Tag Archives: Conservation

Emerging threats to the Białowieża Forest, one of Europe’s last remaining wilderness areas

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From various news sources and personal contacts I’m hearing about some emerging threats to the Białowieża Forest, which at 216,200 ha (2,162 km2 or 835 square miles) is one of Europe’s largest and most ancient forested wilderness areas, and one of the few places where you’ll still see European bison (Bison bonasus)roaming free.

Despite its designation as a World Heritage Site, in recent months the Polish government has revealed plans to increase the amount of logging in the forest, ostensibly as a tree disease control measure.  However Polish scientists dispute this and claim that the real motivation is commercial – see the commentary and letters in this week’s Nature.  Here’s a quote from that article which provides some context to the concerns:

“[the] Białowieża management plan limits logging in the forest to 48,000 cubic metres of wood per year — enough to allow locals to gather firewood. But on 10 November, the local forest administration proposed an amendment that would allow large-scale logging in sections outside the central 17% of the forest that is a national park. They cited an outbreak of the bark beetle pest (Ips typographus) in Białowieża’s Norway spruce (Picea abies). In one forest district where logging is currently limited to 6,000 cubic metres per year, the allowable yearly volume would increase to 53,000 cubic metres”.

 

Interestingly, both Ips typographus and Picea abies are native to these forests and any large-scale outbreak would probably constitute a disturbance that is part of the natural dynamics of the forest. A recent piece on the National Geographic site by conservation biologist Stuart Pimm is worth quoting from in this regard:

“To…scientists studying biodiversity, the main value of the Białowieża Forest is accumulated in a massive occurrence of large and old trees, high amounts of dead-wood and natural dynamics of forest stands all being very unique to this area and supporting thousands of different specialised species ranging from birds and mammals using cavities or building nests in the canopy to lichens, fungi and microbes dependent on different stages of tree life and its decomposition.  It is not surprising that Białowieża Forest has been an invaluable reference area for scientists studying natural characteristics of European forests.” [my emphasis]

 

This is not the first time that concerns have been raised about the Białowieża Forest – here’s an article from the Guardian newspaper from 2011:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/poland-environmentalists-foresters-primeval-forest

Is it too much to hope that the Polish government takes notice and strengthens, not weakens, the protection of its natural heritage?  And allows natural processes to determine what happens in this woodland, rather than trying to manage every aspect of its ecology.

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.

Ecological intensification and pollinator diversity: a new study by Garibaldi et al. (2016)

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2013-04-15 13.54.19-2Think of “farming” and those of us living in the more industrialised parts of the world usually envision large fields that are intensively worked using heavy machinery and regular inputs of fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. But for 2 billion of the world’s farmers, agriculture takes place on smallholdings of less than 2 ha in size, with little money available for vehicles and chemicals.  Maximising food outputs in such systems can be difficult.

Now a new study by Lucas Garibaldi, Luisa Carvalheiro and colleagues entitled “Mutually beneficial pollinator diversity and crop yield outcomes in small and large farms” has demonstrated that these small-scale farmers can increase the yields from insect pollinated crops on their farms by allowing native vegetation to grow alongside the crops, which supports a greater diversity and abundance of pollinators that then spill over into the adjacent fields.

It’s a great study that delivers a message that large agro-chemical firms probably will not wish to hear: that yields can be enhanced without throwing ever more fertiliser or pesticides onto the crops.

The paper is paywalled so you’ll have to ask the authors for a copy unless you (or your institution) has an e-subscription to Science.  But here’s the original abstract:

Ecological intensification, or the improvement of crop yield through enhancement of biodiversity, may be a sustainable pathway toward greater food supplies. Such sustainable increases may be especially important for the 2 billion people reliant on small farms, many of which are undernourished, yet we know little about the efficacy of this approach. Using a coordinated protocol across regions and crops, we quantify to what degree enhancing pollinator density and richness can improve yields on 344 fields from 33 pollinator-dependent crop systems in small and large farms from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For fields less than 2 hectares, we found that yield gaps could be closed by a median of 24% through higher flower-visitor density. For larger fields, such benefits only occurred at high flower-visitor richness. Worldwide, our study demonstrates that ecological intensification can create synchronous biodiversity and yield outcomes.

 

The challenge from this paper is two-fold.  First of all it’s how to operationalise this kind of research on the ground, to farmers and agronomists who are unlikely to be readers of the journal Science.  This is where organisations such as the UN’s FAO, country-level government agencies, and non-governmental organisations  have a crucial role to play, translating research into action.

The second challenge is likewise difficult – how do we bring “ecological intensification” into the industrialised agriculture of more developed nations?  I have no immediate answer to that, but research such as this shows what the potential benefits can be, for both agriculture and biodiversity.

The reference is:  Garibaldi, L.A. et al. (2016) Mutually beneficial pollinator diversity and crop yield outcomes in small and large farms.  Science 351: 388-391

Ecosystem services survey – share your thoughts

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Researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE) are carrying out a public survey on attitudes to the concept of ecosystem services, a subject that I’ve referred to many times on this blog, most recently last week.

The UWE researchers write:  “……give us your views on the term ‘ecosystem services’! Do you feel it is a valuable concept? How should it be used and communicated? Regardless of whether you work with the concept or not, we would like to hear your views. The survey closes 5th February 2016……survey takes 10 minutes or less!”

I’ve done is and they’re right, it’s very short, but well worth completing as it should generate some interesting data into how far the concept has penetrated into the public consciousness.  The link to the survey is:

https://uwe.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/ecosystem-services-sfep

 

Tight But Loose – just what is “biodiversity”?

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Fleet photo 1

Ever since I set up the Biodiversity Blog in 2012 I’ve had it in mind to write a post asking the question “Just what is “biodiversity”?”, but have never quite got round to it, there’s been too many other interesting and important things to write about on here!  This week over at the Dynamic Ecology blog Brian McGill has beaten me to it with a really interesting post entitled:  Biodiversity and pizza – an extended analogy leading to a call for a more multidimensional treatment of nature.

I’m not entirely sure that the pizza analogy works, it’s a little tortuous, but none the less the post is provocative and interesting, and has generated a lot of comments.  I strongly recommend it.

In the interests of recycling, and because the readership of my blog only overlaps partially with that of Dynamic Ecology, thought I’d restate a few things that I brought up in the comments to Brian’s post (but this certainly won’t substitute for going over and reading it yourself”.

One of the questions that Brian asks is:  “Is biodiversity a useful term or has it outlived its usefulness?”  It’ll come as no surprise to readers that I like the word “biodiversity”: I used it for the title of my blog and for my professorship, because it captures a lot about what I value in the natural world, and because it’s a term that I’ve (professionally speaking) grown up with. To my mind it is an umbrella term that can mean different things to different people; some see this as a disadvantage but I think that, as long as we qualify precisely what we are referring to, using “biodiversity” in a loose way is not a problem. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is with politics: if someone describes themselves as a “conservative” or a “socialist” or a “liberal”, those terms cover huge internal variation and political scope, but it’s not a problem because it broadly describes the beliefs of that individual.

As an instance of when “biodiversity” may not be a useful concept for nature conservation, Brian gives an example of salt marsh, often areas with rather low species diversity, as being of low priority for conservation because they are poor in “biodiversity”.  But this ignores the fact that all of the “official” definitions of biodiversity explicitly include diversity of habitats/communities/ecosystems/biomes in a defined geographical area.  For example the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity defines it as:

“the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.” [my emphasis]

Thus destroying an area of salt marsh may indeed result in few species being lost, but it would be a significant loss of biodiversity at that higher level of community/ecosystem, if a region has only salt marsh, woodland and grassland in it: in essence you’ve lost one third of your biodiversity because you’ve lost one third of your habitats.

Something that’s occurred to me over the last couple of days of reading comments and thinking about the questions that Brian posed is that “nature” and “biodiversity” are not actually synonymous at all. When people say they like “being in nature” or they “value contact with nature”, what they are usually saying is that they enjoy landscapes, seascapes, changes in the weather, being out of doors, etc., things which are not strictly part of what we understand as “biodiversity”.

Likewise, “protecting the environment” includes a whole set of non-biodiversity related questions and actions such as air and water quality, wastes management, sustainable use of resources, etc., much of which may not directly affect biodiversity at all.

“Biodiversity” has a specific meaning, as the definition above shows, even though that meaning can be broadly defined. Which sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not – and brought to mind the title of the Led Zeppelin fanzine: “Tight But Loose”*.  Biodiversity as a concept and as a field of research and action involves so many different types of stakeholder (ecologist, botanist, zoologist, artist, conservationist, activist) that (as I said) it provides a useful (loose) umbrella.  Problems only occur when people use different tight definitions and talk past one another.

The other aspect to Brian’s post is around the pros and cons of valuing ecosystem services, which is a much bigger argument in some ways, and I’m going to point readers to two blog posts, one recently from Steve Heard which I think is a very nice, concrete example that captures a lot of the uncertainties that Brian describes:

https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/invasions-beauty-and-ecosystem-services-a-conundrum/

The second is one of mine from last July related to the value of valuing nature, which was prompted by the Costanza et al. update paper:

https://jeffollerton.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/how-do-we-value-nature/

These are fascinating discussions that will run and run, I have no doubt.

 

*I’m fond of bringing musical examples into these blog posts 🙂

 

Nature Improvement Area final report published today by Defra

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As regular readers of the blog will be aware, over the past three years my research group has been involved as a lead partner in the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area (NIA) project, one of 12 NIA schemes across England.  I’ve posted regular updates on the the Nene Valley NIA, for example see my posts entitled Angry Birds! (and startled bees), To Dream a River, and Biodiversity conservation pays its way.

Although our group still has work to do on writing up the results for our ecosystem services assessment of the Nene Valley, the NIA scheme has formally ended, and today Defra has issued a final NIA Monitoring and Evaluation Report, plus an accompanying press release.  Defra (and the government) judges the NIA scheme to be a resounding success and I have to agree with them.  To quote from the press release and from the final report:

  • Nearly 20,000 hectares of natural habitat – the equivalent of almost 23,000 football pitches – has been created, restored or preserved across England.
  • The Nature Improvement Areas have also helped people reconnect with nature, with volunteers contributing over 47,000 days, school children earning their green fingers by planting trees, and communities getting involved in decision making.
  • The NIA partnerships mobilised resources with an equivalent value of £26.2 million (including the financial value of volunteer time and services in-kind) in addition to the initial government grant funding. Of this total, £15.3 million was from non-public sources (e.g. private sector and nongovernmental organisations).
  • Learnings from the Nature Improvement Areas will now help to inform Defra’s 25 year plan for action on the environment which will be published later in the year as part of a comprehensive, long-term vision to protect the country’s natural heritage.

This last point is a critical one; much was achieved with the government’s initial investment of £7.5 million over three years.  Continuation of this type of funding, for the original 12 NIAs and additional projects, would achieve so much more, especially if it was tied in with upland and river restoration projects that focused on natural flood defences (which we know will work).  The potential savings from such investment could run into 100s of millions of pounds.  Let’s hope Defra has the strategic vision to make this happen.

Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators

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Bee on apple blossom 2 - 1st May 2015Back in April 2015 I attended a two day meeting at Imperial College’s Silwood Park campus to discuss initial project ideas to address evidence gaps in the recent National Pollinator Strategy.  I mentioned the meeting in passing in a post at the time concerned with whether biodiversity scientists should also be campaigners, but didn’t say a lot about what conclusions we came to and what the next steps would be because at the time I was unclear on both of those counts: it was a very wide ranging meeting with a lot of participants coming at the question of pollinator conservation from different perspectives.  As well as academics there were representatives from the agrochemical industry, government research organisations, and  the National Farmers Union.

During summer 2015 one of the conveners of the meeting, Dr Richard Gill, herded cats organised colleagues, pulled together all of the text and ideas that were generated, and took on the task of seeing a summary of the meeting through from initial draft to publication.  It was a monumental effort, involving 27 authors and 86 manuscript pages, and Richard did a sterling job.  Entitled “Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators” it will appear as a chapter in the next volume of Advances in Ecological Research, which should be published later this month.

The abstract and contents for the chapter are below; if anyone wants a copy of the full chapter, please let me know.

Abstract

Insect pollination constitutes an ecosystem service of global importance, providing significant economic and aesthetic benefits as well as cultural value to human society, alongside vital ecological processes in terrestrial ecosystems. It is therefore important to understand how insect pollinator populations and communities respond to rapidly changing environments if we are to maintain healthy and effective pollinator services. This paper considers the importance of conserving pollinator diversity to maintain a suite of functional traits to provide a diverse set of pollinator services. We explore how we can better understand and mitigate the factors that threaten insect pollinator richness, placing our discussion within the context of populations in predominantly agricultural landscapes in addition to urban environments. We highlight a selection of important evidence gaps, with a number of complementary research steps that can be taken to better understand: i) the stability of pollinator communities in different landscapes in order to provide diverse pollinator services; ii) how we can study the drivers of population change to mitigate the effects and support stable sources of pollinator services; and, iii) how we can manage habitats in complex landscapes to support insect pollinators and provide sustainable pollinator services for the
future. We advocate a collaborative effort to gain higher quality abundance data to understand the stability of pollinator populations and predict future trends. In addition, for effective mitigation strategies to be adopted, researchers need to conduct rigorous field- testing of outcomes under different landscape settings, acknowledge the needs of end-users when developing research proposals and consider effective methods of knowledge transfer to ensure effective uptake of actions.

Contents
1. Importance of Insect Pollination
1.1 Providing an Ecosystem Service
1.2 Brief Introduction to Pollination Ecology and the Importance of Wild
Pollinators
2. Major Threats to the Pollination Service Provided by Insects
3. Steps in the Right Direction to Protect Insect Pollinator Services: Policy Actions
4. Understanding and Mitigating Specific Threats to Wild Insect Pollinators to Protect Pollinator Services
4.1 Understanding the Stability of Insect Pollinator Communities
4.2 Using Molecular Approaches to Monitor Insect Pollinators
4.3 How Do Parasites Shape Wild Insect Pollinator Populations?
4.4 Understanding Insect Pollinator Population Responses to Resource Availability
4.5 Engineering Flowering Field Margins as Habitats to Attract Insect Pollinators
4.6 How Might We Improve the Wider Countryside to Support Insect Pollinators
4.7 Insect Pollinators in Urban Areas
5. Considerations When Developing Future Research and Mitigation Strategies
Acknowledgements
Appendix
References

Biodiversity lost and found: extinct island birds and living African dragonflies

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Two newly published studies have caught my eye this week as exemplifying two important aspects of biodiversity research: describing new species and understanding which species we’ve recently lost due to human activities.

Researchers working in the Macaronesian islands of the Azores and Madeira have described five new species of endemic water rails (genus Rallus) that are thought to have gone extinct within the period when humans colonised the islands.  One species may even have hung on into historic times.  All of the species were either flightless or had reduced capacity for flying, making them vulnerable to over-exploitation by humans.  That’s a common phenomenon on oceanic islands, with the dodo being the archetypical example.

What’s particularly remarkable is that these five new species increases the known recent diversity of the genus Rallus by about one third!  The reference for the paper, and a link to the pdf, is:

Alcover et al. (2015) Five new extinct species of rails (Aves: Gruiformes: Rallidae) from the Macaronesian Islands (North Atlantic Ocean) Zootaxa 4057: 151–190

The second paper is a mass-naming of 60 (!) new African dragonfly and damselfly species by a team led by KD Dijkstra, a Dutch entomologist whose work I’ve mentioned previously.  I had the pleasure of teaching with KD on a Tropical Biology Association field course in Tanzania a few years ago and his knowledge of African natural history is astounding.

To put these 60 new species into context, it increases the known diversity of African dragonflies and damselflies by almost 10%.  The reference and a link to the paper follows:

Dijkstra et al. (2015) Sixty new dragonfly and damselfly species from Africa (Odonata). Odonatologica 44: 447-678

Finding appropriate names for all of these insect species has required a degree of ingenuity from the authors and a quote from the paper demonstrates how memorable and creative some of them are:

“The Peace Sprite Pseudagrion pacale was discovered on the Moa River near Sierra Leone’s diamond capital Kenema. Twenty years earlier villagers trapped between rebel and government forces on opposite banks drowned in these tranquil waters. Two years later Kenema became the national epicentre of the Ebola outbreak…… The horntail Tragogomphus grogonfla evokes a Liberian pronunciation of ‘dragonfly’, the sparklewing Umma gumma a classic Pink Floyd album…… and the claspertail Onychogomphus undecim simply its date of discovery, 11/11/11.”

One of the things that I’ve tried to impress upon my final year undergraduate students this term during our Monday morning biodiversity seminars is just how little we still don’t understand about life on our planet.  Discoveries of new species are a regular occurrence, and for most we know nothing about their life histories or their interactions with other species (the aspect of biodiversity that particularly interests me).  In other cases (as with the Macaronesian water rails) the species were gone before we knew that they even existed.  I wish that I could be sure that this won’t happen in the future, but it will, until we (and the future generations that we are teaching) do something to address the problems of habitat destruction and inappropriate exploitation of biodiversity.

8 things I learned from the Parliamentary Pollinators Update seminar – UPDATED

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POST event December 2015

As I advertised a couple of weeks ago, last Wednesday I was in London to take part in a Pollinators Update seminar at the Houses of Parliament organised by the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST).  It was a very interesting event and good to catch up with some of the latest ideas about pollinators and their conservation.  However it’s been a busy week since then and I’ve not had time to post a full account of the seminar, which was attended by over 40 people.  So I’ve decided to write a brief summary of eight things I learned that day from my fellow speakers* and from the day in general; in some cases I’ve linked to the original sources where available:

1.  About 46% of Europe’s bumblebees have declining populations (see the European Red List for Bees that I highlighted in an earlier post)

2.  Around 2% of the world’s bee species do 80% of the crop pollination (Kleijn et al. (2015) Nature Communications)

3.  Pollinators other than bees perform 39% of the flower visits to crops (Rader et al. (2015) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

4.  By 2100 the Red-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius), one of the commonest species in Europe, may be extinct across most of the continent due to climate change (Rasmont et al. (2015) Climatic Risk and Distribution Atlas of European Bumblebees)

5.  Only 6.6% of Entry Level Stewardship agreements by farmers across England included plans to grow nectar- and pollen-rich flower mixes.

6.  Criticism of laboratory studies of the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides are just as illogical as criticisms of field studies: both have their limitations and advantages, and both are needed.

7.  A panel of four experts on pollinators and pollination will largely agree about the answers to most questions an audience asks.

8.  A Westminster seminar such as this will attract very few MPs if it clashes with an important debate in the House of Commons, in this case about future military action in Syria.

UPDATE: here’s a number 9 suggested by Simon Potts: we all strongly support and encourage the setup of an All Party Parliamentary Group on “Pollinators” not just “honeybees” or “bees”.

 

*With thanks to my fellow panelists Simon Potts, Claire Carvell and Richard Gill, and to Kirsten Miller and the POST team for organising the event, and for the photograph of the panel in action.