Category Archives: Political Ecology

A Dilemma of Ecological Science

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To save myself from the current problems of funding science in general in North America, I would like to ask an impossible but perhaps interesting question: What research would ecologists carry out if they had ten billion dollars of funding? This of course is a ridiculous question, but it is interesting because it would focus our minds on what the major issues of our time are in the ecological sciences and where to go next. The history of the hard sciences like physics, chemistry and medicine is punctuated with a specification of the most important issues that need solving. These specifications change as progress occurs in each science so that there are many books about successes in solving problems in these hard sciences. Could we do this in ecology and what might this list of problems and possible solutions look like?

The first response is that ecology is not a hard science like physics and chemistry with a plethora of well-defined laws. I think this is a cop-out. Ptolemy and Newton and Darwin did not avoid these questions and forged new ways of thinking in their respective sciences. A second response is that ecological science deals with contingent events much as geological science does. We can understand volcano eruptions and tsunamis, but we cannot predict if, when and where they will occur in the same way we can predict that a bridge will fall over if the construction materials are not correct.

We have in ecology today two major schools of thought about what are the most critical issues that ecologists need to investigate. The first school of thought is that we need to understand how populations and communities are structured, how their components interact, and how much these ecosystems vary in different parts of the Earth. We have adequate to good methods to investigate these questions but lack the funding at present. The major unanswered questions within this paradigm are how these ecosystems will respond to global change with respect to human population growth and climate change. But these questions can only be answered with long-term studies, both observational and experimental. The system is hampered by two constraints – the length of an individual scientist’s research, and the short-term view of funding which assumes all these questions can be answered with 3-5-years of research funding. We can achieve success only by establishing teams of ecologists that focus on major questions and cooperate with observations and experiments that exceed the ability of a single scientist with a limited research lifespan. Success on this front can be seen most readily in the aquatic sciences, avian and mammal ecology and least readily in the ecology of the small guys – insects, bacteria, viruses. So, our current understanding in population and community ecology is best with the species we can eat and with large species rather than small. There is no question but that these advances in ecological knowledge are more difficult in the tropical countries with more complex ecosystems and in general less money for research.

The second major school of thought in the ecological sciences is biodiversity science. This school of thought passes over all the problems of ecosystem ecology to describe the species that exist on Earth. This is a gigantic problem because of the large number of undescribed species. We make progress on this list slowly, and at present if you pick up a plant, small animal, and insect, or a bacterium among other species it is impossible to assign a taxonomic name and description. Progress in identification is progress is moving rapidly because of DNA technology but the desirable target of having an inventory of life on Earth is still a long way off.

Given that we have this partial inventory, the major issue of biodiversity science is the problem of extinction – we do not want to see any species go extinct. This is a tall order but an important one. And it is here that the two major schools of ecology must join forces because you cannot understand extinction unless you have adequate knowledge of the role of each species in the ecosystem. If you read the news today, you will become rather depressed because of reported rates of extinction at the present time. The sentiment is good; the data are poor. An unresolved problem is that most species are rare. We humans notice the big species and the colourful birds and insects, but rare species are difficult to study. News media report every species that was thought to be extinct because none were seen for perhaps 20 or 30 years but now a few were found again. With enough funding and person-power ecologists could analyse the details of extinction in a few species but there is no hope that this could be done for the small fauna that are rare and expensive to find.

So, the take home message is that the two major schools of ecology must interact more to achieve success on both fronts but the shortage of funding and the shortage of ecologists in each of the two major areas are limiting. At some point this will change. There are many very wealthy people in western countries who could fund a very large sum of money for ecological science. To date such a financial event is rare, and a possible reason for this is that the ecological sciences do not support economic growth and human health in the same way that physics, chemistry and medicine do. The ecological costs of economic growth are largely ignored, and the two largest of our global problems are climate change and human population growth which exceeds the carrying-capacity of the Earth.  Both issues operate on a time scale greater than the average human lifespan, so we pass the problem on to our children. Ecological science is caught in the trap of not increasing the god of GDP and reporting more problems every day than it is solving. We have a long way to go, and it is important that ecologists look at the long-term and adjust their scientific goals accordingly. Much talk is good if it leads to much action. But action cannot be done without funding.

Duda, M.D., Beppler, T., Austen, D.J., and Organ, J.F. 2022. The precarious position of wildlife conservation funding in the United States. Human Dimensions of Wildlife 27(2): 164–172. doi:10.1080/10871209.2021.1904307.

Gallo-Cajiao, E., Archibald, C., Friedman, R., et al. 2018. Crowdfunding biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology 32(6): 1426–1435. doi:10.1111/cobi.13144.

Guénard, B., Hughes, A.C., and Williams, G.A. 2025. Limited and biased global conservation funding means most threatened species remain unsupported. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(9): 2412479122. doi:10.1073/pnas.2412479122.

Lant, M., Bendel, C.R., Parent, C.J., and Kaemingk, M.A. 2025. A need for assessing the resiliency of conservation funding. Ecology and Society 30(3): 9. doi:10.5751/es-16322-300309.

Papp, C.R., Scheele, B., Rákosy, L., and Hartel, T. 2022. Transdisciplinary deficit in large carnivore conservation funding in Europe. Nature Conservation 49: 31–52. doi:10.3897/natureconservation.49.81469.

The Ecological Outlook

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There is an extensive literature on ecological traps going back two decades (e.g. Schlaepfer et al. 2002, Kristan 2003, Battin 2004) discussing the consequences of particular species selecting a habitat for breeding that is now unsuitable. A good example is discussed in Lamb et al. (2017) for grizzly bears in southeastern British Columbia in areas of high human contact. The ecological trap hypothesis has for the most part been discussed in relation to species threatened by human developments with some examples of whole ecosystems and human disturbances (e.g. Lindenmayer and Taylor 2020). The concept of an ecological trap can be applied to the Whole Earth Ecosystem, as has been detailed in the IPCC 2022 reports and it is this global ecological trap that I wish to discuss.

The key question for ecologists concerned about global biodiversity is how much biodiversity will be left after the next century of human disturbances. The ecological outlook is grim as you can hear every day on the media. The global community of ecologists can ameliorate biodiversity loss but cannot stop it except on a very local scale. The ecological problem operates on a century time scale, just the same as the political and social change required to escape the global ecological trap. E.O. Wilson (2016) wrote passionately about our need to set aside half of the Earth for biodiversity. Alas, this was not to be. Dinerstein et al. (2019) reduced the target to 30% in the “30 by 30” initiative, subsequently endorsed by 100 countries by 2022. Although a noble political target, there is no scientific evidence that 30 by 30 will protect the world’s biodiversity. Saunders et al. (2023) determined that for North America only a small percentage of refugia (5– 14% in Mexico, 4–10% in Canada, and 2–6% in the USA) are currently protected under four possible warming scenarios ranging from +1.5⁰C to +4⁰C. And beyond +2⁰C refugia will be valuable only if they are at high latitudes and high elevations.

The problem as many people have stated is that we are marching into an ecological trap of the greatest dimension. A combination of global climate change and continually increasing human populations and impacts are the main driving factors, neither of which are under the control of the ecological community. What ecologists and conservationists can do is work on the social-political front to protect more areas and keep analysing the dynamics of declining species in local areas. We confront major political and social obstacles in conservation ecology, but we can increase our efforts to describe how organisms interact in natural ecosystems and how we can reduce undesirable declines in populations. All this requires much more monitoring of how ecosystems are changing on a local level and depends on how successful we can be as scientists to diagnose and solve the ecological components of ecosystem collapse.

As with all serious problems we advance by looking clearly into what we can do in the future based on what we have learned in the past. And we must recognize that these problems are multi-generational and will not be solved in any one person’s lifetime. So, as we continue to march into the ultimate ecological trap, we must rally to recognize the trap and use strong policies to reverse its adverse effects on biodiversity and ultimately to humans themselves. None of us can opt out of this challenge.

There is much need in this dilemma for good science, for good ecology, and for good education on what will reverse the continuing degradation of our planet Earth. Every bit counts. Every Greta Thunberg counts.

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

Dinerstein, E., Vynne, C., Sala, E., et al. (2019) A Global Deal For Nature: Guiding principles, milestones, and targets. Science Advances, 5, eaaw2869.doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2869..

IPCC, 2022b. In: Skea, J., Shukla, P.R., et al. (Eds.), Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. doi: www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/.

Kristan III, W.B. (2003) The role of habitat selection behavior in population dynamics: source–sink systems and ecological traps. Oikos, 103, 457-468.

Lamb, C.T., Mowat, G., McLellan, B.N., Nielsen, S.E. & 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, D.B. and Taylor, C. (2020) New spatial analyses of Australian wildfires highlight the need for new fire, resource, and conservation policies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, 12481-124485. doi. 10.1073/pnas.2002269117.

Saunders, S.P., Grand, J., Bateman, B.L., Meek, M., Wilsey, C.B., Forstenhaeusler, N., Graham, E., Warren, R. & Price, J. (2023) Integrating climate-change refugia into 30 by 30 conservation planning in North America. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 21, 77-84. doi. 10.1002/fee.2592.

Schlaepfer, M.A., Runge, M.C. & Sherman, P.W. (2002) Ecological and evolutionary traps. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 17, 474-480.

Wilson, E.O. (2016) Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. Liveright, New York. ISBN: 978-1-63149-252-5.

In Honour of David Suzuki at his Retirement

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David Suzuki is retiring from his media work this year at age 86. If you wish to have a model for a lifetime of work, he should be high on your list – scientist, environmentalist, broadcaster, writer. He has been a colleague of mine at the Department of Zoology, UBC from the time when I first came there in 1970. He was a geneticist doing imaginative and innovative research with his students on the humble fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The Department at that time was a beehive of research and teaching, and David was a geneticist breathing fire at the undergraduates taking the genetics course. Many a doctor would probably tell you now that Suzuki’s genetics course was the most challenging in their undergraduate education.

The hierarchy in the Department of Zoology was very clear in the 1970s. First came the physiologists, top of the pack and excellent scientists who turned the spotlight on the Department nationally and internationally. Second came the geneticists, with the DNA revolution full on. At the bottom of the pile were the ecologists causing nothing but trouble about fisheries and wildlife management problems, pointing out a rising tide of environmental problems including climate change. Contrary to what you might conclude from the media, environmental problems and climate change issues were very alive even in the 1970s. But somehow these problems did not get through to governments, and David has been a key person turning this around. In 1979 he began a natural history and science program on the CBC entitled “The Nature of Things” which he then hosted for 43 years. In doing so he began to fill an empty niche in Canadian news affairs between the environmental scientists who had data on what was going on in the environment and what needed attention. Environmental scientists were severely ignored both by industry and the governments of the day who operated on two premises – first, that the most critical issues for Canada were economics and economic growth, and second that environmental issues could largely be ignored or could be solved by promises but no action. Alas we are still inundated with the news that “growth is good”, and “more growth is better”.   

I had relatively little involvement in David’s increasing interest in environmental issues by 1979, but I had written 3 ecology textbooks by then, pushing some of the environmental issues that are still with us, and I became a friend of David’s in the Department. We ecologists could only admire his ability to speak so clearly on the environmental issues of our day and connect these issues with the many travesties of how First Nations people had been sidelined. He pointed out very forcefully the astonishing failure of governments to address these issues. The public which was much less aware of environmental issues in the 1980s is now highly mobilized thanks in great part to all the work David and his colleagues have done in the last 50 years. He has many friends now but still strong enemies who continue to think of the environment as a large garbage can for economic growth. And he, still in his retirement, having achieved so much from his environmental work, bemoans the slow pace of government actions on environmental problems, as does every ecologist I know. His Foundation continues to press for action on many conservation fronts. So, thank you David for all your work and your wisdom over all these many years. You have engineered a strong environmental movement among old and young and I thank you for all that.

https://davidsuzuki.org/

How to Destroy a Research Station

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I have had the ‘privilege’ over the last 60 years of watching three ecological field stations be destroyed. Admittedly this is a small sample, against which every ecologist can complain, but I wanted to present to you my list of how to achieve this kind of destruction should you ever be commanded to do so. I will not name names or specific places, since the aim is to develop a general theory rather than to name and pillory specific historical actions and people. I suggest that nine rules are needed to proceed smoothly in this matter if you are given this job.

  1.  Have a clear vision why you wish to destroy an existing station. Do not vacillate. The background may be money, or philosophy of science, or orders from those higher in the echelon, or a personal peeve. Remember you are an administrator, and no one can challenge your wisdom in making major changes or closing the station.  
  2. Speak to none of the current users of the research station. If the research station has a Users Committee, avoid talking to them until after all the decisions are made. A users committee is just an honorary appointment, and it helps if very few of the users are actually people who do research at the station. It is very important that your vision should not be clouded by personnel or research programs currently running at the station. And it is best if the scientists using the station have no information except gossip about the changes that are coming.
  3. Avoid loose talk around your office. If you or your group are paying a visit in the field to the research station before closing it or repositioning its purpose, give out no information to anyone on future courses of action.
  4. Communicate upwards in the hierarchy, never downwards. You must keep all the members of the higher echelons fully informed. Do not dwell on the details of your progress in destruction but emphasize the gains that will flow from this dismantling. Tell fibs as much as you like because no one will question your version of events.
  5. Never read anything about the history of the research station or read any of the papers and reports that have originated there. The key is that you as an administrator know what should be done, and the last consideration is history. Administrators must keep a clear mind, unconcerned with historical trivia.
  6. Let none of the destruction news reach the media lest the public in general might begin to see what is happening. Newspaper and media coverage are rarely flattering to bureaucrats. If possible, line up a sympathetic media person who can talk about the brilliant future of the research station and the wisdom of the decisions you have made.
  7. Take a strong business approach. Do not worry if you must fire people currently running the research station or eject scientists currently working there. Everyone must retire at some point and all business leaders have solid recipes for hiring contractors to take care of any problems with the buildings. No matter what the extra cost.
  8. Sell the research station if you possibly can in order to gain revenue for your yet to be revealed vision. You may talk complete nonsense to explain why you are making major changes or closing the research station because few of your possible critics will be in a position to distinguish nonsense statements from truth. ‘Alternative facts’ are very useful if your decisions are questioned.
  9. Realize that if you have made a mistake in destroying a research station, your employer will not know that for several years. By that time, you will have ascended in the hierarchy of your employment unit for having carried out such a definitive action. And if your co-workers know the poor job you are doing, they will write sterling letters of reference for you to move you to another position in a different department or agency so that the worse the job you have done, the stronger will be the reference letters to recommend you for another job.

There is almost no literature I can find on this topic of administering a field station. If you think field stations are eternal, it may be a sign that you are very young, or you are very fortunate in working for an agency where moving forward is correctly labeled as progress. I have always thought that long-term field research stations were considered sacred but clearly not everyone agrees. Administrators must have something to do to leave their mark on the world for better or worse. All we can do is watch and be alert for emerging symptoms of collapse.

Swanson, F.J. (2015). Confluence of arts, humanities, and science at sites of long-term ecological inquiry. Ecosphere 6 (8), Article 132. doi: 10.1890/ES15-00139.1.

On Administration and Scientific Progress

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After talking and listening to my colleagues and friends who are still employed, I have the urge to try to quantify the utility of administrative meetings to scientific progress. I begin with a very simple model of what this relationship might look like.

The Neutral Model suggests that scientific progress is independent from the number of meetings that are focused on the scientific problem at hand. This is most likely the preferred model of administrators. The Optimistic Model suggests that scientific progress is positively related to the number of administrative meetings, possibly because the coordination among the members of the scientific team is enhanced. The Pessimistic Model suggests that the reverse is true, and if you as a scientific director wish to slow the progress of your scientific team, you should schedule many meetings all the time, presumably with a long agenda.

It is far from clear which model is appropriate for an ecological scientific team and more research is needed on this topic. Many scientists struggling with measurements and data collection are possibly attracted to the Pessimistic Model because time is the limiting element in their lives and both data and results are what limit progress. On the other hand, scientific administrators are possibly drawn to the Optimistic Model if they believe that meetings are the most important point of scientific progress and time is not the limiting factor, or perhaps they are drawn to the Neutral Model if they assume their scientists will work diligently and achieve the same goals no matter how many meetings are scheduled.

I hesitate to present this model given that the underlying mathematics are relatively simple, plus there are probably more business textbooks that make a detailed analysis of this issue than there are words in this blog. In a more realistic framework, we may have a peaked curve that indicate many meetings early in a project and fewer meetings once things are moving forward smoothly. There is going to be no magic numbers here, and the only purpose of this brief discussion is to think about how much you need to meet to define and deliver a set of objectives for a scientific question.

All my speculations above arose from an old paper (Moss 1978) illustrating these same general principles. Parkinson (1958) framed the law that “Work Expands To Fill The Time Available For Its Completion” and showed one consequence of this was that the fraction of administrators within a public organisation tends to increase irrespective of the amount of external scientific work done by that organisation. Moss (1978) produced these data to illustrate this law for British science data from 1976-77, illustrated in this graph:

Moss (1980) further elaborated on how Parkinson’s Law applied to scientific research organizations and noted that it may apply to many other research organizations. Although it is an old ‘law’ it may still be worth some discussion and consideration today.

Moss, R. (1978). An empirical test of Parkinson’s Law. Nature 273, 184. doi: 10.1038/273184a0.

Moss, R. (1980). Expanding on Parkinson’s Law. Nature 285, 9. doi: 10.1038/285009a0.

More on Old Growth Forests and Conservation

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This is a short blog to alert you to a well written plea for saving old growth forests in British Columbia by Karen Price. Karen works with Dave Daust and Rachel Holt, three of our ecological heroes pushing the provincial government to recognize the value of old growth forests. This problem is world-wide but the scientific data alone will not capture the general public as much as this article might.

https://northernbeat.ca/opinion/old-growth-complexity-in-a-sound-bite/

These ecologists have reported their detailed analysis in a report that you can access through the Sierra Club of BC if you want more information on the struggle here in Canada (https://sierraclub.bc.ca/laststand/ ). At present there is nothing but denial from the government and from the industry that there is a problem – the forestry industry is not overharvesting or if it is, we need the jobs. As one person told me, it is not a problem “because we plant one tree seedling for every thousand-year-old tree that we log”.

So please keep up the pressure on governments around the world. Scientists have pushed a strong agenda on sustainable logging for many years with success now looking possible because ordinary citizens demand a change, understanding that forests are more than wood. We must continue the push for sustainable forestry and old growth forest protection.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Kooyman, R.M., Taylor, C., Ward, M., and Watson, J.E.M. (2020). Recent Australian wildfires made worse by logging and associated forest management. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 898-900. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-1195-5.

Price, Karen, Holt, Rachel F., and Daust, Dave (2021). Conflicting portrayals of remaining old growth: the British Columbia case. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 51, 1-11. doi: 10.1139/cjfr-2020-0453.

On Cats and Birds and Policy Gaps

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Many people in western societies like to keep cats as pets, and with that simple observation we run into two problems that require resolution. First, cats are killers of wildlife, particularly birds but also an array of other small prey. Most people do not believe this, because cats are adored and make good, if somewhat disinterested pets. So, my first point might be that if you think cats are not killers, I invite you to keep another cat like a mountain lion for a pet. But we need some data on the kill rate of cats. Before we begin this search, we should note that cats can be kept inside dwellings or in cat runs with no access to birds or other prey. If this is the case, no problem exists for wildlife, and you can skip to the bottom of this blog for one other issue to recognize.

How much mortality can be traced to cats roaming out of doors? This will include normal house cats let out to roam at night, as well as wild cats that have been discarded by their owners into the wild. There is extensive literature on cats killing birds. If you want a brief introduction Greenwall et al. (2019) discuss a nesting colony of Fairy Terns, a threatened species of Australian seabird, along a beach in southwestern Australia. With detailed observations and photographic data, they recorded the complete failure of all 111 nests in this colony with the loss of all tern chicks in the early summer of 2018. The predator was a single desexed feral cat. Many local governments allow the capture of feral cats with the protocol that they are desexed and then released back into the environment. Clearly desexing and release does not remove the problem.

The domestic cat has been spread world-wide, so that the cat problem is not a local one. Li et al. (2021) completed a survey of feral cat kill rates in the eastern part of China and found that the minimum annual loss of wildlife to feral cats was in the range of 2.7-5.5 billion birds, and 3.6-9.8 billion mammals, as well as large numbers of amphibians, reptiles, and fish. In gardens in Western Europe cat predation on ringed birds studied with precise data showed that up to 25% of dead birds were killed by cats, but these data varied greatly among species (Pavisse et al. 2019). For the European Robin which often feeds on the ground 40% of all ringed birds were killed by cats, for the European Greenfinch the figure was 56% of ringed birds killed. These are just two examples of an extensive literature on cat kills going back many years (Calvert et al. 2013).

What can we do about this predation? As with too many conservation issues the answer is simple but difficult to implement: Ban all cats from free-ranging unless they are on a leash and under control. Keep cats in the house or in special cat runs that are confined outdoors. Ban completely stupid programs of catching feral cats, sterilizing them, and releasing them back to the wild to continue their killing. Cats may make marvellous pets but need to be kept indoors. Many people would support these measures but many cat owners would disagree about such measures. Some progress is being made in urban environments in which some suburbs do not permit cats to roam freely.

Feral cats are a serious issue in Australia because they attack many threatened birds and reptiles (Doherty et al. 2019). In this case a federal environmental policy to kill 2 million cats is popular but from a conservation viewpoint still a poor policy. We do not know if killing 2 million cats is too much or too few, and without specific goals for conservation and careful monitoring of bird populations widespread killing my not achieve the goal of protection for threatened species. Eradications of cats on islands is often feasible, but no mainland eradication is currently possible.

As conservation biologists know too well, when humans are the problem, wise policies may not be implemented. So, the second issue and the bottom line might be to consider the human costs of cat ownership. Adhikari et al. (2020) report a highly significant association between the risk of dying from colon cancer and cat ownership. These results are not confounded by sedentary lifestyle, cigarette smoking or socio-economic status. In a similar study Adhikari et al. (2019) found that living with a cat significantly increased the death rate from lung cancer among women. The cause of these associations cannot yet be deciphered but are postulated to result from mycotoxins, toxic secondary metabolites produced by fungi (moulds) in cereal crops used in cat food. Aflatoxin is a mycotoxin that produces well-known chemicals that are seriously toxic to animals and humans.

These kinds of studies of associations arising from surveys can be tossed off by the typical comments ‘these-things-do-not-concern-my cats’ or ‘that there is no proof of the exact cause’ so if you are concerned you might investigate the literature on both mycotoxins and the diseases that cats carry.

It is up to humans to solve human problems, but up to conservation biologists to point out the detrimental effects of household pets and their feral cousins on wildlife. The present situation is a complete policy failure by governments at all levels. Good science is relatively easy, good policy is very difficult.

Adhikari, Atin, Adhikari, A., Jacob, N. K., and Zhang, J. (2019). Pet ownership and the risk of dying from lung cancer, findings from an 18 year follow-up of a US national cohort. Environmental Research 173, 379-386. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2019.01.037.

Adhikari, Atin, Adhikari, A., Wei, Y. D., and Zhang, J. (2020). Association between pet ownership and the risk of dying from colorectal cancer: an 18-year follow-up of a national cohort. Journal of Public Health 28, 555-562. doi: 10.1007/s10389-019-01069-1.

Calvert, A.M., Bishop, C.A., Elliot, R.D., Krebs, E.A., Kydd, T.M., Machtans, C.S., Robertson, G.J., 2013. A synthesis of human-related avian mortality in Canada. Avian Conservation and Ecology 8: 11. doi 10.5751/ACE-00581-080211.

Doherty, T.S., Driscoll, D.A., Nimmo, D.G., Ritchie, E.G., and Spencer, R. (2019). Conservation or politics? Australia’s target to kill 2 million cats. Conservation Letters 12, e12633. doi: 10.1111/conl.12633.

Li, Yuhang, Wan, Yue, Shen, Hua, Loss, S.R., Marra, P.P., and Li, Zhongqiu (2021). Estimates of wildlife killed by free-ranging cats in China. Biological Conservation 253, 108929. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108929.

Greenwell, C.N., Calver, M.C., and Loneragan, N.R. (2019). Cat Gets Its Tern: A Case Study of Predation on a Threatened Coastal Seabird. Animals 9, 445. doi: 10.3390/ani9070445.

Pavisse, R., Vangeluwe, D., and Clergeau, P. (2019). Domestic Cat Predation on Garden Birds: An Analysis from European Ringing Programmes. Ardea 107, 103-109. doi: 10.5253/arde.v107i1.a6.

On Biodiversity Science

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With David Attenborough and all the amazing picture books on biodiversity there can be few people in the world who have not been alerted to the array of beautiful and interesting species on Earth. Until recently the subject of biodiversity, known to First Nations since long, long ago, had not entered the western world of automobiles, industry, farming, fishing, music, theatres, and movies. Biodiversity is now greatly appreciated by most people, but perhaps more as entertainment for western societies and more for subsistence food in less wealthy parts of our world.

There are many different measures of ‘biodiversity’ and when discussing how we should protect biodiversity we should be careful about exactly how this word is being used. The number of different species in an area is one simple measure of biodiversity. But often the types of organisms being considered are less well defined. Forest ecologists attempt to protect forest biodiversity, but logging companies are more concerned only with trees and tree size for commercial use. Bird watchers are concerned with birds and have developed much citizen science in counting birds. Mushroom connoisseurs may worry about what edible mushrooms will be available this summer. But in many cases biodiversity scientists recognize that the community of organisms and the ecosystem that contains them would be a more appropriate unit of analysis. But as the number of species in an ecosystem increases, the complexity of the ecosystem becomes unmanageable. A single ecosystem may have hundreds to thousands of species, and we are in the infant stage of trying to determine how to study these biological systems.

One result is that, given that there are perhaps 10 million species on Earth and only perhaps 10,000 biologists who study biodiversity, where do we begin? The first and most popular way to answer this question is to pick a single species and concentrate on understanding its ecology. This makes are researcher’s life fairly simple. If elephants in Africa are under threat, find out all about the ecology of elephants. If a particular butterfly in England is very rare, try to find out why and how to protect them. This kind of research is very valuable for conservation because it provides a detailed background for understanding the requirements of each species. But the single species approaches lead into at least two quagmires. First, all species exist in a web of other species and understanding this web greatly expands the problem. It is possible in many cases to decipher the effects other species have on our elephants or butterflies, but this requires many more scientists to assist in analysing the species’ food chain, its diseases, its predators and parasites, and that is only a start. The second quagmire is that one of the general rules of ecology is that most species on Earth are rare, and few are common. So that we must concentrate our person-power on the common species because they are easier to find and study. But it is often the rare species that are of conservation concern, and so we should focus on them rather than the common species. In particular, given that only about 10% of the species on Earth have been described scientifically, we may often be assigned a species that does not have any information on its food habits or habitat requirements, its distribution, and how its abundance might be changing over time, a lifetime research program.

The result of this general overview is that the mantra of our day – Protect Biodiversity – begins as a compelling slogan and ends in enormous scientific complexity. As such it falls into the category of slogans like ‘Reduce Poverty’ and ‘Peace on Earth’, something we can all agree on, but the devil is in the details of how to achieve that particular goal.

One way to avoid all these pitfalls has been to jump over the problems of individual species and analyse communities of species or entire ecosystems. The result of this approach is to boil down all the species in the community to a number that estimates “biodiversity” and then use that number in relating ‘biodiversity’ to community attributes like ‘productivity’ or ‘stability’. This approach leads to testing hypotheses like ‘Higher biodiversity leads to greater stability’. There are serious problems with this approach if it is used to test any such hypothesis. First, biodiversity in this example must be rigorously defined as well as stability. The fact that higher biodiversity of butterflies in a particular region is associated with a more stable abundance of these butterflies over time is worthy of note but not of generalization to global communities or ecosystems. And as in all ecological studies we do not know if this is a generalization applicable to all butterfly populations everywhere until many more studies have been done.

A second problem is that this community or ecosystem approach to address ecological questions about biodiversity is not very useful in promoting conservation which boils down to particular species in particular environments. It should force us back to looking at the population ecology of species that are of conservation concern. It is population ecologists who must push forward the main goals of the conservation of the Earth’s biota, as Caughley (1994) recognized long ago.

The practical goals of conservation have always been local, and this constraint is mostly ignored in papers that demand some global research priorities and global ecological rules. The broad problem is that the conservation of biodiversity is a gigantic scientific and political problem that is currently underfunded and in its scientific infancy. At the present too much biodiversity research is short-term and not structured in a comprehensive framework that identifies critical problems and concentrates research efforts on these problems (Nichols et al. 2019, Sutherland et al. 2018). One more important issue for a seminar discussion group. 

Caughley, G. (1994). Directions in conservation biology. Journal of Animal Ecology 63, 215-244. doi: 10.2307/5542

Nichols, J.D., Kendall, W.L., and Boomer, G.S. (2019). Accumulating evidence in ecology: Once is not enough. Ecology and Evolution 9, 13991-14004. doi: 10.1002/ece3.5836.

Sutherland, W.J., Butchart, Stuart H.M., Connor, B., Culshaw, C., Dicks, L.V., et al. (2018). A 2018 Horizon Scan of Emerging Issues for Global Conservation and Biological Diversity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, 47-58. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.11.006.

What does Ecology have to offer for Covid pandemic response planning?

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It has already occurred to many ecologists that Covid pandemic management could obtain some useful advice from ecologists in many subdisciplines. Yet there is apparently no clear use of established ecological idioms for Covid planning that I can find in the literature. No doubt there were many informal meetings among ecologists and medical scientists, and epidemiology is an ecological subdiscipline. Some papers have been published about the behavioural ecology of individual interactions that could lead to infection spread (e.g., Shaw et al. 2021) and books and symposia will no doubt appear once the pandemic is over. But I can find no direct evidence that ecologists were consulted in the early days of the pandemic for ideas about disease spread in spite of an abundant literature on the subject (e.g., Jones et al. 2008, Halliday et al. 2017 and many others). Let us try to list some of the ecological principles that might have been useful if they were injected into the Covid pandemic planning and discussions from the start.

I can see six ecological principles that could be useful for any disease planning:
(1) Invasion ecology
(2) Island eradications
(3) Biosecurity considerations
(4) Pest control
(5) Population regulation.
(6) Evolutionary ecology.

Invasion ecology provides many examples of the clear principle that avoiding the introduction of a new species or disease is the simplest way to avoid potential future issues. Once a species is introduced it is typically impossible to get rid of it or alternatively very expensive.

Island eradications have given us several lessons in the difficulties of eradication of a pest once it is established. The best examples come from introduced rats on islands (Russell and Broome 2016, Wheeler et al. 2019) and cat eradication on Macquarie Island (Dowding et al. 2009). Advances are being made in eradication on islands but to achieve this on a continental scale eludes us unless the species is caught very early in its establishment.

Biosecurity considerations flow from the trade in illegal drugs but of late have focused on endangered wildlife. The principle is to prevent the entry or exit of dangerous or threatened organisms. ‘Do not let the organism in’ seems to be a message lost on most countries during the Covid pandemic.

Pest control has been a major issue both in conservation, in agriculture, and in epidemiology. It is the one ecological principle that has occupied 95% of the energy and the funding for Covid problems that have arisen partly from ignoring the previous three principles. Our success in dealing with Covid is about on par with our success in pest control, which is not a compliment.

Population regulation would seem to be an issue far from a pandemic, but it is an essential feature of the spread of the virus in densely populated areas. Much attention has been paid to social interactions and their behavioural consequences (e.g., Xu and Cheng 2021), but the matter has emerged again as ‘hot spots’ of viral infections and the discussions of whether vaccine availability should be prorated to these areas to reduce contagion or given to more susceptible older people or to essential workers however defined. Individual differences are a major area of behavioural ecology and there is an extensive literature that I think has not been mined for ideas of how to respond to a pandemic.  

Evolutionary ecology is another critical area of great interest in disease management because of the speed of mutational changes in disease organisms. Much of the current discussion is about virus variants that are ‘of concern’ and those that are variants ‘of interest’. Distinguishing these is relatively simple but has not been used as much as it should to prevent continued outbreaks from the new mutations by widespread testing. Much modelling has been done but too little empirical work to trace these invasions in detail from one continent to another.

The bottom line of this discussion is a plea for medical specialists to talk to ecologists and other natural scientists. I suspect too few medical people feel that biologists would have any insight to pandemic management decisions, and I am certain that many or most politicians have no idea of the complexities of the ecology of pandemics. So, this is a plea following Haley et al. (2021) and Shaw et al. (2021) for more cooperation and consultation between scientists who have knowledge of details that might help us in keeping ahead of the next wave.

Dowding, J.E., Murphy, E.C., Springer, K., Peacock, A.J., and Krebs, C.J. (2009). Cats, rabbits, Myxoma virus, and vegetation on Macquarie Island: a comment on Bergstrom et al. (2009). Journal of Applied Ecology 46, 1129-1132. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2009.01690.x

Haley, D., Paucar-Caceres, A., and Schlindwein, S. (2021). A critical inquiry into the value of systems thinking in the time of COVID-19 crisis. Systems 9, 1-14. doi: 10.3390/systems9010013.

Halliday, J.E.B., Hampson, K., Hanley, N., Lembo, T., Sharp, J.P., Haydon, D.T., and Cleaveland, S. (2017) Driving improvements in infectious disease surveillance through locally relevant capacity strengthening. Science 357:146–148. doi:10.1126/science.aam8332.

Jones, K.E., Patel, N.G., Levy, M.A. et al. (2008) Global trends in emerging infectious diseases. Nature 451: 990–993. doi:10.1038/nature06536.

Russell, J.C. and Broome, K.G. (2016). Fifty years of rodent eradications in New Zealand: another decade of advances. New Zealand Journal of Ecology 40, 197-204. doi: 10.20417/nzjecol.40.22.

Shaw, A.K., White, L.A., Michalska-Smith, M., Borer, E.T., Craft, M.E., Seabloom, E.W., et al.  (2021). Lessons from movement ecology for the return to work: Modeling contacts and the spread of COVID-19. PLoS ONE 16, e0242955. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242955.

Wheeler, R., Priddel, D., O’Dwyer, T., Carlile, N., Portelli, D., and Wilkinson, I. (2019). Evaluating the susceptibility of invasive black rats (Rattus rattus) and house mice (Mus musculus) to brodifacoum as a prelude to rodent eradication on Lord Howe Island. Biological Invasions 21, 833-845. doi: 10.1007/s10530-018-1863-4.

Xu, P. and Cheng, J. (2021). Individual differences in social distancing and mask-wearing in the pandemic of COVID-19: The role of need for cognition, self-control and risk attitude. Personality and Individual Differences 175, 110706. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2021.110706.

The Crunch is Here

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There are times when we either act or give up, so if you think that the Covid epidemic, the conservation of endangered species, and the protection of old growth forests are irrelevant problems to your way of life, stop reading here. These three major problems are here and now and have come to a head as a crunch: do something or quit.

The Covid epidemic is the most obvious of the current crises and it is on the radio and TV every day with an array of instructions of how to avoid this virus disease. You can respond to all this in three ways: ignore the problem because you are immortal, take a few precautions when you have time but minimize inconvenience, or take the mortality rate and the sickness rate of Covid to heart and do all you can to prevent infection or spread of infection. In the third wave of this virus, too many people in North America are taking option 1 and 2, perhaps in the hope that the vaccines arriving now will solve the problem of infection. If you think the pandemic will go away without much death and disruption, read Kolata (2019) or one of the many good books on pandemics in history (e.g., Kelly (2006). They are with us and our governments must take note.

Of less visibility in the news media are conservation issues that are equally at a crunch point. The most obvious one in Canada is the decline of mountain caribou, and the current status of conservation efforts on their behalf. Nagy-Reis et al. (2021) have recently reported on the lack of success to date in conserving mountain caribou. We have known for more than 20 years that habitat loss and habitat changes were the critical factors driving mountain caribou populations in Western Canada to extinction. Forest cover within the caribou range is the key indicator for caribou conservation, and forest harvest is the main cause of habitat loss added to by forest fires in more northern areas. From 2000 to 2018 caribou lost twice as much habitat as they gained by restoration policies from forest companies and the governments involved. Loss rates of habitat in different subregions of Western Canada ranged from about 1% per year to 8% per year loss. If we had a bank account with these continued losses over 20 years, we would start a revolution. The accepted policies are failing caribou. Seismic lines that break up caribou habitat are regenerating at a slow rate. Changes in land use management must be implemented to prevent extinction but the crunch comes there – jobs in the forestry industry vs. conservation goals that do not generate cash for governments. Temporary fixes like wolf control will help, but as Nagy-Reis et al. (2021) point out are not sufficient to solve the problem. If we wish to reverse these caribou declines, we must make long-term commitments to land use planning and reduce human alterations of landscapes. 

The third problem in which crunch time is coming is the loss of old growth forests, and thus is related to some extent to the caribou conservation issue. Old growth forest is disappearing globally and in any country on Earth you can hear the cry (e.g. Lindenmayer et al. 2020, Watson et al. 2018). In British Columbia now you must drive many hours to see old growth (3 meters diameter) and they are still logging these stands. The reason for this is the clever foresters who classify “old growth” in this province, so that in their arithmetic at present 26% of our forests are called ‘old growth’. At high elevations many ‘old growth’ stands are small trees, and at one extreme old growth in terms of age could be Krummholz (‘knee timber’) < 1 m tall. The government classifies old growth in wetter areas as stands of 250 years or more in age, and in dryer areas trees of 140 years old, primarily because the logging companies so far have not wanted to log such “small” trees. Price et al. (2021) analysed the forest structure of British Columbia and classified old growth with a proper definition of a productivity class of trees that will grow to 25 m or more in height by age 150 years. By government definitions B.C. has about 50 million ha of forest, of which 26% is classified as ‘old’growth’. So, this means they believe that 13 million ha of forest in B.C. is old growth. But if you consider the more correct ecological definition of old growth as stated by Price et al. (2021) of trees that will grow > 25 m tall in 50 years you find that <1% of B.C. forest is old growth at the present time. People do not drive for miles to see 5 m trees which they already have in cities. They will drive to see trees that are 800-1000 years old and more than 3 m in diameter, so a common-sense definition of old growth prevails in the tourist population. But again, we are back at jobs in forestry vs tourism potentials and the government is so committed to the forest industry that you have to search hard to find anyone who will give you a public lecture on “old growth” logging. So, this is another crunch for our time, jobs vs some 800-year-old trees with a lot of wood that inspire us and our children as being part of nature. All these considerations do not even begin to consider the other species that are lost in logging old growth because they are small and rarely measured (Doak 1989). The accepted government policies are failing us and our children. It is time to use science to challenge these changes which will affect us all now and in the future.

Doak, D. (1989). Spotted owls and old growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. Conservation Biology 3, 389-396.

Kelly, J. (2006) ‘The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time.’ (Harper Perennial: New York.). ISBN: 978-0060-00693-8.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Kooyman, R.M., Taylor, C., Ward, M., and Watson, J.E.M. (2020). Recent Australian wildfires made worse by logging and associated forest management. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 898-900. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-1195-5.

Kolata, G.B. (2019) ‘Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that caused it.’ (Atria Books: New York.). ISBN: 978-14299-79351

Nagy-Reis, M., Dickie, M., Calvert, A.M., Hebblewhite, M., Hervieux, D., Seip, D.R., Gilbert, S. L., Venter, O., DeMars, C., Boutin, S., and Serrouya, R. (2021). Habitat loss accelerates for the endangered woodland caribou in western Canada. Conservation Science and Practice (in press), e437. doi: 10.1111/csp2.437 .

Price, K., Holt, R.F., and Daust, D. (2021). Conflicting portrayals of remaining old growth: the British Columbia case. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 51, 1-11. doi: 10.1139/cjfr-2020-0453.

Watson, J.E.M., Evans, T., Venter, O., Williams, B., and Tulloch, A. (2018). The exceptional value of intact forest ecosystems. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, 599-610. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0490-x.