Work done under the broad umbrella term of systematic conservation planning (SCP) has a lot to deliver. In the face of accelerating biodiversity crisis the original SCP concept has been applied and augmented with computational tools that hold a promise of more cost-efficient – and indeed more efficient – conservation while keeping the process transparent and understandable for manager and policy-makers alike. But anyone who as ever worked with real-life conservation problem knows all too well that nagging feeling of “what if we got it wrong”? Working with heterogeneous sets of input data, empirical and/or modeled, seems to be the norm and the massive uncertainties involved are rarely quantified let alone reported. This needs to change. Or at least that is what Langford et. al (2011) think in a very recent opinion paper “Raising the bar for systematic conservation planning” published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and since the topic is very important for many members of our journal club we spent this Friday’s session discussing the paper – with pulla as always.
Category Archives: Journal club
Sutherland et al (2011): Horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2011
By: Maria Triviño
One problem in conservation biology is that policymakers and practitioners have to make decisions based on insufficient information and evidence. To overcome this information gap between the recent findings in research and the decisions being made Sutherland & Woodroof (2009) proposed a routine horizon scanning, which they described as “the systematic search for potential threat and opportunities that are currently poorly recognized”. They recommended its use in policy, practice and research.
In this weekly Journal Club we decided to read the new article regarding this issue “Horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2011” Sutherland et al., compile new 15 emerging threats to biodiversity on which they consider that we should focus for future research. This exercise has been carried out as well in 2010 and it is planned to be carried out every year.
We found that the methodology was a bit obscure and it would have been better to see a complete list with the outputs from the entire selection process and workshop carried out. Nevertheless, they have published another article with the complete methodological part (reference 15: Sutherland et al (in press) Methods for collaboratively identifying research priorities and emerging issues in science and policy. Methods Ecol. Evol.). It would also be important to know the people that were consulted in the questionnaires because although they claim that this is a global review all the authors were coming from Anglo-Saxon countries: UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; with the only exception of one author coming from the Netherlands. A last complaint regards the time scale used for this scanning process. We thought that a 5-6 years time scale could be a better comprise than an annually one. We believed that that the field of conservation biology is not moving so fast to need an annual horizon scanning and a longer period could give more time to find and evaluate the most urgent threats and opportunities for conservation.
They made a very good job raising emerging issues which covered a wide range of topics. Most of us were unaware of many of the issues such as the problem with earthworms in North America or the hydraulic fracturing. So we believed that this was a very useful and necessary exercise. Moreover, the new issues were presented in a concise and easy format which was very enjoyable to read.
In conclusion, this paper was a very useful exercise and is worth reading it!
The Emerging Field of Conservation Psychology (Saunders 2003)
I picked this rather unconventional topic for us this week because so often our discussions diverge to the ultimate cause behind all environmental problems: human behavior. Our tendency to carelessly consume all we can without regard to what is around us and what comes after us is the underlying cause behind all our problems. Conservation issues cannot be solved if people don’t care. So could conservation psychology offer a solution for achieving our aims?
The authors quite boldly state that the ultimate purpose of CP is to direct human behavior towards more sustainable patterns and increase our care for the nature. We wondered if this could be seen as a problem – is it politically feasible for a branch of science to aim at manipulating people’s preferences and behavior? On the other hand, many applied fields, especially our own conservation biology, aim at influencing rather than just exploring. It’s probably a very subtle balance between actually influencing human behavior towards the desired direction vs. provoking a backlash. But that’s for the psychologists to discover 🙂
In general, we enjoyed this very readable paper and its contents that were largely novel to us. But perhaps for the same reason, being strangers to psychology, we would have preferred even more concrete examples of what has been found in the research so far, instead of just summarizing what topics have been dealt with. The examples that the author did describe were very interesting, and more of those would have been helpful for us laymen. We felt the paper focused a bit too much on the definitions of things, and trying to justify the need for this new field instead of describing its contents more concretely. Whether or not it really differs enough from environmental psychology to merit the status as its own field seemed to divide our opinions. Nevertheless, we did conclude that such research would be highly beneficial and necessary to advance conservation, regardless of what its name was.
The paper quite nicely identified all the gaps in research so far and prospect for future work. We only wondered whether this field has really taken off as was hoped back in 2003 when the paper was written? At least a quick search for more recent papers resulted in a rather thin outcome, mostly short essays rather than actual research papers.
Being largely about terminology and definitions, I should mention that we slightly disagreed with the definition of conservation biology as excluding preservation and including only active management, and including factors such as social sciences and ecophilosophy – these belong to conservation science, not conservation biology. But this probably did not influence the relevance of the psychology contents. The author mentions that a common terminology for care for nature is a key issue for achieving advances in conservation. As a curiosity, in the Finnish language we use the word “hoito” for management, which also means caring (e.g. sairaanhoito = health care, lastenhoito = child care, metsänhoito = forestry, riistanhoito = game management). Not sure if it is a direct consequence of the choice of word here, but many Finns seem to believe that we really are caring and doing the “right thing” for the forest by regularly thinning it and maximizing its growth, or that we are caring for the game animal populations by hunting.
All in all, we enjoyed reading about this divergent topic. It is very useful exercise every now and then to try to broaden our perspectives and think outside our biological boxes!
http://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her102/102saunders.pdf