On the second morning of ECCB 2012, I attended a symposium on “Global biodiversity scenarios to inform environmental policies”.
Jerry Harrison (UNEP) and Bengt-Gunnar Jonsson (Mid Sweden University) discussed the newly established Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES http://www.ipbes.net), the remaining process and the role of SCB in all of it. The platform is still finding its form, aiming at efficient synthesizing of knowledge to facilitate effective conservation decisions.
Rob Alkemade (PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency) presented scenarios of global land use change and its impacts on biodiversity. These are scenarios of hope: according to him, it is possible to achieve multiple sustainability goals: “We have a choice”. Transformative change is necessary at multiple sectors, and it all boils down to whether our governance structures are able to respond to the challenge. Their report can be found at http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/2012/roads-from-rio20
Ben Collen (Zoological Society of London) discussed biodiversity indicator frameworks, such as the Living Planet Index that has been successful in bringing attention to the alarming biodiversity decline. An important limitation of indicators of state, such as the LPI, is that they do not tell us what we should do about the things they indicate. They have recently introduced a framework for modelling conservation effectiveness using the Red List Index and the LPI to compare and assess the effects of alternative policies and call for testable hypotheses about impacts of policy choices (see Nicholson et al. 2012).
Daniele Baisero, Piero Visconti and Carlo Rondinini (Sapienza University of Rome) presented their work on how extinction risk of mammals would develop under global land use scenarios up to 2050. Good news is that given concerted global effort, the plummeting trend in the Red List Index can be halted and brought to current level in the long term! The scenarios can also inform policy by indicating where likelihood of conservation success is great or where it remains low. Follow the work of the Global Mammal Assessment Program at www.globalmammal.org.
After lunch, I attended a symposium on “The emergence of scales in conservation biology”. It seemed to be a diverse set of interesting topics ranging from basic community ecology questions to defining the scales of different conservation actions to discussing the substance of uncertainty. And it was!
Szabolcs Lengyel (University of Debrecen) presented a literature review that covered a range of different conservation actions and the scale at which they were studied and discussed in literature. Their aim was to identify scale mismatches between conservation actions and policy (for introduction to the topic, see Cumming et al. 2006). My attention was caught by their finding that the overwhelming majority of spatial conservation planning studies had a regional scale of focus. This is a nice result, as land use planning usually also takes place at a more regional level. However, there should be come sort of a balance between large scale planning (so that biodiversity features would be protected where they are most abundant) and regional planning.
Yrjö Haila (University of Tampere) distinguished quantitative or technical uncertainty (“rejecting a true 0-hypothesis”) from qualitative uncertainty (“is our question nonsense to begin with”). Scientists have developed reasonable tools to address the technical uncertainty, but what about the qualitative kind? We can aim at either reducing or embracing uncertainty.
John Coll (NUI Maynooth) presented predicted future distributions for habitats and species in Ireland. Their work was based on regional climate models which are likely to provide more accurate estimates about the climatic processes at a national scale.
Calum Brown (University of St. Andrews) discussed the mechanisms of coexistence. The aim was to disentangle different community processes and determine at which spatial scales they are important. In their study system, tropical rainforests, they found evidence of a mixture of processes.
Manuel Morales (Universidad autonoma de Madrid) also discussed community ecology and processes, however his scale and perspective differed from the previous talk. He had studied farmland bird communities and was interested in whether the community structure was determined by biogeographical factors or land management. It seemed that agricultural intensification had a negative impact on diversity. Habitat availability and quality were associated to increased taxonomic and functional diversity.
In the evening, there was a poster session. I found three posters particularly interesting (I’m sure there would have been many more, but time and space were limited and I did not have much time to research the posters before the session).
Yoan Fourcade (University of Angers) had studied the effect of data bias on species distribution model performance with corncrake and found that it indeed made a difference: using a large but biased collection of observations resulted in a highly skewed predicted distribution, whereas resampling the data to from a smaller but unbiased dataset resulted in a prediction that was far more realistic.
Aapo Kahilainen (University of Jyväskylä) asked whether there is a conflict between maximizing species diversity and within-species genetic diversity. He presented a conceptual map of the potential outcomes of different environmental characteristics of protected areas both at a community level and population level. The literature provides mixed conclusions. Protecting large areas seems to be a solution that is beneficial for both objectives.
Luc de Bruyn (Research Institute for Nature and Forest) explored the impacts of different policy scenarios on how biodiversity would evolve in a landscape, incorporating land use and metapopulation dynamics. This is a very interesting approach and it would have been interesting to discuss with him – however, I did not have a chance to do that.
Two days of ECCB to go!