Monthly Archives: January 2019

How to do Conservation Planning

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The biota of the Earth is in trouble because of human activities, and the question conservation people ask is what should we do about it? Conservation planning has become the key way to proceed, but its implementation has unleased an unholy row of the best way to proceed. In a sense conservation planning is like city planning in having to make decisions about what to do where. There are two broad approaches to conservation: focus on species-at-risk and their needs and plan accordingly to protect them. Alternatively focus on ecosystems and protect them without all the detailed knowledge that is required for protecting species-at-risk. This is the first source of conflict because the public at large falls in love with species, so polar bears and blue whales and tigers are an easy sell to obtain funding from private and government sources. This is at present the dominant force in conservation, and if there is enough information available the conservation of polar bears and tigers will act as “umbrella species” to protect many other species at possible risk. So single species conservation can perhaps impinge on ecosystem conservation if we designate national parks or protected areas for the charismatic species that we all admire.

But there are many other species out there that conservation biologists are concerned about, collectively labeled biodiversity. Perhaps we should conserve biodiversity instead of focusing on individual species. But right away we run into two problems. In any ecosystem many of the species present are undescribed so we cannot put a Latin name on them, or if they are described we know almost nothing about their function in the ecosystem. So, we have a key question: do we need to understand ecosystem dynamics before we can prioritize biodiversity conservation? Most ecologists believe that many of the species in any ecosystem could disappear with little effect on ecosystem functioning. The arguments are largely about which species can we dispense with, and true conservation advocates say that all must be saved.

The problem is that conservation planning is a resource allocation problem – where do we put our money (Gerber et al. 2018)? Ideas about how best to establish rules for setting aside critical areas for conservation go back to Pressey and Nicholls (1989) and in subsequent years the conservation planning literature has exploded (e.g. Margules and Pressey 2000). Techniques for conservation planning were first designed to maximize the number of species retained in the reserve, and this was the first of many problems. You had to have ‘empty’ land to set aside in the proposed reserve and you had to know the species that the reserve would protect. This was perhaps more possible in Australia or Canada but difficult to implement in the USA and Europe where much land was in private hands.

Conservation planning involves a set of difficult hurdles. If we concentrate on single species, we may well find that protected areas are in the wrong place (Mason et al. 2018). If we concentrate on ecosystems, we must decide on which ecosystems containing which species, and make this decision when the ecosystems are poorly documented and changing with climate change. All this planning must take place in the public arena where people and their elected politicians are trying to decide whether it is more important to protect large charismatic species like caribou or zebras rather than a few small butterflies. In general, all these decisions are made in a near-absence of ecological concerns about predator-prey interactions, competition, movements, or disease threats, the factors individual ecologists spend their lives studying. Much discussion focuses on critical habitat for a favoured species, and, given that we can define critical habitat for our favoured species, how much is needed and how much will it cost (Gerber et al. 2018). By 2015, critical habitat had been legally identified for only 45% of listed species in the United States, 13% in Canada and less than 1% in Australia (Martin et al. 2017, Bird and Hodges 2017). Once we have identified ‘critical habitats’ for a threatened species, we need to be sure it is not an ecological trap (Battin 2004, Camaclang et al. 2014, Lamb et al. 2017), or that the data we have is not related to the data we need for conservation planning (Dallas and Hastings 2018).

Given all these problems, many efforts are underway to plan conservation areas, particularly in the marine realm (Edgar et al. 2014, Mason et al. 2018). What is necessary now is follow up by careful monitoring the population and ecosystem changes in areas that are set aside for conservation. Without monitoring we will lack an early-warning system to pick up mistakes and try to correct them (Lindenmayer et al. 2018).  

Álvarez-Romero JG, Mills M, Adams VM, Gurney GG, Pressey RL (2018). Research advances and gaps in marine planning: towards a global database in systematic conservation planning. Biological Conservation 227, 369-382. Doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2018.06.027

Battin J (2004). When good animals love bad habitats: ecological traps and the conservation of animal populations. Conservation Biology 18, 1482-1491. Doi: 10.1111/geb.12820

Bird SC, Hodges KE (2017). Critical habitat designation for Canadian listed species: Slow, biased, and incomplete. Environmental Science & Policy 71, 1-8. Doi: 10.1016/j.envsci.2017.01.007

Camaclang AE, Maron M, Martin TG, Possingham HP (2015). Current practices in the identification of critical habitat for threatened species. Conservation Biology 29, 482-492. Doi: 10.1111/cobi.12428

Dallas, T.A. & Hastings, A. (2018) Habitat suitability estimated by niche models is largely unrelated to species abundance. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 27, 1448-1456. Doi: 10.1111/geb.12820

Edgar GJ, et al. (2014). Global conservation outcomes depend on marine protected areas with five key features. Nature 506, 216-220. Doi: 10.1038/nature13022

Gerber LR, et al. (2018). Endangered species recovery: A resource allocation problem. Science 362, 284-286. Doi: 10.1126/science.aat8434

Lamb CT, Mowat G, McLellan BN, Nielsen SE & Boutin S. (2017) Forbidden fruit: human settlement and abundant fruit create an ecological trap for an apex omnivore. Journal of Animal Ecology, 86, 55-65. Doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.12589

Lindenmayer DB, Likens GE, Franklin JF (2018). Earth Observation Networks (EONs): Finding the Right Balance. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, 1-3. Doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.10.008

Margules CR, Pressey RL (2000). Systematic conservation planning. Nature 405, 243-253. Doi: 10.1038/35012251

Pressey RL, Nicholls AO (1989). Application of a numerical algorithm to the selection of reserves in semi-arid New South Wales. Biological Conservation 50, 263-278. Doi: 10.1016/0006-3207(89)90013-X

Martin TG, Camaclang AE, Possingham HP, Maguire LA, Chades I (2017). Timing of protection of critical habitat matters. Conservation Letters 10, 308-316. Doi: 10.1111/conl.12266

Mason C, et al. (2018). Telemetry reveals existing marine protected areas are worse than random for protecting the foraging habitat of threatened shy albatross (Thalassarche cauta). Diversity & Distributions 24, 1744-1755. Doi: 10.1111/ddi.12830

Why do Scientists Reinvent Wheels?

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We may reinvent wheels by repeating research that has already been completed and published elsewhere. In one sense there is no great harm in this, and statisticians would call it replication of the first study, and the more replication the more we are convinced that the results of the study are robust. There is a problem when the repeated study reaches different results from the first study. If this occurs, there is a need to do another study to determine if there is a general pattern in the results, or if there are different habitats with different answers to the question being investigated. But after a series of studies is done, it is time to do something else since the original question has been answered and replicated. Such repeated studies are often the subject of M.Sc. or Ph.D. theses which have a limited 1-3-year time window to reach completion. The only general warning for these kinds of replicated studies is to read all the old literature on the subject. There is a failure too often on this and reviewers often notice missing references for a repeated study. Science is an ongoing process but that does not mean that all the important work has been carried out in the last 5 years.

There is a valid time and place to repeat a study when the habitat for example has been greatly fragmented or altered by human land use or when climate change has made a strong impact on the ecosystem under study. The problem in this case is to have an adequate background of data that allows you to interpret your current data. If there is a fundamental problem with ecological studies to date it is that we have an inadequate baseline for comparison for many ecosystems. We can conclude that a particular ecosystem is losing species (due to land use change or climate) only if we know what species comprised this ecosystem in past years and how much the species composition fluctuated over time. The time frame desirable for background data may be only 5 years for some species or communities but for many communities it may be 20-40 years or more. We are too often buried in the assumption that communities and ecosystems have been in equilibrium in the past so that any fluctuations now seen are unnatural. This time frame problem bedevils calls for conservation action when data are deficient.

The Living Planet Report of 2018 has been widely quoted as stating that global wildlife populations have decreased 60% in the last 4 decades. They base their analysis on the changes in 4000 vertebrate species. There are about 70,000 vertebrate species on Earth, so this statement is based on about 6% of the vertebrates. The purpose of the Living Planet Report is to educate us about conservation issues and encourage political action. No ecologist in his or her right mind would question this 60% quotation lest they be cast out of the profession, but it is a challenge to the graduate students of today to analyze this statistic to determine how reliable it is. We all ‘know’ that elephants and rhinos are declining but they are hardly a random sample. The problem in a nutshell is that we have reliable long-term data on perhaps 0.01% or less of all vertebrate species. By long term I suggest we set a minimal limit of 10 generations. As another sobering test of these kinds of statements I suggest picking your favorite animal and reading all you can on how to census the species and then locate how many studies of this species meet the criteria of a good census. The African elephant could be a good place to start, since everyone is convinced that it has declined drastically. The information in the Technical Supplement is a good starting point for a discussion about data accuracy in a conservation class.

My advice is that ecologists should not without careful thought repeat studies that have already been carried out many times on common species . Look for gaps in the current wisdom. Many of our species of concern are indeed declining and need action but we need knowledge of what kinds of management actions are helpful and possible. Many of our species have not been studied long enough to know if they are under threat or not. It is not helpful to ‘cry wolf’ if indeed there is no wolf there. We need precision and accuracy now more than ever.

World Wildlife Fund. 2018. Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher. Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A.(Eds). WWF, Gland, Switzerland. ISBN: 978-2-940529-90-2.
https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_planet_report_2018/