Tag Archives: biodiversity

bumblebees

Science says bumblebees are being “crushed” by climate change. Apparently their fur coats are too hot at the southern edge of their range, and they aren’t expanding north because so far there is not the kind of vegetation they need to the north.

…climate change could further strain species already struggling with dwindling habitat and other pressures, Kerr says. “We’re hitting these animals with everything,” he says. “There’s no way you can nail a bee with neonicotinoids, invasive pathogens, and climate change and come out with a happy bee.”

The loss of bee species could carry consequences for ecosystems and people. For instance, “plants that like their pollinators to be pretty loyal” could see declines in reproduction, says ecologist Laura Burkle of Montana State University, Bozeman. And given that wild bees help pollinate many crops, “we play with these things at our peril,” Kerr says. “The human enterprise is the top floor in a really big scaffold. What we’re doing is reaching out and knocking out the supports.”

gators and tigers and extinction, oh my!

The extinction rate is now 1000 times normal, says Duke University.

Not to worry, say Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and the University of Florida (and what would they know, those ‘gators with their beady dinosaur eyes), it’s only 114 times normal using “conservative assumptions”.

And according to a surprisingly edgy book review in my favorite special interest publication Civil Engineering (because what could be more special than my own interest), there is a new book out:

You probably don’t subscribe to Civil Engineering, so here is the Amazon description:

A growing number of scientists agree we are headed toward a mass extinction, perhaps in as little as 300 years. Already there have been five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years, including the Cretaceous Extinction, during which an asteroid knocked out the dinosaurs. Though these events were initially destructive, they were also prime movers of evolutionary change in nature. And we can see some of the warning signs of another extinction event coming, as our oceans lose both fish and oxygen. In The Next Species, Michael Tennesen questions what life might be like after it happens.

Tennesen discusses the future of nature and whether humans will make it through the bottleneck of extinction. Without man, could the seas regenerate to what they were before fishing vessels? Could life suddenly get very big as it did before the arrival of humans? And what if man survives the coming catastrophes, but in reduced populations? Would those groups be isolated enough to become distinct species? Could the conquest of Mars lead to another form of human? Could we upload our minds into a computer and live in a virtual reality? Or could genetic engineering create a more intelligent and long-lived creature that might shun the rest of us? And how would we recognize the next humans? Are they with us now?

designing ecosystem complexity

This article in Ecological Engineering is about measuring and purposely designing complexity into ecosystems to support biodiversity. I like this idea – certainly grass and trees are a step up from concrete in cities, but there might be some relatively simple design choices that could improve conditions for both wildlife and people without adding effort or cost. We actually expend enormous amounts of time, effort, and money maintaining our grass and trees, whereas natural ecosystems manage to maintain themselves while being more beautiful, diverse, and productive. The first step is to understand the systems better, the second would be to understand what variables we can manipulate, then the third and most difficult step is always translating that new understanding to actions on the ground and getting people to actually take them.

Simplification of natural habitats has become a major conservation challenge and there is a growing consensus that incorporating and enhancing habitat complexity is likely to be critical for future restoration efforts. Habitat complexity is often ascribed an important role in controlling species diversity, however, despite numerous empirical studies the exact mechanism(s) driving this association remains unclear. The lack of progress in untangling the relationship between complexity and diversity is partly attributable to the considerable ambiguity in the use of the term ‘complexity’. Here, we offer a new framework for conceptualizing ecological complexity, an essential prerequisite for the development of analytical methods for creating and comparing habitat complexity. Our framework distinguishes between two fundamental forms of complexity: information-based complexity and systems-based complexity. Most complexity–diversity studies are concerned with informational complexity which can be measured in the field through a variety of metrics (e.g. fractal dimensions, rugosity, etc.), but these metrics cannot be used to re-construct three-dimensional complex habitats. Drawing on our operational definition of informational complexity, it is possible to design habitats with different degrees of physical complexity. We argue that the ability to determine or modify the variables of complexity precisely has the potential to open up new lines of research in diversity theory and contribute to restoration and reconciliation by enabling environmental managers to rebuild complexity in anthropogenically-simplified habitats.

The Sixth Extinction

Here’s a half hour Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote the book The Sixth Extinction. Her descriptions of ocean acidification and amphibian extinction are particularly eye-opening. The whole thing is worth a listen (better to listen than try to read this transcript), but I especially liked this exchange:

GROSS: So this is going to sound like a horrible question, but, you know, I don’t get to see barrier reefs. I don’t get to see coral. I live in the city. What impact does it have on my life if coral reefs can’t grow anymore and if they start declining because of the acidification of the oceans?

KOLBERT: Well, I guess I’d give you two answers. The first answer is, you know, we are effectively undoing, you know, the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world, which has taken tens of millions of years to reach this point. We’re sort of unraveling that. And if that is something that you just say, well, I don’t care about, then I guess I’d say, well, what do you care about?

(LAUGHTER)

KOLBERT: But on another, on a more, you know, personal sort of like, OK, I want to know how – you know, what’s it mean to me, I guess my answer would be we’re not sure. You know, no one’s – we haven’t done this before. You don’t get to sort of see this experiment run over and over again. So we’re doing, it’s often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don’t know what the end point’s going to be.