Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

integrating movement ecology and biodiversity research

This article talks about two sub-disciplines of ecology that have developed independently and would benefit from more integration. One is about the movement of individual animals, whether natural or fragmented/impacted by humans. The other is about the variety of organisms and how they interact with each other in habitats.

Editorial: thematic series “Integrating movement ecology with biodiversity research”

Bridging the gap between biodiversity research and movement ecology is possible. First integrations demonstrated that individual movement capacities and strategies are critical in determining the persistence of species and communities in fragmented landscapes, with changing climatic conditions, or in the presence of invasive species. At the same time, the ever-increasing human impact on nature puts long-established movement patterns in jeopardy, and organismal movement is changing perceivably across scales. Yet, a full-fledged integration of movement ecology and biodiversity research is still in its infancy. Empirically, we need more studies that not only focus on the movement of individuals, but also how they interact, while moving, with their environment and with other individuals, including their own and other species. From a theoretical viewpoint, there is a lack of modelling approaches that integrate individual movement and its consequences with population and community dynamics.

Movement Ecology

This could potentially be helpful at a time when remaining natural habitats are becoming increasingly fragmented, and are interspersed with agricultural, urban and suburban environments. All this could be optimized, given the right theory. Professional and political understanding and willingness to act would have to follow, of course, but doing the science would be a necessary first step.

Technosols

A technosol is an artificially created planting/structural medium from manmade materials, such as construction debris and compost. This article from Ecological Engineering journal says a mix of 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost might work. If we truly want green cities, and we don’t want to reduce natural habitats to wastelands by harvesting materials from them to green our cities, this could be a good approach.

CDC in the ICU?

I’m not the only one disappointed in the CDC. The Lancet has a scathing editorial.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

The Lancet

Well, you can read the rest for yourself, but the answer to the question is defunding and political interference.

“supporting” ecosystem services in cities

This long article makes a distinction between services provided by natural and semi-natural areas in cities, and a concept of a city as a whole as an ecosystem that provides services. What it reminded me of, though, is the distinction between the UN’s definition of “regulating” ecosystem services and “supporting” ecosystem services.

• Regulating ecosystem services, such as control of stormwater discharge, mitigation of heat in urban areas, mitigation of noise, etc.

• Supporting ecosystem services, such as provision of habitats for urban biodiversity, provision of pollinators for urban farms, etc.

Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning

In the engineering world I inhabit, we have the regulating services reasonably well figured out. We don’t always do a great job of implementing and enforcing, and we exempt too many projects, but basically we have cost-effective standards and best practices for things like flood management and water pollution reduction.

The supporting ecosystem services are mostly not even on our radar. And that means that when we are designing for flood or water quality objectives, our designs are not as green as they might be if we took biodiversity and habitat into account. It might not even cost more to do that, but it would require a more expansive way of thinking. To do that, we would need to communicate effectively to the decision makers and then the rank and file just why they should care.

drought

Alarm bells are beginning to sound on drought risk in western North America and around the world, including some important and populous food growing regions.

Here’s an article in Science talking about “an emerging North American megadrought”:

Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change. We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000–2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought. The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming. Anthropogenic trends in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation estimated from 31 climate models account for 47% (model interquartiles of 35 to 105%) of the 2000–2018 drought severity, pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.

Science

Here’s an article in Earth’s Future (from the American Geophysical Union, which I consider prestigious) talking about some other regions with high drought risk.

The multi‐model ensemble shows robust drying in the mean state across many regions and metrics by the end of the 21st century, even following the more aggressive mitigation pathways (SSP1‐2.6 and SSP2‐4.5). Regional hotspots with strong drying include western North America, Central America, Europe and the Mediterranean, the Amazon, southern Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Compared to SSP3‐7.0 and SSP5‐8.5, however, the severity of drying in the lower warming scenarios is substantially reduced and further precipitation declines in many regions are avoided. Along with drying in the mean state, the risk of the historically most extreme drought events also increases with warming, by 200–300% in some regions.

AGU

So, our species has identified the problem and identified solutions, but is continuing to fail to actually do anything. This is a little like the coronavirus, where early action could have been cheap and effective compared to the drastic action required when the problem became really obvious to even the densest politicians. It’s unlike the coronavirus in that once the problem becomes obvious to even the densest politicians, there may be no effective measures that can be taken, even maximally disruptive ones.

The mention of the Amazon and Southeast Asia are particularly concerning to me. These are both important food growing regions and biodiversity hot spots.

bye bye bumblebees

The latest charismatic species to be at risk of disappearing – bumblebees, according to Science. It’s a simple story – they just can’t handle the heat.

Climate change could increase species’ extinction risk as temperatures and precipitation begin to exceed species’ historically observed tolerances. Using long-term data for 66 bumble bee species across North America and Europe, we tested whether this mechanism altered likelihoods of bumble bee species’ extinction or colonization. Increasing frequency of hotter temperatures predicts species’ local extinction risk, chances of colonizing a new area, and changing species richness. Effects are independent of changing land uses. The method developed in this study permits spatially explicit predictions of climate change–related population extinction-colonization dynamics within species that explains observed patterns of geographical range loss and expansion across continents. Increasing frequencies of temperatures that exceed historically observed tolerances help explain widespread bumble bee species decline. This mechanism may also contribute to biodiversity loss more generally.

Science

debt as a measure of natural capital depletion?

This sprawling article in Ecological Economics talks about human civilization as a “superorganism” that exists only to dissipate energy, fouling its environment in the process. What I found somewhat interesting was the links it tries to make between natural capital depletion and financial debt.

Simultaneously, we get daily reminders the global economy isn’t working as it used to (Stokes, 2017) such as rising wealth and income inequality, heavy reliance on debt and government guarantees, populist political movements, increasing apathy, tension and violence, and ecological decay. To avoid facing the consequences of our biophysical reality, we’re now obtaining growth in increasingly unsustainable ways. The developed world is using finance to enable the extraction of things we couldn’t otherwise afford to extract to produce things we otherwise couldn’t afford to consume.

Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism

I’m not sure this article has a coherent story to tell, but I find it interesting to think what kind of indicators we might be able to look at to tell if an ecological reckoning might be around the corner. The prices of food and energy certainly come to mind. Financial debt, if it is indeed a measure of how much our expectations of the future are out of line with our capacity to innovate and to produce the energy and other materials and find the waste sinks we need to keep going. But there is clearly a lot of noise and short-term fluctuations in all these signals that might make it difficult or impossible to come up with any kind of useful predictive index.

bacteria, viruses, and fungi, oh my!

In the category of new diseases to worry about, and just in case you have not yet perused the latest issue of the Journal of Fungi, Candida auris is a really dangerous yeast fungus making the rounds in hospitals.

On the Origins of a Species: What Might Explain the Rise of Candida auris?

Candida auris is an emerging multidrug-resistant yeast first described in 2009 that has since caused healthcare-associated outbreaks of severe human infections around the world. In some hospitals, it has become a leading cause of invasive candidiasis. C. auris is markedly different from most other pathogenic Candida species in its genetics, antifungal resistance, and ability to spread between patients. The reasons why this fungus began spreading widely in the last decade remain a mystery. We examine available data on C. auris and related species, including genomic epidemiology, phenotypic characteristics, and sites of detection, to put forth hypotheses on its possible origins. C. auris has not been detected in the natural environment; related species have been detected in in plants, insects, and aquatic environments, as well as from human body sites. It can tolerate hypersaline environments and higher temperatures than most Candida species. We explore hypotheses about the pre-emergence niche of C. auris, whether in the environmental or human microbiome, and speculate on factors that might have led to its spread, including the possible roles of healthcare, antifungal use, and environmental changes, including human activities that might have expanded its presence in the environment or caused increased human contact.

beware the powerful house cat lobby

House cats have hired a major lobbying firm to promote their interests, as the song bird special interest attacks continue to escalate.

Okay, that’s my onion-like joke headline. But apparently, there is a vicious academic debate about just how much of a risk domestic cats pose to biodiversity when they are allowed to range outdoors. There is also a values conflict between people who feel very strongly about the welfare of individual animals, both wild and domestic, and people who feel very strongly about ecosystem functions and services. And obviously, there are lots of people who have strong feelings about all these things, and may have some internal conflicts to resolve.

There was one turn of phrase in this article I particularly liked: describing cats as “sentient, sapient, and social individuals”. I looked up sapient in the Websters 1913 dictionary:

Sapient
Sa”pi*ent
 (?), a.
 [L. sapiens, -entis, p. pr. of sapere to taste, to have sense, to know. See Sage
, a.
] Wise; sage; discerning; — often in irony or contempt.

Where the sapient king
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.
Milton.
Syn. — Sage; sagacious; knowing; wise; discerning.