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!

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

Habitat heterogeneity must play a significant role in determining the occurrence, amount and persistence of biodiversity. Well, at least this is what our gut feeling is telling us. Reality, however, seems to be that we now very little about the effects of heterogeneity in different environments and next to nothing generalizable over different environments and scales. Indeed, as Tews et al. (2004) pointed out in their highly sited review, there seems to be a positive correlation between habitat heterogeneity and animal species diversity, but it’s all very species and scale dependent. Furthermore, studies have tended to be very biased towards certain species groups and environments.

Agricultural landscapes are probably one of the more studied environments. In this week’s journal club we read through Fahrig et al. (2010): “Functional landscape heterogeneity and animal biodiversity in agricultural landscapes”. Many of us had hoped for a review-type paper pulling together information on empirical work that has been carried out in agricultural landscapes. Equally, after reading the paper many of us felt a little baffled by the scope of the paper as it turned out not to be a review, but rather a “Idea and Perspective” type of contribution. Authors’ describe their objectives threefold (shortened from the original):

1. to develop a conceptual framework for the study on landscape heterogeneity in the context of agricultural landscapes
2. identifying three important unanswered questions about the relationship between landscape heterogeneity and biodiversity in agricultural landscapes
3. to suggest a general methodological approach for studies to address aforementioned questions

Our greatest complaint about the paper was a general vagueness we felt it has. This may be partly unjustified as it is a perspective paper, but still we would have appreciated more literature (and especially empirical studies) sited, and clearer connection to policy making and implementation. Neither the conceptual framework nor the proposed study questions struck us particularly novel. Dividing heterogeneity into two main components – compositional and configurational – is useful, but we felt that this is generally the way heterogeneity has been treated previously as well. The division between structural and functional heterogeneity reminded us very much about the treatment of connectivity popular especially in the context of landscape ecology.

Far more interesting aspect of the paper is the discussion on what sort of effects does heterogeneity have in different kinds of landscapes and where should it be promoted from biodiversity conservation point of view. These questions are formulated as the three research questions the authors are proposing. Does increasing heterogeneity (or the different components of heterogeneity) increase biodiversity both in more-natural environments as well as in production environments? To put it differently, is increasing heterogeneity more beneficial in more-natural or production kinds of environments? Also, what levels of heterogeneity are desirable? The latter question the authors address by stating that often a times intermediate levels of heterogeneity seem to result in the most biodiverse environments. This observation is similar to that of classical Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis in ecology.

On the policy side Fahrig et al. emphasize that

“agri-environment policy should aim to enhance biodiversity to the extent possible while still providing agricultural products for human consumption”

and that

“Policies aimed at increasing the heterogeneity […] thus reducing agricultural production, will frequently be considered unacceptable by farmers”

Authors are thus emphasizing the main function of agriculture: food production. Given the heavy subsidization of agriculture especially in the EU and the US, it seems the there would be more space for agri-environment schemes and economical instruments. Farmers pay check does not come only from selling revenues, but to a great extent from different subsidies. Therefore decreased production might be acceptable if the loss is compensated in some other manner.

In conlusion, the paper was an interesting read, but an unnecessary lengthy one and from a bit different perspective that at least some of us had hoped for. Obviously more research is needed before we can really say something generalizable on the effect of habitat heterogeneity on the amount in biodiversity, in agricultural landscapes or elsewhere.

Full reference: Fahrig L, Baudry J, Brotons L, et al. 2010: Functional landscape heterogeneity and animal biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Ecology letters. Link to paper

Extra reference: Tews J, Brose U, Grimm V, et al 2004: Animal species diversity driven by habitat heterogeneity/diversity: the importance of keystone structures. Journal of Biogeography. 2004;31:79-92.