"The wolf is connected to the elk is connected to the aspen is connected to the beaver. Keeping these connections going ensures healthy, functioning ecosystems, which in turn support human life."
Showing posts with label Biodiversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biodiversity. Show all posts
October 3, 2012
Why the World Needs Wolves
August 22, 2011
Tracking species as they flee
Species are escaping to higher elevations at an average rate of 36 feet per decade and moving away from the equator at a rate of 10.1 miles per decade. This is 2 to 3 times faster than they were fleeing in 2003 - the last time a similar analysis was conducted.
In the early nineties, a young PhD student at the University of Texas in Austin spent four and a half years following a small black butterfly with red and yellow spots up and down the west coast, from southern California in March to Canada in August. In 1996 she published the results of her laborious fieldwork in a paper titled "Climate and Species Range" in the journal Nature.
The PhD student's name was Camille Parmesan, and her paper offered one of the first documented examples of a species' having shifted its range in response to climate change. Dr. Parmesan's work (she is now an associate professor at the university) showed that over the previous 100 years, the entire range of the butterfly, the Edith's Checkerspot, had moved northward and to higher elevations. In fact, 80 percent of the populations in Mexico and Southern California had disappeared.
Dr. Parmesan's pioneering work helped to unleash a flood of similar research documenting the geographical adaptations of plants and animals to a warming world.
The resulting body of research also provided the data for a new meta-analysisled by Chris D. Thomas of York University in Britain, whose findings were just published in the journal Science.
The paper compiled 23 studies involving latitudinal measures and 31 studies on elevation range shifts for plants, birds, mammals, fish, arthropods, amphibians, reptiles and mollusks from around the world.
The findings indicate that among the plants and animals tracked in the studies, species over all were escaping to higher elevations at an average rate of 36.1 feet per decade and moving away from the equator at a rate of 10.1 miles per decade. That's a steady march poleward of eight inches per hour. Those two rates are respectively two and three greater than those found in the last similar meta-analysis in 2003.
The data also clearly indicates that the species changing their distribution the most rapidly are those in regions where the most warming has occurred.
While the study pulled together literature from around the world, the vast majority of available research comes from Europe and North America, leaving big holes in global understanding how species in one of the most biologically rich areas, the tropics, are responding to climate change.
These unanswered questions are further complicated by the primary role of precipitation, as opposed to temperature, in distributing most species in the tropics. The precise effects of climate change on precipitation are still a source of debate and uncertainty.
What is more, a large minority of species were observed to move in the opposite direction from what was predicted — for instance, to lower elevations and closer to the equators.
"It's an important reminder that there are a whole host of other pressures beyond climate change which determine species distribution," Dr. Thomas said. "Land use change, habitat loss — there's a long list of pressures which must all be balanced. Climate change is a huge pressure, but it's just one pressure facing species around the world."
August 6, 2010
Plant repository at risk
Update September 12, 2010: The New York Times reports, the Russian Housing Development Foundation, the agency auctioning the land for the construction of apartments, decided that it would delay destruction of one parcel, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a group that has been leading the global campaign to halt the project.
Update August 18, 2010: The Guardian newspaper reports, President Dmitri Medvedev intervened, ordering an investigation into the decision to destroy what many scientists consider the world’s oldest seed bank.
The NY Times reports that the world’s largest collection of European fruits and berries — at the Pavlovsk Research Station outside St. Petersburg, Russia — is at risk of being plowed over so developers can build homes there, international environmental groups say.
The collection, now comprising more than 5,000 fruit samples, was established in 1926 as a repository for crop diversity. Run by the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, the collection is effectively a field-based gene bank and cannot be readily moved.
Update August 18, 2010: The Guardian newspaper reports, President Dmitri Medvedev intervened, ordering an investigation into the decision to destroy what many scientists consider the world’s oldest seed bank.
The NY Times reports that the world’s largest collection of European fruits and berries — at the Pavlovsk Research Station outside St. Petersburg, Russia — is at risk of being plowed over so developers can build homes there, international environmental groups say.
The collection, now comprising more than 5,000 fruit samples, was established in 1926 as a repository for crop diversity. Run by the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, the collection is effectively a field-based gene bank and cannot be readily moved.
Scientists say that maintaining samples of many types of plants is important for food security because their genes can be used to breed new variants. That is particularly important in view of global climate change, as the world may need food plants that are better able to tolerate a warmer, drier climate, for example.
Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust called the Russian plan to plow over Pavlovsk’s fields the “most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity, at least in my lifetime.”
The trust says that 90 percent of the plants maintained at the Pavlovsk station do not exist anywhere else in the world.
Late last year, despite the protests of Russian scientists, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development revoked the Vavilov Research Institute’s rights to two parcels of land, transferring control to the Federal Fund of Real Estate Development, according to press material put out by the institute.
Next Wednesday, a Russian court is scheduled to rule on whether the development plan can go forward. Scientists in Russia and abroad have called on the nation’s leaders to intervene. The director of the Pavlovsk station has said that bulldozers could be in the fields within three to four months if the court decision goes against him. And that, the trust says, would “destroy almost a century of work and an irreplaceable biological heritage.”
Stalin had Vavilov killed, but his institute was supported. During the Siege of Leningrad, the institute's staff were dying of starvation, but wouldn't touch the seed banks. In the New Russia, the Pavlovsk field station may be bulldozed so somebody can make a few million dollars.
May 22, 2010
Biodiversity & Climate Change
They include a statement that biodiversity loss will become more important than climate change.
"Using the implied social cost of carbon from the Stern report ($85 per tonne CO2), the long run economic cost of 2008 net greenhouse gas emissions could be in the region of $1.7trillion*. For the same year, the economic cost of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation was estimated to be between US$2 and US$4.5 trillion† (3.3 – 7.5% of global GDP). While these numbers are not directly comparable, the fact that they are in the same order of magnitude should give pause for thought."
Of course, the two are intimately related, but this is a very interesting statement none the less.
Here is the UN's recent take on biodiversity from their Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 Report
"The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history — extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate. The assessment of the state of the world's biodiversity in 2010, ... should serve as a wake-up call for humanity.
Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet. And the linked challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed with equal priority and close cooperation."
Ahmed Djoghlaf
Executive Secretary, Convention on Biological Diversity
"Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050."
Achim Steiner
Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme
May 11, 2010
UN Biodiversity Report
"The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history — extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate. The assessment of the state of the world's biodiversity in 2010, as contained in ...over 110 national reports submitted to the Convention Secretariat, and scenarios for the 21st Century should serve as a wake-up call for humanity.
Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet."
Ahmed Djoghlaf
Executive Secretary, Convention on Biological Diversity
"Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050."
"...most economies remain blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning ecosystems from forests and freshwaters to soils, oceans and even the atmosphere."
Achim Steiner
Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme
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