Like several other members of the GCC Team at the University of Helsinki, I took part of the 11th International Congress of Ecology (INTECOL) in London, 18-23 August in 2013. Amid an overwhelming set of talks, workshops and symposia, I spent a noticeable fraction of my time learning about a few particular themes. Continue reading
Author Archives: Henna Fabritius
My visit to SCCS Cambridge, March 2013
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.
Wade et al. (2008): Ecological restoration of farmland: progress and prospects
On 8th October 2010 we discussed a review article by Wade et al. (2008) on farmland ecological restoration. The authors suggest that ecological restoration projects may become necessary in farmlands in the course of the continuing expansion of agricultural production, in order to secure the functioning of related ecosystem services in the future. The authors also discuss where, when and how ecological restoration projects have been, and could be, implemented. The article was a useful read to at least some of us, since we were so well familiar with the topic, even though changes in agriculture could have a remarkable influence on biodiversity conservation.
The major issue that raised discussion in the journal club was that the role given to biodiversity in the article: the authors assessed the value of biodiversity and the threat of its depletion mainly as how biodiversity benefits the human society via ecosystem services. We recognize the term ‘ecosystem services’ as today’s buzzword, with much of the ‘buzz’ focusing on the quantification of the monetary value of ecosystem services. While we can see the benefit of approximating the scale of human economic benefit from the existence of natural ecosystems, we raised several concerns over this quantification trend from the perspective of species conservation:
- It is important to keep in mind that restoring ecosystems by using ecosystem services as indicators of success does not necessarily have much to do with the conservation of native biodiversity. This is exemplified by the authors of this article, as they present cases where ecosystem functions have been enhanced along with the ecological fitting of exotic species, and while they state that “relatively large increases in ecosystem function may be achieved with low or modest levels of biodiversity enhancement”.
- Studying ecosystems as sets of measurable, categorised services may blur our perception on how complex natural ecosystems are, and how difficult it may be to accomplish a systemic change in ecosystem function that would be truly stable in the long run.
- Giving simple price tags to ecosystem services easily hides the subjectivity of the underlying quantifications. Is there just one way to measure, for instance, the monetary value of pollination to the human society?
While the article focused heavily on ecosystem services, its views on how ecosystem restoration projects support species conservation goals became unclear. The authors stated that there is no worldwide compendium of species that have been targeted in farmland ecological restoration programmes. Species of native ecosystems that have been displaced by agriculture were mentioned as potential targets, but the species known to be dependent on traditional agricultural landscapes were mostly bypassed. The overall goal of “restoring ecosystem ‘health’“ did not quite fit together with the artificiality of examples where, for instance, forest-dwelling insects were supported in agricultural landscapes with added coarse woody debris.
The lack of well-founded conservation goals makes it difficult to evaluate which restoration methods would make sense from conservation point of view. For instance, if the Earth’s land surface area required by agriculture is indeed going to rise to 60 %, some species would probably benefit from it consisting of patchy landscapes full of corridors, edges and nodes, as the authors suggest. But many species of native ecosystems might also suffer from such means of restoration, as they would rather benefit from agricultural landscapes being as compact as possible, which would leave the maximum possible space for continuous, natural ecosystems elsewhere.
Nevertheless, there is a great need for an exchange of views between agro-economics and conservation biology. This very comprehensive, cross-disciplinary article was a welcome element to that discussion.
Link to the paper: