In March 19-21 2013, I made my second visit to the annual Student Conference on Conservation Science in Cambridge, UK. Here is a summary on my visit.
Plenaries
Yadvinder Malhi from the University of Oxford gave a talk on the impact of climate change on tropical forest function and diversity. He started by presenting several environmental factors that could affect the vegetation structure and the overall gain of biomass in varying ways under changing climate. Next, he pointed out that our knowledge on the overall response of the biosphere to the increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is still quite limited. He presented data on recent small-scale and large-scale studies in the tropical areas that have indicated higher-than-predicted gain of biomass in several tropical areas within the past years. (However, studies have also indicated severe periods of droughts and changes in the relative abundances of species.) Then he moved on to demonstrate how much this uncertainty affects vegetation change predictions under climate change scenarios. The scenarios he showed, with the hypothesized biomass gain response to the increasing CO2 concentrations included, gave an impression that the effects of climate change on the Amazon rainforests may not necessarily be as catastrophic as previously thought. However, numerous unknown factors remain. For tropical plants, there is very little knowledge on their thermal tolerance ranges.
Azzam Alwash from Nature Iraq gave an absolutely fascinating talk on the past destruction and the current restoration attempts of Iraq’s marshlands. I had no previous knowledge on Iraq’s past water world – which did not include marshland ecosystems only, but also traditional cultures that were dependent on marshlands and their natural products. To many people’s surprise, restoration of the waterways and flood periods in Iraq has resulted in a relatively rapid return of grasses, birds and even people’s traditional livelihoods.
Debbie Pain from Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust talked about their conservation projects targeted at saving three critically endangered bird species: the Madagascar Pochard (Madagascar), the Spoon-billed Sandpiper (East Russia) and the Gyps Vulture (India). She demonstrated nicely how demographic and environmental modeling can be used to understand the risks driving species to the brink of extinction and to study the types and extent of conservation measures that are needed to rescue them.
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, an anthropologist from UC Davis, showed how an anthropological study can reveal elements behind illegal killing of endangered species. Her story focused on the lion-killing tradition of young men in the Katavi region, Tanzania. Lion-killing was rewarded with money by local people as per their tradition, which in turn gave young men monetary interest to poach lions in the national park. Their study revealed the cultural origins of the tradition and some key elements that maintained it in the contemporary context. An awareness-raising campaign that was targeted at these elements was able to reduce the monetary reward of illegal lion-killing. Her talk was a good remainder how much importance there is on understanding the cultures you work with when doing conservation.
Workshops
Lynn Dicks and her associates organized a workshop on how evidence-based conservation can be applied to real-life conservation questions, and on how conservation scientists can build evidence-base to be used by conservation managers in the future. We practiced how the feasibility of a potential conservation solution can be studied by looking at it with various perspectives, and how evidence from previous conservation projects, being collected at their website ConservationEvidence.com, can be utilized in decision-making. I was already partly familiar with this project following Lynn Dick’s plenary talk at our department’s Spring Symposium in March 2013, but I got better insight into the practical side of this, and I also got very interested in posting my own project at some point to their new journal Conservation Evidence.
On the second day, I attended Bill Amos’ workshop on practical population genetics. Prof. Amos especially wanted to clarify the often misunderstood concept of inbreeding depression by presenting “the sponge metaphor”. In this metaphor, the sponge depicts the population to be studied; the larger the sponge, the larger the population. A sponge can absorb water (harmful mutations) relative to its size. When the sponge is fully wet (has a certain threshold amount of harmful mutations), any additional water dripping onto the sponge (new mutations) will lead into some water dripping off the sponge (inbreeding depression; lowered fitness of the individuals that have got two copies of harmful mutations). He wanted to make a point that inbreeding depression is independent of population size; large populations have more genes subjected to mutations and thus generally a larger pool of harmful mutations. This has several implications. For instance, the benefits of genetic rescue projects of small populations may prove to be short-term, as individuals imported from larger populations are likely to bring a large number of single copies of harmful alleles with them, and after a couple of generations these genes will have become common in the small population. We went on chatting about whether intentional inbreeding should be used in captive breeding programmes to bring about benefits of purging, or whether the target should be the maximum preservation of genetic diversity. After all, not all genetic diversity is beneficial for the species. On the other hand, Prof. Amos mentioned that in the captive breeding programmes of the cheetah, females are nowadays often allowed to choose their mates, which has shown to improve breeding success.
Student talks
Student talks in the SCCS covered a wide range of interdisciplinary topics on conservation, based on a great variety of creative study methods and imaginative research questions, from all corners of the World. Here is a summary of just a fraction of them:
The role of religious sites to nature conservation was highlighted in two talks: in Ashley Massey’s talk on The Gambia’s mythical dragon ninki-nanka and Emma Shepheard-Walwyn’s talk on the Kayas of Kenya. The talks showed that it is important to keep an eye on possible cultural changes in areas where traditional religions have played a major role in the preservation of the remaining forests (for instance, in The Gambia, there is only 0.2 % of the natural forests left!), since the loss of cultural beliefs may lift off the taboos that have prevented the loss of these sites in the past. Fortunately, CBD Aichi targets already acknowledge the role of religious sites in nature conservation.
Two speakers showed that mitigation measures may sometimes work. Randriamamonjy Voahirana Claudia had studied the role of education campaigns among mine workers in the reduction of hunting of endangered lemur species in Madagascar. Her results showed that education campaigns among mine workers had had a significant effect on mine worker’s awareness on protected species and the illegal status of hunting these species, which had reduced the usage of endangered lemur species as food. With similar promising outcomes, Joseph Bull demonstrated potentially feasible biodiversity offsetting schemes for the gas extraction areas in Uzbekistan.
Sofie Monsarrat’s award-winning (1st prize) talk on the historical ranges of marine mammals was the first presentation I’ve seen to utilize the Prezi presentation tool in a way that was appealing to follow. The basis of her visual presentation was the World map highlighting the World’s oceans, from which she zoomed into particular local areas and historical anecdotes of conflict and sightings and then back to the global level. A hierarchical structure such as this is the only type of a presentation structure where I can imagine the Prezi technology to perform better than normal slides.
Rocio Maria Lopez de la Lama’s award-winning (3rd prize) talk on Peruvian seafood preferences was one of my favourites in this conference. It gave a nice example on how to study the causes of species endangerment within the society and also on how practical conservation strategies can be developed simultaneously while gathering scientific data. Discussing the concept of “sustainable gastronomy”, she talked about developing a marine sustainability index for seafood restaurants and on the organization of sustainable gastronomy courses.
Another of my favourite talks was given by Nicholas Zaloumis, who spoke about the fragility of mesic C4 grasslands in South Africa. He started with some eye-opening slides on how grasslands are expected to have disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere during the ice ages, but how the same kinds of ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere are expected to have stayed quite stable during climatically turbulent eras. With this, he wanted to point out that the Southern Hemisphere grasslands are probably age-old ecosystems with a stable history, which might explain why they are not recovering easily after land use changes and disturbances. His results indicated clearly lower levels of biodiversity in recovering sites compared to non-disturbed sites and no signs of succession within sites monitored for up to 17 years. But if so, how about recovery after grassland fires? Are there none in his study areas?
Dusan Jelic gave certainly the most entertaining and adventurous student talk of the conference. His study species was the olm, an evolutionarily distinct umbrella species for cave ecosystem conservation in Croatia. Where it was difficult to get into the habitats of this unique cave-dwelling species, he used environmental DNA aka eDNA, traces of olm DNA in outflowing waterways, to assess olm presence in caves where he could not dive into. His work was a nice demonstration on how you can get media attention to conservation when you are working with curious species: the species was included in the publication “10 most extreme animal habitats” and filmed into a nature documentary. How many of us can claim to have worked with David Attenborough while doing a PhD project?
I very much liked Arshiya Bose’s talk on exploring incentives for conservation in coffee landscapes, and especially her point on that people make their economic decisions actually in two different markets: in the financial market, but also in a social market. Thus, from economic terms only, people’s decisions may sometimes seem irrational. If conservationists learn to understand the socially based decision-making, they may be able to frame conservation goals better in their social context and result with better conservation outcomes with limited results.
Linda Visinoni’s study on the microclimate and microhabitat preferences of the alpine rock ptarmigan was a nice example of a more ecological study that may very well prove useful for estimating the effects of a warming climate for various species.
Stephen Gaughran presented a nice study on how population genetics were used to track the travel routes of a migrating endangered species. The information made it easier to plan where the green turtle population breeding at the Palmyra Atoll area needed to be conserved besides the breeding area, to ensure positive outcomes of planned conservation measures.
Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak presented a study on how Google Earth images can be used to study questions with large-scale visual landmarks. In her case, she identified the densities of fishing weirs in the Persian Gulf coastline to study the sustainability of fishery catches.
Elena Couce had used envelope modeling to project changes in habitat suitability for coral reefs under various climate change scenarios. I am really not an expert in this field, so I was left wondering later on if something as crucial as this hasn’t been done before, or what did she do differently compared to previous studies. However, her results indicated that while the most diverse current coral reef ecosystems are likely to deteriorate in the course of climate change, there might be other areas where suitable habitats may appear in the future. Will this call for a programme of assisted migration in the future?
Poster sessions
I presented a poster of my own in the poster session, so I had very limited time to read other posters presented, as I tried to make sure I was at my own poster when people came to look at it. So, here is a summary of an even smaller fraction of the posters:
The winning poster (1st prize) by Philp Martin was one of my favourites – and not only due to the relevance of his work and the simplicity of the poster, but also by the energetic proactivity of the presenter to explain his work to people approaching it. He had studied the recovery rates of carbon pools and plant biodiversity in restored tropical forests and showed that the time required to recover the biodiversity value of a forest may be longer than the time required to recover the its carbon pool, which may have implications to restoration projects that aim at both targets.
I was also impressed by the highly commended poster of James Lyon that suggested turning Master’s theses into interactive internet sites. Not only the message of the poster was interesting and the poster itself nicely done, but the presenter had also turned his poster site into a real “sales booth” for his idea, with free candy and a roulette game that nicely highlighted the need for the idea behind the poster. (The roulette that determined the fate of your Master’s thesis and you had 50 % probability of hitting “Dusty shelves”.) There were always people around this poster and its lively presenter.
Elina Aletrari presented a study carried out by using Co$ting Nature, a web-based tool for identifying conservation priority areas based on biodiversity values, ecosystem services, human pressure and estimated future threat on the landscape. The presenter told me that there are several projects going on with the future development of this tool. It would be interesting to understand better how the capabilities of this tool differ from those developed in the Biodiversity Conservation Informatics Group of our Centre of Excellence.
Adam Szirak and Sergio Timoteo both had posters describing network studies, however with different kinds of study systems. Sergio’s work on ant diversity and seed dispersal in habitats of different levels of disturbance had several similarities to the work of my colleague Silvija, so I was eager to get them each other’s contact information.
I had a longish talk with Josephine M Chambers on her work to study land use pressures and community-based conservation on a biodiversity corridor between two conservation areas in Peruvian Amazon. I also photographed the poster of Tammy Davies on understanding poverty in conservation, as her poster was done with really bold colours and with lots of pictures, and the result was surprisingly attractive.
My poster
I had good discussions on my own work with quite many student delegates of the conference, but like during my previous visit to SCCS, the best discussions took place with conservation activists that were making visits to the conference. Lincoln Fishpool from Birdlife spent quite a while discussing my work, and later on, I had a nice chat with Paul Furborough from Froglife, who was himself working with the conservation of mid-succession pond ecosystems, where many of the challenges of conserving successional sites are similar as in my study case. These talks were very rewarding.
My poster was evaluated as of excellent science quality and “a stunningly attractive poster” by the evaluators, so I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t included in the highly commended posters. The feedback I got mentioned that some background information related to my result graphs was missing, and especially the data behind one result graph wasn’t clear. The poster and its graphs should have been self-explanatory. It seems to me that there is a cultural difference between my university and the University of Cambridge on what is valued in posters: Whereas Finns put a lot of emphasis on the visual clarity of the poster, so that people will find it easy to approach it, will get motivated to grasp its main points and will talk with the presenter about the details of the study, Cambridge evaluators put much more emphasis on the transparency of the science from data to analyses being explained in the poster itself. The highly commended and award-winning posters were, thus, filled with much more content than my poster.
General thoughts
Generally, I’ve got a feeling based on my two visits to SCCS that there is an extraordinarily sharp focus at the University of Cambridge on the quality of how science should be done. A good study question is both of high scientific or societal relevance and beautiful in its simplicity; and such clear and specific detailed questions are being asked that can be answered to the point with the data collected. I have been very impressed about this.
Other
I utilized the opportunity at SCCS parties to introduce myself to dozens and dozens of prospective colleagues. The final party had great dance music played by a live band.
In 2011, I took a little time to visit the legendary King’s College Chapel. This year I used my bare 30 minutes of free time to see the Catholic Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, a beautiful Gothic Revival 19th century church with detailed stained glass windows, ornaments, sculptures and frescoes.