Category Archives: Birds

What does Brexit mean for British biodiversity?

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Friday 24th June 2016.  What a surreal day.  I spent it trying to understand why a small majority of the voting public had committed us to leaving the European Union, an organisation that has had a demonstrably positive impact upon our lives, our society, our economy, and our environment.  That dream-like state was not helped by the fact that I’d stayed up most of the night with my youngest son James, watching the results roll in.

Saturday 25th June 2016.  Twenty four hours later, after a good night’s sleep, I feel less dislocated but no less confused and disappointed.  It is what it is, let’s get on with it.

It’s much too early to properly answer the question of what this all means for British biodiversity, of course.  But as I pointed out in my post about the environmental arguments for remaining in the EU, there’s a whole raft of policies, legislation, agreements and initiatives that the government and NGOs need to consider.  Just to give a couple of examples, what will happen to the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, or the Special Protected Area status of places such as the Upper Nene Valley?

What I really hope is that we can continue as before, building on the current situation rather than tearing up the whole thing.  To some extent I’m optimistic that we can for the near future, because the government will have (as it sees it) bigger things to worry about.  But I do worry that eventually we will get left behind as EU environmental legislation evolves.  That’s something we have to be mindful of in the coming years.

The ecological internet is already starting to discuss these issues; here are links to a few pieces that I’ve seen:

Adventuresinbeeland has discussed what leaving the EU means for British bees and beekeepers, pointing out that EU funding has enabled bee inspectors to carry out apiary inspections and work with beekeepers on issues such as bee pests and diseases.

The Wildlife Trusts are trying to look positively at the future, with Brian Eversham, Chief Executive for the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, summing it up very well:  “Many of those who disagreed over the Referendum agree strongly that wildlife, our countryside and the natural environment matter, now and for the future. We need their voices loud and clear in the coming months. As we are now responsible for our own, independent future, it is up to all of us to make sure that we keep the environment firmly on the national agenda.”

Mark Avery has also summed up the current situation very succinctly on his blog – one cartoon says an awful lot.

Finally, here’s Craig Bennett, CEO of Friends of the Earth, writing on how can we make Brexit work for the environment?

No doubt there will be more coming soon and I’ll try to provide updates on the blog.

In terms of my day job as an academic at the University of Northampton, things will also change across the whole British Higher Education sector, of course.  On one level that’s a different set of issues to what I’ve been discussing, but there are also links: a great deal of ecological research activity is being funded by the European Union and involves cross-border collaborations.  Scientists across Europe have to continue to make that work.

Silver Medal for the BES’s pollinator’s display at RHS Chelsea Flower Show!

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RHS Silver Medal

An early train to London yesterday got me to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in time for the gates opening at 8am.  I’d agreed to spend the day staffing the British Ecological Society’s Animal Attraction: The garden and beyond display, which deals with the relationships between plants and their pollinators – see my recent posts here and here.

The first thing I noticed as I approached the display was how impressive and well designed it looked, with some wonderful planting to complement the simple, bold scientific information.  The second thing I noticed was that we had won a Silver Medal!  The whole team was very pleased – it’s the third year that the BES has been represented at Chelsea, but the first time that it’s won a medal.  I’m proud to have made a small contribution to that by advising on the plants and the scientific content, but the main kudos goes to the BES’s staff and to the garden designer Emily Darby.

Over the course of a long day we talked to hundreds of visitors about the display, what it represented, and the different ways that flowers are adapted to their pollinators.  There was a huge amount of public interest and support, very gratifying to see.  Here’s some pictures from the day:

RHS display

RHS crowd

RHS crowd with fig

RHS Jeff

RHS display

 

Connecting with Nash, connecting with “nature” – reflections on a recent discussion

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Last night I took a trip up to London with my long-time friend and sounding board Barry Percy-Smith (Professor of Childhood and Participatory Practice at the University of Huddersfield) to watch Graham Nash being interviewed and playing music for a recording of Radio 4’s Mastertapes series.  Regular blog readers may remember that we did the same thing a couple of years ago when Nash’s compadre David Crosby did a similar recording, which I wove into a blog post.

Although I had no intention of using the Nash gig as a jumping-off point for a post, walking through Maida Vale yesterday evening, looking for a good pub, I was thinking about a discussion that’s going on over at the Ideas for Sustainability blog called “Is connection with nature an oxymoron?“.

The discussion centres around a very interesting recent paper by Robert Fletcher in which he argues that “a sense of separation from “nature” is in fact paradoxically reinforced by the very environmental education and related practices employed to overcome it“.  I’d recommend that you read both the paper and the blog post, with comments: there are a number of points raised on Ideas for Sustainability, including whether or not “oxymoron” is the correct term to use here and, more importantly, that Fletcher’s paper has a very narrow frame of reference in terms of how it’s critiquing “connecting with nature”.

But in addition I think that there’s a point to be made that no person on the planet (unless they have been kept in a sealed, sterile, environment their whole life and fed artificial food supplements) is actually “disconnected from nature”.  Directly and indirectly we are all of us connected with non-human life and landscapes, whether we are aware of it or not – and most of the time we are not – via the food we eat or just the subliminal perception of the commonplace wildlife and horticulture that you can see even in the most urbanised of environments.

During our pub quest through what is a very built-up part of London – a city synonymous (at least in the UK) with the idea of disconnection from nature – I was seeing non-human life everywhere: plants were growing in the most inhospitable of places (see the images below of a large wisteria covering most of an apartment block, and a proudly tended balcony of plants in pots); large gulls were crying overhead; house sparrows were chirruping in gardens; “weeds” were popping up in the most unlikely spots.

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Yes it’s common-place stuff, and yes much of it is anthropogenic, but that doesn’t make it any less “nature” or lessen our connection with it. The real question for me is about how many people actually perceive this, either consciously or subliminally. I suspect there’s far more of the latter than the former, but that if the non-human elements of “nature” were removed from even the most built-up parts of large cities like London, that people would notice and respond negatively to its removal.  Perhaps rather than trying to reconnect people with some idealised view of “nature” that is separate from their usual existence we should actually be encouraging (“teaching”?) them to think about the non-human life that they encounter in their daily lives, a process that ought to start at an early age.

On that note it seems appropriate to sign off with one of my favourite Graham Nash songs – Teach Your Children. – and a bad photo from the gig.

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Pollinators at RHS Chelsea Flower Show

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Pollinators, as regular readers of this blog will know, are diverse and important, both ecologically and agriculturally.  But that diversity is declining and it’s an issue that deserves greater publicity and action.

To that end, for the past eight months I’ve been advising a team from the British Ecological Society (BES) on the content for a display at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show which is running all next week.  The display is called “Animal Attraction: The Garden and Beyond” – if you follow that link you’ll get a sense of what the display is all about, but in essence there are three key messages that the BES is trying to get across:

  • Celebrating the diversity of pollinators (not just bees!) both in the UK and globally.
  • Flowers have evolved many different ways of attracting and rewarding pollinators, leading to the fantastic diversity of floral form that gardeners appreciate.
  • Planting a diversity of flowers in your garden can only be a good thing for helping conserve pollinator populations.

As you can see from my wristband, I’ll be helping to staff the stand all day Tuesday 24th May, so if you’re at the show come and say hello and take a look at what the BES team has produced.

Biodiversity monitoring on the University of Northampton’s new campus – a video of my recent talk

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Waterside - 20160504_081622

In a recent post I mentioned the talk that I had presented at a one-day conference on “delivering biodiversity” organised by the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges at the University of Worcester.  The subject of the presentation was the work we’ve been doing with a couple of our students looking at how the building of the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus is impacting on biodiversity on the site, with a particular focus on birds.

The talks from that conference were videoed and can be viewed on the EAUC event site.  All of the presentations are worth viewing, but if you’re particularly interested in the Waterside project, my talk is the fourth one down.  I’ll apologise in advance for the occasional pauses – someone in the first couple of rows was wearing perfume and it was really catching my throat!

Polinode – a user-friendly tool for visualising ecological networks

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Birds mixed flocks (2) - curvedIt is a general ecological rule that no species exists in isolation; all species interact with other organisms within the communities to which they belong. The collection and analysis of ecological interaction data has burgeoned over the past couple of decades, particularly in my own area of (largely) mutualistic species interactions such as plant-pollinator relationships – see for example this recent post on hummingbird-plant networks.

There are a number of software packages available for analysing and visualising this type of data, including bipartite  and foodweb in R, Food Web Designer, and Gephi.  Tools such as this vary in their flexibility and in the investment of time required to produce good quality graphics, and ultimately it’s down to personal preferences which you use.

Recently I discovered some very user-friendly network visualisation software that is browser/cloud based, free to use (at least the basic version), very flexible, intuitive and quick to learn. Ideal if you are pressed for time and want to generate some quick food webs.

The system is called Polinode and was developed primarily to visualise business and social science data (the “poli” part is nothing to do with pollination, that’s purely coincidental). However there’s no reason why it can’t be used for ecological data, as the image above demonstrates. This is a visualisation of mixed-species flocks of birds feeding together and alone on a local urban park that I’ve discussed previously.  The thickness of the line is proportional to number of interactions observed, and the size of each node is proportional to the number of birds.  Both are scalable in Polinode.

One could also present these data as a straight-line graph, without the loops to indicate single-species feeding:

Birds mixed flocks (5)

As well as these types of networks it’s also possible to produce bipartite (what Polinode terms “hierarchical”) graphs, for example this network of bumblebees feeding on different plant families in a British grassland (click for a closer view – I realised afterwards that I downloaded a rather small version):

Bombus hypnorum with plant families

The system is very flexible and nodes can be grabbed and moved around (as I did above to offset the plant family nodes), recoloured, resized, text resized, etc.

Polinode also calculates a range of network metrics such as degree and Louvain communities (a measure of modularity) which is more limited than some ecologists might require, but which is a good starting point for those new to ecological network statistics.

Data files can be uploaded directly from Excel, and there are example templates showing how to lay out the data.  There is also ample online support including written guidance, videos, and a regular blog. Even in the few months I’ve been playing with the system the developers have added more features, including a graphing facility that generates column and scatter plots from your networks.

There you go, that’s an introduction to Polinode for ecologists; hope it’s useful for your work.

Six bees, one stone: recent pollinator-related talks and workshops

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BBKA lecture April 2016As I write this I’m painfully conscious that (a) it’s a couple of weeks since I last posted on the blog; and (b) I have a long list of things to complete before I head off to Tenerife for ten days of field work on Friday.  The absence of posting has been due to my current work load, including the number of conferences, talks and workshops I’ve been involved with in the past month, which seems to have taken up a disproportionate amount of my time.  It’s all been interesting and useful, however, and reflects the rising activity stemming from the National Pollinator Strategy, and increasing interest in pollinators more broadly.  I’ve certainly learned a lot and hopefully my own expertise contributed to the success of these events.

In this post I thought I’d briefly summarise what I’ve been up to recently, in the process expanding the numerical and phylogenetic parameters of “killing two birds with one stone“:

16th March – took part in a workshop to map the latest phase of Buglife’s B-Lines across Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.  This was a really interesting exercise and I felt that we’d actually achieved rather a lot by the end of the day.  Once the final maps are completed I’ll post a link so you can see where the routes go through these counties and how they meet up.

23rd March – spoke at a one-day conference on “delivering biodiversity” organised by the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges at the University of Worcester.  Although I was talking about our bird surveys on the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus, pollinators did receive some attention during a workshop on creating wildflower meadows.  I’ll post an update on the Waterside work once we’ve completed the next set of spring surveys.

30th March – spoke at the Bumblebee Working Group at the University of Sussex – have already posted an account of that.

6th April – took part in a”Pollinator Experts Elicitation” workshop at the University of Warwick, along with a group of nine other academics, and members of stakeholder groups such as FERA and the NFU.  Run as part of Warwick’s Food and Behavioural Science Global Research priority groups, the organisers, from the university’s Department of Statistics, used the Delphi Method to assess the likelihood of sustaining pollinator populations under different scenarios of disease, climate change, and habitat degradation.  It was a fascinating process and interesting to see how often experts’ views converged on the same opinion.  Also rather humbling to see the degree of our uncertainty in our forecasts.  The workshop garnered quite a bit of media attention including pieces on the BBC’s Midlands Today and the Farming Today programmes.

8th-9th April – delivered two lectures at the British Beekeepers Association’s Spring Convention at Harper Adams University.  Rather disconcerting to be the least-informed person in the room, given my limited knowledge of bee keeping, but they were a friendly and curious lot with good-sized audiences for my talks on the diversity of bees to be found in urban settings, and the global diversity and functional importance of pollinators.

13th April – spoke to a very receptive audience at the Friends of Linford Lakes Nature Reserve near Milton Keynes, on the topic of “Bees for dinner?  The importance of pollinators in a changing world“.  Great evening and lots of interesting questions afterwards, though my talk was a bit too long (must cut it for next time).

That’s it for now, hope to do some posts from Tenerife while we are there.

 

The integration of alien plants in mutualistic plant–hummingbird networks – a new study by Maruyama et al. (2016)

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The collaborations with researchers in Brazil and Denmark in which I’ve been involved in recent years, focused particularly on hummingbirds and networks of plant pollinator interactions, have been very productive, most recently seen in a study of the effects of hummingbird feeders on diversity and abundance of the birds.

This collaboration continues with a new study that has just been published in the journal Diversity and Distributions which deals with the way in which non-native plant species are exploited by assemblages of hummingbirds in the New World.  Here’s the abstract:

 

Aim:  To investigate the role of alien plants in mutualistic plant–hummingbird networks, assessing the importance of species traits, floral abundance and insularity on alien plant integration.

Location: Mainland and insular Americas.

Methods: We used species-level network indices to assess the role of alien plants in 21 quantitative plant–hummingbird networks where alien plants occur. We then evaluated whether plant traits, including previous adaptations to bird pollination, and insularity predict these network roles. Additionally, for a subset of networks for which floral abundance data were available, we tested whether this relates to network roles. Finally, we tested the association between hummingbird traits and the probability of interaction with alien plants across the networks.

Results: Within the 21 networks, we identified 32 alien plant species and 352 native plant species. On average, alien plant species attracted more hummingbird species (i.e. aliens had a higher degree) and had a higher proportion of interactions across their hummingbird visitors than native plants (i.e. aliens had a higher species strength). At the same time, an average alien plant was visited more exclusively by certain hummingbird species (i.e. had a higher level of complementary specialization). Large alien plants and those occurring on islands had more evenly distributed interactions, thereby acting as connectors. Other evaluated plant traits and floral abundance were unimportant predictors of network roles. Short-billed hummingbirds had higher probability of including alien plants in their interactions than long-billed species.

Main conclusions: Once incorporated into plant-hummingbird networks, alien plants appear strongly integrated and, thus, may have a large influence on network dynamics. Plant traits and floral abundance were generally poor predictors of how well alien species are integrated. Short-billed hummingbirds, often characterized as functionally generalized pollinators, facilitate the integration of alien plants. Our results show that plant–hummingbird networks are open for invasion.

 

The full reference is: Maruyama, P.K. et al. (2016) The integration of alien plants in mutualistic plant–hummingbird networks across the Americas: the importance of species traits and insularity.  Diversity and Distributions (in press).

Happy to send a PDF to anyone who would like one.

Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production: IPBES gains momentum

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Bee on apple blossom - 1st May 2015

The over-arching themes of this blog have been about understanding biodiversity; the science behind its study; why it’s important; how it contributes to human well being, (including both intangible and economic benefits); and how policy informed by science can support the conservation of species and ecosystems.  These are all issues that have a global perspective beyond the bounds of my home country (the United Kingdom), or even my continent (Europe) because species, ecosystems and the threats to them do not respect political borders.

Enter IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (sometimes shortened to Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services).

IPBES is a United Nations body established in 2012 that in many ways is a parallel entity to the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), bringing together scientists, policy makers and stakeholders, with a mission:

“to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development“

Which has got to be a good thing: science informing policy, what’s not to like?

The first output from IPBES will be a Thematic Assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production, and it’s just been discussed (today) at the 4th Plenary meeting of IPBES in Kuala Lumpur – here’s a link to the press release.

In the coming weeks I’ll talk more about IPBES and its Thematic Assessment (for which I acted as a reviewer), but for now I’ll just repeat some of the headline figures from the report:

  • 20,000 – Number of species of wild bees. There are also some species of butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles, birds, bats and other vertebrates that contribute to pollination.
  • 75% – Percentage of the world’s food crops that depend at least in part on pollination.
  • US$235 billion–US$577 billion – Annual value of global crops directly affected by pollinators.
  • 300% — Increase in volume of agricultural production dependent on animal pollination in the past 50 years.
  • Almost 90% — Percentage of wild flowering plants that depend to some extent on animal pollination*.
  • 1.6 million tonnes – Annual honey production from the western honeybee.
  • 16.5% — Percentage of vertebrate pollinators threatened with extinction globally.
  • +40% – Percentage of invertebrate pollinator species – particularly bees and butterflies – facing extinction.

 

*They are quoting a figure that I calculated, and very proud of it I am too 🙂

Pollinators and pollination – something for the weekend #9

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The latest in an (ir)regular series of posts to biodiversity-related* items that have caught my attention during the past few weeks; this one’s focused on pollinators and pollination because there’s been so much emerging on this recently it’s been impossible to decide what to write more fully about!

 

Feel free to recommend links that have caught your eye.

*Disclaimer: may sometimes contain non-biodiversity-related items.