Wiens & Bachelet: Matching the multiple scales of conservation with the multiple scales of climate change

DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01409.x

This was an extensive article on scale issues in conservation and climate change. It seemed to be targeted at a rather general public, and was therefore very refreshing reading for us. It had a strong NGO perspective due to the authors’ backgrounds, which showed for example in that the issues with conservation scales were largely dealt with through practical examples. This was slightly disappointing for us as conservation scientists. The CC section had a stronger scientific focus, and was more informative for us, for example, we realized we know very little about the Regional Climate Models and “dynamic downscaling” discussed in the paper.  But we felt that this distinction in approaches to conservation vs. CC also reflects the real world situation – conservation planning is still done in practice with weak scientific basis, but no one is  trying to guess how the climate will change based on a feeling.

The key message was that despite all the uncertainties (especially in downscaling the very coarse climate predictions to a level useful for conservation), CC must be accounted for in conservation planning, because it is already clear that the changes will be dramatic. I suppose we agreed on this in general, but would like to emphasize even more strongly that one shouldn’t put too much weight on uncertain future in decision making, because e.g. allocating resources to areas potentially important in the future means having less for those certainly important at present, and risking losing the supposed sources of range shifts already before the shifts take place.

Tuesday 16.2.2010 at Coffeeroom (Anni, Johanna, Joona, Laura, Ninni)

In this paper the authors had used meta-analysis to review 49 published papers containing 120 comparisons of species richness between unmanaged and managed forests in Europe. Articles were chosen from year 1978 to 2007 and that obviously makes the comparison more challenging because of the different methods and styles used in a different times.

Results of the meta-analyses were quite thin if we compare them to what was expected (and that is that the biodiversity would be much greater in unmanaged forests). Species richness was used as a surrogate for biodiversity which could have been weighted differently. Now all that mattered was just the number of species. Results showed us that species richness was only slightly higher in unmanaged forests. Forest management had positive impact on vascular plants and negative impact on species which are dependent on forest cover continuity, deadwood or large trees as well as carabids.

It was said that some areas in Europe were badly represented so it would have been great to see the studying areas in a visible map. But maybe it would just have turned our thoughts away from the main issue: what do the comparisons tell us, and made us stuck with the fact that this kind of comparable information is not available everywhere. We as finns were able to be proud because the whole Scandinavia was well presented. The problem can be that there is no such a research done which would study this issue locally or the research is not a comparable one – it just studies biodiversity of one area but not with right meters or the results are in some other way incomparable.

Even though we agreed that the article didn’t give a lot of food for our thoughts we think it was a great opening for the discussion that articles (or the results) could be represented in a more congruent way, so that they could give benefit to a more extensive research too than just to authors’ own work. Authors pointed out well why this kind of reviewing is important and what kind of details, aspects or data etc. are missing from today’s scientific research work so that the weaknesses in articles and in meta-analyses could be sorted out. This hopely motivates people to continue this work even it now didn’t show much big results.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123243232/PDFSTART

Biodiversity Differences between Managed and Unmanaged Forests: Meta-Analysis of Species Richness in Europe

YOAN PAILLET, LAURENT BERGÈS, JOAKIM HJÄLTÉN, PÉTER ÓDOR, CATHERINE AVON, MARKUS BERNHARDT-RÖMERMANN, RIENK-JAN BIJLSMA, LUC DE BRUYN, MARC FUHR, ULF GRANDIN, ROBERT KANKA, LARS LUNDIN, SANDRA LUQUE, TIBOR MAGURA, SILVIA MATESANZ, ILONA MÉSZÁROS, M.-TERESA SEBASTIÀ, WOLFGANG SCHMIDT, TIBOR STANDOVÁR, BÉLA TÓTHMÉRÉSZ, ANNELI UOTILA, FERNANDO VALLADARES, KAI VELLAK, RISTO VIRTANEN

Conservation Biology, Volume 24 Issue 1 (February 2010)

On Friday, January 29th, we disussed two papers: Carvalho et al. 2010 and and Keith et al. 2009 (see full references below). The first tried to identify strategies for systematic conservation planning with incomplete datasets, while the latter highlighted the likelihood of non-analogous community formation in response to rapid climate change.

Carvalho et al. 2010. Simulating effects of using different types of species distribution data in reserve selection. Biological Conservation 143: 426-438.

Keith et al. 2009. Non-analogous community formation in response to climate change. Journal for Nature Conservation 17: 228-235.

We appreciated the great amount of effort by Carvalho et al. trying to address several questions simultaneously. They were artificially reducing the amount of data on species distribution to 50, 25 and 10% of the original dataset (which had presence/absence records of amphibians and reptiles and covered the Iberian peninsula). These datasets (and the original one) they used in four different ways: as such, fitting species distribution models to them and using the probabilities of occurrence output by the model predictions, using model predictions transformed into presences and absences and compiling “combined” datasets of predicted and observed distributions. Finally, they used the minimum set and target-based planning approaches to perform reserve selection. Ways to use data were compared according to species representation in and cost-efficiency of resulted reserve networks. They found that no one strategy was the best in all cases, but rather the preferable approach varied with data comprehensiveness.

We were a bit concerned that the numerous analyses and steps along the process may have resulted in difficulties to interpret the results of Carvalho et al. It is not always clear what exactly is causing the observed patterns. The target-based planning algorithm in Zonation raised special concerns, as it is known to come up with suboptimal results compared to continuous benefit functions. A question that remained open is which, if any, of the planning approaches resulted in better species representation than what would be expected by random. However, the main conclusion of the paper highlighted the importance of knowing (or being able to estimate) the quality of species distribution data to make good decisions, which seems to be very important.

Keith et al. point out that many of today’s conservation strategies aim at maintaining communities as they are and assign conservation status according to community composition. They raise the question of whether this strategy is meaningful in the face of climate change that affects species distributions and might drive the formation of communities whose composition is different from any communities known today.

We shared Keith et al.’s concern over assigning conservation status to areas based on the occurrence of certain species or species combinations. This may lead to unintentional degradation of biodiversity conservation, if areas lose their conservation status when species occupying them change. Perhaps a more holistic approach to evaluating conservation success than just looking at certain species at certain locations should be adopted. The benchmarking should, however, be based on solid measures to avoid woolliness. If the policies in place are suboptimal for conserving biodiversity for the future, they should be reformed to better serve their purpose.