Tag Archives: conservation

Whither Demography in an Era of Biodiversity Science?

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Biodiversity science has overtaken traditional ecological science in an important way that bears some discussion. Biodiversity science seeks as its main goal to protect species from declining to extinction. It overlaps traditional population and community ecology partly by concentrating on iconic species that are declining in abundance and thus trying to prevent species loss, but the major focus of biodiversity science is on the species composition of communities and ecosystems and trying to understand what factors are driving deleterious changes. This task is difficult to complete currently because of a shortage of research time, person-power and money, so we are driven to select relatively few ecosystems to concentrate our conservation efforts upon. If we cannot do everything for all species, we must choose what to do at the present time, and this releases a cascade of discussions and arguments about what species are ‘flagship’, “umbrella”, or “keystone” in any particular community or ecosystem (Barua 2011).

Now we can go in two directions. We can take the simplest route and say that all species are of equal importance, so the objective of biodiversity science becomes ‘occupancy” – is species X still existing in ecosystem Y? Occupancy can be established in a variety of ways from simple visual sightings, traps, cameras, e-DNA, to electronic sound recording devices. Occupancy for species in a particular ecosystem is a useful parameter for biodiversity studies but it is alpha-level ecology for understanding community or ecosystem dynamics. Determining occupancy every month, year, or decade will provide a start in community and ecosystem understanding but in order to achieve its goal as a science it needs population and community ecology to measure and understand the dynamics underlying occupancy, and this is the more complicated route that we can take. The defining science for this second level of understanding comes from dynamics, both population and community dynamics.

Population dynamics is necessary for determining if a particular species is declining in numbers or biomass, and what the causes are of the observed trends. We are led into demography, the measurement of births, deaths, and movements in animals and the equivalent parameters in plants. But now we run into the most serious problem of determining what parameters are the causal agents of declines in abundance and what procedures will alleviate species declines. If we have many species in our community or ecosystem, the requirements for research are extravagant, given the current workers and dollars currently available for environmental science. All ecologists want to protect biodiversity but how might we best achieve that goal?

We fall back at this point into simple general procedures for biodiversity conservation like designation of national parks or protected areas with the hope that the biodiversity of the designated area will not decline. We do not have the person-power to have frequent occupancy surveys for any national park, much less to have the investigations of why an iconic species is declining in an area. At present we must fall back on ‘umbrella species’ or ‘flagship species’ (Simberloff 1998). There is an extensive literature on this approach to biodiversity conservation and recent reviews, some critical (Tälle et al. 2023), others somewhat more positive (Sumbh and Hof 2022, Clark-Wolf et al. 2024), combining this approach with food web structure (Wang and Zhou 2023).   

Complicating the whole issue of protecting biodiversity is the issue of cryptic species, undescribed species, and rare species that are capable of taxonomic and ecological resolution but only at a large cost and a long timeframe to achieve results (Cheng et al. 2024). Once we are successful in protecting our communities and ecosystems, we immediately face the demographic issue of what affects the abundance of all the species of interest, and then the social and political issue of the funds available for conservation of these species. We need to bring the approaches of biodiversity science and classical demographic ecology together to achieve conservation goals. We can do this only by recognizing that knowing occupancy is not enough to achieve conservation success, and we need to follow up with population and community ecology within the context of food webs so that we can understand trends in abundance and finally propose possible actions for conservation management. We have much to do.

Barua, M. (2011) Mobilizing metaphors: the popular use of keystone, flagship and umbrella species concepts. Biodiversity and Conservation, 20, 1427-1440.doi:10.1007/s10531-011-0035-y.

Cheng, R., Luo, A., Orr, M., Ge, D., Houu, Z.e., Qu, Y., Guo, B., Zhang, F., Sha, Z., Zhao, Z., Wang, M., Shi, X., Han, H., Zhou, Q., Li, Y., Liu, X., Shao, C., Zhang, A., Zhou, X. & Zhu, C. (2024) Cryptic diversity begets challenges and opportunities in biodiversity research. Integrative Zoology, (in press). doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12809.

Clark-Wolf, T.J., Holt, K.A., Johansson, E., Nisi, A.C., Rafiq, K., West, L., Boersma, P.D., Hazen, E.L., Moore, S.E. & Abrahms, B. (2024) The capacity of sentinel species to detect changes in environmental conditions and ecosystem structure. Journal of Applied Ecology, (in press). doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.14669.

Simberloff, D. (1998) Flagships, umbrellas, and keystones: is single-species management passe in the landscape era? Biological Conservation, 83, 247-257.doi: 10.1016/S0006-3207(97)00081-5.

Sumbh, O. & Hof, A.R. (2022) Can pikas hold the umbrella? Understanding the current and future umbrella potential of keystone species Pika (Ochotona spp.). Global Ecology and Conservation, 38, e02247.doi: 10.1016/j.gecco.2022.e02247.

Tälle, M., Ranius, T. & Öckinger, E. (2023) The usefulness of surrogates in biodiversity conservation: A synthesis. Biological Conservation, 288; e110384. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110384.

Wang, Q., Li, X.C. & Zhou, X.H. (2023) New shortcut for conservation: The combination management strategy of “keystone species” plus “umbrella species” based on food web structure. Biological Conservation, 286, 110265.doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110265.

The Five Stages of Conservation

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While listening to the reports on the COP 15 meeting in Montreal I began thinking that one way to look at conservation science and action is to think of it in 5 stages. So I decided to put out this discussion of how we might view all the conservation news.

Stage 1: Recognize the Issue

The most important issue is to make both scientists and the general public aware that there is a large problem with the conservation of the Earth’s biota. We start with having to convince all that biodiversity does not mean dangerous animals and plants. This stage would be simple for anyone who has taken a good biology course in school, but we still find that some people fear the “environment” because it is synonymous with spiders and alligators and bears and wolves. One might think that children’s books involving cute or anthropomorphised animals would make them less susceptible to this worry, but this does not work for all who have read “The Big Bad Wolf” and Little Red Riding Hood. So education about animals and plants should begin to point everyone toward conservation.

Stage 2: Become Concerned

People see that animals die from a great array of problems, and this connects to the human world where people get ill and pass away or become injured in a car accident. Depending on what their interest is, concern about this leads to interventions such as the feeding of birds and other wildlife on the assumption that they cannot take care of themselves. These worries generate a concern in many to protect wildlife on the unfounded assumption that without human interference, all would disappear.

Stage 3: Demand Action

By this stage wildlife and fishery scientists have begun doing many excellent studies on how some populations of wildlife are in serious trouble. The crux at this point is that often the origin of these problems are human actions in cutting down forests, clearing land for agriculture and housing, and polluting the general environment. The problem is people do things related to “progress” and then find it is killing wildlife. If you need an example, think DDT or seismic lines. The public grows more aware and demands conservation action. These demands are translated into small amounts of government action with large amounts of publicity.

Stage 4: Achieve Action

The consequences of the human exploitation of the earth’s resources begins to bite, largely driven by climate emergencies. Much pressure from NGOs and even business people starts to result in action. Wildlife and fisheries agencies make progress but almost always on the scale of single species management often constrained by state or provincial boundaries. Who is in charge of this mess? Biodiversity becomes the cry of the age, and even the New York Times begins to realize that the Earth consists of more than human beings. But while there is more talk, there is less understanding because of the shouting of people who know very little about these conservation issues and how tangled they are. It is important to appear to be on the side of the angels, so progress is slower than one would like.

Stage 5: Understand the Problem

We have barely entered this stage. To be sure ecologists have been at this Stage for many years with reasonable understanding of how to ameliorate conservation problems, but still too few powers that be are convinced, so that we continue to provide subsidies to oil and gas companies that are busy destroying the earth. Subsidies can go in good or bad directions, but few of us can comprehend the volumes of money being committed to subsidies in all directions. We hear promises to achieve X by 2030, and Y by 2050, and still we believe these when we can just look up and see that few of the promises of the last 30 years have been achieved. Few beyond ecologists understand that it is communities and ecosystems that must be protected but almost all our conservation efforts now operate on single species of ecological beauty. Think rhinos.

One hopes for Stage 6 to come to be, but only a small sign of that progress is so far in sight. If only we could convince everyone that conservation issues ought to be treated with the urgency and the funding that COVID has obtained, we could press ahead with more serious conservation objectives. But it is more than declaring that we should protect 30% of our wild areas. Even if we can achieve the 30% goal in the next 8 years, it is but a start toward understanding the stewardship of the Earth if we do not know how the machinery of nature works. Alas, it is a long road ahead being driven by humans who are short-sighted. Can we avoid Plus ça change?

The Two Ecologies

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Trying to keep up with the ecological literature is a daunting task, and my aging efforts shout to me that there are now two ecologies that it might be worth partially separating. First, many published “ecological” papers are natural history. This is certainly an important component of the environmental literature but for the most part good observations alone are not science in the formal sense of science addressing problems and trying to solve them with the experimental approach. The information provided in the natural history literature regarding both plants and animals include their identification, where they live, what nutrients or food resources they utilize and in some cases information on their conservation status. A good foundation of natural history is needed to do good ecological research to be sure so my statements must not be misinterpreted to suggest that I do not appreciate natural history. Good natural history leads into the two parts of ecology that I would like to discuss. I call these social ecology and scientific ecology.

Social ecology flows most easily out of natural history and deals with the interaction between humans and the biota. Thus, for example, many people love birds which are ever present in both cities and countryside, are often highly colourful and vocal in our environment. Similarly, many tourists from North America visit Australia, Africa and Central America to see birds that are unique to those regions. Similar adventures are available to see elephants, bison, bears, and whales in their natural habitats. Social ecology flows into conservation biology in cases where preferred species are threatened by human changes to the landscape. The key here is that there is a mix in social ecology between human entertainment and a concern for species losses that are driven by human actions. Social ecology is mostly about people and their views of what parts of the environment are important to them. People love elephants but are little concerned about earthworms unless they bother them.

Scientific ecology should operate with a broader perspective of testing hypotheses to understand how populations and communities of animals and plants interact to produce the world as we see it. It asks about how species interactions change over time and whether they lead to environmental stability or instability. Scientific ecology has a time dimension that is much longer than that of social ecology. The focus of scientific ecology is hypothesis testing to answer problems or questions about how the biological world works. This perspective interacts strongly with climate change and human disturbances as well as natural disturbances like flooding or forest fires. While social ecology asks what is happening, scientific ecology asks why this is happening in our ecosystems. Scientific ecology allows us to determine the causal factors behind problems of change and the management approaches that might be required. While social ecology observes that migratory birds appear to be declining in abundance, scientific ecology asks exactly which bird species are at risk and what factors like food supplies, predation, or disease are the cause of the decline. And most importantly can humans change the environment to prevent species losses?

Conservation ecology has become the link between social and scientific ecology and shares elements of both approaches. Too much of social conservation biology consists of moaning and groaning about changes with little data and unverifiable speculations. As such it provides little help to solve conservation problems. When there is clear public support for issues like old growth logging, politicians often do not act ethically to follow public support because of economics or inertia. Scientific ecology has been strongly influenced by Karl Popper’s (1963) book, with much discussion today among philosophers about Popper’s approach to hypotheses within the context of our social values and objectives (Dias 2019). Lundblad and Conway (2021) provide a classic example of hypothesis testing for clutch size in birds which illustrates well the path of scientific ecology over many years from initial conjectures to more refined understanding of the original scientific question.

In a sense this ecological dichotomy is found in many of the sciences. Medicine is a good example. We can observe and describe symptoms of people dying of lung cancer, but medical scientists really wish to know what environmental causes like air pollution or cigarette smoking are producing this mortality, and whether genetic backgrounds are involved. Science is far from perfect and there are many false leads in proposals of drugs in medicine that turn out to be counterproductive to solving a particular problem. Kim and Kendeou (2021) discuss the critical question of knowledge transfer as science progresses in our society today through knowledge transfer from generation to generation.

My concern is that social ecology is replacing scientific ecology in the ecological literature so that as we are so enamoured with the beauty of nature, we forget the need to find out quantitatively what is happening and how it might be mitigated. As with medicine, talking about problems does not solve them without serious empirical scientific study.

Dias, E.A. (2019) Science as a game in Popper. Griot : Revista de Filosofia,, 19, 327-337.doi: 10.31977/grirfi.v19i3.1239. (in Portuguese; use Google Translate)

Kim, J. & Kendeou, P. (2021) Knowledge transfer in the context of refutation texts. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 67, 102002.doi: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2021.102002.

Lundblad, C.G. & Conway, C.J. (2021) Ashmole’s hypothesis and the latitudinal gradient in clutch size. Biological Reviews, 96, 1349-1366.doi: 10.1111/brv.12705.

Popper, K.R. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. 412 pp.

On Conservation Complexities

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It is too often the case that biodiversity problems are managed by single species solutions. If you have too many deer in your parks or conservation areas, start a culling program. If your salmon fishing stocks are declining, cull seals and sea lions. The overall issue confounding these kinds of ‘solutions’ are now being recognized as a failure to appreciate the food web of the community and ecosystem in which the problem is embedded. Much of conservation action is directed at heading back to the “good old days” without very much data about what the ecosystem was like in the “good old days”.

Problems with introduced species top the list of conservation dilemmas, and nowhere are these problems more clearly illustrated than by the conservation dilemmas of New Zealand and Australia. If we concentrate our management efforts on introduced predators or herbivores, we face a large set of conservation issues, well-illustrated by the current New Zealand situation (Leathwick and Byrom 2023, Parkes and Murphy 2003).

New Zealand is a particularly strong case history because we have a good knowledge of its indigenous biodiversity from the time that people colonized these islands, as well as reasonable information about how things have changed since Europeans colonized the country (Thomson 1922). It is in some respects the classic case of biodiversity impacts from introduced species. The introduced species list is large and I can talk only about part of these species introduced mostly in the late 1800s. Seven species of deer were released in New Zealand, along with chamois, hares, rabbits, cats, hedgehogs, three mustelid species, brushtail possums, rats, house mice, along with all the usual farm animals like cattle, horses, and dogs (King & Forsyth 2021). The first concerns began about 100 years ago over ungulate browsing in forests and grasslands. Deer control began about 1930, and over 3 million deer were shot between 1932 and 1954. Caughley (1983) showed that this amount of control did not reduce the impact of browsing and grazing by ungulates in native ecosystems. Control and harvesting efforts decreased in recent years partly from a lack of government funding with the result that deer numbers have rebounded. The recognition of the impact of other pests like rabbits, weasels, and rats led to a focus on poison campaigns. Brushtail possum control with poisons was started to reduce tree browsing damage by the 1970s and gradually increased to reduce TB transmission to domestic livestock by the 1990s. Large scale predator control began in the late 1990s with a focus on rats, stoats (weasels, Mustela erminea), and possums with good success in preventing declines in threatened bird species. All this history is covered in detail in Leathwick and Byrom (2023).

These efforts led to a declaration in 2016 of “Predator Free New Zealand 2050” (PF2050) a compelling promise that would alleviate biodiversity problems by making New Zealand free of possums, mustelids, and rats by 2050, and predator control has thus became the focus of recent conservation action. The 2050 part of the promise was always a worry, since governments in general promise much in advances by that year, but the optimistic view is that predator control will achieve this objective if careful planning is made, adequate funding is available (c.f. Department of Conservation 2021), and well-articulated guidelines for eradication of invasive species are followed (Bomford & O’Brien 1995). The message is that biodiversity goals can be achieved if we move from single species management to a stable system of ecosystem management in the broad sense, including strong research, good public participation and support toward these goals, and that biodiversity conservation will be greatly boosted by thorough consultation with (if not leadership by) the indigenous groups involved.

The New Zealand specific situation cannot be applied directly to all biodiversity concerns, but the New Zealand conservation story and the 12 recommendations given in Leathwick and Byrom (2023) show the necessity of goal definition and coordination between the public, government, and private foundations if we are to maximize the effectiveness of our approach to the biodiversity crisis. Not every conservation issue involves introduced species, but the principle must be: What do we want to achieve, and how are we going to get there?

Bomford, M, & O’Brien, P 1995. Eradication or control for vertebrate pests? Wildlife Society Bulletin 23, 249–255.

Caughley, G. (1983) The Deer Wars: The Story of Deer in New Zealand. Heinemann, Auckland. ISBN: 0868633895.

Department of Conservation (2020). Annual Report. Available at: https://www.doc.govt. nz/nature/pests-and-threats/predator-free-2050/goal-tactics-and-new-technology/tools-to-market/.    See also: PF2050-Limited-Annual-Report-2022.pdf

King, C.M. & Forsyth, D.M. (2021). eds. The Handbook of New Zealand Mammals. 3rd edition. CSIRO Publishing, Canberra. ISBN 978-1988592589.

Leathwick, J.R. & Byrom, A.E. (2023) The rise and rise of predator control: a panacea, or a distraction from conservation goals? New Zealand Journal of Ecology, 47, 3515. doi: 10.20417/nzjecol.47.3515.

Parkes, J. & Murphy, E. (2003) Management of introduced mammals in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Zoology, 30, 335-359. doi:10.1080/03014223.2003.9518346.

Thomson, G.M. (1922) The Naturalisation of Animals and Plants in New Zealand. The University Press, Cambridge, England. doi: 10.5962/bhl.title.28093.

Management by Killing

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While reading a recent wildlife management magazine I became focused on the idea that the main topic of interest was killing in the same way that the news every day is now about who killed who yesterday. The management paradigm behind my concerns is this simple one:

  1. Decide who are the “good guys” and who are the “bad guys”.
  2. Kill all (or many) of the “bad guys”.

I know this sounds too simple but bear with me. In the papers this week are two current management issues. In Sweden they have decided they need only 400 wolves in the entire country, and they have several hundred too many, so they armed many hunters with very large guns to go out and kill every wolf they can find, using dogs and other tricks, until they reach the magic number of 400 left. In British Columbia there is concern that predators like sea lions and seals eat Pacific salmon so there are fewer salmon for the fishers to catch and sell. The answer again leaps to mind – kill the sea lions and seals and anything else that eats salmon, Fisheries Science 101.

If this approximates ‘management’, our main discussions must be to decide who are the “good guys”. This leads to conflicts with conservation at times, so we must develop a “killing for conservation” subroutine (Shutt and Lees 2021) which raises the cumbersome question of whether our conservation efforts are causing harm to other species.

One way to challenge the Management by Killing paradigm is to start with a food web of the species involved – what might be the consequences of taking one species out of a food web on any or all the other species in the web? Now the management problem expands because we must do good community ecology to answer these questions. Some of the simple food web consequences have already been well described. Study the coyotes in the grasslands and you will find out how complex its diet is (Lingle et al. 2022), so that killing coyotes will affect other species and you may get many more prairie dogs or ground squirrels, some of which may carry the plague bacterium and many of which predate on ground nesting birds. Or if you are a fan of penguins in Antarctica you will find that killer whales eat penguins (Pitman and Durban 2010) so do we kill killer whales to save penguins? King penguins are declining on Macquarie Island for reasons that are not clear, and predation by a suite of avian birds of prey is one possible component (Pascoe et al. 2022). Yet we are reluctant to kill bird predators. Barred owls kill the endangered spotted owl in western North America, so should we be killing barred owls in areas of overlap (Bodine and Capaldi 2017, Wiens et al. 2021)? So even if you have available detailed natural history information on a predator, you cannot easily estimate the effect of removing it without field experimentation.  

My main points are two. First, if you are able, educate your favourite newscaster about the complexities of the Management by Killing approach to conservation. Second, support more detailed research on food web dynamics to show that ecosystems cannot be managed by the two simple rules listed above.

It does not escape me that all this discussion could be applied to the human species, but I venture far out of my field of competence to address this political and social issue (Ein et al. 2022).

Bodine, E.N. & Capaldi, A. (2017) Can culling Barred Owls save a declining Northern Spotted Owl population? Natural Resource Modeling, 30, e12131.doi. 10.1111/nrm.12131.

Ein, N., Liu, J.J.W. Houle, S. Easterbrook, B. et al. (2022) The effects of child encounters during military deployments on the well-being of military personnel: a systematic review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 13(2): 2132598. doi. 10.1080/20008066.2022.2132598.

Lingle, S., Breiter, C.J., Schowalter, D.B. & Wilmshurst, J.F. (2022) Prairie dogs, cattle subsidies and alternative prey: seasonal and spatial variation in coyote diet in a temperate grassland. Wildlife Biology, 2022: 5.1doi. 10.1002/wlb3.01048.

Pascoe, P., Raymond, B. & McInnes, J. (2022) The current trajectory of king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus ) chick numbers on Macquarie Island in relation to environmental conditions. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 79, 2084-2092.doi.

Pitman, R.L. & Durban, J.W. (2010) Killer whale predation on penguins in Antarctica. Polar Biology, 33, 1589-1594.doi. 10.1007/s00300-010-0853-5.

Shutt, J.D. & Lees, A.C. (2021) Killing with kindness: Does widespread generalised provisioning of wildlife help or hinder biodiversity conservation efforts? Biological Conservation, 261, 109295.doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109295.

Wiens, J.D., Dugger, K.M., Higley, J.M., Lesmeister, D.B., Franklin, A.B., et al. (2021) Invader removal triggers competitive release in a threatened avian predator. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (31), e2102859118.doi. 10.1073/pnas.2102859118.

In Honour of David Suzuki at his Retirement

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David Suzuki is retiring from his media work this year at age 86. If you wish to have a model for a lifetime of work, he should be high on your list – scientist, environmentalist, broadcaster, writer. He has been a colleague of mine at the Department of Zoology, UBC from the time when I first came there in 1970. He was a geneticist doing imaginative and innovative research with his students on the humble fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The Department at that time was a beehive of research and teaching, and David was a geneticist breathing fire at the undergraduates taking the genetics course. Many a doctor would probably tell you now that Suzuki’s genetics course was the most challenging in their undergraduate education.

The hierarchy in the Department of Zoology was very clear in the 1970s. First came the physiologists, top of the pack and excellent scientists who turned the spotlight on the Department nationally and internationally. Second came the geneticists, with the DNA revolution full on. At the bottom of the pile were the ecologists causing nothing but trouble about fisheries and wildlife management problems, pointing out a rising tide of environmental problems including climate change. Contrary to what you might conclude from the media, environmental problems and climate change issues were very alive even in the 1970s. But somehow these problems did not get through to governments, and David has been a key person turning this around. In 1979 he began a natural history and science program on the CBC entitled “The Nature of Things” which he then hosted for 43 years. In doing so he began to fill an empty niche in Canadian news affairs between the environmental scientists who had data on what was going on in the environment and what needed attention. Environmental scientists were severely ignored both by industry and the governments of the day who operated on two premises – first, that the most critical issues for Canada were economics and economic growth, and second that environmental issues could largely be ignored or could be solved by promises but no action. Alas we are still inundated with the news that “growth is good”, and “more growth is better”.   

I had relatively little involvement in David’s increasing interest in environmental issues by 1979, but I had written 3 ecology textbooks by then, pushing some of the environmental issues that are still with us, and I became a friend of David’s in the Department. We ecologists could only admire his ability to speak so clearly on the environmental issues of our day and connect these issues with the many travesties of how First Nations people had been sidelined. He pointed out very forcefully the astonishing failure of governments to address these issues. The public which was much less aware of environmental issues in the 1980s is now highly mobilized thanks in great part to all the work David and his colleagues have done in the last 50 years. He has many friends now but still strong enemies who continue to think of the environment as a large garbage can for economic growth. And he, still in his retirement, having achieved so much from his environmental work, bemoans the slow pace of government actions on environmental problems, as does every ecologist I know. His Foundation continues to press for action on many conservation fronts. So, thank you David for all your work and your wisdom over all these many years. You have engineered a strong environmental movement among old and young and I thank you for all that.

https://davidsuzuki.org/

On Climate Change Research Funding

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I have grown weary of media and news statements that climate change research should be a priority. At the present time military spending, war, and oil and gas companies seem to be the priority spending of many governments. Climate change research seems to be more focused on the physical sciences in attempts to predict what changes in temperature, rainfall, and sea conditions can be expected if we continue at the present global rates of greenhouse gas emissions. This is all very good, and the IPCC reports are excellent. The people are listening and reacting to the bad news even if all the major western governments are close to ignoring the problem. So where does this leave ecological scientists?

Our first response is that we should mimic the climatologists in predicting what the ecological world will be like in 2050 or 2100. But there is a major problem with this centered around the fact that physics has a whole set of fixed laws that will not change in a thousand years, so that the physics of the atmosphere and the oceans is reasonably understood and by the application of the laws of physics, we can arrive at a reasonable prediction that should be constrained by physical laws. Ecological science is nowhere near that paradigm of predictability because it deals with organisms that can evolve and interactions that can change rapidly when an unexpected invasive species arrives on the scene or humans interfere with ecosystem services. Ecological changes are not driven solely by climate change, a fact it is easy to forget. One consequence of this limitation is that we cannot make any kind of reliable predictions about the state of our ecosystems and the state of the Earth’s biodiversity by 2050 or 2100. We can however, in contrast to the physical sciences, do something about ecological changes by finding the limiting factors for the species under concern, protecting these endangered species and setting aside natural areas protected from human depredation. While we can do this to some extent in rich countries, in poor countries, particularly tropical ones, we have a poor record of protecting the exploitation of national parks and reserves. Think Brazil or the Central African Republic.

But given this protection of areas and funding for threatened species, conservation ecologists still have some very difficult problems to face. First and foremost is the conservation of rare, endangered species. It is nearly impossible to study rare species to discover the limiting factors that are pushing them toward extinction. Second, if you have the information on limiting factors, it is difficult to reverse trends that are determined by climate change or by human disrespect for conservation values.

In spite of these problems, the ecological literature is full of papers claiming to solve these issues with various schemes that predict a brighter future sometime. But if we apply the same rigor to these papers as we do to other areas of ecology, we must treat them as a set of hypotheses that make specific predictions, and try to test them. If we have solutions that are feasible but will require 50 years to accomplish, we should be very clear that we are drawing a long bow. Some statement of goals for the next 5 years would be desirable so we can measure progress or lack of progress.

The screams of practitioners go up – we have no time to test hypotheses, we need action! If we have clear-cut a forest site, or bulldozed shrub habitats, we may have a good idea of how to proceed to restoration. But with a long term view, restoration itself in highly contestable. In particular with climate change we have even less ability to predict with knowledge based on the last 50 year or so. So if you are in a predictive mode about conservation issues, have multiple working hypotheses about what to do, rather than one certain view of what will solve the problem.

This is not a cry to give up on conservation, but rather to trim our certainty about future states of ecosystems. Trying to predict what will happen under climate change is important for the Earth but we must always keep in mind the other critical factors affecting biodiversity, from predators to parasites and diseases, and the potential for evolution. Human destruction of habitats is a key issue we do not control well enough, and yet it may be the most important short term threat to conservation.

All of this leads into the fact that to achieve anything we need resources –people and money. The problem at present is where can we get the money? Governments in general place a low value on conservation and the environment in general in the quest for money and economic growth. Rich philanthropists are useful but few, and perhaps too often they have a distorted view of what to invest in. Improving the human condition of the poor is vital; medical research is vital, but if the environment suffers losses as it is at present, we need to balance or reverse our priorities of where to put our money. I do not know how to accomplish this goal. The search for politicians who have even a grade 1 understanding of environmental problems is not going well. Read Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin. What is being accomplished now is more to the credit of private philanthropy which has clear goals but may pull in diverse directions. I submit that to date we have not been successful in this pursuit of environmental harmony, but it is a goal we must keep pushing for. E.O. Wilson once said that there was more money spent in New York City on a Friday night on beer than was devoted to biodiversity conservation for the entire world for the year.  This should hardly be a good epitaph for our century.

Our World View and Conservation

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Recent events have large implications for conservation science. Behind these events – Covid, climate change, wars – lies a fundamental dichotomy of views about humanity’s place in the world today. At the most basic level there are those who view humans as the end-all-and-be-all of importance so that the remainder of the environment and all other species are far down the list of importance when it comes to decision making. The other view is that humans are the custodians of the Earth and all its ecosystems, so that humans are an important part of our policy decisions but not the only part or even the most important part. Between these extreme views there is not a normal distribution but a strongly bimodal one. We see this very clearly with respect to the climate emergency. If you explain the greenhouse dilemma to anyone, you can see the first reaction is that this does not apply to me, so I can do whatever I want versus the reaction of others that I should do something to reduce this problem now. It is the me-here-and-now view of our lives in contrast to the concern we should have about future generations.

Our hope lies in the expectation that things are improving, strongly in young people, more slowly in older people, and negligibly in our politicians. We must achieve sustainability professed by the Greta Thunberg’s of the world, and yet recognize that the action needed is promised by our policy makers only for 2050 or 2100. There is hope that the captains of industry will move toward sustainability goals, but this will be achieved only by rising public and economic pressure. We are beset by wars that make achieving any sustainability goals more difficult. In Western countries blessed with superabundant wealth we can be easily blinded by promises of the future like electricity from nuclear fusion at little cost, or carbon-capture to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. If things get impossibly bad, we are told we can all go to Mars. Or at least the selected elite can.

Conservation gets lost in this current world, and pleas to set aside 30% or 40% of the Earth for biosphere conservation are rarely even heard about on the evening news. The requests for funds for conservation projects are continually cut when there are more important goals for economic growth. Even research funding through our first-class universities and government laboratories is falling, and I would wager without the data that less than 20% of funding for basic research goes to investigating environmental problems or conservation priorities. In my province in Canada a large section of this year’s budget labelled “Addressing Climate Change” is to be spent on repairing the highways from last year’s floods and trying to restore the large areas affected by fires in the previous dry summer.  

What is the solution to this rather depressing situation? Two things must happen soon. First, we the public must hold the government to account for sustainability. Funding oil companies, building pipelines, building highways through Class A farmland, and waging wars will not bring us closer to having a sustainable earth for our grandchildren. Second, we must encourage private industries and wealthy philanthropists to invest in sustainability research. Conservation cannot ever be achieved without setting aside large, protected areas. The list of species that are in decline around the Earth is growing, yet for the vast number of these we have no clear idea why they are declining or what can be done about it. We need funding for science and action, both in short supply in the world today. And some wisdom thrown in.   

On How Genomics will not solve Ecological Problems

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I am responding to this statement in an article in the Conversation by Anne Murgai on April 19, 2022 (https://phys.org/news/2022-04-african-scientists-genes-species.html#google_vignette) : The opening sentence of her article on genomics encapsulates one of the problems of conservation biology today:

“DNA is the blueprint of life. All the information that an organism needs to survive, reproduce, adapt to environments or survive a disease is in its DNA. That is why genomics is so important.”

If this is literally correct, almost all of ecological science should disappear, and our efforts to analyse changes in geographic distributions, abundance, survival and reproductive rates, competition with other organisms, wildlife diseases, conservation of rare species and all things that we discuss in our ecology journals are epiphenomena, and thus our slow progress in sorting out these ecological issues is solely because we have not yet sequenced all our species to find the answers to everything in their DNA.

This is of course not correct, and the statement quoted above is a great exaggeration. But, if it is believed to be correct, it has some important consequences for scientific funding. I will confine my remarks to the fields of conservation and ecology. The first and most important is that belief in this view of genetic determinism is having large effects on where conservation funding is going. Genomics has been a rising star in biological science for the past 2 decades because of technological advances in sequencing DNA. As such, given a fixed budget, it is taking money away from the more traditional approaches to conservation such as setting up protected areas and understanding the demography of declining populations. Hausdorf (2021) explores these conflicting problems in an excellent review, and he concludes that often more cost-effective methods of conservation should be prioritized over genomic analyses. Examples abound of conservation problems that are immediate and typically underfunded (e.g., Turner et al. 2021, Silva et al, 2021).   

What is the resolution of these issues? I can recommend only that those in charge of dispensing funding for conservation science examine the hypotheses being tested and avoid endless funding for descriptive genomics that claim to have a potential and immediate outcome that will forward the main objectives of conservation. Certainly, some genomic projects will fit into this desirable science category, but many will not, and the money should be directed elsewhere.  

The Genomics Paradigm listed above is used in the literature on medicine and social science, and a good critique of this view from a human perspective is given in a review by Feldman and Riskin (2022). Scientists dealing with human breast cancer or schizophrenia show the partial but limited importance of DNA in determining the cause or onset of these complex conditions (e.g., Hilker et al 2018, Manobharathi et al. 2021). Conservation problems are equally complex, and in the climate emergency have a short time frame for action. I suspect that genomics for all its strengths will have only a minor part to play in the resolution of ecological problems and conservation crises in the coming years.

Feldman, Marcus W. and Riskin, Jessica (2022). Why Biology is not Destiny. The New York Review of Books 69 (April 21, 2022), 43-46.

Hausdorf, Bernhard (2021). A holistic perspective on species conservation. Biological Conservation 264, 109375. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109375.

Hilker, R., Helenius, D., Fagerlund, B., Skytthe, A., Christensen, K., Werge, T.M., Nordentoft, M., and Glenthøj, B. (2018). Heritability of Schizophrenia and Schizophrenia Spectrum based on the Nationwide Danish Twin Register. Biological Psychiatry 83, 492-498. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.08.017.

Manobharathi, V., Kalaiyarasi, D., and Mirunalini, S. (2021). A concise critique on breast cancer: A historical and scientific perspective. Research Journal of Biotechnology 16, 220-230.

Samuel, G. N. and Farsides, B. (2018). Public trust and ‘ethics review’ as a commodity: the case of Genomics England Limited and the UK’s 100,000 genomes project. Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy 21, 159-168. doi: 10.1007/s11019-017-9810-1.

Silva, F., Kalapothakis, E., Silva, L., and Pelicice, F. (2021). The sum of multiple human stressors and weak management as a threat for migratory fish. Biological Conservation 264, 109392. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109392.

Turner, A., Wassens, S., and Heard, G. (2021). Chytrid infection dynamics in frog populations from climatically disparate regions. Biological Conservation 264, 109391. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109391.

More on Old Growth Forests and Conservation

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This is a short blog to alert you to a well written plea for saving old growth forests in British Columbia by Karen Price. Karen works with Dave Daust and Rachel Holt, three of our ecological heroes pushing the provincial government to recognize the value of old growth forests. This problem is world-wide but the scientific data alone will not capture the general public as much as this article might.

https://northernbeat.ca/opinion/old-growth-complexity-in-a-sound-bite/

These ecologists have reported their detailed analysis in a report that you can access through the Sierra Club of BC if you want more information on the struggle here in Canada (https://sierraclub.bc.ca/laststand/ ). At present there is nothing but denial from the government and from the industry that there is a problem – the forestry industry is not overharvesting or if it is, we need the jobs. As one person told me, it is not a problem “because we plant one tree seedling for every thousand-year-old tree that we log”.

So please keep up the pressure on governments around the world. Scientists have pushed a strong agenda on sustainable logging for many years with success now looking possible because ordinary citizens demand a change, understanding that forests are more than wood. We must continue the push for sustainable forestry and old growth forest protection.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Kooyman, R.M., Taylor, C., Ward, M., and Watson, J.E.M. (2020). Recent Australian wildfires made worse by logging and associated forest management. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 898-900. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-1195-5.

Price, Karen, Holt, Rachel F., and Daust, Dave (2021). Conflicting portrayals of remaining old growth: the British Columbia case. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 51, 1-11. doi: 10.1139/cjfr-2020-0453.