We’ve had a visiting researcher with us this week, Dr Piero Visconti, from the Global Mammal Assessment programme, Sapienza University of Rome (http://globalmammal.org/staff/piero-visconti/). I invited him over for some collaborative research and to get to know our crew in general, as we clearly have many shared interests. Piero gave a talk at the department with a slightly provocative title: “Mitigating future biodiversity loss, how much can protected areas do?” Mammal conservation clearly attracts people, as we had a full house at the seminar even though it’s mid-June and the department appears half empty. Piero has selected the paper for this week’s journal club, and will make a guest appearance in the blog shortly!
Tag Archives: conservation
Draw a picture for forestry people of forest conservation
Woodland key habitats evaluated as a part of a functional reserve network
Anne Laita, Mikko Mönkkönen, Janne S. Kotiaho
Biological Conservation 143 (2010)
The article was important in several ways:
First of all it clarifies and underlines important issues and facts that are familiar to us working with conservation biology but for example in commercial forest scene they might be stranger. In our opinion the most meaningful and useful audience for a paper like this right now is most probably for example Finnish forestry people to whom those ecological based well-known facts might have been strangers. We were happy to read from discussion many kinds of suggestions and ideas that could benefit the biodiversity and the longevity of woodland key habitats such as buffer zones.
Species do no distribute themselves only systematically. We wondered how the size of areas affects the results. And we would like to point out that there are some studies that show that it is the quality of the habitat patch that matters before connectivity so that if the quality is good the connectivity increases (Hodgson et al.??) Because the affect of the area had been left out we wondered could there be soon another article with the areas? It would be interesting to see the effect.
The article had surprisingly much writing errors and unclearness in figures and tables. That gave us an expression that it wasn’t written with a very serious feeling even though we thought that the subject and the possible impact of the article would be important. We understood though that the researchers wanted to show all possible numbers openly to make the discussion more transparent. Also we were quite surprised about the references used: they seemed maybe a little bit outdated, many of them rapports or books and they were quite few. But this article was written of very important topic from very important view and we thought this was almost like a popularisation on science that is often needed.
We like the fact that Woodland key habitats are considered here as an addition of already existing reservation network. To be able to keep our minds in the contexts we were hoping to read something about the old matrix and the condition of the nature before. What we couldn’t find out was how much has the different habitat types lost of their distribution when comparing the situation today and in past. We wondered as well how much the matrix has changed during the time: is it now more hostile than before?
We would like to also remind of the “well known fact” that all additions of /for conservation reservation areas are beneficial for the conservation. But the bigger question is that how much is enough to retain the favourable level of conservation. And it’s always better to conserve than not to conserve. We were left with a desire to see what would have been the third option.
Some notes were left floating in the air…
The profit gained varies among different species.
This article does not use any population dynamic modelling or doesn’t deal with rescue effect.
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Journal Club 26.11.2010
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ps. By now (20.4.2012) Anne Laita has defended her thesis in University of Jyväskylä (The Opponent was MRG’s Otso Ovaskainen) with the exiting title “Conservation in space”.
Overpositive babble about translocation of species and climate change?
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
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.