Category Archives: Ecosystem services

Thank the insects for Christmas (reduce, reuse, recycle part 2)

The university term has drawn to a close in a flurry of activity as we complete our pre-Christmas teaching and assessments, and the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences conducted a successful five-yearly Periodic Subject Review of its degree programmes. I’m conscious that some of the things I wanted to write about since my last blog entry have slipped past without action, including a week that was bookended by visits with students to iconic localities on the biodiversity and conservation map. These were a Monday trip to the Darwin Centre of the Natural History Museum in London with students on my final year Biodiversity and Conservation module; followed by a Friday visit to Wicken Fen, arranged by my colleague Janet Jackson for second year students on her Habitat Ecology and Management module. Both great days away from the lecture room, if for different reasons.

At the Natural History Museum we looked at the insect research collections, behind the scenes where the public does not normally venture. Wicken Fen, on the other hand, is open to all and we met birders and walkers as we toured the site. I kept a tally of the number of bird species we identified and the final count was 29 (30 if you include the chickens being kept in a back garden close to the visitor centre). It would have been impossible to make a meaningful species count at the Musuem as we were overwhelmed by the statistics presented by the curators: 85,000 butterfly and moth specimens in the Lepidoptera section, 3 to 4 million specimens of true flies (Diptera). On it went; wonderful diversity and an incredible scientific resource.

Which brings me neatly to the main topic of this entry: the importance of insects at Christmas! I’ve mentioned before that one of the intentions of this blog was to reuse some of the writing I’ve done over the years in various fora, sometimes updating and re-casting it ro reflect recent activities or events (hence the “reduce, reuse, recycle” epithet). The publication this month of the final report of the Government-sponsored workshop Insect Pollinators: Linking Research and Policy in which I was involved has prompted me to modify and re-post an entry that first appeared on the University of Northampton’s blog at this time last year.

The social and economic news is not great, global poverty is on the increase even in the richest countries and the range of human-influenced assaults on the natural environment seems to be escalating on a weekly basis. But at least it’s Christmas! A time to relax and enjoy ourselves, to share time with family and friends, and to unwind during the cold and gloom of winter. Whatever your faith, or lack of it, Christmas should be about taking a break and reflecting on the year that has passed. We’re helped in that respect by the ceremonial seasonal trimmings: the Christmas tree, strings of flashing lights, baubles and tinsel. So while you’re kissing a loved one under the mistletoe, admiring that glossy holly wreath, or tucking into your Christmas dinner, spare a thought for the insects.

“What in Saint Nicholas’s name” you are asking ”have insects got to do with Christmas?!” Well, like the turkey, we’d be stuffed without them: they play an essential part in providing us with the things we associate with the Christmas. If we had no flies, wasps, bees and other bugs acting as pollinators there’d be no berries on your mistletoe or your holly. Kissing and admiring would be a less festive affair and that’s just for starters. These insects also pollinate many of the vegetables, herbs and spices on your plate, as well as some of the forage that went to fatten your roast bird or tender joint of meat. Not to forget much of what went into the nut roast that’s feeding the vegetarian relatives.

The economic value of insect pollination in the UK was estimated by the recent National Ecosystem Assessment to be about £430 million per year . In fact this is a huge under valuation because the labour costs alone of paying people to hand pollinate those crops would run into billions of pounds. This sounds far fetched but it’s already happening to fruit crops in parts of China. The answer is to encourage wild insects, not artificially managed honey bees, because collectively the former are far more abundant, and often more effective, as pollinators. Their diversity is an insurance against losing any one species in the future.

The NEA’s valuation is also too low because it only deals with edible crops. Mistletoe and holly are both dioecious species, which is to say that individual plants are either male or female, as is the case with most animals. This means that the plants cannot self pollinate and insects are absolutely vital to their reproduction and to the production of the decorative berries we so value (a holly wreath without berries is just a big spiky doughnut, in my opinion). Whilst researching the economic value of the annual mistletoe and holly crops for this blog posting I’ve been having a conversation with Jonathan Briggs over at Mistletoe Matters and he tells me that “the mistletoe trade in Britain is entirely unregulated and not documented in any tangible way” and the same is true of holly. We therefore have no idea what the economic value actually is. But some back-of-the-red-and-gold-Christmas-lunch-napkin calculations can at least give us an insight. Auction reports this year show that on average the best quality berried holly was selling for £2.50 per kg whilst equivalent quality holly without berries cost only 75p per kg. In other words, pollination by insects increases the value of that crop by over 300%. Similarly the high quality mistletoe averaged 80p per kg, whilst the second grade stuff was only 20p per kg. And the best holly wreaths (presumably with berries!) were averaging £3.40 each. These are wholesale prices, of course; retail cost to the customer is much greater. A decent holly wreath will set you back between £15 and £30 whilst online shopping for mistletoe is in the £5 to £15 bracket. The national census of 2011 shows us that there are 23.4 million households in England and Wales, plus there are 2.36 million in Scotland and 0.70 million in Northern Ireland. Let’s round it down and say there’s 26 million households in the whole of the UK. Let’s also be very conservative and estimate that only 5% of those households bought one holly wreath and some mistletoe at a total cost of £20. Multiply that by the small proportion of households buying these festive crops and you arrive at a figure of about £26.5 million! And that doesn’t include non-household use in shops, offices and businesses. So there you have it: an industry worth a few 10s of millions (at least) all being ultimately supported by insects.

With pollination, timing is everything, and Jonathan also made the point that spring flowering mistletoe and holly can be important early nectar sources for insects. Therefore despite the poor summer weather, this year has been a good one for mistletoe berries because the pollination happened before the heavy rains began. Despite being quite common plants, rather little research has been done on either holly or mistletoe pollination in the UK and it would make for an interesting student project.

The Landscape and Biodiversity Research Group here at the university is playing its part by working to understand the ecology of plants and pollinators, and how to best conserve them. In this blog I’ve referred a few times to some ongoing projects researching how the wider landscape is supporting pollinators in habitats such as country house gardens (Hilary Erenler’s PhD work which she’s currently writing up) and urban centres (ongoing PhD work by Muzafar Hussain). There’s also the recently completed work by Sam Tarrant and Lutfor Rahman on pollinator (and other) biodiversity on restored landfill sites. Plus work that’s only just started by Kat Harrold on how whole landscapes support pollinators in the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area. This is all part of a broader programme of research into the conservation of biodiversity in our region and beyond, including a contribution to the Shared Enterprise Empowering Delivery (SEED) sustainability project. Biodiversity matters and its importance to our society is being increasingly recognised by government, business and the public.

So if you make one New Year’s resolution on the 31st December, let it be that you will put away your bug sprays for 2013 and learn to love the insects (even wasps!) who give us so much and help to support our economy in a very real way. It costs us nothing; all we need to give them is well managed, diverse, unpolluted habitats in which to live.

Have a great Christmas everyone!

The Great eSCAPE

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As I begin to write this blog entry, there’s a buzz of voices around me, excitedly discussing future research or past results, or saying goodbye to friends and colleagues, old and new. It is the last day of SCAPE 2012, the annual meeting of the Scandinavian Association of Pollination Ecologists (or “for Pollination Ecology” or “for Pollination Ecologists” – the name seems to have drifted over the years). SCAPE was the first overseas conference I attended, as a young and enthusiastic PhD student, in 1991. Older but no less enthusiastic, SCAPE is for me a regular fixture in the calendar. Even if I can’t always attend, I try to send my good wishes to the organisers, with a promise to be there the following year.

SCAPE was founded in 1986 as an informal get together of Swedish research students who were all broadly interested in questions of pollination ecology. Since then it has been held every year, maintaining the informal organisation and circulating between Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, which is the venue for this year’s meeting in Skjærhalden in the beautiful Ytre Hvaler National Park. Attendance in recent years has varied between 50 and 80 participants, peaking when it’s one of the 5 yearly anniversary specials. One of the many great things about SCAPE is that it’s a very friendly, open hearted conference at which new research students rub shoulders with established researchers, and can present their provisional research findings safe in the knowledge that they will receive constructively critical feedback. Those established researchers can expect to have their conclusions challenged, as good scientists should, but it’s never done with malice.

The talks this year have spanned the usual wide range of geographical localities (Brazil, Israel, Spain, Ireland, as well as Scandinavia), scales of research focus (from the genetics of self incompatibility to landscape scale assessments of pollinator diversity), and quality of presentations (overuse of laser pointer on text-dense slides to textbook examples of how to deliver a message in 15 minutes).

Although I enjoyed the whole meeting and gained new knowledge from every presentation, there have been some talks which really stood out for me because I appreciated the overall approach, the message that was being delivered, or the insights it gave into questions I’d not previously considered. These include Dara Stanley’s estimate that bumblebees from 800 different nests were foraging on a single field of oil seed rape; Achik Dorchin’s account of the staggering number of bee species in small habitat fragments in Israel (totalling more than in the whole of Britain); a dissection of the question of when pollination can be a limiting ecosystem service for crops by Ignasi Bartomeus; and Robert Junker’s initial account of the huge diversity of bacteria associated with different flower organs. There were many others I enjoyed, of course, but that gives a taste of how diverse the subjects were.

Although I wasn’t speaking this year, two members of my research group were: André Rodrigo Rech talked about his PhD work on pollination of Curatella americana in Brazilian savannahs; and Stella Watts presented some of her postdoctoral work on honey bee versus unmanaged bee pollination in an endemic Iris species in Israel. This last work was undertaken with Amots Dafni, one of the doyens of pollination ecology. Amots attended the conference and told us he’d finally decided, in his 68th year, to retire from formal university teaching, administration and supervising research students – and begin a new project! Enjoy your “retirement” Amots!

Karin attended SCAPE with me and enjoyed scientist-watching, a hobby that gives me frequent insights into how we work as a community, and gives her insights into what makes me tick. Half a day of travel saw us back home at 2am Monday morning; I then had to be in university for a 9am seminar with students on my final year Biodiversity & Conservation module. Despite being tired the seminar went well, perhaps fuelled by the post-conference buzz I usually feel after these events. The seminar finished early to enable me to drive up to Park Campus, the university’s other site, for a brief meet-and-greet with the head of Sandtander Universities and his team. Banco Santander’s higher education arm has been funding scholarships and research activities at the university for several years now and it was a small grant from them that enabled André to attend SCAPE. Seemed only polite to say thank you.

A highlight later that week was Thursday, which was taken up with our annual first year undergraduate trip to Oxford Botanic Garden, part of my module Biodiversity: an Introduction. I also wrote about this in March but for the current academic year we have brought the trip forward. Our visit was hosted by the superintendent, Timothy Walker, who engaged the students for an hour as we walked the gardens, covering everything from the medical importance of plants such yew trees (Taxus spp.) in providing treatments for cancer, to the importance of specific trees for two Oxford writers, JRR Tolkien and Phillip Pullman. Timothy also described how much of the planting is laid out in beds according to plant families as defined by the latest phylogenetic research the (APG III system) stressing the importance of modern systematics to understanding biodiversity. If you want to know more about this, Timothy wrote and presented a recent television series called Botany: A Blooming History which remains the best account I’ve seen of the history of plant taxonomy and why it is relevant to modern plant sciences.

That evening Karin and I attended the opening of a show at the university’s gallery called “Encounters with Drawing” by artist Angela Rogers. There’s some very thought provoking material in the show and I recommend a visit if you are local and have time – it runs until 30th November. We chatted with Angela about the “drawing conversations” she has with people and some of her comments about “how much space do individuals need” chimed with familiar ideas from ecology about intra- and inter-specific competition in organisms and niche theory.

I’m going to end this entry with a link to a video post by my friend K.-D. Dijkstra (who I introduced in an earlier blog). It’s not often that the actual moment that a species new to science is discovered gets captured for everyone to see, but here’s K.-D. doing just that!

We are so very ‘umble

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Studying biodiversity can be a humbling experience. It is humbling to contemplate the intricate ecological context in which species exist, embedded within a matrix of other organisms with which they engage in competition or cooperation or feeding relationships. It is also humbling to learn that, for some scientists, the focus of their research into ecological complexity and biodiversity is on a single system of species interacting in a single place over a period of decades.

A recent article by Professor Tim Birkhead on the Times Higher Education website illustrates this nicely and conveys beautifully the long term passion and commitment demonstrated by some field biologists and ecologists to research projects. However I disagree with one of his statements that “….long-term studies are rare. In total there aren’t many more than a dozen or so”. I suspect that Tim is talking about long term studies of breeding success and population dynamics of vertebrates in the UK. If one broadens both the taxonomic scale (to take in plants and invertebrates) and the geographic coverage, then there are many, many ecological studies that have continued for decades. The Park Grass plant community experiment, for example, begun at Rothamsted in 1856, is the oldest ecological experiment anywhere in the world.

Other long term studies are documented in the recent edited volume by Ian Billick and Mary Price – The Ecology of Place. Highly recommended for its demonstration of the scientific and conservation value of long term ecological research. Ecology of Place was one of the books I took with me to Tenerife during field work earlier in the summer and I’ve been working through it ever since, absorbed by its chapters more than I can recall in any other edited volume of research. Some scientists have committed their professional (and sometimes personal) lives to the study of a single locality for over 50 years and the ecological insights from such work have been enormous. It’s a commitment to the science that I could not possibly mirror; I’m not that kind of scientist. Whereas I am capable of building up “long term” datasets that span up to 16 years (and counting) these are not the kinds of highly focused, in-depth studies that Mary and Ian have picked for their book. Perhaps my problem has always been a short attention span and a desire for novelty, like a kid in a toy shop wanting to pick up and play with all of the exciting things on offer. There’s no single right way to be a scientist (though there are lots of wrong ways).

But back to Uriah Heep and his expressions of ’umbleness. It’s always been my opinion that as a society we require some humility when we consider how reliant we are on the processes and resources provided by the biosphere, something that has come to be called ecosystem services, and which I’ve discussed before in a number of blog posts, starting here. The fact that we rely on the natural world to provide soil nutrients, fresh water, carbon storage, crop pollination, and a whole range of other goods and services, is beyond dispute. More controversial, however, is the valuation of ecosystem services: how (indeed, should) do we put a monetary value on what nature provides?

A lot of words have been written about these questions in the past few years and recently the writer and environmental activist George Monbiot has weighed into the discussion with an article for the Guardian newspaper that argues that the whole notion of valuation of ecosystem services “diminishes us, it diminishes nature. By turning the natural world into a subsidiary of the corporate economy, it reasserts the biblical doctrine of dominion”.

Now, I have a lot of respect for George, whose writing is always provocative and pulls no punches. He also puts his money where his mouth is, not least in publicly declaring his earnings. And on a philosophical level I don’t have a problem with George’s thesis that valuing nature in terms of money is fundamentally wrong; it is wrong, but it’s also the best wrong strategy amongst a whole set of strategies for biodiversity conservation. Before I explain why, I should also say that I don’t think George argues his case very effectively. He begins by setting up something of a journalistic straw man in his article by initially claiming that at “a cost of £100,000, [the government] commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England’s ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported….”.

George is presumably referring to the UK National Ecosystem Assessment which as its website clearly states: “was an inclusive process; many government, academic, NGO and private sector institutions helped to design the assessment, contribute information and analyses, review the preliminary findings, and promote the results.”

Not a “research company” then.

George Monbiot also misses the point that spiritual and cultural ecosystem services are explicitly valued within this framework, making a lie of his claim that in the future we won’t ” be able to argue that an ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and delight”. Yes we can, it just so happens that the argument is being framed in economic terms.

Clearly George believes that valuation of ecosystem services is just some neoliberal government/big business conspiracy to rip off the public. But that’s not its purpose, even if it may be one possible outcome, and one which we must guard against. As environmentalist Tony Juniper recognises in a response to George Monbiot’s article, ecosystem service valuation is a serious attempt to value something which has been dismissed by big business as valueless. Regardless of whether the actual monetary values are in any way accurate, it’s backed up by some very sound science and scientists, including some who have the kind of long term commitments to ecology that I discussed above. Ecosystem services valuation is not perfect but it’s a way forward that should not be dismissed. It’s an approach that we are using within the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area project that I’ve talked about previously, most recently with respect to the River Nene.

Those of us who have had an interest in environmentalism and ecology for many years have noticed a slow shift in public attitudes to “green” issues. What was once the preserve of hippies and tree huggers is now mainstream. Most people “get” that the environment is important, even if they can’t articulate what that importance is. There are some, including those good folks currently climbing the Dark Mountain, who believe that despite this mainstreaming of environmentalism, we are still going to hell in a handcart and the future is bleak. Perhaps we are and it is, I don’t know. But the valuation of our natural capital and the ecosystem services it provides may be our last chance to save the natural world, including our society and our species. You will note that I wrote “including” not “and”. That’s important: I don’t distinguish between the two because Homo sapiens is part of “nature” – we evolved within and are shaped by this biosphere and nothing that we do is therefore “unnatural”. Some of our decisions and activities may be perverse and misguided and against the long term interests of both ourselves and the planet we inhabit. But it’s not against nature. How can we be against something of which we fundamentally are a part? Understanding that we are saving ourselves by conserving the biosphere is a more humbling conclusion that any pretence that we have stewardship, or worse dominion, over “nature”.

To Dream a River

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The notion of streams and rivers as the veins and arteries of a nation, bringing life giving fluids to the country’s urban hearts, is an overplayed one for sure. But it’s accurate nonetheless, even if these fluids contain biodiversity enough to give any blood disease specialist palpitations. Given their importance it is therefore odd (I’m tempted to write “suicidal”) that in Britain we have a history of our towns turning their backs, both metaphorically and literally, on our rivers, ignoring their cultural, social, biological and frankly life sustaining importance. I’ve mentioned the brewery and sewage effluent entering the River Wear at Sunderland in an earlier posting. As the pollution went in so there was a gradual receding of business, industry and habitation away from the river. There seems to be a correlation between the use and value of a river and the condition of its water and biodiversity: as rivers become ignored and disconnected from urban centres, so they become dumping grounds for whatever can be flushed or piped into them.

This process of riparian neglect was repeated throughout the twentieth century across the country and Northampton’s River Nene is no exception. From its central place in the town’s commercial activities in the nineteenth century, with its links to the Grand Union Canal and to the North Sea, the Nene has declined in both importance to the town and in its ability to support wildlife, at least in the stretch running through the town and just down river. Much of the ecological quality of water in this stretch is considered “moderate” to “poor” against the criteria set out by the Water Framework Directive, the main driver of European (and therefore UK) water management.

Against this backdrop of neglect and river decline, recently a group of us went for a seven mile hike along the River Nene, from the western fringes of Northampton at Duston Mill, through the centre of the town, out to Billing Mill. The trek was organised by a former student of ours, Neil Monaghan, now working for the River Nene Regional Park (RNRP). The purpose of this walk was (quoting Neil’s brief for the day) “to inform the Northampton Enterprise Zone River Nene Re-naturalisation Study” by “identify[ing] issues and opportunities for works in-stream and in areas influencing the watercourse which would be likely to facilitate improvements (or at least negate degradation) through land use change or water management”. My particular interest in this relates to the work we are doing as part of the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area (NIA) project I’ve mentioned before. Also taking part in the hike were representatives from most of the groups with an interest in the River Nene’s ecology, water quality and flood risk management, including my university colleagues Duncan McCollin & Chris Holt; another former student Hugh Bunker, now working for the Environment Agency (EA); independent consultant ecologist Steve Brayshaw; Heather Ball and Oliver Burke from the Wildlife Trust; Martin Janes from the River Restoration Centre; and other staff from RNRP, the EA, Northants County Council and Northampton Borough Council. All in all, a wide range of interests and expertise, giving their own perspectives on the River Nene.

Although I’d visited parts of the area that we walked, I’d never before hiked this whole stretch. It was a revelation. We passed some really pleasant stretches of river and lake close to commercial centres in Northampton that I know well, in the sense of “drive there, buy things, drive away”. But I was wholly ignorant of just how close the river is to some of these points.

One of the reasons why it’s easy to lose track of the water courses and lakes, is that it is so geographically complex. Take a look at the Nene Valley on Google Earth and what you’ll see what I mean. The aerial view reveals a network of river branches, tributaries, canals and lakes, traced across the landscape. Some of these seem to have no obvious starting point, or end abruptly. At one point a lower lying stream passes under the river via a siphon. It’s very confusing for a predominantly terrestrial ecologist! The whole area is historically prone to flooding, as Chris has discussed in some of his published research and so understanding the dynamics of the whole catchment is an important task for the Environment Agency and local government.

Away from the river, one of the highlights of the trip was a guerrilla visit to a post-industrial site that is posited as the new campus for the university. It’s actually the site of the former Northampton power station and like many abandoned brownfields across the country, it has developed its own ecological community of invasive alien plants (for example buddleia, in abundance) and native species, many of them normally at home on dry grasslands. One section was described by Steve, half seriously, as “urban tundra” as it was dominated by a species of lichen from the genus Cladonia.

Our main attention was the River Nene, of course, never far from the path that we walked. Further down the course we came to the Northampton Washlands, an area of low lying grassland and flooded gravel pits that serves to store flood water when the river overtops its banks. It’s also an internationally important site for migratory birds such as lapwing and golden plover, and is part of the recently designated Special Protection Area (SPA). It was another highlight in a day of exploration and surprises.

The dream of a river which can support biodiversity, provide drinking water, allow a wide range of recreation, and be flood managed, is a hugely ambitious one. But there are many people and organisations working hard to see it flourish because the River Nene is a vital part of the life of the town and the county. And without dreams, what are we….?

Scientists Must Write (and Speak and Listen and Review and Edit)

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“Scientists Must Write” was the title of a book published back in the late 1970s by a former tutor of mine, Robert Barrass, at what was then Sunderland Polytechnic (now the University of Sunderland). I had assumed the book was now a long gone publishing memory and no longer available. But it turns out that Robert updated it in the early 2000s and it’s still in print. Almost 30 years (30!) later I can clearly remember Robert impressing upon us the importance of good writing skills for scientists-in-training. At the time I was as far from being a professional scientist as it’s possible to be and so didn’t fully grasp this, but nonetheless what he said chimed with my own notions that writing was important, even for a scientist.

Nowadays I realise that it’s not just the writing of standard, academic papers, book chapters and books which is essential: writing of all kinds is a necessary facet of the life of a research active scientist. This June sees the publication of two contrasting articles that illustrate this point. The Royal Horticultural Society’s journal The Plantsman has published a piece entitled “The Importance of Native Pollinators“, whilst the historical journal Notes and Records of the Royal Society has published my paper on “John Tweedie and Charles Darwin in Buenos Aires“. Neither of these is standard academic fare, at least for me. The first is a popular article aimed largely at gardeners and others interested in understanding more about pollinator conservation. The second, whilst academic and rigourously peer reviewed, is primarily historical rather than scientific.

Why am I writing popular conservation articles and historical papers? Largely for different reasons, though they are linked by my overall fascination with biodiversity. The Plantsman article is an example of taking ideas and findings from the LBRG‘s research and presenting it to a wider audience who might, at the least, find it interesting and hopefully useful. One might describe it as “popular science” though I don’t really like the term: it suggests that it’s somehow different to “real” science, which is not the case: it’s really only the format of the presentation which is different.

The John Tweedie/Charles Darwin paper reflects my desire to understand where our scientific knowledge of biodiversity comes from. As scientists and conservationists, we draw conclusions about species’ distributions, conservation threats, extinctions, and so forth, based on information from specimens that have been collected by people like Tweedie and Darwin, and curated at places such as Kew and the Natural History Museum. By its nature it’s a historical process and historical research helps us to understand how we arrived at our current understanding. The only reason we know that 23 species of bee have gone extinct in England since about 1800 for example, as I cite in my Plantsman article, is that over the past two centuries specimens and observations have been recorded and analysed. This is an ongoing process, exemplified by the BWARS project mapping the spread of Bombus hypnorum the most recent addition to the UK’s native bee list.

As well as writing we scientists gain much from listening to what others in our field have to say and a well attended, and very interesting, meeting in London last week launched the British Ecological Society’s Macroecology Special Interest Group . The range of talks spanned community structure, interaction networks, ecosystem services, latitudinal gradients and disease biology, all at the large spatial and temporal macroecological scales covered by this subdiscipline of ecology. Or is it really a multidisciplinary field, a merging of old fashioned biogeography with more modern ecological approaches? Who knows, perhaps this is sterile semantics; as I mentioned to one of the organisers in the pub afterwards, “macroecology” seems to me to be more about a philosophy of approach rather than a field in itself.

Formal teaching has largely finished for the time being, so in addition to research activities and university administrative work, much of the remainder of the last couple of weeks seems to have been taken up with editorial and peer reviewing duties for journals, including PLoS ONE, for which I’m an academic editor. This can be time consuming and thankless, but is absolutely vital if the whole system of scientific publishing is not to grind to a halt. Scientists must write, but that writing is supported by a body of individuals who act as peer reviewers, editors, proof readers, and so forth. Collectively that eats up a lot of scientist-hours and is something we should never take for granted.

Up a Mountain, Darkly

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Someone (probably claiming to be wise) once said something along the lines of: “There are many paths but only one mountain”. Or possibly: “There’s only one mountain but many paths”. Or some other contortion of those words and ideas. I don’t know where it originated and a quick google doesn’t really help; there’s lots of permutations and attributions out there in cyberspace. Whoever the author and whatever the original meaning behind it, the notion has now come to refer to religious and spiritual pluralism: believe what you like, worship how you will, we’ll all get to God in the end.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m in no way religious, and spiritual only in so far as wild landscapes, beautiful organisms, profound notions and great buildings make me feel a bit strange inside. But it struck me recently that the paths and mountain concept could equally apply to approaches to environmentalism and biodiversity conservation. It came out of a conversation I’ve been following that’s going on over at Thoreau Farm between Wen Stephenson and Paul Kingsnorth. The discussion began as a rather bad tempered exchange on Twitter but ended with a large degree of mutual respect and an agreement to differ. It’s worth reading.

A few years ago I met writer and (former) environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth when he came to the university to give a talk about the ideas he was developing (with Dougald Hine) around the Dark Mountain Project. Paul is an engaging writer and thinker, and the notion of the Dark Mountain intrigued me both as a metaphor and as a framework for exploring what it is to be “environmentally aware” or “green” or an “ecologist” (in all senses of that widely used word). The debate with Seth centres around his (initial) impression that Paul and the Dark Mountain Project were promoting giving up the environmental struggle and letting things run their course: our society collapses, ultimately, and then we dust ourselves off and build something new. However a lot of what the Dark Mountain is about is to build stories and ideas and other acts of creativity that will prepare us for this “Uncivilisation”. As Paul argues, this is very different to “giving up”.

Some months after we met I sent Paul the first draft of an article that was subsequently published in issue one of the Dark Mountain book. W(h)ither science was a very personal take on the role of scientists, and the knowledge they generate, in the early 21^st century. It was framed within the context of the Dark Mountain’s ideas of “what happens when it all goes wrong?” I prefer to think of it as “if” rather than “when” because, as I originally put it, “knowledge is not predictable”. In other words, we don’t know what will happen in the future, we can only prepare for a range of outcomes. In the last two centuries England has lost about 95% of its diverse meadows and grasslands to intensive agriculture. Linked to this around 10% of our bee and butterfly species have gone extinct and many others have declined enormously. Yet our natural and agricultural ecosystems, and the society they support, continue to function. How long that can last, who knows?

I am drawn to the Dark Mountain because it scares me. The implications of its message are profound: our western (and increasingly eastern and southern) civilisation in its present form is doomed because our lifestyles cannot possibly be maintained at their present levels of resource use. The resulting environmental degradation, intensified by climate change, will reach a point where ecosystem services will no longer be sustained and our societies will collapse. It’s a bleak prospect but Paul sees it as an honest one; as he puts it: “I am trying to walk away from dishonesty, my own included. Much environmental campaigning, and thinking, is dishonest. It has to be, to keep going.”

Sometimes it’s good to be scared. Karin and I attended the first Dark Mountain Festival in summer 2010 and thoroughly enjoyed the mix of spoken word, music, art and creativity (but not the Welsh weather, the walk back to the camp site or the crappy beer). However we missed the second festival in 2011 as I was teaching on the TBA Tanzania field course I referred to in an earlier blog. Also teaching on that course was a remarkable Dutch entomologist Klaas-Douwe Dijkstra. K.-D., as he is known universally, is an authority on the Odonata, the dragonflies and damselflies. He is probably the most widely traveled African odonatologist there is, with an encyclopaedic memory for the details of African dragonfly biodiversity. This week he and a raft of colleagues have published an important paper on the diversity of African Odonata and how they can be considered as “guardians of the watershed”.

Also this week, our research group has been joined by André Rodgrigo Rech from Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil. André will be working with me for the next 12 months on his doctoral thesis on pollination and reproductive biology in some neotropical members of the plant family Dilleniaceae. He’s also going to get involved with some of this season’s field work. These collaborative processes are important to scientists as they widen the scope of our knowledge: I’m going to learn a lot about some plants that I’m unfamiliar with and André will gain an understanding of temperate European plants and pollinators.

The contrast between these ways of doing scientific conservation and the Dark Mountain project is striking. But I see them not as at odds with one another, but as complimentary. As Paul says in one of his contributions to the debate with Seth: “Do what you need to, and what you have to, and what you feel is right.” To paraphrase: find your own path. The mountain is dark and we have no idea what’s at the top. But there are plenty of mountaineers traveling up its many faces, some on paths well trod and others hacking their own trails. See you at the summit.

Angry Birds! (and startled bees)

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The texture of the life academic is nothing if not varied. After a couple of days working from home thanks to a dose of flu, Thursday was spent supervising three one hour tests for my first year students, scattered throughout the day from 0930 to 1600. As I watched over these hurriedly scribbling undergraduates their shifting expressions ranged across boredom, panic, rapt intensity, smugness and exhaustion. The latter because it’s been a long term and we’ve worked them hard. The Easter break will be a relief. Whilst they pored over the questions I shifted between marking second year literature reviews, checking email and gazing thoughtfully out of the window.

Between tests I went back to the office and worked on completing the first draft of a manuscript that I’ve been promising to send to my co-author Clive Nuttman of the Tropical Biology Association. It’s based on data we collected in Tanzania last year during the TBA field course whilst observing aggressive interactions between nectar feeding male sunbirds and large Xylocopa carpenter bees. The bees sneak into the sunbirds’ territories and, if spotted, the birds fly at them, chasing them through the forest. The plant on which they were feeding is a member of the squash and melon family (Cucurbitaceae) and like many in that family it has separate male and female plants. Only the male flowers produce nectar; the females function, in effect, as rewardless mimics of the males. In addition it seems as though only the bees are pollinators as the birds don’t pick up pollen on their feathers and (crucially) don’t visit the female flowers. However the birds might be providing a service to the plants by driving the bees to move between plants rather than staying on the male flowers most of the time. It’s a complex story (which ones in ecology aren’t?) and we’ve only scratched the surface of what is going on, but the aggressive interactions side of it makes a nice starting point for further work. We’re calling it: “Angry Birds! Aggressive displacement of Xylocopa carpenter bees from flowers of Lagenaria sphaerica (Cucurbitaceae) by territorial male Eastern Olive Sunbirds (Cyanomitra olivacea) in Tanzania”. Let’s see if the journal editor and reviewers will go along with the tongue in cheek pre-title.

Friday started with a meeting between Muzafar Hussain, on of my PhD students you met last time, and Peter Nalder from South Court Environmental. SCE is a local co-operative dedicated to environmental projects, and organic and permaculture food production. The group is responsible for managing a number of old, remnant fruit tree orchards around Northampton. We took a look at a really interesting site over in Abington that was originally a farm. It’s now been converted into sheltered housing for old folks and a nature conservation area that includes an orchard. Muzafar is planning to incorporate some of these orchards into his urban bees surveys. This will add to what we know about the diversity of habitats available to these bees and relates it directly to the ecosystem service of crop pollination that the bees provide.

In the afternoon I drove up to the Wildlife Trust’s offices at Lings House for the first formal meeting of the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area partners to be held since the announcement that we had secured the funding back in February. I intend to write more about the Nene Valley NIA in the coming months and years. But for now it’s enough to say that we’re incredibly excited about the opportunities the NIA will bring to improve the level of biodiversity conservation in the region. The university is leading on one of five objectives: to assess the range of ecosystem services being delivered in the Nene Valley and the condition of the biodiversity (including habitat as well as taxonomic diversity) that is supporting those services. We’ll focus on pollination, naturally, but also on other services including fresh water provision and flood alleviation, and possibly carbon storage. These are new areas for me and it’s going to be a steep learning curve. A PhD student has already been recruited to work on pollinator diversity and in the near future we’ll take on a post-doc for the main part of the project (if you know of anyone who might be interested ask them to send me their CVs).

Chairing the meeting was Oliver Burke the Wildlife Trust’s energetic and enthusiastic Conservation Manager who has been the real driving force behind the NIA (which on a map looks like a large intestine squiggling its way across the landscape; in honour of him I renamed it “Oliver’s Colon”. Not sure if it will stick but I intend to use it in all official NIA documents from now on). Most of the meeting was concerned with the nuts and bolts of how the finances will work, reporting of activities, membership of the steering group, etc. Dull but vital if the Nene Valley NIA is to be the success we want it to be.

Also at the meeting was Adrian Southern from the RSPB, standing in for a colleague. I keep bumping into Adrian in the most unlikely places, first at Biosphere 2 in Arizona in 2001 during an Ecological Society of America meeting that ultimately led to the Waser & Ollerton (2006) edited volume. Then a few years later at another conference when he was a PhD student at University of East Anglia. We never really kept in touch so it was a surprise to see him. Now Adrian’s with the RSPB I hope to talk more with him about some ecosystem services projects he’s working with as part of their Futurescapes programme. So add that to the lots of different things going on at the moment. But varied is good. If tiring. So looking forward to a week off over Easter.

Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs, an’ Aa’ll tell ye aall an aaful story

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Every other Thursday I try to make it to the 6pm seminar organised by the Media, English and Culture department of the School of The Arts. The seminars take place in the building adjacent to the one in which I work; they feature a diverse mix of internal and external speakers; and wine is always served.

Invariably I’m the only scientist in a room full of staff and postgrads with research and teaching interests as varied as 19^th Century Gothic literature, Elizabethan playwrights, the history of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop and the scientific romances of HG Wells. So the wine helps to imbue a cosy sense of oneness with my fellow academics and by the second glass I’ve convinced myself that I can contribute something meaningful to the discussion which follows. (One day I’ll have to record those conversations and listen to them sober…..)

The seminar this week was by Dr Jon Mackley, a specialist in the literature of the early Medieval and “Dark Age” periods. Jon talked about the writing he’s been doing aimed at understanding the lost pantheon of gods worshipped by our Anglo Saxon ancestors, and their fates as feast days and rituals were absorbed into British Christian culture. This replacement of deities put me in mind of Neil Gaiman’s brilliant novel American Gods, but that’s by the by.

What has this got to do with biodiversity, you ask? Bear with me…..

Conversation afterwards got onto dragon-hero myths and (fortified by some cheap red) I brought up the story of the Lambton Worm. This legend originates from County Durham, the part of England in which I grew up, and so has always been a part of my personal culture. My dad often sang the first few lines of the 19th Century song when I was young and in turn I’d occasionally sing it to my kids when they were very small, in a broad Durham dialect:

Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An’ Aa’ll tell ye aall an aaful story,
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An’ Aa’ll tel ye ‘boot the worm.

(Wikipedia provides a useful translation of the song for anyone born south of Darlington)

When I was thinking about the legend afterwards it struck me that there were some interesting metaphors regarding biodiversity and ecosystem services contained within it, beyond the culturally important “mythical biodiversity” of such creatures as dragons, unicorns and griffins.

The story of the Lambton Worm begins with young Sir John Lambton fishing in the River Wear:

One Sunda morn young Lambton went
A-fishing in the Wear;
An’ catched a fish upon he’s heuk
He thowt leuk’t vary queer.

Exploitation of wild fish stocks has always been an important provisioning ecosystem service for human societies in a local context, with Sunday fishermen such as John Lambton taking the occasional fish for their family; and at a national level, providing significant amounts of protein for the human food chain. Global fish stocks are beyond the level at which they can be sustainability exploited, however, and a scandalous proportion of what is currently netted is thrown back into the sea, often dead, as “bycatch“. The “fish” that Lambton caught was in fact a juvenile dragon (or “worm”) which looked so strange (and presumably inedible) to the young knight that he disposed of it:

But whatt’n a kind ov fish it was
Young Lambton cudden’t tell-
He waddn’t fash te carry’d hyem,
So he hoyed it doon a well

John Lambton throwing the worm into a well could be a metaphor for the way in which our society so often gets rid of the things that we produce and that we don’t want, with no real thought for its fate. As a kid growing up in the 1970s close to the banks of the very same River Wear where John Lambton fished the Worm, I well remember the stream of turds, condoms, tampons and filth slicks that the river was expected to absorb and to transport into the North Sea. Later I worked for a while in the local Vaux Brewery which flushed its untreated waste water in vast volumes into the Wear. By then no one was bothering to fish the river. In the 1980s new sewage treatment works were built to deal with the effluent of what was at that time the largest town in Britain. Slowly the water quality of the River Wear improved until it is now considered by the Environment Agency to be “one of the most improved rivers in England“. A river which John Lambton would perhaps now recognise.

Alongside the quality of the water, the quality of life of people who live by or visit the Wear has also improved as the river’s ability to sustain cultural ecosystem services related to work, tourism and leisure has increased. Which brings us back to the department of Media, English and Culture. What is a muddy boots ecologist with interests in the biodiversity of species interactions doing sitting in on their seminars on a Thursday evening? Beyond the fact that they are always entertaining and informative (and they serve wine), it’s the opportunities these seminars provide to draw parallels and create metaphors which relate to my own area of expertise which fascinates me. Making such connections and spinning these stories is something my brain does without me asking it and I find them useful for understanding not just the complexity of the science I deal with, but also the environmental challenges facing humanity. As a species we cannot get away from our evolutionary and ecological roots within the totality of biodiversity of planet Earth (a topic which I’ll return to in future blogs) and that is reflected in the cultural biodiversity of ideas and research topics that a university such as Northampton sustains.

Business and Biodiversity: Oil & Water?

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An early start yesterday to get to London for a meeting/workshop called “Biodiversity & ecosystem services: new collaboration opportunities for academics with businesses”. The meeting was organised by the Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network , a fairly new government initiative trying to link industry/businesses with university-level researchers and third sector organisations. The aim of the day was to:

“….bring together academics and businesses with an interest in the Natural Capital/Ecosystem Services approach that the Natural Environment White Paper (NEWP) envisages for the UK. The Natural Environment White Paper has put business at the centre of the stage to deliver the sustainable economy that the Government pledges to provide.”

There’s a lot of scepticism in both camps about whether businesses and researchers can really ever talk mutually comprehensible languages or have convergent priorities. But I’m open minded enough to attend these events and see what I can learn from them. It was also an opportunity to catch up with some old friends who I hadn’t seen for a while, and to promote the biodiversity bit of the SEED project.

Highlight of the day for me (other than seeing said friends) was Professor Ian Bateman’s presentation on the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and the ecosystem services approach to valuing nature. Whilst there wasn’t anything in the presentation that I was not already broadly familiar with, it was a wonderfully clear and forthright exposition on just how much we have under valued the natural capital of the UK. Putting a monetary value on our biodiversity leaves a lot of scientists and activists uncomfortable and I share some of that discomfort. But it may be our best opportunity to safeguard biodiversity for the future.

Also impressive (and dryly funny) was the presentation by Martin Ross from South West Water on how his company is providing grants to farmers with land in their catchments to manage farms in a way which minimises pollution and therefore the cost of water treatment.

Lowlight of the day was a (rather young and I think naive) environmental consultant’s claims that “we know almost nothing about biodiversity in this country except for a few charismatic species” and “nature conservation has failed in the UK”. I thought that a guy from the JNCC was going to explode when he heard that last statement! The first comment betrayed a lack of historical understanding: we have an enormous reservoir of biodiversity knowledge in this country, added to and developed by both professional and amateur researchers. What we lack is a truly comprehensive method of bringing all of this together in a way that is usable for biodiversity planning.

In the workshop I attended there was some discussion as to whether technical language such as “biodiversity”, “natural capital” and “ecosystem services” (which one contributor referred to as “eco-babble”) deters senior business managers from engaging with nature conservation. I pointed out that words and phrases such as “email”, “internet” and “world wide web” were not so very long ago similarly considered to be technical jargon but are now part of our every day language. Don’t think they were convinced.

Left a very sunny, spring-y London on a packed train, arriving in a colder, over cast Northampton. A short taxi ride took me to the university in time to enjoy a really stimulating evening lecture by photographer John Hilliard, part of the School of The Arts’ Articulation series. Great to see a packed audience of mainly students listening intently to an artist of his reputation. Look forward to next week’s talk by Ian McKeever.

Home by 8.30pm to enjoy delicious chicken soup and (at 9.00pm) furious ranting at the BBC Horizon programme about the subconscious mind, both courtesy of my psychotherapist partner Karin. Too exhausted by 10pm to watch anything more than the news headlines. Sleep came easily….