Tag Archives: ecology

forecasting extinction risk

I agree with this article that it doesn’t make sense to start protecting species only after they become rare and threatened. Forecasting which ones will become rare and threatened in the future could make sense. Of course, serious efforts to protect, create, and connect habitats would make the most sense. The method I am familiar with, which is appeals to me most, is the geographically-based metapopulation method of Ilka Hansky. But there are some others mentioned here that are new to me, or at least unfamiliar names for concepts I might have come across.

Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions

Conservation prioritisation emphasises currently threatened species, but there are strong arguments for complementary, more proactive approaches based on forecasting future extinction risk for unthreatened species. Forecasting methods vary in the timescale of extinction risk estimation and include established methods such as Population Viability Analysis (PVA) and Early Warning Systems, and emerging ‘Over-the-Horizon’ (OTH) methods. We develop a framework that integrates extinction risk assessment across timescales and outlines tradeoffs between shorter- and longer-term extinction prevention goals. This framework facilitates use of extinction risk forecasting in decision-theoretic conservation prioritisation that explicitly considers alternative time horizons for extinction prevention. Considering extinction risk on extended timescales offers a future-proof approach to conservation planning that may prevent more extinctions than focusing exclusively on currently threatened species.

reading list on ecology

This blog post from Geekcologist has a fantastic set of links to classic essays and more recent blog posts on ecological topics. As an amateur (albeit an amateur who just spent 3.5 years thinking about the intersection of ecology and engineering and myself wrote about 250 pages on the topic) who cares about the natural world I think it is critically important to try to understand and grapple with these ideas. Because by and large it is not decisions made by ecologists that are determining the fate of our ecosystems. It is the decisions of politicians, bureaucrats, engineers, architects, planners, and businesspeople of all stripes. Even if we have morals that might cause us to make better ecological choices, we don’t know very much about ecology, and we just aren’t thinking about this every day. Meanwhile, if I were going to criticize ecologists I would say they are just arguing with each other in an echo chamber and not getting through to the rest of society. Or, they are probably getting through to us in elementary school, and then the vast majority forget what we learned in elementary school when we turn into serious and cynical grownups. Anyway, a person could spend a lot of time drilling into the links in this one post. Maybe I will try to do some follow up posts on a handful of them.

beech leaf disease

A new disease is threatening beech trees (Philadelphia Inquirer, paywalled) in the U.S. We don’t want to lose our beeches like we did our chestnuts. Beeches have some similar features in that they make up a significant amount of our eastern forest canopy (like chestnuts used to), produce fatty nuts that feed birds and other species, and their leaves serve as host plants for insects that feed birds and other species. It is not clear yet what is causing this disease, but hopefully we can learn from the cautionary tale of the chestnut and try to get out in front of it.

Go Birds!

It’s the morning of Super Bowl Sunday as I write this, and I don’t know if the Philadelphia Eagles will win tonight. If you are reading this, you will probably know or you can look it up. In the meantime, if you want to watch eagles on TV there are at least two live streams of bald eagle nests in Pennsylvania. When I checked just now, one had an eagle in it and one was empty. Even an empty bald eagle nest is an impressive structure worth a look.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution horizon scan

This journal does an annual “horizon scan” of of emerging topics and issues. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • “bio-batteries” – “DNA-enabled biobattery technology uses a set of enzymes coupled to DNA to degrade organic compounds, releasing electrons and generating electricity…Such batteries could theoretically supply power densities in orders of magnitude greater than widely used lithium-ion batteries”. There are also new processes for extracting lithium more sustainably from waste materials. So there is some hope that the resource and waste limitations to scaling up renewable energy can be solved. Thermophotovoltaic cells are a third energy storage technology mentioned.
  • more practical methods of converting human urine to fertilizer – This might not sound like a big deal, but our coastal waters are being choked by nutrients both from treated wastewater and from farm runoff, while the nutrients in the farm runoff are derived from fossil fuels in the case of nitrogen or a mined from finite geological resources in the case of phosphate. Reprocessing urine into fertilizer is almost a no-brainer. And the technology has been known for awhile. The problem has been waste taboos which seem to be extremely ingrained in our psyches. I really want this one to be overcome, but as a wastewater industry insider I have become more cynical about this one over time. Genetic engineering of crops to help them take up nitrogen directly from the atmosphere (which peas and beans can do naturally, but most crops can’t) is also mentioned.
  • A particular pathogen that infects amphibians may be spreading to new areas.
  • European countries are considering new policy/legal frameworks for biodiversity reporting and conservation. This might sound boring, but we have gotten there with conventional pollution and we are getting there with greenhouse gases and renewable energy, while land use and conversation have mostly been left out to date.
  • Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to try to accelerate drug, chemical, and pesticide research.
  • trash reefs – New ecosystems may actually develop and adapt around ocean garbage patches.

wolves create a landscape of fear!

The “landscape of fear” is a thing in ecology where predators control prey behavior just by making them afraid of predation. This article compares the cost of wolf predation of livestock to the money saved when wolves keep deer away from highways. The comparison is overwhelmingly in favor of leaving the wolves to keep deer from the highways, even if they eat a few sheep.

Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation

Recent studies uncover cascading ecological effects resulting from removing and reintroducing predators into a landscape, but little is known about effects on human lives and property. We quantify the effects of restoring wolf populations by evaluating their influence on deer–vehicle collisions (DVCs) in Wisconsin. We show that, for the average county, wolf entry reduced DVCs by 24%, yielding an economic benefit that is 63 times greater than the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock. Most of the reduction is due to a behavioral response of deer to wolves rather than through a deer population decline from wolf predation. This finding supports ecological research emphasizing the role of predators in creating a “landscape of fear.” It suggests wolves control economic damages from overabundant deer in ways that human deer hunters cannot.

PNAS

So in a rational world you would maybe take a small fraction of gas tax or toll payments and use it to compensate the farmers for their sheep, in exchange for the farmers not going after the wolves. Or you could just make it illegal to go after the wolves and try to enforce that law. Or some combination. What makes this sort of thing tough in the real world is that a small group impacted by a policy can organize and get political attention, whereas some nebulous idea of “society as a whole” is not going to organize, understand the issue, and lobby the politicians. You could maybe imagine insurance companies representing car owners and truckers getting involved in this issue, if the savings are really so dramatic.

tongue eating parasites

In Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files books, there are horrifying demon parasites from alternate dimensions that can eat your tongue (and, um…other body parts – why spoil it?) and live in your mouth, while turning you into a sort of zombie. A horrifying idea, but these books are fun, tongue-in-cheek (oops…) highly entertaining and recommended (by me). Anyway, it looks like he got the idea from an IRL horrifying parasite that is about a third of an inch long and can indeed eat your tongue and live in your mouth – if you are a fish. Gross.

John Philip Grime

Trends in Ecology and Evolution has an obituary on John Philip Grime, a giant in plant ecology. Not being well educated in plant ecology, I had not heard of him, but I like to learn.

Two seminal publications of the early 1970s would come to define Phil’s approach to finding universal patterns in the structure of vegetation. ‘Competitive exclusion in herbaceous vegetation’ [1.] introduced the ‘hump-backed’ model, which predicted that plant species richness peaks in communities that produce an aboveground biomass of about 600 g m–2 year–1. The model was one of the first to make specific recommendations about the management of local biodiversity. ‘Vegetation classification by reference to strategies’ [2.] introduced ‘competition-stress-disturbance’ (CSR) theory. CSR would become synonymous with Phil’s approach to studying vegetation; because he chose to present the concept as a triangle of three opposing selection pressures, many would come to refer to CSR theory as Grime’s triangle. Although not obvious from these papers, each was based on extensive vegetation datasets of the Sheffield region compiled by the UCPE team (particularly longtime associate John Hodgson). Although many would come to know Phil as a theorist and provocateur (a role he would assume often in the 1980s and 1990s), Phil would always argue that his insights were born of detailed field observations and a UCPE research team with expertise in both field botany and physiology.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution