Tag Archives: Nature conservation

Protecting British Pollinators event TOMORROW – 25th March

I meant to post about this earlier but it’s been a really busy few weeks, so apologies if this is late in the day for any of you. Tomorrow morning there’s a webinar being run by the Public Policy Exchange entitled: “Protecting British Pollinators”. There’s an interesting set of speakers and I’ve been asked to provide the opening introduction and to chair the event.

Here’s the link for more details and booking information:

https://www.publicpolicyexchange.co.uk/event.php?eventUID=LC25-PPE

It should be a good meeting, hope to see some of you there.

Online talks and training: here’s a selection of what I offer

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Over the past few months I’ve done a large number of online talks for a variety of audiences, including natural history and gardening societies, beekeeping groups, private companies, university estates departments, and ecological consultancies. I thought it would be useful to provide a list of what I offer, with a short description. All talks are accessible and understandable to a broad audience, and can be tailored to the individual needs of the group:

Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society is an introduction to the importance of pollinators and the pollination services that they provide to both wild and crop plants. The name, of course, reflects that of my recent book.

The Politics of Pollination is an account of how society (governments, organisations and individuals) has responded to the current “pollination crisis” (if that’s what it actually is…)

Bees in Cities: an Introduction to Urban Pollinators focuses on the positive roles that urban environments can play for pollinators, and the potential threats of city living.

Pollinators in Gardens gives practical advice on how to make your garden “pollinator friendly”.

Pollinator Conservation: Threats and Opportunities describes how and why pollinators are declining and what we can do about it at the individual and societal level.

Habitat Creation and Management for Pollinators gives an introduction to how NGOs, estates departments, consultancies, and so forth, can effectively support pollinators in ways that go beyond just planting flowers and putting up a few “bee hotels”.

To Be a Flower is an introduction to how flowers function and the ways in which they manipulate the behaviour of their pollinators to ensure reproduction.

Darwin’s Unrequited Isle: a Personal Natural History of Tenerife describes some of the field work that we’ve been doing on this most fascinating of the Canary Islands.

Biodiversity: What Is It and Why Should We Care? gives a very general overview of the topic of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Talks typically last for around 50 minutes, following which I’m happy to answer questions and discuss any issues that have arisen. I also offer a half- or full-day of training for those organisations that need more depth, for example ecological consultancies. Note that I charge for all of my talks and training. If you would like to enquire about any of this, please use the form on the Contact page.

Why did I write the book? An interview with NHBS

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The nice people at NHBS recently did a wide-ranging interview with me about my new book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society and what led me to write it. It covers a lot of ground, including climate change, food security, the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, and growing up in Sunderland.

Here’s the link:
https://www.nhbs.com/blog/jeff-ollerton-pollinators-pollination

“Bee Together” with YDMT – pollinator online talks during January and February

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As I write a slow haze of fine snow is falling, covering our garden with a thin white dusting. Spring feels a long way off, despite the emerging spears of daffodil leaves. But you can get a taste of what the new season will bring by signing up for a short series of free evening online talks on the topic of pollinators that has been organised by the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust – here’s the link for the Bee Together programme – and here’s more details of the talks:

Thursday January 28 at 7pm: Pollinators and Pollination: Nature and Society
An overview of the diversity of pollinators in Britain, why they are important, and the threats to that diversity with Jeff Ollerton.

Thursday February 18 (7pm): The B-Lines Project
Buglife’s B-Lines network is an imaginative solution to the problem of the loss of flowers and pollinators. B-Lines are a series of ‘insect pathways’ running through our countryside and towns, along which Buglife are restoring and creating a series of wildflower-rich habitat stepping stones. Catherine Jones talks about mapping the recently completed B-Lines map and some of the projects that have already created habitat for pollinators.

Thursday February 25 (7pm): The Hidden Lives of Garden Bees
Brigit Strawbridge Howard will explain some of the basic differences between bumblebees, solitary bees, and honeybees – including lifecycles and nesting behaviour; the problems they all face; and, most important, what we can do to help. Brigit is a wildlife gardener, amateur naturalist and advocate of bees. She writes and campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of native wild bees, and is the author of Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature.

I hope to see some of you there: Happy New Year everyone!

Finally, a physical copy of my book!

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Yesterday I was delighted to finally receive an advance copy of my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society! It’s been over three years in the writing and production, much longer than I had anticipated. But, as I describe in its pages, the book is the culmination of >50 years of experience, study and research. So perhaps three years isn’t so bad…

If you’re interested in buying a copy you can order it direct from Pelagic Publishing and from most of the large online booksellers. Let me know what you think.

The chapter titles for my book: Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society

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A few people have asked me about what’s covered in my book which is being published by Pelagic and is currently in production. Here’s the chapter titles:

Preface

1 The importance of pollinators and pollination

2 More than just bees: the diversity of pollinators

3 To be a flower

4 Fidelity and promiscuity in Darwin’s entangled bank

5 The evolution of pollination strategies

6 A matter of time: from daily cycles to climate change

7 Agricultural perspectives

8 Urban environments

9 The significance of gardens

10 The shifting fates of pollinators

11 New bees on the block

12 Managing, restoring and connecting habitats

13 The politics of pollination

14 Studying pollinators and pollination

As you can see it’s a very wide-ranging overview of the subject, and written to be accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike. To quote what I wrote in the Preface:

“While the book is aimed at a very broad audience, and is intended to be comprehensible to anyone with an interest in science and the environment, and their intersection with human societies, I hope it will also be of interest to those dealing professionally with plants and pollinators. The subject is vast, and those working on bee or hoverfly biology, for example, or plant reproductive ecology, may learn something new about topics adjacent to their specialisms. I certainly learned a lot from writing the book.”

The book is about 100,000 words in length, lots of illustrations, and there will be an index. My copy editor reckons there’s 450 references cited, though I haven’t counted. I do know that they run to 28 pages in the manuscript, and that’s with 11pt text. All going well it will be published before Christmas.

Forest restoration for climate change: don’t forget the pollinators and seed dispersers

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2020-02-07 09.29.47

There’s been much discussion in the news and online recently about seed collecting, habitat restoration, and tree planting as a way of storing carbon in an effort to reduce the effects of climate change. This is one of the (many) elements proposed by the recent Drawdown Framework. In fact their “Table of Solutions” ranks tropical forest restoration in the top 5 to 10 ways of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere, and temperate forest restoration and planting in the top 20.

At one end of the spatial scale, Markus Eichhorn relates the story of his father’s obsession with collecting oak seedlings to reforest the local countryside. At the other, there’s some very high profile forest restoration schemes going on at the moment; here’s a couple that immediately come to mind:

Grain for Green – China’s attempt to restore vegetation to abandoned farmland to reduce soil erosion and flooding. According to the Wikipedia entry “Grain for Green has involved 124 million people in 1,897 counties in 25 provinces……. By 2010, around 15 million hectares of farmland and 17 million hectares of barren mountainous wasteland were converted back to natural vegetation”.

Great Green Wall – a multinational initiative in Africa aimed at restoring the vegetation on the southern edge of the Sahara to combat desertification and mitigate climate change.

Several countries have also made a great deal of noise about marshaling huge public efforts to plant hundreds of millions of trees in a single day, for example India and Ethiopia.

These big schemes are all well and good: they generate a lot of publicity for actions on climate change and a warm, fuzzy feeling that governments and people are Doing Something. But there’s a couple of problems. First of all, planting trees is not enough: we could not plant enough trees in the world to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels. Secondly, planted trees require nurturing. It is not enough just to put in some young plants and hope for the best; a high proportion of trees die even when well looked after. If they are just planted and ignored, who knows how many will survive?

However habitat restoration is important; it’s not a silver bullet solution to climate change, but it is part of our toolbox of Things We Can Do. Just as importantly, restoring habitats provides more opportunities for species to move in response to changing climates, and to recolonise areas from where they have been extirpated. And of course diverse, functioning ecosystems support human societies in ways both tangible and unquantifiable.

With all of this in mind I was interested to read a piece by John Carey in PNAS entitled “The best strategy for using trees to improve climate and ecosystems? Go natural“. There’s some really inspiring stories in here, it’s well worth taking a look. The main message of the article is that allowing forest vegetation to naturally regenerate, from seeds, and dormant roots and stumps, is by far the best way to ensure that trees survive and the restoration is successful. However there’s something fundamental missing from that article: the role of species interactions in determining the survival of these forests over long time scales.

The vast majority of the world’s plants are animal pollinated; this includes trees. Even in the UK where we often associate trees with wind pollination, about 65% of our native species are insect pollinated. In the tropics this can rise to 100% of species within a community. Although many of those trees can engage in some self-pollination, in the long term this is likely to result in genetic problems associated with inbreeding. Outcrossing sex is common in plants for a good reason.

Similarly many trees require animals to move their offspring away from the parent plant. This avoids competition between parent and offspring, and the impacts of diseases and pathogens caused by the Janzen-Connell Effect. I don’t have any comparable statistics on the proportion of trees, regionally and globally, that use animals as seed dispersers (does anyone? Please comment below if I’ve missed something). But I’m willing to bet that it’s a high proportion.

Without pollinators and seed dispersers, restored forests will not flourish in the long term. There seems to be an implicit assumption that once the forests are established, the pollinators and seed dispersers will follow. That may be true up to a point, but it shouldn’t be taken for granted, particularly for isolated fragments of forest with no ecological connections to more established areas of woodland. These are the aspects that are missing from John Carey’s (otherwise fine) article, and indeed from wider discussions about forest restoration and tree planting. As so often when we talk about the conservation of biodiversity we neglect to consider the role of species interactions. I’ve been trying to press home that point for years, on the blog and in papers, and I was pleased to see an interesting contribution to this topic by Pedro Luna and colleagues from Mexico on “Measuring and Linking the Missing Part of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function: The Diversity of Biotic Interactions“.

Let’s not forget: species do not occur in isolation, and the biodiversity of species interactions in fundamental to the ecology of the planet.

The role of press freedom in protecting the environment

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Ollerton et al Press freedom Figure 1

Recently I’ve been working with a couple of journalist colleagues at the University of Northampton on a short article exploring the relationship between press freedom and environmental protection in different countries. That piece has just been published on the Democratic Audit website – here’s the link.

I think that the findings are really interesting, and timely in an age when press freedoms are being eroded and journalists physically attacked and even murdered.

Should environmentalists be optimistic in a time of uncertainty?

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Over at the Ideas for Sustainability blog Joern Fischer posted a really interesting piece on 1st January called “A new kind of hope” about the current state of the world and whether, from an environmental perspective, there’s really anything to be optimistic about. If environmental collapse via climate change and over-exploitation is inevitable, the collapse of civilization is not far behind. Joern’s piece is well worth reading, lots to think about in there, and I highly recommend that you take a look.

I posted a comment there which I’m going to copy here and add to because I think it bears repeating.

Going back to at least my student days I always thought that there was only a slim chance of our civilization making it to the end of the 20th century without some kind of catastrophe wiping us out. So it was a surprise to celebrate the millennium as December 1999 segued into January 2000. Since then, whilst I think there’s lots to be optimistic about such as the increase in renewable energy, large-scale habitat restoration in some regions, and a growing recognition of the environmental damage of biocides and plastics, there’s also the nagging fear that it’s too little, too late.

These days I alternate between wild optimism and deep depression over the fate of humanity and of the planet. It’s so easy to get sucked into the vortex of negative environmental narratives and ignore the positive ones. Especially so if you actively use social media. So I try hard to be optimistic and resist the urge to just give up, but the political situation across much of the world makes that difficult. As I learn more about the natural world through my own research and that of others’, and as world events such as Brexit and the rise of the Far Right unfold, I realise how little any of us really know about anything at all. Thus I have a deep suspicion of anyone who spouts certainties, whether they be moral, philosophical, religious, scientific, political, or artistic. All we can do is feel our way into the future, cautiously.

With respect to the question that Joern poses of “If we have to re-build something after some kind of collapse … do we have ideas for what that something will be?”, this is the rationale behind the Dark Mountain Project, a loose collaboration of writers, artists, thinkers, etc., who are trying to look for new narratives for humanity and the planet we depend upon. I’ve written a couple of pieces for their journal, most recently for issue 10 where I discussed the role of poetry in science. And although I don’t buy into their certainty that there will be a collapse, I think it’s an important project for understanding where we are now, where we’ve been, and where we might be going to. Here’s a link to the project’s website.

The discussion over whether we should be optimistic about the future of the planet that supports us, and how that optimism will play out, is important for scientists, and society at large, to be having. By coincidence as I was writing this post the map above started circulating on Twitter. It’s a Russian teaching aid from 1928 showing the different biomes of the USSR and can be downloaded from this site.

What really struck me about this graphic was the certainty with which it represents the natural world, as if all of this could never change. There are polar bears on ice flows and a frozen tundra in the far north; water still fills the Aral Sea, hyenas feast in the steppe, snow leopards haunt the mountains, Siberian tigers prowl the pine forests. And an optimistic looking whale heads towards Japan. Some of this is gone, some will almost certainly change, but a lot of it we could save, if we want to, saving ourselves in the process.

Why I’m joining the People’s Walk for Wildlife on Saturday 22nd September

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Peoples walk for wildlife

If you live in the UK and have an interest in wildlife you’ve probably heard about the event that takes place in London this coming Saturday: The People’s Walk for Wildlife. If you follow that link you’ll find a video of Chris Packham explaining what the walk is all about and why he’s organised it, plus logistical information, timings, etc.

Karin and I are going to join the walk and I thought I’d give a brief summary of why I think it’s important for people to take part.

If you watch the video you’ll see that Chris does a great job of laying out the issue of wildlife loss, a loss not just of species but of abundance. There are species that still can be found in Britain but which have declined in numbers by 90% or more over my lifetime. Such species can be found in all of the major groups of biodiversity in this country: birds, mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians, insects and other invertebrates, fungi, and plants. Many, many millions of individuals gone from our countryside.

Why has this happened? Well, the causes are complex and inter-related. Agricultural intensification over the last century has been a major issue as I’ve previously discussed on this blog in relation to pollinator extinctions. But that’s only part of it. Another big problem that we have in the UK is an unwillingness to let nature just get on with itself. We feel that we have to manage everything: Too many ravens? Cull them. Hedgerows or road verges looking a bit untidy? Cut them. Old tree infected with a fungus? Chop it down.

In part this mindset is linked to an idea of what natural heritage should look like, an idea of order within a landscape, of making the countryside look pretty, and of doing things simply because that’s what our predecessors did. A good example was recently tweeted by Dave Goulson who had found mole traps on a Natural Trust property that he visited; as Dave rightly said: “When will we stop slaughtering harmless wildlife that causes us the tiniest inconvenience?” There is no reason in this day and age to kill moles – what conceivable harm do they do? In fact, as ecosystem engineers, they are an important part of the ecology of the British countryside.

One of the reasons why this is happening largely unnoticed by the government agencies responsible for the environment is that our landscapes change at a very slow rate. Indeed places like the Lake District or the Scottish Highlands or the Chiltern Hills look much the same as they have done for hundreds of years. Visually they are still stunning places to visit and that’s why they attract millions of tourists every year, and also why people enjoy living there. But they have lost much of their wildlife and, with it, some of the ecological function that makes them work as ecosystems. If this continues then natural processes such as dispersal of seeds by birds and mammals, and the subsequent maintenance of tree populations, will cease.

But that’s okay isn’t it? Trees and shrubs not establishing themselves: go out and plant them by hand. Is this really what we want? If it is then we will end up turning our countryside into a museum. And not even a very good museum at that: not a museum with dynamic interactive displays, rather a static, dull set of exhibits that you can only peer at through dusty glass.

So that’s why we are joining the People’s Walk for Wildlife next Saturday: this is an important issue and people need to show government that they are concerned. I hope you agree and I hope you will join us.

Dave G. has promised to come dressed as a bumblebee; I’ve seen his costume and he’s a man of his word, so it’ll be worth looking out for him. I can’t promise anything so flamboyant but I may well take a placard that says something like: “Save ALL of our pollinators, not just bees!” If you spot it, do some over and say hello.