Tag Archives: climate change

Ecosystem Science to the Rescue

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What can ecologists do to become useful in the mess that is currently the 21st Century? In Australia we have a set of guidelines now available as “Foundations for the Future: A Long Term Plan for Australian Ecosystem Science” (http://www.ecosystemscienceplan.org.au ) It is a useful overall plan in many respects and the only question I wish to discuss here is how we ecologists come to such plans and whether or not they are realistic.

We should begin by treating this plan as an excellent example of political ecology – a well presented, glossy brochure, with punch lines carved out and highlighted so that newspaper reporters and sympathetic politicians can present sound bites on air or in Parliament. One example: “Healthy ecosystems are the cornerstone of our social and economic wellbeing”. No arguments there.

Six key directions are indicated:

  1. Delivering maximum impact for Australia: Enhancing relationships between scientists and end-users
  2. Supporting long-term research
  3. Enabling ecosystem surveillance
  4. Making the most of data resources
  5. Inspiring a generation: Empowering the public with knowledge and opportunities
  6. Facilitating coordination, collaboration and leadership

Most ecologists would agree with all 6 key directions, but perhaps only 2 and 3 are scientific goals that are key to research planning. Everyone supports 2, but how do we achieve this without adequate funding? Similarly 3 is an admirable direction but how is it to be accomplished? Could we argue that most ecologists have been trying to achieve these 6 goals for 75 years, and particularly goals 2 and 3 for at least 35 years?

As a snapshot of the importance of ecosystem science, the example of the Great Barrier Reef is presented, and in particular understanding reef condition and its changes over time.

“Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is one of the seven wonders of the natural world, an Australian icon that makes an economic contribution of over $5 billion annually. Ongoing monitoring of the reef and its condition by ecosystem scientists plays a vital role in understanding pressures and informing the development of management strategies. Annual surveys to measure coral cover across the Great Barrier Reef since 1985 have built the world’s most extensive time series data on reef condition across 214 reefs. Researchers have used this long-term data to assess patterns of change and to determine the causes of change.”

The paper they cite (De’ath et al. 2012) shows a coral cover decline on the Great Barrier Reef of 50% over 27 years, with three main causes: cyclones (48% of total), crown-of-thorns starfish (43%) and coral bleaching (10%). From a management perspective, controlling the starfish would help recovery but only on the assumption that the climate is held stable lest cyclones and bleaching increase in future. It is not clear at all to me how ecosystem science can assist reef recovery, and we have in this case another good example of excellent ecological understanding with near-zero ability to rectify the main causes of reef degradation – climate change and water pollution.

The long-term plan presented in this report suggests many useful activities by which ecosystem studies could be more integrated. Exactly which ecosystem studies should be considered high priority are left for future considerations, as is the critical question of who will do these studies. Given that many of the originators of this ecosystem plan are from universities, one worries whether universities have the resources or the time frame or the mandate to accomplish all these goals which are essentially government services. With many governments backing out of serious ecosystem research because of budget cuts, the immediate future does not look good. Nearly 10 years ago Sutherland et al. (2006) gathered together a list of 100 ecological questions of high policy relevance for the United Kingdom. We should now go back to see if these became a blueprint for success or not.

De’ath, G., Fabricius, K.E., Sweatman, H., and Puotinen, M. (2012). The 27–year decline of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef and its causes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(44): 17995-17999. doi:10.1073/pnas.1208909109.

Sutherland, W.J., et al. (2006). The identification of 100 ecological questions of high policy relevance in the UK. Journal of Applied Ecology 43(4): 617-627. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2006.01188.x

 

On Research Questions in Ecology

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I have done considerable research in arctic Canada on questions of population and community ecology, and perhaps because of this I get e mails about new proposals. This one just arrived from a NASA program called ABoVE that is just now starting up.

“Climate change in the Arctic and Boreal region is unfolding faster than anywhere else on Earth, resulting in reduced Arctic sea ice, thawing of permafrost soils, decomposition of long- frozen organic matter, widespread changes to lakes, rivers, coastlines, and alterations of ecosystem structure and function. NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program is in the process of planning a major field campaign, the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), which will take place in Alaska and western Canada during the next 5 to 8 years.“

“The focus of this solicitation is the initial research to begin the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) field campaign — a large-scale study of ecosystem responses to environmental change in western North America’s Arctic and boreal region and the implications for social-ecological systems. The Overarching Science Question for ABoVE is: “How vulnerable or resilient are ecosystems and society to environmental change in the Arctic and boreal region of western North America? “

I begin by noting that Peters (1991) wrote very much about the problems with these kinds of ‘how’ questions. First of all note that this is not a scientific question. There is no conceivable way to answer this question. It contains a set of meaningless words to an ecologist who is interested in testing alternative hypotheses.

One might object that this is not a research question but a broad brush agenda for more detailed proposals that will be phrased in such a way to become scientific questions. Yet it boggles the mind to ask how vulnerable ecosystems are to anything unless one is very specific. One has to define an ecosystem, difficult if it is an open system, and then define what vulnerable means operationally, and then define what types of environmental changes should be addressed – temperature, rainfall, pollution, CO2. And all of that over the broad expanse of arctic and boreal western North America, a sampling problem on a gigantic scale. Yet an administrator or politician could reasonably ask at the end of this program, ‘Well, what is the answer to this question?’ That might be ‘quite vulnerable’, and then we could go on endlessly with meaningless questions and answers that might pass for science on Fox News but not I would hope at the ESA. We can in fact measure how primary production changes over time, how much CO2 is sequestered or released from the soils of the arctic and boreal zone, but how do we translate this into resilience, another completely undefined empirical ecological concept?

We could attack the question retrospectively by asking for example: How resilient have arctic ecosystems been to the environmental changes of the past 30 years? We can document that shrubs have increased in abundance and biomass in some areas of the arctic and boreal zone (Myers-Smith et al. 2011), but what does that mean for the ecosystem or society in particular? We could note that there are almost no data on these questions because funding for northern science has been pitiful, and that raises the issue that if these changes we are asking about occur on a time scale of 30 or 50 years, how will we ever keep monitoring them over this time frame when research is doled out in 3 and 5 year blocks?

The problem of tying together ecosystems and society is that they operate on different time scales of change. Ecosystem changes in terrestrial environments of the North are slow, societal changes are fast and driven by far more obvious pressures than ecosystem changes. The interaction of slow and fast variables is hard enough to decipher scientifically without having many external inputs.

So perhaps in the end this Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (another misuse of the word ‘experiment’) will just describe a long-term monitoring program and provide the funding for much clever ecological research, asking specific questions about exactly what parts of what ecosystems are changing and what the mechanisms of change involve. Every food web in the North is a complex network of direct and indirect interactions, and I do not know anyone who has a reliable enough understanding to predict how vulnerable any single element of the food web is to climate change. Like medieval scholars we talk much about changes of state or regime shifts, or tipping points with a model of how the world should work, but with little long term data to even begin to answer these kinds of political questions.

My hope is that this and other programs will generate some funding that will allow ecologists to do some good science. We may be fiddling while Rome is burning, but at any rate we could perhaps understand why it is burning. That also raises the issue of whether or not understanding is a stimulus for action on items that humans can control.

Myers-Smith, I.H., et al. (2011) Expansion of canopy-forming willows over the 20th century on Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, Canada. Ambio, 40, 610-623.

Peters, R.H. (1991) A Critique for Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. 366 pp.

On Political Ecology

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When I give a general lecture now, I typically have to inform the audience that I am talking about scientific ecology not political ecology. What is the difference? Scientific ecology is classical boring science, stating hypotheses, doing experiments or observations to gather the data, testing the idea, and accepting or rejecting it, outlined clearly in many papers (Platt 1963, Wolff and Krebs (2008), and illustrated in this diagram:

Scientific ecology is clearly out-of-date, and no longer ‘cool’ when compared to the new political ecology.

Political ecology is a curious mix of traditional ecology added to the advocacy issue of protecting biodiversity. Political ecology is aimed at convincing society in general and politicians in particular to protect the Earth’s biodiversity. This is a noble cause, and my complaint is only that when we advocate and use scientific ecology in pursuit of a political agenda we should be scientifically rigorous. Yet much of biodiversity science is a mix of belief and evidence, with unsuitable evidence used in support of what is a noble belief. If we believe that the end justifies the means, we would be happy with this. But I am not.

One example will illustrate my frustration with political ecology. Dirzo et al. (2014) in a recent Science paper give an illustration of the effects of removing large animals from an ecosystem. In their Figure 4, page 404, a set of 4 graphs purport to show experimentally what happens when you remove large wildlife species in Kenya, the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (Young et al. 1997). But this experiment is hopelessly flawed in being carried out on a set of plots of 4 ha, a postage stamp of habitat relative to large mammal movements and ecosystem processes. But the fact that this particular experiment was not properly designed for the questions it is now being used to address is not a problem if this is political ecology rather than scientific ecology. The overall goal of the Dirzo et al. (2014) paper is admirable, but it is achieved by quoting a whole series of questionable extrapolations given in other papers. The counter-argument in conservation biology has always been that we do not have time to do proper research and we must act now. The consequence is the elevation of expert opinion in conservation science to the realm of truth without going through the proper scientific process.

We are left with this prediction from Dirzo et al. (2014):

“Cumulatively, systematic defaunation clearly threatens to fundamentally alter basic ecological functions and is contributing to push us toward global-scale “tipping points” from which we may not be able to return ……. If unchecked, Anthropocene defaunation will become not only a characteristic of the planet’s sixth mass extinction, but also a driver of fundamental global transformations in ecosystem functioning.”

I fear that statements like this are more akin to something like a religion of conservation fundamentalism, while we proclaim to be scientists.

Dirzo, R., Young, H.S., Galetti, M., Ceballos, G., Isaac, N.J.B. & Collen, B. (2014) Defaunation in the Anthropocene. Science, 345, 401-406.

Platt, J.R. (1964) Strong inference. Science, 146, 347-353.

Wolff, J.O. & Krebs, C.J. (2008) Hypothesis testing and the scientific method revisited. Acta Zoologica Sinica, 54, 383-386.

Young, T.P., Okello, B.D., Kinyua, D. & Palmer, T.M. (1997) KLEE: A long‐term multi‐species herbivore exclusion experiment in Laikipia, Kenya. African Journal of Range & Forage Science, 14, 94-102.

What is Policy?

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One seemingly popular way of muzzling scientists is to declare that they may not comment on issues that impact on government policy. In Canada and in Australia at the present time this kind of general rule seems to be enforced. It raises the serious issue of what is ‘policy’. In practice it appears that some scientific papers that discuss policy can pass the bar because they support the dominant economic paradigm of eternal growth or at least do not challenge it. But the science done by ecologists and environmental scientists often conflicts with current practices and thus confronts the economic paradigm.

There are several dictionary definitions of policy but the one most relevant to this discussion is:

“a high-level overall plan embracing the general goals and acceptable procedures especially of a governmental body”

The problem an ecologist faces is that in many countries this “high overall plan for the country” involves continuous economic growth, no limitations on the human population, the minimization of regulations regarding environmental pollution, and no long-term plan about climate change. But probably the largest area of conflict is over economic growth, and any ecological data that might restrict economic growth should be muzzled or at least severely edited.

This approach of governments is only partially effective because in general the government does not have the power to muzzle university scientists who can speak out on any topic, and this has been a comfort to ecologists and environmental scientists. But there are several indirect ways to muzzle these non-government scientists because the government controls some of the radio and TV media that must obtain funding from the federal budget, and the pressure of budget cuts unless ‘you toe the line’ works well. And the government also has indirect controls over research funding so that research that might uncover critical issues can be deemed less important than research that might increase the GNP. All of this serves the current economic paradigm of most of the developed countries.

Virtually all conservation biology research contains clear messages about policy issues, but these are typically so far removed from the day to day decisions made by governments that they can be safely ignored. A national park here or there seems to satisfy many voters who think these biodiversity problems are under control. But I would argue that all of conservation biology and indeed all of ecology is subversive to the dominant economic paradigm of our day so that everything we do has policy implications. If this is correct, telling scientists they may not comment on policy issues is effectively telling them not to do ecological or environmental science.

So we ecologists get along by keeping a minimal profile, a clear mistake at a time when more emphasis should be given to emerging environmental problems, especially long term issues that do not immediately affect voters. There is no major political party in power in North America or Australia that embraces in a serious way what might be called a green agenda for the future of the Earth.

The solution seems to be to convince the voters at large that the ecological world view is better than the economic world view and there are some signs of a slow move in this direction. The recent complete failure of economics as a reliable guide to government policy should start to move us in the right direction, and the recognition that inequality is destroying the social fabric is helpful. But movement is very slow.

Meanwhile ecologists must continue to question policies that are destroying the Earth. We can begin with fracking for oil and gas, and continue to highlight biodiversity losses driven by the growth of population and economic developments that continue the era of oil and natural gas. And keep asking when will we have a green President or Prime Minister?

Let me boil down my point of view. Everything scientists do has policy implications, so if scientists are muzzled by their government, it is a serious violation of democratic freedom of speech. And if a government pays no attention to the findings of science, it is condemning itself to oblivion in the future.

Davis, C., and Fisk, J.M. 2014. Energy abundance or environmental worries? Analyzing public support for fracking in the United States. Review of Policy Research 31(1): 1-16. doi: 10.1111/ropr.12048.

Mash, R., Minnaar, J., and Mash, B. 2014. Health and fracking: Should the medical profession be concerned? South African Medical Journal 104(5): 332-335. doi: 10.7196/SAMJ.7860.

Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press, Harvard University, Boston. 696 pp. ISBN 9780674430006

Stiglitz, J.E. 2012. The Price of Inequality. W.W. Norton and Company, New York.

 

Identifying the Most Critical Problems in Environmental Science

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A common perception of government policy makers is that ecologists fritter around doing interesting tidbits that produce nice 7 second sound-bites for radio or TV, but they never address the most serious environmental problems that the government faces in environmental science. So the question we need to address for any developed nation is this – what are the most critical environmental problems that ecologists could help to address? Since most critical environmental problems are long-term, one constraint would be that goals have to be achieved in the short term so that people could see progress. There would be funding constraints but let us assume that if we hit the right buttons, funding would be plentiful (think military).

There is no question that not all countries would have the same detailed list of critical environmental problems. But there ought to be communalities so we ought to cast a wide, general net to define problems. Start with some clear ecological principles: there is only one Earth and we ought to take care of it with a time frame that follows the First Nations principle of ‘seven generations’, about 300 years, as our time horizon. We know the solution to some environmental problems but new ones are continually a challenge. We need in every country the equivalent of an Environmental Army monitoring environmental problems.

1. Food security. All populations need food yet modern agriculture violates many simple ecological rules. Is the system sustainable in the long term? Probably not so the first major problem is how might we move modern agriculture toward sustainability. Subheadings here abound – pest control and alternatives to poisons, biological control of insect pests, cultural pest control, soil fertility decline, quarantine control, the list goes on. Implicit in all this is a regulatory framework that prevents the introduction of new miracle agricultural practices without adequate ecological background checks. The neonicotinoids-and-bees problem immediately comes to mind. We must get away from the attitude of ‘do it now’ and ‘clean up the mess later’ when we find problems.

2. Pollution effects. This is the hard one because it is climate change in the long term which must be emphasized. But in the shorter term detailed measurements of air quality and harmful effects of smoke and diesel fumes among other things on human and animal health could give an immediacy to such a detailed research program. The same principle applies here – do not put something new out in the environment and ask questions later. Fracking for natural gas and oil comes to mind, as well as the whole recycling system. Electricity generation is a key driver and mining for carbon-based energy ought to be eliminated gradually.

3. Conservation. Could our country be the first on Earth to have a complete inventory of species in all the taxonomic groups? It is a scandal that we do not have a list of life on Earth, and we need to get this message across with clever advertising. Taxonomists ought to be more important than bankers and be paid accordingly. Again many subheadings here – endangered species problems, pest management interactions with agriculture, disease ecology (always a hot button), monitoring, monitoring interacting with citizen science where possible.

4. The Oceans. We ought to be responsible for the health of at least our near-shore ecosystems, and monitoring protocols should be established so that we have ecosystem health scores presented as frequently as stock market reports. As global citizens we should be contributing to studying global problems of the high seas, the Antarctic Continent, and acting together with other nations to solve global issues.

The advantage of all these 4 topics with respect to convincing a politician to fund them is that they are interdisciplinary and consequently can be addressed only by carefully selected teams of ecologists, physicians, molecular biologists, geologists, chemists, and social scientists. A call for research proposals in these areas would soon build teams of scientists to address the major issues of our time. Money can help glue together scientific teams.

All of this will cost a lot of money and our current political philosophy seems to be that environmental costs are the lowest priority, and taxes for protecting the environment should be as near zero as possible. This must change soon lest the Earth become a garbage can unfit for human habitation.

Dicks, L. et al. (2013). What do we need to know to enhance the environmental sustainability of agricultural production? A prioritisation of knowledge needs for the UK food system. Sustainability 5, 3095-3115.

Sutherland, W.J.,et al. (2010) The identification of priority policy options for UK nature conservation. Journal of Applied Ecology 47(5): 955-965.

Are We Destroying the Planet?

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My question for everyone to ask themselves today is this: are we humans destroying Planet Earth? This is perhaps a strange question to ask and one would expect most people to say, ‘no, of course not’. So perhaps we should put a constraint on this question that this pertains to the next 100-200 years. So it is not an immediate question, something that will happen in the coming six months, but a long-term question about what will happen in the next centuries.

So the immediate response is, ‘how could we be destroying the whole of planet Earth?’ The answer might be to look at the newspaper this week, and ask yourself what will possibly happen when we run out of resources. Like food and water. As a simple paradigm of our problems we might use the sewage disposal problem of Victoria, BC. Victoria for years has simply dumped its untreated sewage out into the ocean in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The ocean, as we seem to believe, is a very large garbage dump. But might we think that a useful assumption of a civilized society is that you should not dump your garbage across the fence into your neighbour’s back yard? So then we say, we need to spend the money to construct a proper treatment plant. But the Victoria-area municipalities cannot even agree on a location for the sewage plant, and there are loud protests that we cannot possibly afford a modern treatment plant. What can we say about humans who think it is acceptable to dump their garbage over the fence into the ocean? One interpretation is that they have made the correct decision, and this will not affect them during their lifetime since it has been going on now for more than 100 years, so carry on. Yet this is a perfect mimic of the problems of the world today.

Climate change is all about what we dump into the atmosphere, in particular greenhouse gases and perhaps most obviously CO2. But we take no responsibility for this because it will not affect us in our lifetime and surely some clever engineer will solve this problem in the next century. Preferably at no cost to the taxpayers.

So yes, you might argue that we are indeed destroying the planet. But since Victoria, BC, and indeed all of Canada are only a small part of the global problem because of a low population base, why should we have to do anything? Well, many people think we should be doing something, but yet the majority continue to elect politicians who ignore the three major problems of the world today – climate change, population growth, and food security or at best say they will do something about it by 2020 or 2050. Most of the political parties of the developed world today subscribe to three propositions – growth is good and more growth is better, climate change is a minor problem, and implicitly we do not care one bit about what kind of a world we leave to our children and grandchildren. Spend now, they can pay later.

Now you will be hard pressed to find any business person or politician of any stripe saying any of these things, and all will protest loudly that they are doing all the right things. In their minds the main problems of our day are that taxes are too high and must be reduced, and that the 1% must be let free to improve the world as they choose.

None of this of course is ecological science or even sustainability science. The argument rests on only one simple principle – that the environment is not a garbage can. And what we do now impinges on what kind of Earth we wish to leave to the coming generations. So it might help to ask your favourite politician if he or she thinks we are destroying the Earth, and if not, why they do not read the newspapers. And why they do nothing about the major problems of our day?

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Ehrlich, Anne H. (2013). Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, 20122845. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2845.

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Ehrlich, Anne H. (2013). Future collapse: how optimistic should we be? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, 20131373. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1373.

Kelly, Michael J. (2013). Why a collapse of global civilization will be avoided: a comment on Ehrlich & Ehrlich. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1193.

The Common Good

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Human society appears to thrive best when the governments of the day are guided by the common good. But what is the common good and how can we determine what actions are consistent with it? These are most difficult questions and the most controversial issues of the day involve human rights and obligations over issues like abortion rights. But the common good also describes many problems that are environmental, and ecologists have a right to assert the common good from their collective knowledge of how biodiversity operates to sustain life.

The common good is any action that benefits society as a whole, in contrast to benefiting the private good of individuals, sections of society, and corporations. It is a worthwhile exercise to look at the controversies and decisions made by governments in our time and judge whether they pass the litmus test of the common good. Just this week for example, the Canadian government has promoted regulations restricting the use of antibiotics in meat and poultry production because current indiscriminate use invites antibiotic resistance in bacteria that cause human diseases. Such a decision is a cost to livestock producers but a benefit to society. Since microbial ecologists have been suggesting such a restriction for more than 25 years, the only question left is why the common good was set aside of all these years.

The common good looks to the future while many of our governments do not. Climate change is an issue that ecologists have been discussing for more than 20 years with virtually no action from our governments, much talk, little action. In British Columbia at the moment there is a discussion about damming the Peace River at Site C for hydroelectricity. The justification for this is the common good that a growing population in BC will need more electricity, and this is pollution free electricity, what many ecologists have been requesting. But the price of this is a loss of good farmland and the disruption of river food chains. Is this plan to build a dam at Site C consistent with the common good? It might be if there is no alternative to the dam, and if indeed the power generated is for the people of BC rather than for mining companies that taxpayers subsidise. Would not the common good be better served by conservation of electricity use, the development of solar power, geothermal power, or wind power?

Conservation of biodiversity is a clear public issue where the common good is obvious. Implicit in the concept of the common good is the assumption that we will not take actions that imperil the future for our children and grandchildren. In conservation decision making ecologists play only a small role at present, but this was not always the case. Someone had the foresight to set aside parks and reserves long before ecology was taught in the schools, and governments at least appeared to operate for the common good. But now we see tendencies to define the common good as more export dollars for coal and gas and oil, so that pipelines can be permitted in national parks and reserves with few questions asked.

Money talks but people vote, and consequently it would be useful for ecologists as well as ordinary citizens to demand that our society define and follow the common good rather than the generation of wealth for the few and nothing for future generations.

Everard, M., B. Pontin, T. Appleby, C. Staddon, E. T. Hayes, J. H. Barnes, and J. W. S. Longhurst. 2013. Air as a common good. Environmental Science & Policy 33:354-368.

Sandel, M. J. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. 244 pp.

Sargent, R.-M. 2012. From Bacon to Banks: The vision and the realities of pursuing science for the common good. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43:82-90.

Vineis, P. 2014. Public health and the common good. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 68:97-100.

The Conservative Agenda for Ecology

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Many politicians that are conservative are true conservatives in the traditional meaning of the term. Many business people are conservative in the same way, and that is a good thing. But there exist in the world a set of conservatives that have a particularly destructive agenda based on a general belief that evidence, particularly scientific evidence, is not any more important as a basis for action than personal beliefs. Climate change is the example of the day, but there are many others from the utility of vaccinations for children, to items more to an ecologist’s interest like the value of biodiversity. In a sense this is a philosophical divide that is currently producing problems for ecologists in the countries I know most about, Canada and Australia, but possibly also in the USA and Britain.

The conservative political textbook says cut taxes and all will be well, especially for the rich and those in business, and then say ‘we have no money for ‘<fill in the blank here> ‘so we must cut funding to hospitals, schools, universities, and scientists’. The latest example I want to discuss is from the dismemberment of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia by the current conservative government.

CSIRO was sent up in the 1950s to do research for the betterment of the people of Australia. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s it was one of the world premier research organizations. If you do not believe this you can look at how many important papers, awards, and the occasional Nobel Prize came out of this organization. It had at this time perhaps 8500 employees in more than 25 Divisions. Divisions varied in size but in general they would have about 200-300 scientists and technicians. Divisions were run by a Chief who was a scientist and who decided the important directions for research in his or her area, whether it be horticulture, wildlife, energy technology, animal science, or mathematics and statistics. CSIRO itself was led by eminent scientists who provided some guidance to the Divisions but left the directions of science to the Chiefs and their scientists. It was a golden development for Australian science and a model for science that was appreciated all around the world.

This of course is dreamland in today’s world. So by the late 1980s the Australian federal government began determining scientific priorities for CSIRO. We know what science is important, the new leaders said, so do this. This would work well if it was not guided by politicians and MBAs who had no scientific training and knew nothing about science past or present. Piled on this were two neo-conservative philosophies. First, science is important only if it generates money for the economy. Coal mining triumphs wildlife research. Second, science in the public interest is not to be encouraged but cut. The public interest does not generate money. Why this change happened can be declared a mystery but it seemed to happen all around the western world in the same time frame. Perhaps it had something to do with scientific research that had the obvious message that one ought to do something about climate change or protecting biodiversity, things that would cost money and might curtail business practices.

Now with the current 2014 budget in Australia we have a clear statement of this approach to ecological science. The word from on high has come down within CSIRO that, because of cuts to their budget, one goal is as follows: “Reduce terrestrial biodiversity research (“reduced investment in terrestrial biodiversity with a particular focus on rationalising work currently conducted across the “Managing Species and Natural Ecosystems in a Changing Climate” theme and the “Building Resilient Australian Biodiversity Assets” theme in these Divisions”).Translated, this means about 20% of the staff involved in biodiversity research will be retrenched and work will continue in some areas at a reduced level. At a time when rapid climate change is starting, it boggles the mind that some people at some high levels think that supporting the coal and iron ore industry with government-funded research is more important than studies on biodiversity. (If you appreciate irony, this decision comes in a week when it is discovered that the largest coal company in Australia, mining coal on crown land, had profits of $16 billion last year and paid not one cent of tax.)

So perhaps all this illustrates that ecological research and all public interest research is rather low on the radar of importance in the political arena in comparison with subsidizing business. I should note that at the same time as these cuts are being implemented, CSIRO is also cutting agricultural research in Australia so biodiversity is not the only target. One could obtain similar statistics for the Canadian scene.

There is little any ecologist can do about this philosophy. If the public in general is getting more concerned about climate change, the simplest way to deal with this concern for a politician is to cut research in climate change so that no data are reported on the topic. The same can be said about biodiversity issues. There is too much bad news that the environmental sciences report, and the less information that is available to the public the better. This approach to the biosphere is not very encouraging for our grandchildren.

Perhaps our best approach is to infiltrate at the grass roots level in teaching, tweeting, voting, writing letters, and attending political meetings that permit some discussion of issues. Someday our political masters will realize that the quality of life is more important than the GDP, and we can being to worry more about the future of biodiversity in particular and science in general.

 

Krebs, C.J. 2013. “What good is a CSIRO division of wildlife research anyway?” In Science under Siege: Zoology under Threat, edited by Peter Banks, Daniel Lunney and Chris Dickman, pp. 5-8. Mosman, N.S.W.: Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M.M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press. 355 pp. ISBN 978-1-59691-610-4

Shaw, Christopher. 2013. “Choosing a dangerous limit for climate change: Public representations of the decision making process.” Global Environmental Change 23 (2):563-571. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.12.012.

Wilkinson, Todd. 1998. Science Under Siege: The Politicians’ War on Nature and Truth. Boulder, Colorado: Johnson Books. 364 pp. ISBN 1-55566-211-0

 

On Important Questions in Ecology

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There is a most interesting paper that you should read about the important questions in ecology:

Sutherland, W.J. et al. (2013) Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology, 101, 58-67.

This paper represents the views of 388 ecologists who culled through all of the 754 questions submitted and vetted in a two day workshop in London in April 2012. There are many thesis topics highlighted in this list and it gives a good overview of what many ecologists think is important. But there are some problems with this approach that you might wish to consider after you read this paper.

We can begin with a relatively trivial point. The title indicates that it will discuss ‘fundamental’ questions in ecology but the Summary changes this to ‘important’ questions. To be sure the authors recognize that what we now think is ‘important’ may be judged in the future to be less than important, so in a sense they recognize this problem. ‘Important’ is not an operational word in science, and consequently it is always a focus for endless argument. But let us not get involved with semantics and look at the actual 100 questions.

As I read the paper I was reminded of the discussion in Peters (1991, p. 13) who had the audacity to point out that academic ecologists thrived on unanswerable questions. In particular Peters (1991) focused on ‘why’ questions as being high on the list of unanswerable ones, and it is good to see that there are only 2 questions out of 100 that have a ‘why’ in them. Most of the questions posed are ‘how’ questions (about 65 instances) and ‘what’ questions (about 52 instances).

In framing questions in any science there is a fine line in the continuum of very broad questions that define an agenda and at the other extreme to very specific questions about one species or community. With very broad questions there will never be a clear point at which we can say that we have answered that question so we can move on. With very specific questions we can answer them experimentally and move on. So where do we cut the cake of questions? Most of these 100 questions are very broad and so they both illuminate and frustrate me because they cannot be answered without making them more specific.

Let me go over just one example. Question 11 What are the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that govern species’ range margins? First, we might note that this question goes back at least 138 years to Alfred Wallace (1876, The Geographical Distribution of Animals), and has been repeated in many ecology textbooks ever since. There are few organisms for which it has been answered and very much speculation about it. At the moment the ecological mechanism in favour is ‘climate’. This is a question that can be answered ecologically only for particular species, and cannot be answered in real (human) time for the evolutionary mechanisms. Consequently it is an area rife for correlational ecology whose conclusions could possibly be tested in a hundred years if not longer. All of these problems should not stand in the way of doing studies on range margins, and there are many hundreds of papers that attest to this conclusion. My question is when will we know that we have answered this question, and my answer is never. We can in some cases use paleoecology to get at these issues, and then extrapolate that the future will be like the past, a most dubious assumption. My concern is that if we have not answered this question in 138 years, what is the hope that we will answer it now?

It is good to be optimistic about the future development of ecological science. Perhaps I have picked a poor example from the list of 100 questions, and my concern is that in this case at least this is not a question that I would suggest to a new PhD student. Still I am glad to have this list set out so clearly and perhaps the next step would be to write a synthesis paper on each of the 100 topics and discuss how much progress has been made on that particular issue, and what exactly we might do to answer the question more rapidly. How can we avoid in ecology what Cox (2007) called a “yawning abyss of vacuous generalities”?

Cox, D. R. (2007) Applied statistics: A review. Annals of Applied Statistics, 1, 1-16.

Peters, R. H. (1991) A Critique for Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.

Sutherland, W. J., Freckleton, R. P., Godfray, H. C. J., Beissinger, S. R., Benton, T., Cameron, D. D., Carmel, Y., Coomes, D. A., Coulson, T., Emmerson, M. C., Hails, R. S., Hays, G. C., Hodgson, D. J., Hutchings, M. J., Johnson, D., Jones, J. P. G., Keeling, M. J., Kokko, H., Kunin, W. E. & Lambin, X. (2013) Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology, 101, 58-67.

On Understanding the Boreal Forest Ecosystem

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I have spent the last 40 years studying the Yukon boreal forest. When I tell this to my associates I get two quite different reactions. First, on the positive side they are impressed with the continuity of effort and the fact that we have learned a great deal about the interactions of species in the Canadian boreal forest (Krebs, Boutin, and Boonstra 2001). Alternatively, on the negative side, I am told I am at fault for doing something of no practical management importance for so long when there are critical conservation problems in our Canadian backyard. Clearly I prefer the positive view, but everyone can decide these issues for themself. What I would like to do here is to lay out what I think are the critical issues in the Canadian boreal forest that have not been addressed so far. I do this in the hope that someone will pick up the torch and look into some of them.

The first issue is that ecological studies of the boreal ecosystem are completely fractionated. The most obvious division is that we have studied the boreal forest in the southwest Yukon with few concurrent studies of the alpine tundra that rises above the forest in every range of mountains. The ecotone between the forest and the tundra is not a strict boundary for many plant species or for many of the vertebrate species we have studied. On a broader scale, there are few studies of aquatic ecosystems within the boreal zone, either in lakes or streams, another disconnect. The wildlife management authorities are concerned with the large vertebrates – moose, bears, caribou, mountain sheep – and this work tends not to tie in with other work on the smaller species in the food web. Interests in the carbon dynamics of the boreal zone have greatly increased but these studies in Canada are also completely disconnected from all other ecological studies that consider population and community dynamics. I think it is fair to say that carbon dynamics in the boreal forest could turn out to be a very local affair, and too much generalization has already been made with too little spatial and temporal data.

One could consider the ecology of the boreal zone like a puzzle, with bits of the puzzle being put together well by researches in one particular area, but with no view of the major dimensions of the total puzzle. This is readily understood when much of the research is done as part of graduate thesis work that has a limit of 4-5 years before researchers move on to another position. It is also a reflection of the low funding that ecology receives.

Within the Yukon boreal forest there are several areas of research that we have not been able to address in the time I and my many colleagues have worked there. Mushroom crops come and go in apparent response to rainfall (Krebs et al. 2008) but we do not know the species of above ground mushrooms and consequently do not know if their fluctuations are uniform or if some species have specialized requirements. Since fungi are probably the main decomposers in this ecosystem, knowing which species will do what as climate changes could be important. On a practical level, foresters are determined to begin logging more and more in the boreal zone but we have no clear understanding of tree regeneration or indeed any good studies of forest succession after fire or logging. Since logging in northern climates is more of a mining operation than a sustainable exercise, such information might be useful before we proceed too far. If the turnaround for a logged forest is of the order of 300 years, any kind of logging is unsustainable in the human time frame.

The list goes on. Snowshoe hare cycles vary greatly in amplitude and we suspect that this is due to predator abundance at the start of any 10 year cycle (Krebs et al. 2013).  The means to test this idea are readily available – satellite telemetry – but it would require a lot of money because these collars are expensive and need to be deployed on lynx, coyotes, and great-horned owls at least. And it needs to be done on a landscape scale with cooperating groups in Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and British Columbia at least. Large-scale ecology to be sure, but the results would be amazing. Radio-telemetry has the ability to interest the public, and each school in the region could have their tagged animals to follow every week. Physicists manage to convince the public that they need lots of money to do large experiments, but ecologists with down to earth questions are loath to ask for a lot of money to find out how the world works on a large scale.

Migratory songbirds have been largely ignored in the boreal forest, partly because they leave Canada after the summer breeding period but at least some of these songbirds appear to be declining in numbers with no clear reason. Yet studies on them are virtually absent, and we monitor numbers in imprecise ways, and continue to mark the position of the deck chairs on the Titanic with no understanding of why it is sinking.

Insect populations in the boreal forest are rarely studied unless they are causing immediate damage to trees, and consequently we have little information on their roles in ecosystem changes.

At the end of this list we can say in the best manner of the investigative reporter why did you not do these things already? The answer to that is also informative. It is because almost all this completed research has been done by university professors and their graduate students and postdocs. What has been done by all my colleagues is amazing because they are not in charge of the boreal forest. The people are, via their governments, provincial and federal. The main job of all of us when this research in the Yukon boreal forest was being done has been education –to teach and do research that will train students in the best methods available. So if you wish to be an investigative reporter, it is best to ask why governments across the board have not funded the federal and provincial research groups that had as their mandate to understand how this ecosystem operates. Because all these questions are about long-term changes, the research group must be stable in funding and person-power in the long term. There is nothing I have seen in my lifetime that comes close to this in government for environmental work except for weather stations. In the short term our governments work to the minute with re-election in sight, and long term vision is suppressed. The environment is seen as a source of dollars and as a convenient garbage can and science only gets in the way of exploitation. And in the end Mother Nature will take care of herself, so they hope. Perhaps we need a few Bill Gates’ types to get interested in funding long-term research.

But there remain for ecologists many interesting questions that are at present not answered, and will help us complete the picture of how this large ecosystem operates.

Krebs, C.J., S. Boutin, and R. Boonstra, editors. 2001. Ecosystem Dynamics of the Boreal Forest: the Kluane Project. Oxford University Press, New York.

Krebs, C.J., P. Carrier, S. Boutin, R. Boonstra, and E.J. Hofer. 2008. Mushroom crops in relation to weather in the southwestern Yukon. Botany 86:1497-1502.

Krebs, C.J., K. Kielland, J. Bryant, M. O’Donoghue, F. Doyle, C. McIntyre, D. DiFolco, N. Berg, S. Carrier, R. Boonstra, S. Boutin, A.J. Kenney, D.G. Reid, K. Bodony, J. Putera, and T. Burke. 2013. Synchrony in the snowshoe hare cycle in northwestern North America, 1970-2012. Canadian Journal of Zoology 91:562-572.