Tag Archives: Nature conservation

August 26, 2020 · 9:47 am

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

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.

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March 6, 2020 · 11:41 am

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

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.

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October 3, 2019 · 10:59 am

The role of press freedom in protecting the environment

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.

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January 20, 2019 · 12:36 pm

Should environmentalists be optimistic in a time of uncertainty?

zoogeo-ussr

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.

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September 17, 2018 · 11:23 am

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

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.

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August 20, 2018 · 10:38 am

British phenological records indicate high diversity and extinction rates among late-summer-flying pollinators – a recently published study

Balfour et al Figure 1

Natural history records of plant flowering and pollinator foraging, much of them collected by well informed amateurs, have huge scientific importance. One of the values of such records to ecology is that it allows us to document where these species occur in space and when they are active in time. This can be done at a range of spatial and temporal scales, but large-scale patterns (for example at a country level) are, I think, especially useful because they provide scientific evidence that can inform national conservation strategies.

During 2017 I collaborated with a young early career researcher at the University of Sussex, Dr Nick Balfour, on an analysis of the phenologies of British pollinators and insect pollinated plants.  That study was recently published (see citation below) and I think that the results are fascinating.

Nick did most of the leg work on this, which involved assessing more than one million records that document the activity times of aculeate wasps, bees, butterflies and hoverflies held in the databases by three of the UK’s main insect recording organisations, the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society (BWARS), the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) and the Hoverfly Recording Scheme (HRS).  Information on flowering times was taken from a standard British flora (Clapham et al. 1990 – Flora of the British Isles. Cambridge University Press).

As well as looking at annual flight periods and flowering trends for these organisms we also focused on pollinator and plant species that were endangered or extinct. Here are some headline results and thoughts on what the work shows:

  • About two-thirds (62%) of pollinator species peak in their flight times in the late summer (July and August), though there was some variation between the different groups – see the figure from the paper above).  Particularly noticeable was the double peak of the bees, with the first peak denoting the activity of many early-emerging solitary bees, such as species of the genus Andrena, whilst the second peak is other solitary bees plus of course the bumblebees which by that time have built up their colonies.
  • A rather fixed phenological pattern with respect to different types of plants was also apparent, which I was not expecting at all: insect pollinated trees tend to flower first, followed by shrubs, then herbaceous species (again, refer to the figure above). This might be because larger plants such as trees and shrubs can store more resources from the previous year that will give them a head start in flowering the following year, but that idea needs testing.
  • Putting those first two points together, what it means is that trees tend to be pollinated by those earlier emerging bees and hoverflies, whereas the herbs are mainly pollinated by species that are active later.
  • When looking at the extinct and endangered pollinators, the large majority of them (83%) were species with a peak flight times in the late summer, a much larger proportion than would be expected given that 62% of all species are active at that time. However this was mainly influenced by extinct bee species and the same pattern was not observed in other groups.
  • The obvious explanation for that last point is that historical changes in land use have led to a dramatic reduction in late summer flowering herbaceous species and the subsequent loss of floral resources has been highly detrimental to those bees. But intriguingly no such pattern was apparent for the endangered pollinators and clearly there are complex reasons why pollinators should become rare or extinct, a point that I have discussed previously on the blog.
  • The lack of late summer flowering resources for pollinators is a contentious issue however as plant conservation groups have in the past recommend that meadows and road verges are cut in late summer to maximise plant species richness.  Mowing road verges once or twice a year certainly benefits plant diversity, as this recent review by Jakobsson et al. (2018) demonstrates.  But there’s very little data available that assesses how timing of cutting can affect pollinators.  The only study that I know of (and if I’ve missed any, please let me know) that has considered this is the PhD work of one of my former students, Dr Sam Tarrant who looked at pollinators and plants on restored landfill sites compared to nearby nature reserves.  In a paper that we published in the journal Restoration Ecology in 2012 we showed that on restored landfill sites the abundance of pollinators in autumn surveys (conducted September-October) was just as high as for summer surveys.  On nature reserves, which are routinely cut from mid-July onward, this was not the case.

Here’s the full citation of Nick’s study with a link to the publisher’s website, and a copy of the abstract is below.  If anyone wants a PDF, drop me a line:

Balfour, N., Ollerton, J., Castellanos, M.C., Ratnieks, F.L.W. (2018) British phenological records indicate high diversity and extinction rates among late-summer-flying pollinators. Biological Conservation 222: 278-283

Abstract:

The long-term decline of wild and managed insect pollinators is a threat to both agricultural output and biodiversity, and has been linked to decreasing floral resources. Further insight into the temporal relationships of pollinators and their flowering partners is required to inform conservation efforts. Here we examined the
phenology of British: (i) pollinator activity; (ii) insect-pollinated plant flowering; and (iii) extinct and endangered pollinator and plant species. Over 1 million records were collated from the historical databases of three British insect monitoring organisations, a global biodiversity database and an authoritative text covering the national flora. Almost two-thirds (62%) of pollinator species have peak flight observations during late-summer
(July and August). This was the case across three of the groups studied: aculeate wasps (71% of species), bees (60%), and butterflies (72%), the exception being hoverflies (49%). When species geographical range (a proxy for abundance) was accounted for, a clear late-summer peak was clear across all groups. By contrast, there is marked temporal partitioning in the flowering of the major plant groups: insect-pollinated tree species blossoming predominantly during May (74%), shrubs in June (69%), and herbs in July (83%). There was a positive correlation between the number of pollinator species on the wing and the richness of both flowering insect pollinated herbs and trees/shrubs species, per calendar month. In addition, significantly greater extinctions occurred in late-summer-flying pollinator species than expected (83% of extinct species vs. 62% of all species). This trend was driven primarily by bee extinctions (80% vs. 60%) and was not apparent in other groups. We contend that this is principally due to declines in late-summer resource supplies, which are almost entirely provisioned by herbs, a consequence of historical land-use change. We hypothesize that the seasonality of interspecific competition and the blooming of trees and mass-flowering crops may have partially buffered spring flying pollinators from the impacts of historical change.

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July 30, 2017 · 1:19 am

Final thoughts from the International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen

IBC 47 Veg market

Despite my best efforts I’ve not been able to produce a daily post about the International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Shenzhen.  The days were just too busy: too many interesting people to talk to; too many great talks to see; too much cold beer to be drunk and tasty food to be eaten; and a too-comfortable bed to collapse into at the end of a long, long day.

It’s Sunday today, and the closing ceremony took place yesterday afternoon.  Speeches were made and thanks offered to our Chinese hosts.  It was a fitting end to what has been a truly remarkable conference, the like of which I’ve never previously experienced, and may never again.  It wasn’t just the scale of it – almost 7,000 delegates giving and attending hundreds of talks – but just the very positive buzz of all of these plant scientists determined to make a difference in some way, through their research and education and outreach work.  That’s been the main theme of this conference: that a healthy global population living in a safe and sustainable world is not possible without plants, and to achieve that we must take the plant sciences very, very seriously indeed.  Plants are the foundation of our civilization and the key to surviving the future.

Anyone who doubts that last sentence should have joined us the other day when we made a short visit to a local fruit and vegetable market.  Beautifully displayed on low stalls was botanical produce that reflected both thousands of years of Chinese cultivation and crop breeding, including food plants not very familiar in the west……

IBC 45 Veg market.jpg

IBC 46 Veg market

….together with the produce that’s only been a part of the Chinese diet for a few hundred years, or less, following its introduction from Europe and the Americas, including current staples such as chillies, squashes and potatoes:

IBC 43 Veg market

Global movements of food crops have enriched diets and supported the populations of entire countries: most of the fruit and vegetables that we eat in the UK, for instance, are not even native to Europe let alone the British Isles.

During this trip to the market I was able to add two new plant families to my life list of those I’ve eaten.  They were Sauruaceae (the leaves and rhizomes of Houttuynia cordata) and Portulacaceae (Portulaca oleracea being a common leaf vegetable in some parts of the world, but not the UK).  That brings my current total of pant families I’ve eaten to more than 90.

That theme of the importance of plants was codified by the launch at the IBC of the Shenzhen Declaration on Plant Sciences, on which the Natural History Museum’s Sandy Knapp has been an author; hopefully you can read the seven priorities in this image:

IBC 40 Shenzhen Declaration

The Shenzhen Declaration provides both a rallying call for plant scientists to convince their governments of the importance of their work, but also highlights how seriously China takes the whole concept of sustainable development.  It’s remarkable (but actually perfectly logical) that such a fast developing country should be the prime mover in the area of green sustainability.  Only time will tell if they are doing enough, at a pace that will make a difference.

There were a couple of awards made at the closing ceremony, including the first ever Shenzhen Award to Prof. Peter Raven, 81 years old and still going strong.  Earlier in the week a colleague introduced me to this giant of botany and evolutionary biology, and I got to shake his hand, feeling a bit awe struck I have to admit!

IBC 40 Peter Raven.jpg

The Engler Medal went to Chinese botanist Prof. Hong Deyuan for his systematic work on paeonies and other Chinese plants:

IBC 40 Hong Engler.jpg

So, that’s it for another six years.  IBC 20 will be held in Rio in 2023; the Shenzhen Congress has set a high bar, but we’re sure that Brazil can match it!

IBC 39 Rio

Today I’m off to Fairy Lake Botanical Garden to do a bit of exploring with some colleagues, then I fly home tomorrow evening.  It’s been a wonderful trip but I’m looking forward to seeing my family, our cats, and how our garden has changed in the short time I’ve been away.  My sincerest thanks to all the friends and colleagues who have made this such a stimulating and extraordinary conference.  Especial thanks to our Chinese hosts who made us feel so welcome, and the IBC Awards Committee for providing me with an “Excellent Scholar” award to enable me to take part. Over and out from Shenzhen.

IBC 37 - Jeff

 

 

 

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February 25, 2017 · 11:40 am

Proposals to “sequence the DNA of all life on Earth” suffer from the same issues as “naming all the species”

Tanzania ichneumonid P1000757

There’s a short piece on the website of the journal Science this week entitled “Biologists propose to sequence the DNA of all life on Earth“.  I don’t propose to say much about it except to say to anyone interested: read that piece, then read my recent post entitled “The road to degradation: is ‘naming all the species’ achievable or even desirable?”

In my view “naming all the species” and “sequencing the DNA of all life” suffer the same issues and flaws. At a time when research funding is becoming ever more difficult to obtain (in part because it’s becoming more concentrated on fewer institutions and individuals) such multi-billion dollar initiatives make great headlines, but are they value for money?

At the moment Science also has a series of stories on its conservation news web pages, and you can find others all over the web, that point to our inability to conserve even large, charismatic species such as elephants and the big cats, and how this in turn can impact on human survival and wellbeing.  Perhaps we should devote more funding and more research energy to fixing these issues before we attempt such large-scale projects?

As always, your opinions and comments are welcomed.

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October 8, 2016 · 6:33 am

International Wildlife Gardening Conference – 23rd November

20160702_100724An International Wildlife Gardening conference is to be held at the Natural History Museum in London on 23rd November this year, organised by the Wildlife Gardening Forum.  The theme is:  “What European wildlife and nature gardeners can learn from each other” – very apt in these post-Brexit times.  The cost is £50 for the day (including lunch) and you can book by following this link.

Here is the programme for the day:

10.00 Registration and tea/coffee

10.30 Introduction and background; The Forum and the Wildlife gardening movement in England and Wales – Dr Steve Head (WLGF)

10.50 Nature gardening in Germany: an historical view from the start to today. How useful is the concept of native plants for wildlife? – Dr Reinhard Witt (President of Naturgarten e.V. [Nature Gardeners’ Association], Germany)

11.25 Naturgarten e.V.: nature-oriented design in gardens, educational institutions and public space in an era of climate change – Ulrike Aufderheide (Naturgarten e.V. [Nature Gardeners’ Association], Germany)

12.00 Lunch and networking (optional guided tour of the Wildlife Garden)

1.30 Biodiversity path in a heritage park: a case study – Jérôme Constant and Carole Paleco (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) (Afternoon Session Chair: Andrew Salisbury)

2.05 Looking for oases – Marianne van Lier and Willy Leufgen (Stichting Oase [Oasis Foundation], Netherlands)

2.40 Tea/coffee

3.00 Looking after our roots and the brown stuff – Sarah Rubalcava (Ireland)

3.35 19 years of Garden for Life: working together to promote wildlife gardening in Scotland – Dr Deborah Long and Juliette Camburn (Garden for Life Forum, Scotland)

4.10 Panel session with speakers (led by Adrian Thomas)

4.30 Summing up and Close

(Please note; this programme may be subject to late changes)

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February 21, 2016 · 1:02 pm

Rewilding reconsidered: academic disagreements, big science, and beavers.

P1110320Rewilding has been the topic of a couple of blog posts over the last few years  (for example here, in relation to the George Monbiot-narrated video about the wolves of Yellowstone Park; and also here, about the notion that perhaps we should also think about rewilding the human digestive ecosystem).

Since then there’s been a lot of activity with respect to rewilding, some of it practical and adding to the evidence base, some of it conceptual and controversial.  So I thought I’d do a quick round up of rewilding-related items I’d seen recently: feel free to suggest others.

In an open-access paper in Current Biology, entitled “Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation” David Nogués-Bravo and colleagues ask “what exactly is rewilding, and is it based on sound ecological understanding?”  Their conclusion is that “there is a worrying lack of consensus about what rewilding is and what it isn’t” and that “scientific support for the main ecological assumptions behind rewilding, such as top-down control of ecosystems, is limited”.  They go on to discuss the potential dangers of (re)introducing species into existing ecosystems, including both ecological and economic concerns.

Meanwhile Jens-Christian Svenning and colleagues have an open access paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of the USA about “Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research” which takes a much more positive view of the potential benefits of rewilding, though still urges caution and further research, pointing out that “empirical research on trophic rewilding is still rare, fragmented, and geographically biased, with the literature dominated by essays and opinion pieces.”  Science writer John Carey provides some useful wider context to this discussion in a companion piece.

Subsequently Dustin and Daniel Rubenstein critiqued the Svenning et al. paper with an opinion piece called “From Pleistocene to trophic rewilding: A wolf in sheep’s clothing“, to which Svenning and colleagues replied: “Time to move on from ideological debates on rewilding“.

Svenning et al.‘s request for more empirical data on the effects of rewilding has been heeded this month by a study in Freshwater Biology from Alan Law and colleagues on “Habitat engineering by beaver benefits aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem processes in agricultural streams“.  Focusing on the recent reintroduction of beaver to Scotland, these researchers documented positive effects of the beaver on removal of inorganic nutrients from streams, and overall freshwater invertebrate diversity.

I find it really exciting that so much interesting debate and data are now being generated on the topic of rewilding: it’s fascinating and important science with a clear practical component that could leave the planet richer and in better condition for future generations.  It certainly deserves to be better funded, perhaps taking a slice of the “big science” pie from physics and astronomy, an argument that has been raised several times by Charley Krebs on his Ecological Rants blog.

As a researcher I don’t have a horse in this race (or even a Konick pony, such as are being used in a small-scale rewilding project at Wicken Fen). However I do wonder what a “rewilded” landscape would look like for pollinators in Britain, given that most of their diversity and abundance is associated with open grassland and heathland habitats, which were rare in these islands prior to human deforestation.  Having said that, a greater density of large mammalian herbivores can certainly open up woodland – see Bakker et al.‘s paper on “Combining paleo-data and modern exclosure experiments to assess the impact of megafauna extinctions on woody vegetation“.

As a teacher these discussions provide a lot of scope for interesting class exercises and seminars on the topic, which I’ll certainly be developing more next year.  Expect this to be an ongoing topic on the blog.

 

 

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