Wright et al. 2009: The Future of Tropic…

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Wright et al. 2009: The Future of Tropical Species on a Warmer Planet

This is a paper we decided to read because some papers we have previously read cited it. We thought the topic was interesting because it highlighted the tropical areas and the tropical species in relation to climate change. The authors suggest that tropical species may be particularly sensitive to global warming because of a number of factors, such as a species’ sensitivity to temperature change and proximity to cooler refuges. The analysis was done for the extant mammals and with a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Unfortunately the paper was very heavy to read and included many different aspects with land cover types, distances to potential cool refuges and habitat associations. It was difficult to keep track of what underlying data and assumptions that were behind the figures. This meant that although the paper did have some interesting points, the authors did not manage to open them up for the reader. One issue that was not discussed at all was the fact that although tropical species might be poorly adapted to changes in temperature, they are likely to be highly adapted to changes is precipitation. The paper also did not address the question what will happen with the areas where there now has been high species richness and centers of speciation, i.e. what will come in the place of the tropical species? We also saw some concerns about technical things, such as having 1960s temperatures but land use data from the 2000, and using annual mean temperatures for the analyses. Additionally, when looking at the map in figure 5 some of use pointed out that it merely seems to be a question about altitude, rather than latitude. Especially when comparing the figure to maps of present day topography of the earth. The green areas (i.e. those with least distance to refuges) are all situated in mostly mountainous areas, and do not, as the authors claim, seem to be much related to latitudes.

Wright, S.J., Muller-Landau, H.C., Schipper, J. 2009: The Future of Tropical Species on a Warmer Planet. Conservation Biology 23: 1418-1426.

doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01337.x

Norgaard 2009: Ecosystem services: From an eye-opening metaphor to a complexity blinder

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Norgaard 2009: Ecosystem services: From an eye-opening metaphor to a complexity blinder

This was a nice paper about the problematics of ecosystem services, or more precisely,
its “practical” use in connection withmarket economy, rather than as a metaphor as originally intended. It has become such a fashionable concept that’s supposed to solve all the problems in the world that its effectiveness in the real world has rarely been questioned.

This was one of those papers where thoughts that at some level had already been in our minds were put into proper words, and while reading you just go “yes, exactly, I agree!”. But for the very same reason it perhaps didn’t provoke that much discussion because we didn’t find much to criticize or question in it. Although it was perhaps not the easiest paper for us ecologists to read (and could have ideally been a bit more compact too), I think we all had managed to actually read it, of which a few extra point to the author – not that common, I have to admit!

Points made by the authors (sorry for the boring bullets..)

  • ecology behind ES is not strong enough to identify levels of sustainable use
  • risk of biasing ecological research towards this ecologically very insignificant concept (see the P.S.!)
  • interactions caused by ES projects with other aspects of economy are typically ignored, which makes achieving sustainability impossible
  • many ES may have been misestimated in the past and the current situation is therefore worse than is believed and current actions are not adequate
  • ideas with a noble purpose may end up going horribly wrong when connected with market dynamics/economics. Like in the case of the REDD programme, which mostly serves the wealthy countries’ will to “continue combusting fossil hydrocarbons”.
  • What is required instead is “becoming serious about environmental governance”

Although we did enjoy the paper, at least some of us were left with a rather hopeless
feeling in the end – if the only solution really is such a massive revolution of the way basically our entire civilization works, is it ever going to happen, or are we just inevitably going to consume until we can no more, and leave a completely messed-up planet behind us? Credit to the authors though for an attempt to provide “what to do” instructions, although not as concrete as one might hope for.

All in all, we didn’t leave our pulla break too depressed, just more convinced than ever
that jumping on the ES bandwagon is not the solution to probably much anything… well, maybe a bit exaggerated, let’s go for “part of a larger solution” as Norgaard writes, assuming its dominance does not “blind us to the complexity of the challenges we actually face”.

P.S. A funny coincidence was, that on the very same day as we discussed this paper, there was the DL for a targeted call by a Finnish foundation where a major theme was research on ecosystem services. As one might guess, we didn’t apply…

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.009

Brooks et al. (2009) and Stork (2009)

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This Friday we discussed two papers written by Brooks and colleagues and by Stork.

Brooks et al. 2009: “Evaluating the success of conservation actions in safeguarding tropical forest biodiversity”

This paper focuses on the effectiveness of conservation. It tries to create an overview on how much our various conservation actions so far have actually managed to prevent species from going to extinct. It covers sections from protected area designation to education and policy, trying to summarize the past progress, current status and measured outcomes in each section.

Although the topic of this paper is most relevant to say the least, the authors fail to bring new sights to the discussion of conservation effectiveness. They sum up several of the sections very nicely, bringing together many important and interesting bits of information, but yet are not able to give any analytical view in them. Therefore, and unfortunately, the paper remains as a sort of literature review of what has been done or is being done, with few examples of successful or not-so-successful species recoveries and, a good list of relevant numbers and references.

We were slightly annoyed by the focus of the paper on tropical forests, and failed to see the reason why the authors decided to publish this type of an article in a special issue. Given that no quantitative analyses were done (nor, in terms of covering all the given sectors, have been done), we feel slightly sceptical about the final conclusions the authors make: “Overall our review provides grounds for cautious optimism. At least in short term, conservation actions can and do prevent extinctions; thus, there is hope in even the most challenging conservation contexts (Posa et al. 2008).” To our opinion, the review does not offer strong support for this.

There are, however, some key messages to take home with: So far, the quantitative evidence that our global conservation actions are actually making a difference, are more or less lacking. Thus, further studies are desperately needed to (reliably) say what is working and when. In addition the authors make an important statement how “conservation science should place more emphasis on addressing practical conservation needs and goals (Brooks et al. 2009)”. We believe that this will be one of the big issues discussed and studied in conservation science in the near future.

Final conclusion: Good literature review 🙂

Link to the paper: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123190981/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

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