Tag Archives: climate change

Overpositive babble about translocation of species and climate change?

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Chris D. Thomas 2011 (Trends in ecology and Evolution): Translocation of species, climate change, and the end of trying to recreate past ecological communities

Conversation planning Journal Club 23.6.2011

http://bit.ly/oBeKfV

We pick up this paper for two reasons: Firstly, translocation of species is an important and very relevant topic and the conversation around it has gain strength within the rise of the awareness of problematic nature of climate change and the share humans are responsible for its acceleration. Secondly, we were interested to hear what Chris Thomas has to say about this subject. After read and discussed the paper in our Journal Club we felt somewhat confused. We wondered that the tune of the paper was too positive. It felt more like lobbying-paper than hard expertise showing scientific opinion-paper (is there such?). And we were waiting more just an “opinion”. For a paper published in TREE we expect more scientific proof. WE think references are poor and scientific feeling is more or less lazy. This is more like politics – he is not telling bad things just trying to polish the goods.

We found some issues that had a negative impact on the credibility of the paper.

1) The paper didn’t take sides whether the species which were mentioned were in danger for some other reasons too and not only due to climate.

2) Species follow their ecological niche but the location of the niche is random – not transcontinental. This paper concentrates on species which have small distributions and they are vulnerable.

3) The British examples are quite poor – they are not about habitats but about climate conditions and food (Lynx b)

4) The aspect “we gain lot of new species” cannot be the most important result. This result doesn’t take into account for example relationships and interactions between species, conservation of habitats and loss of resources (for example money) if translocations fail.

5) Excuse reason cannot be that “everyone else does it”.

6) Thomas has looked for every single positive side of translocations.

Nevertheless the paper points out some aspects that we support strongly. They are such as protection of big areas, connectivity between different features (species, habitats, actions, threads etc.) and high quality of areas that have only low human impact.

One used to think that “nature is in balance”. Now days we know that nature is in continuous change. This cannot be seen in public opinion yet, but time is changing this too. We would like to point out that climate change is not just one event but an ongoing process! So if we translocate species – where on earth are we going to locate them? And we have to remember that the meaning of invasive species will change within the climate change.

And then some trivial points from our conversation…

The biggest numbers of translocations are found in seas. (For example it is estimated that in Baltic sea there is found approximately 80 permanent alien species. Number of alien species found in Baltic Sea altogether is approximately 120: personal communication with Reetta Ljungberg 20.4.2012.) Here “alien species” mean species that couldn’t have came here (or where ever) without human made transmission.

We were left wondering what kind of international translocations have been done.

Getting the first step right in modelling future species distributions

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Owing to our recent interest in different approaches to modelling extinction risk, and because climate change impacts on biodiversity and conservation is always one of our key interests, we discussed a paper by Barbet-Massin et al. (2010). The authors state that considering the full range of a species is essential for modelling future climatic suitability within a region of interest. For evidence, they provide a comparison of using species occurrence data only within Europe versus considering the full Western Palearctic region. The loss of climatic suitability is decreased when the input data for modelling consists of a larger area. The authors show that extending the geographical space also tends to extend the environmental space which is suitable for the species according to the input data, which makes it more likely for a species to maintain suitable climate space in the course of climate change. Continue reading →

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