Tag Archives: long-term problems

Large Mammal Conservation

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The conservation problem is largely focused on large things, birds and mammals, with a few pretty things like butterflies thrown in. What concerns me is the current distortion in the conservation knowledge base available for large animal conservation. I will talk largely about mammals but large birds are equally a problem.

The difficulty is this. It is nearly impossible to study large mammals because they are scarce on the ground, so census methods must be spatially extensive and thus very expensive. One needs a big budget to do this properly, and this effectively rules out university scientists unless they can collaborate with government biologists who have large budgets or private consortia who need the large mammals so they can shoot them. But even with a large budget, a large mammal ecologist cannot be very productive as measured in papers per year of research effort. So the universities in general have shied away from hiring young scientists who might be described as large mammal ecologists. This produces positive feedback in the job market so that few young scientists see this as a viable career.

All of this would be changed if governments were hiring large mammal ecologists. But they are not, with few exceptions. Governments at least in Canada and Australia have been shedding ecologists of all varieties while all the time professing how much they are doing for conservation of threatened species. The advantage of this approach for governments is that they shed high cost biologists, and cover their tracks with some hiring of public relations personnel who have no field costs and perhaps a few biologists who concentrate on small creatures and local problems. So we reach a stalemate when it comes to large mammal conservation. Why do we need polar bear scientists when all they do is make trouble? We can escape such trouble easily. Count the polar bears or the caribou every 5 years or so, so there is consequently much less information that scientists can put their fingers on. (Imagine if we counted the stock market once every 5 years.) The consequence is that in many areas we have large scale, long-term problems with few scientists and only small scale funding to find out what is happening in the field. For polar bears this seems to be partly alleviated by private funding from people who care, while the government shirks its duties for future generations.

For caribou in Canada the situation is worse because the problem is spread over more than half of Canada so the funding and person-power needed for conservation is much larger, and this is further compounded by the immediate conflict of caribou with industrial developments in oil, gas, and forestry. When dollars conflict with conservation needs, it is best not to bet on conservation winning. What good has a polar bear or a caribou done for you?

The potential consequence of all this is that we slowly lose populations of these large iconic species. If this loss is slow enough, no one seems to notice save a few concerned conservation biologists who do not own the newspapers and TV stations. And conservation ecologists grow pessimistic that we can save these large species that require much habitat and freedom from disturbance. The solutions seem to be two. First, build a big fence and keep them in a very large zoo (Packer et al. 2013). This will work for some species like caribou, as Kruger Park in South Africa illustrates so well with African large mammals (but some disagree, Creel et al. 2013). But the fence-solution will not work for polar bears, and our best response for their conservation may be to cross our fingers and hope, all the while trying to slow down the losses in the best way we can. A second solution is to decide that these large mammal conservation situations are not scientific but sociological, and progress can best be made by doing good sociological research to change the attitudes of humans about the value of biodiversity. If this is the solution, we do not need to worry that there are no biologists available to investigate the conservation issues of large mammals.

I think perhaps the bottom line is that it takes a spirited soul to aim for a career in large mammal conservation research and we hope that this happens and the conservation future for large mammals in Canada grows brighter.

Creel, S., 2013. Conserving large populations of lions – the argument for fences has holes. Ecology Letters 16 (5): 635-641. doi: 10.1111/ele.12145.

Packer, C., et al. 2013. Conserving large carnivores: dollars and fence. Ecology Letters. 16: 1413-e3. doi: 10.1111/ele.12091.

Pauly, D. 1995. Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10: 430.

What is Policy?

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One seemingly popular way of muzzling scientists is to declare that they may not comment on issues that impact on government policy. In Canada and in Australia at the present time this kind of general rule seems to be enforced. It raises the serious issue of what is ‘policy’. In practice it appears that some scientific papers that discuss policy can pass the bar because they support the dominant economic paradigm of eternal growth or at least do not challenge it. But the science done by ecologists and environmental scientists often conflicts with current practices and thus confronts the economic paradigm.

There are several dictionary definitions of policy but the one most relevant to this discussion is:

“a high-level overall plan embracing the general goals and acceptable procedures especially of a governmental body”

The problem an ecologist faces is that in many countries this “high overall plan for the country” involves continuous economic growth, no limitations on the human population, the minimization of regulations regarding environmental pollution, and no long-term plan about climate change. But probably the largest area of conflict is over economic growth, and any ecological data that might restrict economic growth should be muzzled or at least severely edited.

This approach of governments is only partially effective because in general the government does not have the power to muzzle university scientists who can speak out on any topic, and this has been a comfort to ecologists and environmental scientists. But there are several indirect ways to muzzle these non-government scientists because the government controls some of the radio and TV media that must obtain funding from the federal budget, and the pressure of budget cuts unless ‘you toe the line’ works well. And the government also has indirect controls over research funding so that research that might uncover critical issues can be deemed less important than research that might increase the GNP. All of this serves the current economic paradigm of most of the developed countries.

Virtually all conservation biology research contains clear messages about policy issues, but these are typically so far removed from the day to day decisions made by governments that they can be safely ignored. A national park here or there seems to satisfy many voters who think these biodiversity problems are under control. But I would argue that all of conservation biology and indeed all of ecology is subversive to the dominant economic paradigm of our day so that everything we do has policy implications. If this is correct, telling scientists they may not comment on policy issues is effectively telling them not to do ecological or environmental science.

So we ecologists get along by keeping a minimal profile, a clear mistake at a time when more emphasis should be given to emerging environmental problems, especially long term issues that do not immediately affect voters. There is no major political party in power in North America or Australia that embraces in a serious way what might be called a green agenda for the future of the Earth.

The solution seems to be to convince the voters at large that the ecological world view is better than the economic world view and there are some signs of a slow move in this direction. The recent complete failure of economics as a reliable guide to government policy should start to move us in the right direction, and the recognition that inequality is destroying the social fabric is helpful. But movement is very slow.

Meanwhile ecologists must continue to question policies that are destroying the Earth. We can begin with fracking for oil and gas, and continue to highlight biodiversity losses driven by the growth of population and economic developments that continue the era of oil and natural gas. And keep asking when will we have a green President or Prime Minister?

Let me boil down my point of view. Everything scientists do has policy implications, so if scientists are muzzled by their government, it is a serious violation of democratic freedom of speech. And if a government pays no attention to the findings of science, it is condemning itself to oblivion in the future.

Davis, C., and Fisk, J.M. 2014. Energy abundance or environmental worries? Analyzing public support for fracking in the United States. Review of Policy Research 31(1): 1-16. doi: 10.1111/ropr.12048.

Mash, R., Minnaar, J., and Mash, B. 2014. Health and fracking: Should the medical profession be concerned? South African Medical Journal 104(5): 332-335. doi: 10.7196/SAMJ.7860.

Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press, Harvard University, Boston. 696 pp. ISBN 9780674430006

Stiglitz, J.E. 2012. The Price of Inequality. W.W. Norton and Company, New York.

 

Are We Destroying the Planet?

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My question for everyone to ask themselves today is this: are we humans destroying Planet Earth? This is perhaps a strange question to ask and one would expect most people to say, ‘no, of course not’. So perhaps we should put a constraint on this question that this pertains to the next 100-200 years. So it is not an immediate question, something that will happen in the coming six months, but a long-term question about what will happen in the next centuries.

So the immediate response is, ‘how could we be destroying the whole of planet Earth?’ The answer might be to look at the newspaper this week, and ask yourself what will possibly happen when we run out of resources. Like food and water. As a simple paradigm of our problems we might use the sewage disposal problem of Victoria, BC. Victoria for years has simply dumped its untreated sewage out into the ocean in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The ocean, as we seem to believe, is a very large garbage dump. But might we think that a useful assumption of a civilized society is that you should not dump your garbage across the fence into your neighbour’s back yard? So then we say, we need to spend the money to construct a proper treatment plant. But the Victoria-area municipalities cannot even agree on a location for the sewage plant, and there are loud protests that we cannot possibly afford a modern treatment plant. What can we say about humans who think it is acceptable to dump their garbage over the fence into the ocean? One interpretation is that they have made the correct decision, and this will not affect them during their lifetime since it has been going on now for more than 100 years, so carry on. Yet this is a perfect mimic of the problems of the world today.

Climate change is all about what we dump into the atmosphere, in particular greenhouse gases and perhaps most obviously CO2. But we take no responsibility for this because it will not affect us in our lifetime and surely some clever engineer will solve this problem in the next century. Preferably at no cost to the taxpayers.

So yes, you might argue that we are indeed destroying the planet. But since Victoria, BC, and indeed all of Canada are only a small part of the global problem because of a low population base, why should we have to do anything? Well, many people think we should be doing something, but yet the majority continue to elect politicians who ignore the three major problems of the world today – climate change, population growth, and food security or at best say they will do something about it by 2020 or 2050. Most of the political parties of the developed world today subscribe to three propositions – growth is good and more growth is better, climate change is a minor problem, and implicitly we do not care one bit about what kind of a world we leave to our children and grandchildren. Spend now, they can pay later.

Now you will be hard pressed to find any business person or politician of any stripe saying any of these things, and all will protest loudly that they are doing all the right things. In their minds the main problems of our day are that taxes are too high and must be reduced, and that the 1% must be let free to improve the world as they choose.

None of this of course is ecological science or even sustainability science. The argument rests on only one simple principle – that the environment is not a garbage can. And what we do now impinges on what kind of Earth we wish to leave to the coming generations. So it might help to ask your favourite politician if he or she thinks we are destroying the Earth, and if not, why they do not read the newspapers. And why they do nothing about the major problems of our day?

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Ehrlich, Anne H. (2013). Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, 20122845. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2845.

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Ehrlich, Anne H. (2013). Future collapse: how optimistic should we be? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, 20131373. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1373.

Kelly, Michael J. (2013). Why a collapse of global civilization will be avoided: a comment on Ehrlich & Ehrlich. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1193.

The Snowshoe Hare 10-year Cycle – A Cautionary Tale

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We have been working on the ten-year cycle of snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) in the southwest Yukon since 1975 trying to answer the simple question of what causes these cyclic fluctuations. I think that we now understand the causes of the cyclic dynamics, which is not to say all things are known but the broad picture is complete. But some misunderstanding persists, hence this one page summary. Some biology first.

The snowshoe hare cycle has been known from Canada lynx fur return data for more than 100 years, and of course known to First Nations people much before that. Hares are herbivores of small trees and shrubs, they reproduce at age 1 and rarely live more than 1-2 years. They have 2-4 litters in a summer, with litter size around 4-6. Juvenile losses are high and at best populations increase about three-to-four-fold per year. Almost everything eats them – lynx, coyotes, great-horned owls, goshawks, a long list of predators on the young. Reproduction collapses with rising density and females reduce their output from 4 litters to 2 in the peak and decline phase.

The obvious driving factors when Lloyd Keith and his students began working on the hare cycle in Alberta in the 1960s were winter food shortage and predation. When there is a high hare peak, damage to shrubs and small trees is obvious. But it was quite clear in Keith’s studies that the decline phase continued well after the vegetation recovered, and so he postulated a two-factor explanation, winter food shortage followed by high predation losses. He looked for disease and parasite problems in hares but found nothing.

Testing the winter food limitation would appear to be simple but is fraught with problems. Everyone believes that food is an ultimate limiting factor, so that it must be involved in the cyclic dynamics. We began testing food limitation in the mid-1970s and found that one could add natural food or artificial food (rabbit chow) and apparently have no effect on cyclic dynamics. Hares came to the food grids so the density increased by immigration, but the decline started at the same time and at the same rate as on control grids. So what is the role of food?

Our next attempt was to do a factorial experiment adding food, reducing predation, and doing both together. The details are important, replication was never enough for the manipulated treatments, we did it only for 10 years rather than 20 or 30. What we found was that there was an interaction between food addition and mammal predator exclusion so that the combined treatment increased to a much higher density than any single treatment. But this result came with a puzzle. What is the role of food? Hares showed no evidence of malnutrition in the peak or decline, fed hares did not increase their reproductive output. What produced the strong interaction between food addition and predator reduction?

The next breakthrough came when Rudy Boonstra suggested that predator-caused stress might underlie these strange dynamics. Because we could now measure stress with faecal cortisol measures we could test for stress directly in free-ranging hares. The surprise was that this idea worked and Michael Sheriff capped off the stress hypothesis by showing that not only does predator-induced stress reduce reproductive rates, but the stress effect is inherited maternally in the next generation.

The bottom line: the whole dynamics of the snowshoe hare cycle are predator-induced. All the changes in mortality and reproduction are direct and indirect effects of predators chasing and eating hares. The experimental food/predator interaction was mechanistically wrong in targeting food as a major limiting factor.

This of course does not mean that food is irrelevant as an important factor to study in hare cycles. In particular very high peak populations damage shrubs and small trees and we do not yet have the details of how this works out in time. Secondary chemicals are certainly involved here.

Why does all this matter? Two points. First, the hare cycle is often trumpeted as an example of a tri-trophic interaction of food – hares – predators, when in fact it seems to be a simple predator-prey system, as Lotka suggested in 1925. Models of the hare cycle have proliferated over time, and there are far more models of the cycle in existence than there are long-term field studies or field experiments. It is possible to model the hare cycle as a predator-prey oscillation, as a food plant-hare oscillation, as a parasite-hare interaction, as a cosmic particle – hare oscillation, as an intrinsic social – maternal effects interaction, and I have probably missed some other combinations of delayed-density dependent factors that have been discussed. That one can produce a formal mathematical model of the hare cycle does not mean that the chosen factor is the correct one.

The other point I would leave you with is the large amount of field work needed to sort out the mechanisms driving the population dynamics of hares. Ecology is not simple. This enigma of the ten-year cycle has always been a classic example in ecology and perhaps it is now solved. Or perhaps not?

Boonstra, R., D. Hik, G. R. Singleton, and A. Tinnikov. 1998. The impact of predator-induced stress on the snowshoe hare cycle. Ecological Monographs 68:371-394.

Boutin, S., C. J. Krebs, R. Boonstra, M. R. T. Dale, S. J. Hannon, K. Martin, A. R. E. Sinclair, J. N. M. Smith, R. Turkington, M. Blower, A. Byrom, F. I. Doyle, C. Doyle, D. Hik, L. Hofer, A. Hubbs, T. Karels, D. L. Murray, V. Nams, M. O’Donoghue, C. Rohner, and S. Schweiger. 1995. Population changes of the vertebrate community during a snowshoe hare cycle in Canada’s boreal forest. Oikos 74:69-80.

Keith, L. B., and L. A. Windberg. 1978. A demographic analysis of the snowshoe hare cycle. Wildlife Monographs 58:1-70.

Keith, L. B. 1990. Dynamics of snowshoe hare populations. Current Mammalogy 4:119-195.

Krebs, C. J., S. Boutin, R. Boonstra, A. R. E. Sinclair, J. N. M. Smith, M. R. T. Dale, K. Martin, and R. Turkington. 1995. Impact of food and predation on the snowshoe hare cycle. Science 269:1112-1115.

Krebs, C. J., S. Boutin, and R. Boonstra, editors. 2001. Ecosystem Dynamics of the Boreal Forest: the Kluane Project. Oxford University Press, New York.

Sheriff, M. J., C. J. Krebs, and R. Boonstra. 2009. The sensitive hare: sublethal effects of predator stress on reproduction in snowshoe hares. Journal of Animal Ecology 78:1249-1258.

Yan, C., N. C. Stenseth, C. J. Krebs, and Z. Zhang. 2013. Linking climate change to population cycles of hares and lynx. Global Change Biology 19:3263-3271.

On Important Questions in Ecology

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There is a most interesting paper that you should read about the important questions in ecology:

Sutherland, W.J. et al. (2013) Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology, 101, 58-67.

This paper represents the views of 388 ecologists who culled through all of the 754 questions submitted and vetted in a two day workshop in London in April 2012. There are many thesis topics highlighted in this list and it gives a good overview of what many ecologists think is important. But there are some problems with this approach that you might wish to consider after you read this paper.

We can begin with a relatively trivial point. The title indicates that it will discuss ‘fundamental’ questions in ecology but the Summary changes this to ‘important’ questions. To be sure the authors recognize that what we now think is ‘important’ may be judged in the future to be less than important, so in a sense they recognize this problem. ‘Important’ is not an operational word in science, and consequently it is always a focus for endless argument. But let us not get involved with semantics and look at the actual 100 questions.

As I read the paper I was reminded of the discussion in Peters (1991, p. 13) who had the audacity to point out that academic ecologists thrived on unanswerable questions. In particular Peters (1991) focused on ‘why’ questions as being high on the list of unanswerable ones, and it is good to see that there are only 2 questions out of 100 that have a ‘why’ in them. Most of the questions posed are ‘how’ questions (about 65 instances) and ‘what’ questions (about 52 instances).

In framing questions in any science there is a fine line in the continuum of very broad questions that define an agenda and at the other extreme to very specific questions about one species or community. With very broad questions there will never be a clear point at which we can say that we have answered that question so we can move on. With very specific questions we can answer them experimentally and move on. So where do we cut the cake of questions? Most of these 100 questions are very broad and so they both illuminate and frustrate me because they cannot be answered without making them more specific.

Let me go over just one example. Question 11 What are the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that govern species’ range margins? First, we might note that this question goes back at least 138 years to Alfred Wallace (1876, The Geographical Distribution of Animals), and has been repeated in many ecology textbooks ever since. There are few organisms for which it has been answered and very much speculation about it. At the moment the ecological mechanism in favour is ‘climate’. This is a question that can be answered ecologically only for particular species, and cannot be answered in real (human) time for the evolutionary mechanisms. Consequently it is an area rife for correlational ecology whose conclusions could possibly be tested in a hundred years if not longer. All of these problems should not stand in the way of doing studies on range margins, and there are many hundreds of papers that attest to this conclusion. My question is when will we know that we have answered this question, and my answer is never. We can in some cases use paleoecology to get at these issues, and then extrapolate that the future will be like the past, a most dubious assumption. My concern is that if we have not answered this question in 138 years, what is the hope that we will answer it now?

It is good to be optimistic about the future development of ecological science. Perhaps I have picked a poor example from the list of 100 questions, and my concern is that in this case at least this is not a question that I would suggest to a new PhD student. Still I am glad to have this list set out so clearly and perhaps the next step would be to write a synthesis paper on each of the 100 topics and discuss how much progress has been made on that particular issue, and what exactly we might do to answer the question more rapidly. How can we avoid in ecology what Cox (2007) called a “yawning abyss of vacuous generalities”?

Cox, D. R. (2007) Applied statistics: A review. Annals of Applied Statistics, 1, 1-16.

Peters, R. H. (1991) A Critique for Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.

Sutherland, W. J., Freckleton, R. P., Godfray, H. C. J., Beissinger, S. R., Benton, T., Cameron, D. D., Carmel, Y., Coomes, D. A., Coulson, T., Emmerson, M. C., Hails, R. S., Hays, G. C., Hodgson, D. J., Hutchings, M. J., Johnson, D., Jones, J. P. G., Keeling, M. J., Kokko, H., Kunin, W. E. & Lambin, X. (2013) Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology, 101, 58-67.

Open Letter from a Scientist to a Bureaucrat

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Let us assume for the moment that I am a scientist who has worked in a government research organization for 25 years under a series of bureaucrats. I have just retired and the object of this letter is to tell a bureaucrat what is good and what is bad about the bureaucratic government system. If you work in a perfect government system, perhaps you do not need to read further.

Dear Sir/Madam:

I would like to offer you some free advice that comes from a scientist who has worked in government for many years. This is presumptuous to be sure in light of our relative positions, but I feel you might benefit from some notes from the trenches.

First, science should never be organized in a top-down manner. We ecologists know about trophic cascades and the consequences it has for the lower trophic levels. You should not tell us what to do because you know nothing about the subject matter of the science, in this case ecology. I note especially that an MBA does not confer infinite wisdom on science matters. So I suggest you consider organizing things bottom-up. Your job is to provide scientists with the technical support, the funding, and the facilities to do their work. I note that this does not preclude you providing us with general areas of science in which we are expected to do our research. If our general position is to study the effectiveness of pollination in California crops, you should not tolerate us going to Africa to study elephant ecology. We appreciate that the government has at least some general ideas of what is critical to study. If they do not, it would be advisable to gather a group of scientists to discuss what the critical problems are in a particular area of science. Scientists do not work in closed rooms and do have a general understanding of what is happening in their field.

Second, do not muzzle us about anything scientific. We do not work for you or for the current government but we do work for the people of Canada or Australia or whatever country, and our mandate is to speak out on scientific questions, to provide evidence based policy guidance and to educate the public when errors are promulgated by people who know nothing about what they speak. This could well include government ministers who are known at least on occasion to utter complete nonsense. Our job is not to support the government’s policies of the day but to provide evidence about scientific questions. In general we scientists do not see government ministers crying out that they know more about brain surgery than trained doctors, so we think the same attitude ought to be taken toward ecologists.

Third, ask your scientists about the time frame of their scientific studies. Most bureaucrats seem to think that, since the world was created in 7 days, scientific work ought to take no more than a year or two or perhaps three. We would like to tell you that many, perhaps most, important ecological questions involve a time frame of 10 years or more, and some require continuous funding and support for periods in excess of 50 years. You apparently did not ask medical scientists to stop working on cancer or malaria after 3 years or even 50 years, so we are uncertain why ecologists should be kept to short time frames for their research. Ecological research is perhaps the most difficult of all the sciences, so if we do not find answers in a few years it is not because we are not working hard enough.

Finally, ask your scientists to publish in national and international journals because that is the corner stone for judging scientific progress. We do not mind having rules about rates of publication. And as a spur please fund your scientists to go to scientific meetings to present their results to the scientific world. And have them communicate to the public what they are doing and what they have found. After all the public pays, so why should they not hear about what has come of their tax dollars.

Your job, in a nutshell, is to support your scientists not to hinder them, to encourage their work, and to speak to the higher levels of government about why funding science is important. And to (at least on occasion) protest about government policies that are not based on scientific evidence. If you are successful in all of this, the people of your country will be the better for it. On the other hand, you may be headed for early retirement if you follow my advice.

I wish you success.

Sincerely yours,

A.B.C. Jones PhD, DSc, FRS, FAA
Retired

On House Mouse Outbreaks in Australia

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It occurred to me after some recent discussions that the problem of house mouse outbreaks in Australia is almost a paradigm for modern ecological science. A brief synopsis. At irregular intervals house mice (an introduced pest) reach high densities in the wheat growing areas of eastern and southern Australia, and cause serious damage to wheat, barley, oats, and sunflower crops. There are two approaches to this applied problem.

The ecological approach is to understand why these outbreaks occur and why for many years (2-9 years) between outbreaks, hardly a mouse can be found. This approach has been highly successful led by a series of excellent Australian ecologists over the last 40 years. The key limitation is food, combined with social interactions, and the food supply is driven by rain at critical times of the year to provide seeds for the mice. There are no competitors for house mice, and there are a few insignificant predators, overwhelmed by the mouse’s high reproductive rate. These ecological facts are clearly known, and the job now is to build the best predictive models to help the farmers anticipate when the outbreak is coming. There are still important ecological questions to be studied, to be sure, but the broad outline of the ecological play is well described.

The management approach is much simpler because farmers can control house mice with poison, primarily zinc phosphide, and for them the question is when to poison, and secondarily (over time and with more research) can we develop better poisons so there are few non-target problems. Poisoning costs time and money so good farmers wish to minimize these costs.

The long-term issues get lost in this situation, a model of the way the world operates now with ecological and environmental problems. Questions about sustainability multiply in any system dependent on poisons for a solution. Will the target organisms become resistant so the poison does not work? Many examples exist of this already. Are there any long-term problems with soil organisms, or non-target species? No research yet on these issues, and perhaps they are more serious with herbicide applications in agriculture. And while predators do not control house mice during outbreaks, they do eat many of them and this food pulse may have implications for the wider ecosystem. We focus on farming and forget the wider ecosystem which has no dollars attached to it.

Ecologists recognize that these issues are not the farmers’ fault, but we raise the question of who worries about the long-term future of this system, and the answers to these long-term questions. The government is rushing to get out of long-term ecological and agricultural research and we leave problems that do not have immediacy.

Consequently we become short-sighted as a society. Long-term research becomes 1-3 years and not the 50-100 years that ecologists would support. And consequently applied ecologists bounce from one problem to the next under the paradigm that, no matter what we do, science will come up with a technological fix. There should be a better way. To go back to our house mice, we might ask (for example) if we implement no-till agriculture, what will be the consequences for house mouse survival and future outbreaks? The practical minister of agriculture will respond that we have no time or money for such research, so we lurch along, managing the world in an ad-hoc manner. There should be a better way. But meanwhile we must follow the money.

On Understanding the Boreal Forest Ecosystem

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I have spent the last 40 years studying the Yukon boreal forest. When I tell this to my associates I get two quite different reactions. First, on the positive side they are impressed with the continuity of effort and the fact that we have learned a great deal about the interactions of species in the Canadian boreal forest (Krebs, Boutin, and Boonstra 2001). Alternatively, on the negative side, I am told I am at fault for doing something of no practical management importance for so long when there are critical conservation problems in our Canadian backyard. Clearly I prefer the positive view, but everyone can decide these issues for themself. What I would like to do here is to lay out what I think are the critical issues in the Canadian boreal forest that have not been addressed so far. I do this in the hope that someone will pick up the torch and look into some of them.

The first issue is that ecological studies of the boreal ecosystem are completely fractionated. The most obvious division is that we have studied the boreal forest in the southwest Yukon with few concurrent studies of the alpine tundra that rises above the forest in every range of mountains. The ecotone between the forest and the tundra is not a strict boundary for many plant species or for many of the vertebrate species we have studied. On a broader scale, there are few studies of aquatic ecosystems within the boreal zone, either in lakes or streams, another disconnect. The wildlife management authorities are concerned with the large vertebrates – moose, bears, caribou, mountain sheep – and this work tends not to tie in with other work on the smaller species in the food web. Interests in the carbon dynamics of the boreal zone have greatly increased but these studies in Canada are also completely disconnected from all other ecological studies that consider population and community dynamics. I think it is fair to say that carbon dynamics in the boreal forest could turn out to be a very local affair, and too much generalization has already been made with too little spatial and temporal data.

One could consider the ecology of the boreal zone like a puzzle, with bits of the puzzle being put together well by researches in one particular area, but with no view of the major dimensions of the total puzzle. This is readily understood when much of the research is done as part of graduate thesis work that has a limit of 4-5 years before researchers move on to another position. It is also a reflection of the low funding that ecology receives.

Within the Yukon boreal forest there are several areas of research that we have not been able to address in the time I and my many colleagues have worked there. Mushroom crops come and go in apparent response to rainfall (Krebs et al. 2008) but we do not know the species of above ground mushrooms and consequently do not know if their fluctuations are uniform or if some species have specialized requirements. Since fungi are probably the main decomposers in this ecosystem, knowing which species will do what as climate changes could be important. On a practical level, foresters are determined to begin logging more and more in the boreal zone but we have no clear understanding of tree regeneration or indeed any good studies of forest succession after fire or logging. Since logging in northern climates is more of a mining operation than a sustainable exercise, such information might be useful before we proceed too far. If the turnaround for a logged forest is of the order of 300 years, any kind of logging is unsustainable in the human time frame.

The list goes on. Snowshoe hare cycles vary greatly in amplitude and we suspect that this is due to predator abundance at the start of any 10 year cycle (Krebs et al. 2013).  The means to test this idea are readily available – satellite telemetry – but it would require a lot of money because these collars are expensive and need to be deployed on lynx, coyotes, and great-horned owls at least. And it needs to be done on a landscape scale with cooperating groups in Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and British Columbia at least. Large-scale ecology to be sure, but the results would be amazing. Radio-telemetry has the ability to interest the public, and each school in the region could have their tagged animals to follow every week. Physicists manage to convince the public that they need lots of money to do large experiments, but ecologists with down to earth questions are loath to ask for a lot of money to find out how the world works on a large scale.

Migratory songbirds have been largely ignored in the boreal forest, partly because they leave Canada after the summer breeding period but at least some of these songbirds appear to be declining in numbers with no clear reason. Yet studies on them are virtually absent, and we monitor numbers in imprecise ways, and continue to mark the position of the deck chairs on the Titanic with no understanding of why it is sinking.

Insect populations in the boreal forest are rarely studied unless they are causing immediate damage to trees, and consequently we have little information on their roles in ecosystem changes.

At the end of this list we can say in the best manner of the investigative reporter why did you not do these things already? The answer to that is also informative. It is because almost all this completed research has been done by university professors and their graduate students and postdocs. What has been done by all my colleagues is amazing because they are not in charge of the boreal forest. The people are, via their governments, provincial and federal. The main job of all of us when this research in the Yukon boreal forest was being done has been education –to teach and do research that will train students in the best methods available. So if you wish to be an investigative reporter, it is best to ask why governments across the board have not funded the federal and provincial research groups that had as their mandate to understand how this ecosystem operates. Because all these questions are about long-term changes, the research group must be stable in funding and person-power in the long term. There is nothing I have seen in my lifetime that comes close to this in government for environmental work except for weather stations. In the short term our governments work to the minute with re-election in sight, and long term vision is suppressed. The environment is seen as a source of dollars and as a convenient garbage can and science only gets in the way of exploitation. And in the end Mother Nature will take care of herself, so they hope. Perhaps we need a few Bill Gates’ types to get interested in funding long-term research.

But there remain for ecologists many interesting questions that are at present not answered, and will help us complete the picture of how this large ecosystem operates.

Krebs, C.J., S. Boutin, and R. Boonstra, editors. 2001. Ecosystem Dynamics of the Boreal Forest: the Kluane Project. Oxford University Press, New York.

Krebs, C.J., P. Carrier, S. Boutin, R. Boonstra, and E.J. Hofer. 2008. Mushroom crops in relation to weather in the southwestern Yukon. Botany 86:1497-1502.

Krebs, C.J., K. Kielland, J. Bryant, M. O’Donoghue, F. Doyle, C. McIntyre, D. DiFolco, N. Berg, S. Carrier, R. Boonstra, S. Boutin, A.J. Kenney, D.G. Reid, K. Bodony, J. Putera, and T. Burke. 2013. Synchrony in the snowshoe hare cycle in northwestern North America, 1970-2012. Canadian Journal of Zoology 91:562-572.

Why The Environmental Sciences Always Lose Out

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One of the basic observations of our time in almost all countries is that some sciences are held in high esteem while others are not popular. Science is often confused with technology, so positive marks are typically given for new types of cell phones, tablets and computers, and the sciences that give rise to these technological advances like physics, chemistry, and engineering are viewed as gold stars. Medical advances are also highly regarded out of self-interest and most medical science from basic to applied is given high support in our society. At the other end of the ranking is ecology and in general environmental science. These are viewed poorly by many, so that action on climate-change and biodiversity conservation are supported by a dwindling few. Why are some sciences highly praised and others damned?

Part, but only part, of the explanation lies in religious beliefs. I do not know of any major religious group that condemns Iphones and computers, or medical advances, or even space research. But many people seem to have objections to biological concepts like evolution and question the role of humans in affecting the earth’s ecosystems. Possibly a larger part of this rejection of environmental science is explained by the fact that environmental scientists bring mostly bad news to the social table, while physicists promise infinite free energy and medical scientists promise cures for diseases. We prefer good news to bad.

The most prominent bad news story currently is climate change and the role of humans in causing these changes. Climate change science is easy to deny. The data are always variable, sometimes it still snows in the wrong month of the year or the summer is particularly cool. But most importantly the problem is slow moving, and humans are not very good at assessing slow moving catastrophes. Few of us will be alive when the climate problems get so serious only a fool would deny them, and our penchant for demanding fast solutions to problems will not work when the reversal of the cause (e.g. CO2 enrichment of the air) takes 100-200 years. So it is better to put our head in the sand and deny everything.

The problem with conservation ecology and biodiversity loss is similarly long-term and slow. To solve these problems we have to do something and we are all in favour of doing something if it does not reduce economic growth. So population growth is favoured since exponential growth is the new God pushing economic growth, and biodiversity loss does not seem to impact on most of us living in large cities. Sustainability thus becomes a meaningless word in both politics and business, talk much and do little. If there is an apparent conflict between economics and the environment guess who wins. Convincing people that economics cannot exist without the environment is the challenge of our time. We could start by electing governments that cultivate environmental concerns on an equal basis with economic concerns.

Oreskes, N. and E. M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press, New York. 365 pp.
Washington, H. 2013. Human Dependence on Nature. Routledge.144 pp.