing to offset extinction.

But without getting into the specifics of triage per se, a related issue is how we set environmental policy targets. While it’s a lovely, utopian pipe dream that somehow our consumptive 7-billion-and-growing human population will somehow retract its massive ecological footprint and be able to save all species from extinction, we all know that this is irrevocably  fantastical.

So when legislation is passed that is clearly unattainable, why do we accept it as realistic? My case in point is South Australia’s ‘No Species Loss Strategy‘ (you can download the entire 7.3 Mb document here) that aims to

“…lose no more species in South Australia, whether they be on land, in rivers, creeks, lakes and estuaries or in the sea.”

When I first learned of the Strategy, I instantly thought to myself that while the aims are laudable, and many of the actions proposed are good ones, the entire policy is rendered toothless by the small issue of being impossible.

Extinctions are, of course, a normal part of life, at least over geological time scales^1,2. However, the rapidly expanding human population has put such pressure on the Earth’s resources that we have now entered the sixth mass extinction event now dubbed ‘The Anthropocene’³. In a local context, Australia has the highest current extinction rate of mammals in the world⁴, and we have lost nearly 40% of our forest cover since European colonisation⁵. South Australia in particular has seen extensive habitat loss, local extinctions and habitat degradation (you can see some of the evidence for this in South Australia’s State of the Environment reports).

That’s bad enough, but the major damage has been done and we’re now on track to rectifying the limited vision of past, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, degradation of the past has not yet wreaked the havoc on species due to a phenomenon known as ‘extinction debt’⁶. This well-demonstrated component of extinction means that extinctions continue years, decades and sometimes centuries past the major environmental perturbation. Thus, even if a comprehensive, state-wide and massive ecological effort were to begin tomorrow in South Australia (another unlikely scenario), we would still be committed to decades of extinctions from past degradation. These are not wild, uncertain concepts – these are well-established facts.

Combine this notion with the observations that few, if any, of the indicators used to track biodiversity change in South Australia are suggesting improvement, and the Strategy loses credibility. It is therefore beyond avoidance that extinctions will continue in South Australia regardless of our actions. Of course, we can slow the process, but we cannot possibly meet the policy targets set by the Strategy.

Now, some people might suggest that the Strategy’s ‘No Species Loss’ title shouldn’t be taken literally and of course we cannot avoid all extinctions, but this sentiment isn’t expressed anywhere in the document. It is therefore disingenuous to the public that such a bold, yet fantastical policy exists at all. Some could also argue that a mere word change would rectify the problem – I disagree. The entire notion of triage is ignored here because it implicitly assumes that there is no hierarchy or prioritisation necessary.

My intention here is not to denigrate my respected colleagues in the State government (and I do actively work with many of them); rather, I seek to stimulate the responsible bureaucrats to listen to the relevant experts to address these important gaps in our environmental policies. Otherwise, what happens when (and not if) we fail? Do we simply say ‘oh well’, admit defeat, and continue on as before? It seems to me that this is an overly naïve way of proceeding, and it does not embrace the fountain of ecological knowledge we have already tapped. Let’s be cleverer about how we approach biodiversity conservation.

CJA Bradshaw

References

1. Raup, D. M. Biological extinction in Earth history. Science 231, 1528-1533, doi:10.1126/science.11542058 (1986)
2. Raup, D. M. The role of extinction in evolution. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 91, 6758-6763, doi:10.1073/pnas.91.15.6758 (1994)
3. Crutzen, P. J. Geology of mankind: the Anthropocene. Nature 415, 23, doi:10.1038/415023a (2002)
4. Johnson, C. N. Australia’s Mammal Extinctions: A 50 000 Year History.  (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
5. Bradshaw, C. J. A. Little left to lose: deforestation and forest degradation in Australia since European colonization. J Plant Ecol 5, 109-120, doi:10.1093/jpe/rtr038 (2012)
6. Tilman, D., May, R. M., Lehman, C. L. & Nowak, M. A. Habitat destruction and the extinction debt. Nature 371, 65-66, doi:10.1038/371065a0 (1994)

Don’t be distracted © motivatedphotos.com

I have, on many occasions, been faced with a difficult question after giving a public lecture. The question is philosophical in nature (and I was never very good at philosophy – just ask my IB philosophy teacher), hence its unusually complicated implications. The question goes something like this:

Given what you know about the state of the world – the decline in biodiversity, ecosystem services and our own health and welfare – how do you manage to get out of bed in the morning and go to work?

Yes, I can be a little, shall we say, ‘gloomy’ when I give a public lecture; I don’t tend to hold back much when it comes to just how much we’ve f%$ked over our only home, or why we continue to shit in our own (or in many cases, someone else’s) kitchen. It’s not that I get some sick-and-twisted pleasure out of seeing people in the front row shake their heads and ‘tsk-tsk’ their way through my presentation, but I do feel that as an ‘expert’ (ascribe whatever meaning to that descriptor you choose), I have a certain duty to inform non-experts about what the data say.

And if you’ve read even a handful of the posts on this site, you’ll understand that picture I paint isn’t full of roses and children’s smiling faces. A quick list of recent posts might remind you:

• inevitable extinctions
• climate change much worse than appreciated
• protected areas failing
• over-fished seas
• boreal forest decline
• threats to Cameroon’s forests
• Australia’s deforestation history
• world’s worst mammal extinction rate

And so on. I agree – pretty depressing.

So how do I answer that question? I suppose it might be obvious to many that part of my response involves something along the lines of hoping that my work slows down the loss of our life support system (which is, admittedly, a slightly arrogant and gratuitous response, especially given we know that most conservation research leads to very little real conservation outcomes¹). I also usually add a little about hoping to save a little slice of the planet for my daughter once she grows up (this is slightly less arrogant, closer to truth, but ultimately, self-serving). Of course, I usually avoid mentioning that it’s my job and given that I do few other things well, it’s the only way I know to put food on the table.

But none of these is a terribly good response to the question. I do not possess an above-average level of happiness (in fact, I probably have above-average anger, if anything), and am not by nature optimistic, nor do I have a particular high opinion of most members of my own species.

On the contrary, I do thoroughly enjoy the scientific part of the process. The part about collecting and analysing data that cannot lie; data and results that are not subject to belief, opinion, fashion or personal agendas². I become a grinning, back-slapping, high-fiving fanatic when a good experiment, statistical model or validation works out. Yes, I am a self-confessed, proud, out-of-the-closet geek.

Now back to that most difficult-to-scratch itch of a question. Being positive about conservation ‘successes’ has become all the rage in conservation lately. Evidence that springs to mind includes Garnett’s and Lindenmayer‘s comment ‘Conservation science must engender hope to succeed‘, the IUCN’s latest announcement of the Green List of Protected Areas (a list of protected areas that have been ‘successful’), and Bill Sutherland‘s journal Conservation Evidence. That these entail some valid comments, or are good examples we should all aspire to promulgate is not really worth debating, but I can’t help but think that these endeavours are probably the most indicting attestation of how we have failed. Indeed, telling people how bad things really are clearly hasn’t worked – across the board, not one, single, broad biodiversity metric around the globe shows improvement (continued deterioration is the theme of the day). So we’re now turning that frown upside-down and attempting to give people a different message.

Fine, but we have to be very, very careful. We cannot go too far the other way. If the message is simplified (as it is always) to “well, it’s not all that bad then”, then we risk severely duping the public and engendering even more apathy. As I’ve mentioned before, people tend not to value the invaluable until it’s no longer there (or at least, on the way out), which is why selling ecosystem services is a mind-bogglingly difficult ask. I’m afraid it IS that bad, and probably worse than most (conservation scientists included) suspect.

Another important aspect is what we call ‘successes’. In no way, shape, or form have we halted or arguably slowed the Anthropocene extinction rate with our interventions – it’s a case of a ½-step forward and about 20 back. Just because we’ve planted a few trees, removed some rats from a few islands, and increased an ‘on-the-edge’ species from 20-200, doesn’t necessarily mean that those particular cases are successes. Improvement is one thing (it’s hard to go anywhere but up when you’re already at the bottom), but ‘success’ is an entirely different matter, and incredibly difficult to demonstrate.

So yes, we can all do with a healthy (operative word) dose of positivity when educating the uninformed, but do not hide the most important message behind the smiles and congratulatory back-slaps. It’s our duty to tell the world how it really works (or in our case, doesn’t). You would be disingenuous to do otherwise.

–
CJA Bradshaw

–
¹There I go again, being depressing.
²I’m not for a moment suggesting that science is entirely objective – science is instead the pursuit of subjectivity reduction and is the ONLY human endeavour that can claim to do so.

© P. Harris

There’s nothing like a bit of good, intelligent and respectful debate in science.

After the publication in Nature of our paper on tropical protected areas (Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas), some interesting discussion has ensued regarding some of our assumptions and validations.

As is their wont, Nature declined to publish these comments (and our responses) in the journal itself, but the new commenting feature at Nature.com allowed the exchange to be published online with the paper. Cognisant that probably few people will read this exchange, Bill Laurance and I decided to reproduce them here in full for your intellectual pleasure. Any further comments? We’d be keen to hear them.

–

COMMENT #1 (by Hari Sridhar of the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore)

In this paper, Laurance and co-authors have tapped the expert opinions of ‘veteran field biologists and environmental scientists’ to understand the health of protected areas in the tropics worldwide. This is a novel and interesting approach and the dataset they have gathered is very impressive. Given that expert opinion can be subject to all kinds of biases and errors, it is crucial to demonstrate that expert opinion matches empirical reality. While the authors have tried to do this by comparing their results with empirical time-series datasets, I argue that their comparison does not serve the purpose of an independent validation.

Using 59 available time-series datasets from 37 sources (journal papers, books, reports etc.), the authors find a fairly good match between expert opinion and empirical data (in 51/59 cases, expert opinion matched empirically-derived trend). For this comparison to serve as an independent validation, it is crucial that the experts were unaware of the empirical trends at the time of the interviews. However, this is unlikely to be true because, in most cases, the experts themselves were involved in the collection of the time-series datasets (at least 43/59 to my knowledge, from a scan of references in Supplementary Table 1). In other words, the same experts whose opinions were being validated were involved in collection of the data used for validation.

–

OUR RESPONSE (William F. Laurance, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Susan G. Laurance)

Sridhar raises a relevant point but one that, on careful examination, does not weaken our validation analysis.

As detailed in our Supplementary Information, we made a concerted effort to locate fully independent time-series datasets against which to test our interview findings, but struggled to find usable overlap with the specific protected areas, guilds and potential environmental drivers evaluated in our study. Fortunately, we ultimately located 59 empirical time-series datasets that met several a priori criteria we established, including two important safeguards: (1) most were published only after our expert interviews were completed, thereby minimizing the exposure of most of our experts to these reports; and (2) each of the response variables we tested was derived by averaging up to 4-5 separate expert opinions, thereby diluting the impact of any one individual’s opinion (although we removed low-confidence opinions from our analysis).

Ideally, one would exclude any empirical dataset in which our experts had any involvement at all, even as a minor author, but this was simply not possible. Most of the protected areas we studied had relatively few field biologists with long-term expertise, and most of these experts were included in our study (216 were co-authors). Had we excluded every potential validation study in which one of our experts had had even marginal involvement, we would have had little basis for validation. As it was, the 59 empirical time-series datasets we identified permitted us to test just a small fraction (1.6%) of the 3,589 expert responses generated by our study. Importantly, we acknowledged the limitations of our approach by stating in our Supplemental Information that the safeguards we imposed provided “a more independent test” (not a fully independent test) of our interview data.

These caveats aside, if Sridhar is correct that our validation analysis was compromised, one would expect the datasets in which our interviewed experts had any involvement to agree more frequently with the interview data than did those in which our experts had no involvement at all. Of the 59 validation studies, our co-authors had some involvement in 43, and no involvement in the remaining 16. The former agreed with our interview data in 88.4% of cases (38/43), and the latter in 81.3% (13/16). These minor differences did not differ statistically (G_adj=0.44, df=1, P=0.51; G-test for independence, adjusted for sample size).

Hence, we suggest that the safeguards we imposed were reasonable given the severe constraints on suitable time-series datasets—limitations we readily acknowledged. Our safeguards appear to have been largely effective, as otherwise one would expect the frequency of agreement to differ between those validation tests in which our experts had some involvement versus those with no involvement at all.

–

COMMENT #2 (by Fabio de Oliveira Roque of the Centre for Biological Sciences and Health at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Campo Grande, Brazil & Tadeu Siqueira of the Department of Ecology at the Paulista State University in Rio Claro, Brazil)

Biodiversity is disproportionally concentrated in the tropics, with more than half of all known species inhabiting tropical forests. Although, reserves are not the only strategy to conserve biodiversity, they are believed to be highly cost effective in protecting it¹. A relative wave of optimism followed the recent Biodiversity International Convention report that pointed to an increase in the number of reserves created within the last decade in the tropics². Laurance et al., however, call our attention to a very serious concern: protected areas in the tropics may not be effectively protecting biodiversity. The authors go further and conclude that many tropical reserves are actually losing biodiversity, as they have reported a decrease in the abundance of various sensitive guilds – e.g., apex predators, stream-dwelling amphibians and large-seed old-growth trees – over the past 20 to 30 years. The study was based on a huge number of interviews, but given the practical consequences of this type of conclusion, we identified a major limitation that we believe deserves careful consideration. We suggest that the empirical data they use are not appropriate to infer the ‘health’ state of reserves within the entire tropical region.

According to the latest statistics from the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, there are now over 157,000 nationally designated protected areas covering about 12.7 per cent of the world’s land area outside Antarctica. Tropical reserves are not distributed homogeneously through the world’s continents and countries, so any study aiming to measure global tropical reserve ‘health’ should carried be out using true stratified and representative samples that consider this inbalance in the distribution of reserves. Therefore, we suggest that regions with more reserves, in number and area, should be more extensively sampled if one is interested in evaluating biodiversity trends in tropical reserves.  For example, in Brazil, one of the world’s most mega-diverse countries, which has the largest tropical protected area system in the world with 310 federal, 568 state, 89 municipal, and 629 private reserves, totaling approximately 150 million ha in size (Brazilian Ministry of the Environment), Laurance et al. selected only 1 reserve in the Atlantic Forest (~430 ha) and three in the Amazon (together with ~143,000 ha). These reserves represent less than 0.004% of the area of Atlantic Forest reserves and 0.12 % of Amazon reserves in Brazil. Hence, their data set is not stratified or randomly sampled to assess a very complex issue, such as reserve ‘health’, at least for a large piece of tropical world. This does not mean that Brazilian reserves are not threatened by anthropogenic pressures or that improvements in reserve managementare not needed. What we are suggesting is that simplistic approaches to assess reserve ‘heath’ and unrepresentative sampling designs can result in more problems for conservation in the tropics (e.g., ill-intentioned argumentations that reserves are not important) than solutions based on global representative data also useful for regional or local decision-making. In short, although we applaud the initiative made by Laurance et al. in bringing this issue to our attention, we suggest their letter should be seen as a general opinion of a group of researchers about biodiversity trends in tropical reserves. It is not supported by global representative data in a statistical sense and the limitations of its inferences should have been at least considered in their original contribution.

1. Rodrigues, A. S. L. et al. Effectiveness of the global protected area network in representing species diversity. Nature 408, 640-643 (2004).
2. Global Biodiversity Outlook. Global Biodiversity Outlook 3. (2010).

–

OUR RESPONSE (William F. Laurance, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Susan G. Laurance)

Roque and Siqueira suggest that, because protected areas are not evenly distributed across the world’s tropical forest regions, conclusions based on our pantropical sample of 60 protected areas might lack statistical validity. This is a pertinent concern because we did hope to identify some broad trends in the biological ‘health’ of tropical forest reserves globally.

However, our selection of tropical forest protected areas was in fact broadly representative, for several reasons:

1)    The 60 reserves we sampled were evenly stratified across the world’s three major tropical forest regions: Africa (including Madagascar), the Americas (South and Central America plus the Caribbean), and the Asia-Pacific region (Southeast Asia, South Asia, Melanesia and tropical Australia). A total of 36 different nations were represented in this sample.

2)    Based on data from the World Database on Protected Areas (www.wdpa.org), we found no significant difference in the frequency of high-protection (IUCN Categories I-IV), multiple-use (Categories V-VI) and unclassified reserves between our sample of 60 protected areas and all 16,038 reserves found in the same tropical nations.

3)    Likewise, we found no significant difference in the geographic isolation of our 60 reserves (travel time to the nearest city of > 50,000 residents) compared to an equal number of reserves randomly stratified across the same 36 nations.

4)    Finally, across the tropical nations represented in our study, we recently tested for and found a strong, positive relationship (r_s=0.427, n=33, P=0.014; Spearman rank correlation) between the number of reserves we selected and current forest cover¹ (China, Nepal and Australia were excluded from this comparison because most of their forest cover is non-tropical).

From these findings we can conclude that the protected areas in our study (1) broadly sampled the world’s major tropical forest regions and represent most tropical nations, (2) reasonably reflect the state of existing reserves in terms of their current legal-protection status, (3) are comparable to existing reserves in terms of their geographical isolation from nearby human populations, and (4) reasonably sampled, at a national scale, the large variability in tropical forest cover. Via all of these measures, we assert that our reserves were broadly representative.

We do, nonetheless, concede that one aspect of our sampling strategy—one that Roque and Siqueira do not mention—might have created a subtle bias. It was impossible for us to sample reserves in a truly random fashion because we could only include those with some expert knowledge (in our study, any reserve with fewer than 10 journal publications and 4-5 experts willing to be interviewed was not considered). We highlight this limitation because recent evidence based on a single reserve suggests wildlife poaching is reduced in areas where researchers are present². If this finding applies more generally, then our conclusions regarding the condition of tropical protected areas might be slightly too optimistic, and one could underscore the potential benefits of sustained field research for tropical biodiversity.

1. FAO. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005 (U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation [FAO], 2005).
2. Campbell, G., Kuehl, H., Diarrassouba, A., N’Goran, P.K., Boesch, C. Long-term research sites as refugia for threatened and overharvested species. Biol. Lett. 7, 723-726 (2011).

Apologies for the delay in getting this latest post out. If you read my last one, you’ll know that I’ve been in the United Kingdom for the last week. I’m writing this entry in the train down from York to Heathrow, from which I’ll shortly begin the gruelling 30-hour trip home to Adelaide.

Eight days on the other side of the planet is a bit of a cyclonic trip, but I can honestly say that it was entirely worth it. My first port of call was London where I attended the Zoological Society of London’s Protected Areas Symposium, which is the main topic on which I’ll elaborate shortly.

But I also visited my friend and colleague, Dr. Kate Parr at the University of Liverpool, where I also had the pleasure of talking with Rob Marrs and Mike Begon. Liverpool was also where I first observed the habits of a peculiar, yet extremely common species – the greater flabby, orange-skinned, mini-skirted, black-eyed scouser. Fascinating.

I then had the privilege and serendipitous indulgence of visiting the beautiful and quaint city of York where I gave another talk to the Environment Department at the University of York. My host, Dr. Kate Arnold was simply lovely, and I got to speak with a host of other very clever people including Callum Roberts, Phil Platts, Andy Marshall and Murray Rudd. Between the chats and real ales, mushy peas, pork pies and visits to the Minster, I was in north English heaven.

Enough of the cultural compliments – the title of this post was the take-home message of the ZSL symposium. There I gave a 25-minute talk summarising our recent paper on the performance of tropical protected areas around the globe, and added a few extra analyses in the process. One interesting result that was missing from the original paper was the country-level characteristics that explain variation in protected area ‘health’ (as we defined it in the Nature paper). After looking at a number of potential drives, including per-capita wealth, governance quality, environmental performance, human population density and the proportion of high conservation-value protected areas (IUCN Ia, Ib, II and IV categories), it came out that at least at that coarse country scale that only the proportion of high conservation-value protected areas explained any additional variation in health. In other words, the more category Ia, Ib, II and IV protected areas a country has (relative to the total), the better their protected areas do on average (and remember, we’re talking largely about developing and tropical nations here).

My presentation, along with several others, followed by the inevitable chats and questions, appear to indicate a growing realisation in the protected-areas community – that just adding more and more protected areas is not enough to ensure biodiversity preservation within them; you have to put in some hard-core management to make them work. Indeed – we reported this trend in the Nature paper, but people like Ben Collen of the ZSL stated boldly that even increasing the size of a protected area is less effective than really good management.

I also had a chat with Ian Craigie of James Cook University who pretty much found the same thing for protected areas in Africa. He had access to individual PA-level budgets and management plans, so his finer-scale conclusions seem to confirm our broader-scale ones. The next step with our global sample is to try to get a hold of just such PA-specific data – I hope we can manage to convince the relevant managers to provide them.

Of course, the IUCN protected-areas representatives who attended the symposium were most interested in this conclusion, and believe that more emphasis needs to made on this at the policy level worldwide. It should be noted too that we’re not necessarily talking about more money either; rather, efficient and effective use of the money invested is key. Given the poor performance of some of the best-funded protected areas in the world such as Kakadu National Park and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, this cannot be overstated – being financially well off does not guarantee biodiversity preservation at all. You have to put in the effort too.

So hats off to the ZSL and Lucas Joppa, Jonathan Baillie, John Robinson and the other organisers for a great symposium (and thanks for the invitation).

CJA Bradshaw

© James Cameron

The saying “it isn’t rocket science” is a common cliché in English to state, rather sarcastically, that something isn’t that difficult (with the implication that the person complaining about it, well, shouldn’t). But I really think we should change the saying to “it isn’t ecology”, for ecology is perhaps one of the most complex disciplines in science (whereas rocket science is just ‘complicated’). One of our main goals is to predict how ecosystems will respond to change, yet what we’re trying to simplify when predicting is the interactions of millions of species and individuals, all responding to each other and to their outside environment. It becomes quickly evident that we’re dealing with a system of chaos. Rocket science is following recipes in comparison.

Because of this complexity, ecology is a discipline plagued by a lack of generalities. Few, if any, ecological laws exist. However, we do have an abundance of rules of thumb that mostly apply in most systems. I’ve written about a few of them here on ConservationBytes.com, such as the effect of habitat patch size on species diversity, the importance of predators for maintaining ecosystem stability, and that low genetic diversity doesn’t exactly help your chances of persisting. Another big one is, of course, that in an era of rapid change, big things tend to (but not always – there’s that lovely complexity again) drop off the perch before smaller things do.

The prevailing wisdom is that big species have slower life history rates (reproduction, age at first breeding, growth, etc.), and so cannot replace themselves fast enough when the pace of their environment’s change is too high. Small, rapidly reproducing species, on the other hand, can compensate for higher mortality rates and hold on (better) through the disturbance.

Ask any fisher about it. The first (and perhaps best) predictor of a problem in an exploited stock of fish is when the average size starts to drop. When you see the big ones become rarer, you know that your mortality source is picking off the big ones by preference. Usually this also means that the best reproducers are being taken out of the system, so recruitment goes down too. We’ve even seen this effect in the world’s largest fish (whale sharks).

So how many readers up until now had ‘animals’ in the mind’s eye? Probably most of you. It turns out that plants, and in particular, trees, follow the same general rule. So this week I report (a little belatedly, I’ll admit) a clever Perspective that just came out in Science by my good friend and colleague, Bill Laurance (along with David Lindenmayer and Jerry Franklin). Spawned by Bill’s article in New Scientist earlier this year, the Perspective reports the nearly global trend of large trees disappearing – from the jungles of the Amazon to the wet eucalypt forests of southern Australia.

Of course, selective logging has historically taken out the biggest trees first (much like fisheries have done to big fish), and from Bill’s earlier work we know that fragmentation hits big trees the hardest, but it’s actually more complex than that. As the climate warms, increasing frequencies of drought means that the big fellas have a hard time drawing the necessary volume of water up to their canopy leaves, giving rise to leaf loss and eventual death of the individual tree. Also, increasing invasion of things like opportunistic lianas and lantantas prevent recruitment of tree seedlings on the forest floor. Diseases are also hitting big trees the hardest, as are outbreaks of tree-eating insects like the mountain pine beetle in western North America.

So, like the Home Tree of Pandora that succumbed to the greed of extra-planetary humans, the species dependent on large trees the world over are also losing ground. If we lose the biggest of the forest, we’ll lose countless other species. This is just another sad chapter in the synergistic loss of life on Earth.

CJA Bradshaw

I’m winding down here for the year (although there might be a few more posts before the New Year), so here’s the latest batch of 6 biodiversity cartoons (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

–

There’s a gradual, but rising tide of rational, enviro-progressive scientists out there who are committed to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. Many of these problems involve touchy subjects, including ways to reduce poverty while improving or maintaining high standards of living elsewhere, the means for ‘sustainable’ electricity generation, and how to limit the human population’s over-consumption and over-production.

Inevitably, however, many well-intentioned, but grossly misinformed environmentalists (‘enviro-conservatives’?) object to technical solutions based on emotional or ideological grounds alone. As self-professed enviro-progressives (but also scientists who base decisions on evidence, logic and balancing trade-offs as part of our everyday work), we hope to reduce this backlash by providing the data and analyses needed to make the best and most coherent decisions about our future.

–

On 14 September 2012, Japan’s government announced a nuclear-free policy to phase out its nuclear power generation by 2040. Of course, electricity demand would have to be supplied by both renewable energy and fossil fuels to respond the public unwillingness for nuclear power.

But is this most environmentally sound, safest and economically rational aim? In a new paper we’ve just had published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy, we set out to test Japan’s intentions the best way we know – using empirical data and robust scenario modelling.

Before the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan produced 25% of its total electricity consumption from nuclear power, 63% from fossil fuels (mostly coal and liquefied natural gas), and 10% from renewables (including hydro). Originally, the Japanese government had planned to increase nuclear power up to 45% of supply, and include new renewables builds, to combine to make major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and meet or exceed their Kyoto targets. However, the original plan could reduce emissions by the energy sector from 1122 Mt CO₂e in 2010 to < 720 Mt CO₂e by 2030 (< 70% of 1990 emission levels).

After the accident, the National Policy Unit in Japan hinted that the original plan was likely to be scrapped in favour of a new scenario, whereby the nuclear target was to be reduced to somewhere between 0–35% and the renewables target increased to 20–30%. Obviously, these new plans will not be able to meet the original emission reduction targets (Cyranoski, 2012; Normile, 2012). Our paper examines the implications of these different energy mixes.

Why do many people think ‘an anti-nuclear policy’ is environmentally friendly or sustainable?

The reasons are varied, but the perceptions basically emanate from at least one of the following concerns:

1. Safety issues – health problems and land contamination from released radioactive materials
2. Environmental – Cutting greenhouse-gases is claimed to be more effective using renewables
3. Cost – nuclear energy is assumed to be too expensive

To address these concerns and measure whether they are real or only perceived, we chose ten objective criteria followed the guidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency (2005):

For the economic dimension:

(1)   levelised cost of electricity and

(2)   energy security

For the environmental dimension:

(3)   greenhouse-gas emissions,

(4)   land transformation,

(5)   water consumption,

(6)   heated-water discharge,

(7)   air pollution,

(8)   radioactive waste, and

(9)   solid waste

For the social dimension:

(10) safety issues.

These ten criteria covered all possible negative impacts of the energy systems we investigated (nuclear power, fossil fuels, and renewables), and compared them based on Japan’s four newly planned scenario options as well as the current condition (before the accident) (Table 1), using multi-criteria decision-making analysis (MCDMA), which is a transparent and objective methodology for choosing among alternative scenarios.

Table 1.

Our results clearly show that the less nuclear power is used, the lower will be the sustainability of the future Japanese energy network, based on MCDMA (Fig. 1). The nuclear-free pathway has more negative impacts than the current condition for some environmental and economic criteria (energy security, levelised cost of electricity, greenhouse gas emissions, land transformation, and freshwater consumption). For the other criteria, the current condition has the most negative values.

Fig. 1. A comparison of each sustainability impact criterion for the four proposed future energy scenarios for Japan, and the current condition, from 0 (no negative impact) to 1 (largest negative impact).

All the details of our analyses are explained in the paper (a PDF of which you can be sent by emailing a request to the corresponding author, Prof. Barry Brook). We also outlined some discussion points relevant to this modelling in an article published on The Conversation. What is the take-home message? – Having the appearance of an environmentally friendly energy policy doesn’t necessarily mean you have one.

Of course, it’s a no-brainer that a higher penetration of renewables is better than a fossil-fuel future, but in countries like Japan and South Korea, there a few realities that make renewables potentially less of the cure-all that they are often purported to be. First, many countries with a high human population density cannot supply 100% of their current electricity (let alone energy) consumption using renewable energy sources. Even if targets could be met, the intermittency of renewable sources restricts their usefulness. In other words, the electricity is not always there when needed, so massive facilities for energy storage, like pumped hydro, is essential; this in turn requires substantial land transformation, immense new engineering works in often pristine areas, and financial investment, and of course, emits more greenhouse gases.

Second, there is no perfectly safe system in the world. Even a chair can kill you. For example, there were about 1,500 wind power-related accidents and 4 fatalities from 2007–2011 in the UK (according to RenewableUK). In our paper, we cited evidence from a range of authoritative sources, including the International Energy Agency and World Health Organisation, that nuclear power has a much lower accident and death rate, which includes direct and indirect damage and external costs of fatalities, injuries, and evacuations, compared to any fossil fuel sources, and is as safe or safer than most renewables.

Another concern about nuclear power is radioactivity. It is obvious that more nuclear power will produce more radioactive materials in the form of controlled waste. However, coal power – nuclear’s major competitor in Japan – also releases radioactive waste in the form of uncontrolled pollution –as solid waste and fly ash. Indeed, when we only consider ‘uncontrolled radioactive pollutants’, the nuclear-free pathway releases more radioactive materials than any other scenarios.

Third, and most importantly, an anti-nuclear pathway aims to replace a massive ‘greenhouse-gas free’ energy source (nuclear), with other forms of zero-carbon energy sources (renewables), rather than seeking to reduce or displace dependence on coal, natural gas and oil (almost all of which is imported in Japan).

The primary consequence of a no-nuclear choice is, unfortunately, that we run a major risk of losing the battle against global climate change, because we’ve thrown away our best fighting force. The greenhouse-gas emissions of the nuclear-free scenario can reach up to about 421 kg per megawatt hour. By comparison, in the 35% nuclear-power scenario, it is only 262 kg per megawatt hour despite the higher renewable energy share of the former. This means that a high dependence on renewables will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Japan due to physical limits and the lack of large-scale energy storage.

So when you look at the numbers and avoid the temptation to let ideology take over, our paper transparently and objectively demonstrates that Japan’s choice to limit its nuclear power generation is the least sustainable option.

Limiting fossil-fuelled electricity generation is the primary concern here – not preferencing or advocating for any particular non-carbon technology. It’s just that nuclear power is the only option that can achieve it in the foreseeable future. We are not saying that renewable energy doesn’t have a role (of course it does) – but nuclear energy is a key component of that long-term sustainability goal. In fact, replacing nuclear power for other sources will allow the role of fossil fuels to expand rather than reduce.

As conservationists (Brook and Bradshaw have worked for almost two decades on research and models aimed at saving endangered species and protecting global biodiversity), we are dedicated to finding solutions that benefit the Earth’s natural systems. If relying on nuclear fission is the only way we can achieve real climate change mitigation, then we have one clear choice. Climate change is possibly one of the biggest additional pressures biodiversity will face over the coming centuries – if we don’t do anything about it, then our ecosystems – our life support systems – will continue to spiral down the gurgler.

Yes, some people might die if we adopt nuclear power globally, but orders of magnitude more people will if we don’t, and biodiversity will suffer all the more.

Sanghyun Hong, CJA Bradshaw & BW Brook (co-published simultaneously on BraveNewClimate.com)

–

References

1. Cyranoski, D., 2012. Japan considers nuclear-free future. Nature 486.
2. International Atomic Energy Agency, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Energy Agency, Eurostat, European Environment Agency, 2005. Energy indicators for sustainable development: Guidelines and methodologies. International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna.
3. Normile, D., 2012. Growing distaste for nuclear power dims prospects for R&D. Science 336, 1220-1221.

Here’s the latest 6 biodiversity cartoons for your simultaneous viewing pleasure and pain (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

–

A tough little Eucalyptus porosa – one day soon this entire ex-paddock will be filled with carbon-guzzling natives. Note the plot markers in the background.

I had a great morning today checking out the progress of our carbon-biodiversity planting experiment out at Monarto Zoo. What a fantastic effort! Briony Horner and her team have made some amazing progress.

If you haven’t read about what we’re up to, here’s a brief re-cap:

Late last year we were awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grant in which we proposed to examine experimentally the cost-benefit trade-off between biodiversity and carbon using a replicated planting regime. The approach is quite simple, but it will take many years to pay off. What we are asking is: how many different species and in what densities are required to restore a native woodland from an over-grazed paddock that provide the biggest long-term biodiversity and carbon benefits simultaneously for the lowest costs?

Our basic approach is to apply a few biodiversity (native monoculture, medium diversity, high diversity) and planting density treatments (low and high spacing) to plots within blocks repeated across a landscape. We want to test whether the time-consuming and expensive high-density, high-diversity plots end up sequestering more carbon and housing more species once the forest has matured then the other treatments. However, if we can get away with (i.e., end up with the similar carbon sequestration and biodiversity) lower tree densities when planting, and fewer species planted, then our costs will go down.

Digging the pitfall traps

The soil-core drilling rig

Briony invited me out this morning to see the progress, and I was blown away! To date we have slashed the grass & weeds, set up and marked out the 80 25 × 25 m experimental plots in 10 blocks, begun digging the reptile pitfall traps, plotted out the bee & invertebrate trapping grids, and taken initial soil cores for carbon analysis. A few photos are included here to demonstrate.

Next week, co-investigator Margie Mayfield is coming down from UQ to help with the baseline biodiversity monitoring. In May, the entire site will be burnt and treated with herbicide to kill the weeds, and then planting begins in June! I can’t wait to see all the plants in the ground.

Freshly dug soil cores for carbon analysis

What was merely an idea only 6 months ago is turning into a fully fledged, 20-ha experiment thanks to Briony and her amazing project management.

Many thanks as well to the ARC, Zoos South Australia, David Chittleborough and his soil team, the South Australia Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources (DEWNR) and the Australian Flora Foundation for co-investment.

CJA Bradshaw

Briony and her babies ready for planting

I’m not usually one to promote conservation volunteer opportunities, but this is a little different. First, I’m involved in this one, and second, it’s very near to my home. As you might know, the Mount Lofty Ranges area has had about 90 % of its forests destroyed since European settlement, with a corresponding loss of ecosystem services. We need smart restoration on massive scale, and Monarto is one place where we can develop the best practices to achieve this goal. We really do need some help here, so I encourage anyone in the Adelaide area with an interest in evidence-based forest restoration to lend us a hand.

–

The Monarto Restoration Project will provide an internationally recognised opportunity to experience and engage with wild Australia as it was.

Our aim is restore and expand habitats at Monarto to represent what used to exist in the region before clearing for agriculture and the introduction of pest species. Monarto used to be teeming with wildlife. The remnant vegetation at Monarto is unique as it is located at the cross-over of two vegetation communities (the Mt Lofty Ranges and Murray Mallee). This means it provides important habitat for a range of threatened bird and plant species. However, there are still a number of species in danger of being lost from the area, so we need to focus on restoring habitat to support them too.

We provide an opportunity to see the bush in a way that is no longer possible in most parts of Australia. We hope to help you see what we have lost and encourage you to participate in conservation. It gives us the opportunity to include everyone in on-ground conservation work and pass on skills that can be applied beyond a day or this project. With your help we can reduce the impacts of pest species on the property and re-introduce some of the native species that are now locally extinct.

How you can help

The Monarto Restoration Project provides a great way to get involved in on-ground conservation work, and build skills and experience in conservation.

Opportunities this year include:

• The University of Adelaide and The University of Queensland Australian Research Council Grant (ARC) Linkage Project – designed to investigate the cost-benefit trade-off between biodiversity and carbon sequestration, i.e. what gives most “bang for your buck”. The project will commence surveys week beginning 15 April and we need your help! Opportunities include vegetation surveys, pitfall (reptile) traps, invertebrate traps, bee surveys.
• Planting – this year we have some 50,000 plants to put in the ground over 55 ha spread over multiple sites. Holes are predrilled so all you need to is bring some gloves, de-tube a plant, and drop it in a hole! Too easy. We’ll even let nature do the watering.

Equipment for tasks is supplied. You will need to wear suitable outdoor work clothes including a hat and sensible footwear. Bring your lunch, snacks and plenty of water to drink.

Please nominate a date range to assist with our planning and to allow us to coordinate groups:

• 20-24 May
• 27-31 May
• 3-7 June
• 10-14 June

More information about the Monarto Restoration Project can be found here. You can also access the PDF flyer for the volunteer call here.

We sent out this media release the other day, but it had pretty poor pick-up (are people sick of the carbon price wars?). Anyway, I thought it prudent to reprint here on CB.com.

–

Will Australia’s biodiversity benefit from the new carbon economy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Or will bio-’perversities’ win the day?

“Cautious optimism” was the conclusion of Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute. He is lead author of a new paper published in the journal of Biological Conservation which reviewed the likely consequences of a carbon economy on conservation of Australian biodiversity.

“In most circumstances these two very important goals for Australia’s future - greenhouse gas emissions reduction and biodiversity conservation – are not mutually exclusive and could even boost each other,” Professor Bradshaw says.

“There are, however, many potential negative biodiversity outcomes if land management is not done with biodiversity in mind from the outset.”

The paper was contributed to by 30 Australian scientists from different backgrounds. They reviewed six areas where Australia’s Carbon Farming Initiative could have the greatest impact on biodiversity: environmental plantings; policies and practices to deal with native regrowth; fire management; agricultural practices; and feral animal control.

“The largest biodiversity ‘bang for our buck’ is likely to come from tree plantings,” says Professor Bradshaw. “But there are some potential and frightening ‘bioperversities’ as well. For example, we need to be careful not to plant just the fastest-growing, simplest and non-native species only to ‘farm’ carbon.

“Carbon plantings will only have real biodiversity value if they comprise appropriate native tree species and provide suitable habitats and resources for valued fauna. Such plantings could however risk severely altering local hydrology and reducing water availability.”

Professor Bradshaw says carefully managing regrowth of once-cleared areas could also produce a large carbon-sequestration and biodiversity benefit simultaneously. And carbon price-based modifications to agriculture that would benefit biodiversity included reductions in tillage frequency, livestock densities and fertiliser use, and retention and regeneration of native shrubs.

“About 60% of Australia is devoted to cropping and grazing, so if we can manage to modify agricultural practices using carbon legislation that also benefits biodiversity, the potential gains are large,” he says.

He urged conservation planners to start taking greenhouse gas abatement values into account when planning optimal biodiversity outcomes.

“In general we are cautiously optimistic that moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through carbon pricing initiatives can also help conserve our biodiversity – but that, of course, depends on future governments not short-sightedly killing the carbon pricing system,” Professor Bradshaw says.

It’s interesting when a semi-random tweet by a colleague ends up mobilising a small army of scientists to get pissed off enough to co-write an article. Euan Ritchie of Deakin University started it off, and quickly recruited me, Mick McCarthy, David Watson, Ian Lunt, Hugh Possingham, Bill Laurance and Emma Johnston to put together the article. It’s a hugely important topic, so I hope it generates a lot of discussion and finally, some bloody action to stop the rapid destruction of this country’s national parks system.

Note: Published simultaneously on The Conversation.

–

It’s make or break time for Australia’s national parks.

National parks on land and in the ocean are dying a death of a thousand cuts, in the form of bullets, hooks, hotels, logging concessions and grazing licences. It’s been an extraordinary last few months, with various governments in eastern states proposing new uses for these critically important areas.

Australia’s first “National Park”, established in 1879, was akin to a glorified country club. Now called the “Royal National Park” on the outskirts of Sydney, it was created as a recreational escape for Sydney-siders, with ornamental plantations, a zoo, race courses, artillery ranges, livestock paddocks, deer farms, logging leases and mines.

Australians since realised that national parks should focus on protecting the species and natural landscapes they contain. However, we are now in danger of regressing to the misguided ideals of the 19th Century.

Parks under attack

In Victoria, new rules will allow developers to build hotels and other ventures in national parks. In New South Wales, legislation has been introduced to allow recreational shooting in national parks, and there is pressure to log these areas too.

Late last year, NSW announced a new trial to re-instate grazing in the new Millewa National Park and other reserves, following Victoria’s unsuccessful attempt to allow grazing in the Alpine National Park.

And just this week, the Queensland government passed new laws that allow graziers tofeed their stock in national parks during droughts.

It’s not just the land that’s under assault. NSW recently lifted bans on shore-based recreational fishing in most state marine sanctuaries. Coastal marine parks in Australia are mostly young, small (particularly the sanctuary zones), and poorly resourced. But they are vital for regulating human activities and making coastal ecosystems resilient to pollution, invasive species, resource extraction and climate change.

The picture is grim and set to get worse. In Queensland and Victoria, land clearing laws (outside of national parks) are being “relaxed”, with at least two major impacts. First, it will place an even higher value on our reserves, as more land is cleared and further degraded. Second, it will decrease connectivity between remaining patches of native vegetation, further threatening species that require large, connected habitats.

Set against a background of rapidly changing climates (and associated changes in storm and fire frequency, droughts and floods), many imperilled species will face range contractions at best, and full extinction at worst.

Parks already doing too little

Why should all this matter?

It’s widely acknowledged that our current reserve system and efforts to conserve our native biodiversity are eminently praiseworthy, but hopelessly inadequate. Indeed, prolonged government failure to implement existing environmental laws and draw up plans for threatened species has recently resulted in court action.

The problem isn’t limited to Australia. Biodiversity in many protected areas around the world is declining due to encroaching threats from surrounding areas. There is no free lunch; as parks suffer, their biodiversity suffers too.

Management interventions such as feral animal control, fire management and at times,grazing management, can be useful tools to achieve conservation goals in some circumstances. However, these need to be based on the best available ecological knowledge and practice and be aimed at conserving biodiversity. This is not the motivation for any of the recent changes.

Exploitation of our parks, without scientific evidence for positive biodiversity outcomes, will hasten losses. These areas need to be in the best shape possible to cope with the intensifying pressures imposed by a disrupted climate and likely increases in the frequency of species invasions.

Australia’s rich biodiversity is one of the few things our country has that is truly, globally unique. It is worth billions of dollars to our economy, and provides crucial natural services that are not easily replaced. Beyond their value to plants and animals, our national parks, wild places, and nature in general, are “good for us”.

Desperate times call for smarter measures

To illustrate how we, and the governments representing us, are failing to make use of the best available science to aid park management, and the consequences this has, we draw attention to two issues: grazing and pest animal control.

Nobody questions the stress graziers face when their stock begins to starve as drought intensifies in parts of southern and eastern Australia. But simply opening the fences to national parks is a dangerous precedent that provides, at best, a Band-Aid solution to a recurring problem.

Moving stock from pastures to parks increases the risk of spreading weeds and further degrading natural habitats for birds and mammals, as well as sensitive water resources on which we and our livestock depend.

The current trend in drought-relief programs is helping farmers prepare for droughts. We no longer rely on emergency measures to cope with droughts that are expected and recurrent. Opening parks to grazing does not fit this model.

Australia needs to get smarter. We should do more to encourage flexibility in our agricultural and aquaculture systems. Why don’t we produce animals better suited to the unique Australian conditions?

Making better use of Australian species could also help us deal with the pest animals, overabundant herbivores (goats, camels, buffalo, deer and kangaroos) and introduced predators (cats and foxes) overrunning our parks. We have been using bullets and poison for a long time, with little evidence for an overall gain. In some cases, this approach has generated new problems.

In many regions, our best available weapon to control pest animals is the dingo. Abundant research now demonstrates that dingoes strongly limit goat, kangaroo and fox populations. Dingoes are an unrelenting and ultimately free service.

Dingoes therefore provide the perfect example of how we can start making better use of our native species to protect biodiversity more broadly, build more resilient landscapes and shift our approach from the reactive, ineffective, costly and interventionist approaches we often see at present, to more proactive, longer-term, integrated and effective conservation and management solutions.

Our parks are the last vestiges of Australian nature – a final refuge for our irreplaceable biodiversity and ecosystems. A return to the outdated views of the 19th century – when parks were little more than playgrounds for city dwellers to escape the urban malaise – would run counter to everything that Australians have learnt about environmental conservation in the last 150 years.

Here are 6 more biodiversity cartoons illustrating through humour the sad state of the natural world (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

–

Following our The Conversation article a few weeks ago about the rapid demise of national parks in Australia, a few of us (me, Euan Ritchie & Emma Johnston) wrote a follow-up piece on the Australia’s national park misnomer (published simultaneously on The Conversation).

–

Australia boasts over 500 national parks covering 28 million hectares of land, or about 3.6% of Australia. You could be forgiven for thinking we’re doing well in the biodiversity-conservation game.

But did you know that of those more than 500 national parks, only six are managed by the Commonwealth Government? For marine parks, it’s a little more: 61 of the 130-plus are managed primarily by the Commonwealth. This means that the majority of our important biodiversity refuges are managed exclusively by state and territory governments. In other words, our national parks aren’t “national” at all.

In a world of perfect governance, this wouldn’t matter. But we’re seeing the rapid “relaxation” of laws designed to protect our “national” and marine parks by many state governments. Would making all of them truly national do more to conserve biodiversity?

One silly decision resulting in a major ecosystem disturbance in a national park can take decades if not hundreds of years to heal. Ecosystems are complex interactions of millions of species that take a long time to evolve – they cannot be easily repaired once the damage is done.

Almost overnight, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have rolled back nearly two centuries of park protection. What’s surprising here is that many of our conservation gains in the last few decades (for example, the Natural Heritage Trust, the National Reserve System, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and anational marine reserve network) originated from Coalition policies.

Having six quasi-autonomous states and several territories means the probability of implementing bad biodiversity policies is considerably higher than if a single, central government agency was responsible for their protection.

Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke has proposedextending the Commonwealth’s power to veto potentially high-impact activities like logging, grazing and mining proposed in national parks.

As ecologists and conservation scientists, we couldn’t agree more with the intent of this proposal, although we have several recommendations and caveats.

The power to veto high-impact activities isn’t enough. Vetos could be legally challenged by the states, and cooperation will depend on which parties are in control at state and federal levels at the time. Veto power alone could make for expensive and drawn-out court battles.

As far as legalisation goes, what we need is more concrete federal legislation restricting specific activities like fishing, logging and grazing.

It’s no guarantee of course that the Commonwealth is any better at managing national parks than the states. Kakadu National Park – our biggest and possibly most important national park, and managed by the Commonwealth – is a global conservation embarrassment. Undermined by internal management bickering and insufficient funding, its unique biodiversity has been declining sharply for decades. Just having a Commonwealth-run national park can be insufficient.

The best thing the federal government can do is allocate a little more money to national parks. More evidence is coming to light that for national parks to maintain healthy ecosystems, they require substantial effort on the part of their managers, and adequate funding.

That “adequate funding” wouldn’t drain the national budget dry. A study last year estimated that it would cost up to US$4.76 billion annually to protect the the entire planet’sthreatened species from extinction, or up to US$76 billion annually to protect and maintain protected areas like national parks. To put those amounts into perspective, that’s less than 20% of the global annual budget spent on soft drinkseach year.

If we therefore allocated only a little more to finance the management of our national reserve system, and a little more for local communities to get involved, we could fix many of the conservation problems our national parks face today.

We need to take a long, hard look at our national parks, marine parks and our national reserve system in general, and ask ourselves if we value the biodiversity they are meant to protect. If the answer is “yes”, then we need to encourage our leaders to push more of the budget pie in their direction, and discourage – through legal means – knee-jerk decisions to exploit their resources. We can do better.

© G. Gallice

A corker of an idea, and post, from Diogo Veríssimo.

–

I don’t like biodiversity. I like beef lasagna, I like the British museum and I like everything Jules Verne ever wrote. When it comes to biodiversity, it’s different. I think about it all the time, try to be close to it and suffer emotional distress when I think of it going irretrievably away. This is LOVE.

Understanding how to get this passion across effectively has always been one of my main goals. That is why my research has focused on the links between marketing and conservation. But recently I started feeling a bit more empowered to take this mission seriously, and all thanks to the Facebook page I fucking love Science. This page became an internet sensation amassing more than 5 million fans and engaging frequently over 4 million users in any given week. Forget the New York Times and National Geographic, this is the real deal.

So I wondered, why can’t I do the same for biodiversity? The idea lingered in my head until I read a recent paper by McCallum and Bury on Google search patterns, which shows how even during the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity we are failing to mainstream biodiversity and its associated issues. If fact, people seem to be less interested. Whatever we are doing is clearly not working. So why not give this concept a try? And so I fucking love Biodiversity (IFLB) was born.

The idea of having a Facebook page about biodiversity is of course by no means original. But I want to go about it in a slightly different way. First, I want IFLB to be all about fun and positive messaging, no more guilt, righteousness or fear, these link feelings of awe and curiosity with the natural world. Second, I strive to make IFLB as jargon free as possible, without dumbing down the content, as to allow anyone from any background to understand the content easily. Third, I want to make sure the page makes full use of what businesses have learned about social media user engagement, and there is lots of it, although even major conservation NGOs often ignore it.

Although, IFLB has only been going for a couple of weeks, I have already learned a lot while researching the content for the page. From facts about some outrageously awesome species and updates newly discovered ones, to biodiversity-themed internet memes and our series dedicated to species named after celebrities, our daily posts offer something to both the biodiversity veteran and the “cannot-tell-a-sparrow-from-a-peacock” novice.

The response has been great: almost 700 fans in two weeks. Sure it’s not quite at the same level as Skittles with their 25 million fans or Lady Gaga with her 58 million, but if you think biodiversity should actually have more than both of them combined, why not become a fan? Time to show the world just how loveable biodiversity can be.

It’s the time of year that scientists love to hate – the latest (2012) journal ranking have been released by ISI Web of Knowledge. Many people despise this system, despite its major role in driving publishing trends.

I’ve previously listed the 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 IF for major conservation and ecology journals. As before, I’ve included the previous year’s IF alongside the latest values to see how journals have improved or worsened (but take note – journals increase their IF on average anyway merely by the fact that publication frequency is increasing, so small jumps aren’t necessarily meaningful; I suspect that declines are therefore more telling).

Principally ‘conservation’ journals:

• Animal Conservation: 2.692 (2012) versus 2.931 (2011) ↓ 8.2 %
• Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems: 1.917 (2012) versus 1.929 (2011) ↓ 0.6 %
• Biodiversity and Conservation: 2.264 (2012) versus 2.238 (2011) ↑ 1.2 %
• Biological Conservation: 3.794 (2012) versus 4.115 (2011) ↓ 7.8 %
• Bird Conservation International: 1.074 (2012) versus 1.25 (2011) ↓ 14.1 %
• Chelonian Conservation and Biology: 0.744 (2012) versus 0.913 (2011) ↓ 18.5 %
• Conservation Biology: 4.355 (2012) versus 4.692 (2011) ↓ 7.2 %
• Conservation Evidence: no Impact Factor yet
• Conservation Genetics: 2.183 (2012) versus 1.610 (2011) ↑ 35.6 %
• Conservation Letters: 4.356 (2012) versus 4.082 (2011) ↑ 6.7 %
• Diversity and Distributions: 6.122 (2012) versus 4.830 (2011) ↑ 26.7 %
• Environmental Conservation: 2.341 (2012) versus 1.927 (2011) ↑ 21.5 %
• Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: 7.615 (2012) versus 9.113 (2011) ↓ 16.4 %
• Global Change Biology: 6.910 (2012) versus 6.862 (2011) ↑ 0.7 %
• Insect Conservation and Diversity: 1.937 (2012) versus 1.705 (2011) ↑ 13.6 %
• Journal for Nature Conservation: 1.535 (2012) versus 1.864 (2011) ↓ 17.7 %
• Oryx: 1.624 (2012) versus 1.826 (2011) ↓ 11.0 %
• Tropical Conservation Science: 1.092 (2012) versus 0.54 (2011) ↑ 102.2 %

Some ecology journals that frequently publish conservation-related material:

• Ambio: 2.295 (2012) versus 2.025 (2011) ↑
• Austral Ecology: 1.738 (2012) versus 1.824 (2011) ↓
• Biology Letters: 3.348 (2012) versus 3.762 (2011) ↓
• Biotropica: 2.351 (2012) versus 2.229 (2011) ↑
• Ecography: 5.124 (2012) versus 4.188 (2011) ↑
• Ecological Applications: 3.815 (2012) versus 5.102 (2011) ↓
• Ecology: 5.175 (2012) versus 4.849 (2011) ↑
• Ecology and Society: 2.831 (2012) versus 3.310 (2011) ↓
• Ecology Letters: 17.949 (2012) versus 17.557 (2011) ↑
• Journal of Animal Ecology: 4.841 (2012) versus 4.937 (2011) ↓
• Journal of Applied Ecology: 4.740 (2012) versus 5.045 (2011) ↓
• Journal of Biogeography: 4.863 (2012) versus 4.544 (2011) ↑
• Global Ecology and Biogeography: 7.223 (2012) versus 5.145 (2011) ↑
• Marine Ecology Progress Series: 2.546 (2012) versus 2.711 (2011) ↓
• Methods in Ecology and Evolution: 5.924 (2012) versus 5.093 (2011) ↑
• Molecular Ecology: 6.275 (2012) versus 5.522 (2011) ↑
• Oecologia: 3.011 (2012) versus 3.412 (2011) ↓
• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B: 6.230 (2012) versus 6.401 (2011) ↓
• Wildlife Research: 1.381 (2012) versus 1.323 (2011) ↑

Some more general journals that occasionally publish conservation papers:

• BioScience: 4.739 (2012) versus 4.621 (2011) ↑
• Current Biology: 9.494 (2012) versus 9.647 (2011) ↓
• Nature: 38.597 (2012) versus 36.280 (2011) ↑
• Proceedings of the Royal Society London B: 5.683 (2012) versus 5.415 (2011) ↑
• PLoS Biology: 12.690 (2012) versus 11.452 (2011) ↑
• PLoS One: 3.730 (2012) versus 4.092 (2011) ↓
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA: 9.737 (2012) versus 9.681 (2011) ↑
• Science: 31.027 (2012) versus 31.201 (2011) ↓
• Trends in Ecology and Evolution: 15.389 (2012) versus 15.748 (2011) ↓

Based on percentage change, the biggest relative gains among the ‘conservation’ journals were made by Conservation Genetics, Diversity and Distributions, Environmental Conservation and Tropical Conservation Science.

On an absolute IF front, most journals haven’t made many huge gains or losses, although Ecography, Global Ecology and Biogeography, Molecular Ecology and PLoS Biology made bigger jumps.

CJA Bradshaw