Global Change Ecology (BIO347)

Differing perceptions on conserving nature

A Tharu village in the buffer zone of Chitwan National Park, Nepal. (photo: Ben Robson)

The natural world has constantly changed and developed as a result of both natural and anthropogenic influences over geological time [1], the notion of conserving and preserving landscapes for future generations is however relatively recent. In particular, a distinction exists between perceptions of how “pristine” landscapes should be conserved between the more developed “Northern” countries and the less developed nations in the “South.”

Countries in the North generally moved from a predominantly rural population to a more urbanised population during the industrial revolution, as such when national parks and conservations were established in the mid-20^th century, significant populations were already settled within the new national park boundaries, thereby limiting the amount of conservation that could be carried out. National parks in Western Europe generally conform to a grade V classification according to the IUCN classification scheme (table 1), aiming to find a compromise between the needs of both mankind and nature.

75% of land within English and Welsh national parks is privately owned meaning it is seldom that pure «wilderness» is found. Activities such as farming, mineral extraction or power generation are in some cases permitted within the park, but economic activity that that could aesthetically impact the landscapes that we associate with our cultural or national identity are limited [2]. and steps are taken to preserve the building style, land-use and character of the area. For example, many would associate the Lake District National Park with William Wordsworth, traditional rustic farming, the rolling hills of England and relaxing around the lakes than they would with untouched nature. It could be argued that most British, and to an extent European national parks are therefore preserving a human-influenced landscape that we feel is in danger rather than a wilderness. Economics can be one of the biggest driving factors in establishing new parks, revenue from tourism has helped create parks in Australia, the UK and Canada during the last 20 years[2].

The Lake District, UK, has been a popular destination long before it was designated a national park in 1951. William Wordsworth famously wrote «I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud» about the area in 1802 (photo: wikipedia)

Our Tharu guide, Raju, had his father killed by a wild elephant. (Photo: Pål Ringkjøb Nielsen)

National parks in developing countries on the other hand were often established after those in industrialised nations and while a higher proportion of the population lived rurally. Some communities therefore underwent challenges to their livelihoods, or in some cases were forcibly evicted in favour of conservation [3]. Following the establishment of the Chitwan National Park in Nepal, the Tharu people faced restrictions on the amount of biomass and fruit that could be harvested, while fishing, hunting, and the amount of grazing land were also restricted [4]. Since 1964 over 22,000 Tharu have been removed from the park. Despite initial high expectations, many Tharu found the compensatory land was inadequate in terms of soil quality, resources, location and cultural value. Additionally, the re-location has affected the community social structure by mixing indigenous and hill castes [4]. The fate of the Tharu people is just one of many examples of local people being marginalised in favour of conservation, where following resettlement the population are forced to become less self-sufficient without the natural resources they previously relied upon.

It’s not just the understanding of national parks that differ between the “North” and “South” when it comes to how conservation is perceived. There is also a large distinction on how the conservation of large mammals. Despite a population of just 35 to 52 wolves, Norway kills over 25% of the population each year, and also permits the cull of bears, wolverines and even Golden eagles that have killed reindeer [5]. The wolves are exterminated based on the risk posed to farmers and their livestock. In reality however no one has been killed by a wolf in Norway since 1800 and of the 26,512 cases where farmers were richly compensated for livestock killed by wolves in 2012, only 1809 (7%) cases presented carcasses. A further 20,000 cases were rejected by the authorities [6].

That one of the world’s richest countries can kill a “critically endangered” species seems contradictory when you consider how Norway is an avid supporter of conservation in the developing world. Human-wildlife interactions are a serious problem in Nepal where 21 people were killed by wild elephants between 2008 and 2012 [7] while crops such as rice, lentils and wheat are frequently damaged by wild animals [8]. Some have argued that if less developed countries were to use similar tactics for protecting their agricultural livelihoods there would be widespread commendation [6].

Of course, the Scandinavian countries do many great things for conservation both at home and abroad, but I think that if conservation of nature is to be addressed on a global scale then we need a global consensus of how to construe conservation.  We need to decide what landscapes we are conserving and whether they should be conserved due to their importance for wildlife and nature or due to their cultural value to us and whether there should be a distinction in conservation techniques between landscapes. Similarly we cannot expect poorer nations to act on our public perception and advice concerning conserving of large mammals when we take such drastic action on curtailing animals perceived to be a threat within our own territory.

1. Hannah, L., et al., Conservation of biodiversity in a changing climate. Conservation Biology, 2002. 16(1): p. 264-268.
2. Woods, M., Rural geography: Processes, responses and experiences in rural restructuring. 2004: Sage.
3. Brockington, D. and J. Igoe, Eviction for conservation: A global overview. Conservation and society, 2006. 4(3): p. 424.
4. McLean, J. and S. Straede, Conservation, relocation, and the paradigms of park and people management – A case study of Padampur Villages and the Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal. Society & Natural Resources, 2003. 16(6): p. 509-526.
5. Monibot, G., Norway’s plan to kill wolves explodes myth of environmental virtue, in The Guardian. 2012: London.
6. McPherson, B., Den norske ulveløgnen, in Aftenposten. 2013: Oslo.
7. Pant, G. and M. Hockings, Understanding the Nature and Extent of Human-Elephant Conflict in Central Nepal. 2013.
8. Studsrød, J.E. and P. Wegge, Park-people relationships: the case of damage caused by park animals around the Royal Bardia National Park, Nepal. Environmental conservation, 1995. 22(02): p. 133-142.

Domesticated ecosystems and their tradeoffs

Nowadays in the greater part of Europe food is something trivial, something omnipresent, something you don’t waste time to think about it’s origin. You just buy it in the supermarket and then you eat it. That’s it. Of course people are thinking and talking about food all the time, but if we are honest, it is more about, what we want to eat and what we should eat in order to maintain or gain our dream body. I can’t remember the last time, I had a conversation with a friend about how this trivial thing „food“ is produced, or even more: Which consequences could it entail to domesticate and tame not only crops and animals in order to gain food, but to domesticate whole landscapes in order to increase food production? And furthermore, what tradeoffs are we willing or not willing to accept in order to satisfy our everlasting desire for what we are used to: food at any given time and in any amount.

The fact alone that around 24% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is occupied by cultivated systems, in order to satisfy the increasing demand for food, feed and fibre(1), makes it quite clear that the question of foodproduction is a very important one, when it comes to man-made landscape change. Therefore I decided to discuss some major points of the article „Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare“ by Peter Kareiva et al.(2) in my blog.

In order to see the topic of domestication and land-use in general a bit more in context, I had a closer look on the planetary boundaries. In figure 1 you can see an illustration for the planetary boundaries, which are showing the risks of destabilizing the Earth system, as we know it in the Holocene, at a planetary scale. (3) As you can see Land-system change is one of the areas, that already have reached the zone of increasing risk, which means, that it has exceeded the boundary. Moreover, the area of Biochemical flows, which is by fertilization closely related to intensive cultivation of crops, is already in the high risk zone. Especially the nitrogen cycle is strongly out of balance.

Figure 1: Shows the exceeded and not exceed boundaries of the earth system. picture from: see (3) (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/1259855.full)

Nevertheless, the reasons why humans are domesticating landscapes are easy to understand: The three main goals of domestication are increased overall productivity, promoted commerce and protection from predators and nature events, as for example storms.(2) If you only consider these three aims, then domestication is significantly enhancing the well-being of humans. But we must not forget, that there is a known price we pay for these benefits and what is perhaps even more important, that there could be so far undiscovered risks. Therefore it is most crucial to go on researching in this field, so that the tradeoffs in ecosystem services can be better understood. This is the only way I see to decide, what is a desirable management of these tradeoffs, not only for now, but also with regard to future generations.

In order to illustrate, what is meant by tradeoffs, I have chosen one example mentioned in the article for each of the three aims. The first example has the aim to maximize productivity. As mentioned before the nitrogen cycle has been strongly damaged in order to reach an increase of food production. The massive use of fertilizers in agroecosystems leads to water pollution and as a consequence to destroyed coastal zones and algal blooms (2). An example for the impacts and tradeoffs, resulting from our pursuit of promoted commerce, is the rapid spread of deseases and invasive species, indebted by the enhanced trade. (2) The third and last example is an example for the aim to avoid risks: By the removal of top carnivores, the danger for hikers, farmers and ranchers to get attacked is decreasing. But on the other hand missing predators, can lead to an enormous increase of herbivore populations, which can cause overgrazed landscapes and other damages to the ecosystem.(2) At least after these examples we can see, that the idea of tradeoffs in ecosystem services is not only crucial but also quite complex, what makes it most likely, that there are still tons of unknown consequences of domestication.

In the debate about what the best form of stewardship for the nature is, the first idea probably most people have in mind, is the conservation of wild and pristine nature.

But because of the fact, that today only 1% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is set aside as real wilderness (4), this is quite utopian. Moreover, I think that this idea also neglects that humans will always do, what benefits them the most. Basic human needs, like food, will always be rated higher than other desirable matters.

For me that means, that we need to spend more money on research of tradeoffs and that we need to do a greater affort to understand how the ecosystems, that we are shaping, are working. This can give us better awareness of how our decisions are influecing not only the ecosystems by themselves, but also the current and prospective well-being of humankind. This personal opinion of mine fits well together with the conclusion of Kareiva et al., that an understanding of tradeoffs made in ecosystem services is important, in order to do the step away from only trying to protect nature from human influences, towards a well-conceived management of tradeoffs among ecosystem services, from which humans and nature can simultaneously thrive. (2)

By: Bianka Mertins

References:

(1) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Current State and Trends, Chapter 26, Island Press, 2005: http://www.unep.org/maweb/documents/document.295.aspx.pdf (accessed: 16.02.2015).

(2) Kareiva, P., et al., Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare, Science, 2007.

(3) Steffen, W.,Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet, Science, 2015: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/1259855.full (accessed:16.02.2015).

(4) UCN,World Database on Protected Areas(IUCN, Washington, DC), 2007.

Extinction debt – Do current red lists highly underestimate extinction risks?

Plants growing on high mountains are often expected to be among the first losers of the global change. When a species’ habitat changes critically the species has three options: migrate, adapt or die. Parallel with the temperature increase of the last decades, we have seen plant species migrating upwards towards colder habitats. But for high-alpine species migration is not an option as they are already sitting at the last stops – on the highest peaks. However, even after decades of climate change there have been surprisingly little extinctions. Fast adaptation maybe? No, unfortunately part of these species is already using overtime. I say overtime because their extinctions are only delayed after the disturbance, in this case climate change and increased competition (1). Extinction debt is what we call the sum of all the species with delayed extinctions (1).

Scientists modelling future distributions for alpine plant species have found out that a species might remain in its old habitat even 50 years after the habitat has changed unsuitable for the species (2). This tendency towards high delay in extinctions in high-alpine regions is mainly due to longevity of these species. Even if new plant individuals are not able to survive anymore because the habitat has gone through too much change, the old individual may remain after decades. But to be able to remain in the old habitat in the long run, the species would also need to adapt to the new environment, and for alpine specialists with long life cycles this seems very unlike.

Figure 1. Left: Chummer Schwarzhorn, a mountain top in South-Eastern Swiss Alps. Right: Glacier buttercup, a typical high alpine species feared to go extinct, growing on the same mountain. Pictures by Aino Kulonen.

Mountain tops are of great interest because changes in diversity have been fast and well reported, but after all, they represent an extreme environment, covering only a small part of earth land area and small part of total biodiversity. Indeed, we should be even more scared of underestimating the extinction risk and losing essential parts of our biodiversity everywhere. Recently it has been shown how entire Europe is carrying a heavy extinction debt on its shoulders (3). And now we are not only talking about some pretty flowers whose beauty mainly mountaineers would be able to enjoy, but hundreds of species including mammals, reptiles, insects and plants.

A practical way to investigate regional extinction risk is to look at red list species. Red lists contain species that are announced to be endangered in national level. In a recent study national proportions of endangered species were compared with the pressure these countries have put on their ecosystems in years 1900, 1950 and 2000 (3). This pressure was measured as socioeconomic activity; population density, per capita GDP and intensity of land use (Fig 2). The result is alarming: for most taxonomic groups current numbers of endangered species are mirroring the pressure for ecosystem from 1900 and 1950. This means that today’s endangeredness and extinctions are results from the damage done by human already a century ago. The extinction risks we measure today are lagging 50-100 years behind human activities.

Figure 2.Left: Proportions of species facing medium-to-high extinction risks in national red lists in 22 European countries. Right: Trends in three socioeconomic indicators in Europe (human population density in people per square kilometer; per capita GDP in 100,000 International Geary–Khamis dollars; and human appropriation of net primary productivity, which is defined here as the proportion of the total net primary productivity harvested by humans to the net primary productivity of the potential vegetation (NPP₀). Figure from reference 3.

The delay in extinction risk is longest for vascular plants, bryophytes, dragonflies and grasshoppers. For long living plants, long lag is not a surprise but one would think that short living insects would correspond to habitat change faster. However, simulations have shown that insect populations could show a delay of over a century even when their habitat network has been reduced close to the extinction threshold. This might be the case in Europe where agricultural landscape is a matrix of intensively used land area and near-natural habitats. Proportions of endangered fish species are the only ones that mirror best the current pressures to the ecosystem. Fish populations might indeed suffer most directly from anthropogenic actions like water pollution and management of water systems. Proportions of endangered mammals correspond well to both 1900 and 1950’s socioeconomic activity. Shorter delay is explained by their bigger habitat sizes. Fragmentation and degradation of big habitats make species meet their extinction thresholds faster than by species with small habitats.

As the pressure for ecosystems has steadily increased after 1900, we are carrying an extinction legacy that might be massive and almost impossible to measure. The study presented here is based on direct human activities, habitat fragmentation and environmental degradation like pollution (3). Novel pressures for environment like climate change, nitrogen and acidic depositions together with invasions of new species are likely to interact with direct effects and even intensify environmental degradation. With all these different direct and indirect drivers, long lag-times blur the picture and makes it harder and harder to see what is actually causing the extinction of certain species. We might easily target completely wrong drivers with our actions.

Red lists in national and global level might be way too optimistic, because they use criteria like size and recent reduction in population and range (3). Even if the current state of a species seems fine to us, the species might be doomed to extinction already decades or even a century ago. And once we notice that something’s wrong, our attempts to improve the situation might come decades too late (3).

Good news is that once we have a broader perception of the extinction debt, it will be easier to direct conservation efforts to regions and species groups with the greatest debt. As long as a species exists there is hope to save it by habitat restoration and landscape management (1). But if the driver of extinction on mountain tops really is climate change, it is harder to act directly and fast enough to save these vulnerable species. Just like shrinking glaciers, endangered mountain plants seem to work as a touchable proof of global change, but how will we save them? Are botanical gardens our only hope to save samples of these species from increasing temperatures and competition?

by Aino Kulonen

References

1. Kuusisaari et al. (2009). Extinction debt: a challenge for biodiversity conservation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 24: 10, 564-571.
2. Dullinger et al. (2012). Extinction debt of high mountain plants under twenty-first-century climate change. Nature Climate Change 2, 619-622.
3. Dullinger et al. (2013). Europe’s other debt crisis caused by the long legacy of future extinctions. Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences 110:18, 7342-7347.