This was an international agreement made in 2014 to “halve deforestation and restore 150 million hectares of forests by 2020”. At the 5 year mark, this plan is “not on track”.
The New York Declaration on Forests
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Tag Archives: biodiversity
May 2019 in Review
This wasn’t my most prolific writing (or reading) month ever. In fact, it my have been my worst. But here are a few highlights of what I did get around to.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
Most hopeful story:
- Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
- Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
monarchs
Monarch butterflies are not doing well, according to USA Today.
The number of monarch butterflies turning up at California’s overwintering sites has dropped by about 86 percent compared with only a year ago, according to the Xerces Society, which organizes a yearly count of the iconic creatures.
That’s bad news for a species whose numbers have already declined an estimated 97 percent since the 1980s.
So plant some milkweed. I started and planted a few seeds of butterfly milkweed in my small urban garden about 3 growing seasons ago, and they are just now starting to get a bit aggressive. I’m not sure how the neighbors feel, but it’s fine with me. I have in fact seen a few monarchs out there.
November 2018 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing stories:
- Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
- The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
- About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
Most hopeful stories:
- Eating “organic” foods may actually reduce your cancer risk after all.
- New drugs could mean very low transmission risk of AIDS, even for people engaging in previously high-risk behavior.
- Climate change news: A serious program of ecosystem restoration could offset around a fifth of annual U.S. carbon emissions. And the children suing the U.S. government for not addressing climate change might actually have a chance.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
- A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
- People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.
habitat complexity doesn’t affect biodiversity?
There’s theory, and then there is collecting actual evidence to support a theory, which tends to be messy. In this case, the theory is that more complex habitats should support more diversity. They didn’t at least in this study of insects and spiders in Sydney.
Habitat complexity does not affect arthropod community composition in roadside greenspaces
Urban greenspaces including remnant patches of vegetation, backyard gardens and public parks provide important habitat for wildlife conservation. Maintaining and enhancing the conservation value of these spaces requires both an understanding of the biodiversity they support, and the factors, including habitat traits, influencing species occurrence. Roadside greenspaces, including road verges and median strips are often overlooked in current greenspace biodiversity studies. We quantified arthropod community assemblages in roadside and public park greenspaces, and determined if habitat complexity was an important trait influencing species composition in these areas. Using pitfall traps, we sampled ground dwelling arthropods along five major roads in the greater Sydney Region and in public parks. Whilst roadside greenspaces (road verges and median strips) and public parks supported significantly different arthropod assemblages, habitat complexity had no impact on community assemblage and neither factor affected the assemblage of key arthropods taxa including ants, beetles and spiders. Additionally, in public parks but not road side greenspaces we found an effect of habitat complexity on arthropod abundance; arthropods were more abundant in high complexity park sites. Our results highlight the unique arthropod community assemblage supported by roadside greenspaces, and suggest management practices like increasing habitat complexity may be important in some but not all urban greenspace types.
Large Igneous Provinces and mass extinction
Ars Technica has an article on Large Igneous Provinces, which are volcanic eruptions so large (occurring every 15 million years or so on average) they are thought to be the main culprit behind most mass extinctions. Lava and toxic gas can be bad but are not enough to explain mass extinction. They can actually cause large-scale global cooling on a short time scale (a decade or so) due to particulate emissions, but that effect also is not enough to explain mass extinction. The way they are thought to cause global mass extinction this is by burning underground fossil fuels on an enormous scale, causing catastrophic climate change that species cannot adapt to (including global warming, sea level rise, and ocean acidification, which kick in after the shorter-term cooling effect has run its course, and last a lot longer).
I was also wondering about volcanic activity versus comet and asteroid strikes. The article addresses that too:
Debate over what caused these factory resets of life has raged ever since Cuvier’s time. He considered them to be caused by environmental catastrophes that rearranged the oceans and continents. Since then, a host of explanations have been proposed, including diseases, galactic gamma rays, dark matter, and even methane from microbes. But since the 1970s, most scientists have considered the likely root cause to be either asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, or a combination of both.
Those asteroid (or comet) impacts have captured the public imagination ever since 1980, when Luis and Walter Alvarez found global traces of iridium, which they inferred to be extraterrestrial, at the geological boundary that marked the disappearance of the dinosaurs. The identification of the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico soon after sealed the deal. Impacts have been proposed to explain other mass extinctions, but there’s very little actual evidence to support those links. In the words of researchers David Bond and Stephen Grasby, who reviewed the evidence in 2016: “Despite much searching, there remains only one confirmed example of a bolide impact coinciding with an extinction event…”
Volcanism, on the other hand, has coincided with most, if not all, mass extinctions—it looks suspiciously like a serial killer, if you like.
According to the article, the rate of fossil fuel burning is similar to what humans are doing now. So it follows that natural ecosystems could collapse this time too. That would be a catastrophe in itself, but how resilient can our species and food production systems be compared to all the others that have come and gone before us?
Sounding the alarm on biodiversity
What’s the elevator pitch to convince a skeptic that biodiversity is important? To people who value nature for its own sake and believe it is immoral to destroy it, maybe it seems as though the pitch should not be needed. But it’s needed, considering the difficulties communicating the practical/economic case against global warming when that case should be fairly obvious (reliability of the food supply; cost of food, energy, and water; cost to protect, relocate or abandon coastal cities; impacts of extreme weather, drought and fire inland).
Of course, the practical/economic case to fight biodiversity loss has to do with how much our civilization relies on free ecosystem services, and has neither the level of technology nor wealth to replace them in the near term. I believe many people will respond to the ethical case too, and more would if we emphasized ethics more in children’s education. But this paragraph is already too long for an elevator pitch now, isn’t it.
Here are a couple articles that talk about bolstering both the science and the communications.
http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(17)30263-X
disappearing bugs
This surprising study from Germany raises the possibility that a catastrophic loss of insects is occurring and that it could lead to ecological collapse.
More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
Global declines in insects have sparked wide interest among scientists, politicians, and the general public. Loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to provoke cascading effects on food webs and to jeopardize ecosystem services. Our understanding of the extent and underlying causes of this decline is based on the abundance of single species or taxonomic groups only, rather than changes in insect biomass which is more relevant for ecological functioning. Here, we used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96 unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna. Our analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study. We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline. This yet unrecognized loss of insect biomass must be taken into account in evaluating declines in abundance of species depending on insects as a food source, and ecosystem functioning in the European landscape.
I knew about the frogs, elephants, tigers, bees, and loss of larger animal species and biomass in general, but I hadn’t really heard this idea that insects are disappearing. I can see a silver lining to this – I can’t really create elephant or tiger habitat around my house, and frog habitat is a little tough, but insects – I can actually help the little guys. On a larger scale, there is the question of green infrastructure – can we deliberately design habitats in cities, larger reserves, and corridors connecting them to support as much ecological function as we can? I think so, but I don’t think our public officials, engineers, urban planners, scientists, and others in a position to do this are tuned into the issue or even very open to hearing about it.
Aichi biodiversity targets, Sustainable Development Goals and the Protected Planet report
The Aichi Biodiversity Targets were adopted by the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010, and at least some aspects of them (slightly confusing to me) were incorporated in the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015. In short, my understanding from a quick skim is that the target is to protect 17% of land area. The current status is reported in a Protected Planet report that the UN produces every two years. (Disclaimer: I could easily have some details wrong here.)
In terms of the representation element of Aichi Biodiversity Target 11, less than half of the world’s 823 terrestrial ecoregions have at least 17% of their area in PAs and only one third of the 232 marine ecoregions have at least 10% of their area protected. Less than 20% of Key Biodiversity Areas are completely protected, and therefore further efforts are needed to expand PA systems to ensure that the global PA estate adequately covers areas important for biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services to people.
de-extinction
Here’s the Amazon description of a new (to me) book called Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction.
If you could bring back just one animal from the past, what would you choose? It can be anyone or anything from history, from the King of the Dinosaurs, T. rex, to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, and beyond.
De-extinction, the ability to bring extinct species back to life is fast becoming reality. Around the globe, scientists are trying to de-extinct all manner of animals, including the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon and a bizarre species of flatulent frog. But de-extinction is more than just bringing back the dead. It’s a science that can be used to save species, shape evolution and sculpt the future of life on our planet.
In Bring Back the King, scientist and comedy writer Helen Pilcher goes on a quest to identify the perfect de-extinction candidate. Along the way, she asks if Elvis could be recreated from the DNA inside a pickled wart, investigates whether it’s possible to raise a pet dodo, and considers the odds of a 21st century Neanderthal turning heads on public transport.
Pondering the practicalities and the point of de-extinction, Bring Back the King is a witty and wry exploration of what is bound to become one of the hottest topics in conservation if not in science as a whole in the years to come.