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Category Archives: Biodiversity and Species Preservation
Cardenalito
Species preservation and coffee agriculture meet: Ed Yong explains the conservation prospects for the Red Siskin (Spinus cucullata).
Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding
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On the island
Emily Graslie talks to Robb Telfer about his work to conserve Illinois’s only endemic flowering plant, Kankakee Mallow (Iliamna remota), to Langham Island in the Kankakee River.1
1 USDA PLANTS lists I. remota as a synonym for the more widely distributed Iliamna rivularis var. rivularis.
Birds and botany
Duarte S. Viana et al. have published research on the importance of migratory birds as a long-distance seed dispersal mechanism.
By sampling birds caught while in migratory flight by GPS-tracked wild falcons, we show that migratory birds transport seeds over hundreds of kilometres and mediate dispersal from mainland to oceanic islands.
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Botany
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Some links: 74
A mini-roundup of bird-related links:
- Alan Neuhauser reports estimates of avian mortality attributable to various energy sources. Although wind takes a toll, the big killer, on an absolute basis, is coal. It would be interesting to see this data on a per-kWh basis.
- GrrlScientist summarizes recent research that indicates certain bird species do better in areas under more intensive agriculture that leaves some patches undisturbed (so-called “land-sparing farming”) while others to better under “land-sharing” (e.g., intercropping in a shade-grown coffee plantation).
Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Energy Sources and Consumption
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Ashes
Helen Macdonald speaks for the trees.
People of a certain age tend to look back elegiacally at the things that have gone: the store you used as a kid that closed, the room that became a memory. But those small, personal disappearances, however poignant, are not the same as losing biodiversity. Brands are not butterflies. Changes to city skylines are not the same as acres of beetle-blasted trees: Though they are caught up in stories about ourselves, trees are not ever just about us.
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation
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Two artifacts
… one small, one large.
Since I’ve started serving with Friends of the Migratory Bird/Duck Stamp, I am more attentive to equivalent efforts at the state level. The state of Ohio promotes a Wildlife Legacy Stamp. I bought one when I was in the Toledo area for the Biggest Week in American Birding. For $15, you get a stamp, of course, but you also get package of collateral: stickers, a thank you card, and a very fine pin that you can attach to the back of your favorite birding cap. Funds are collected by the Department of Natural Resources and support
- habitat restoration, land purchases and conservation easements
- keeping common species common
- endangered & threatened native species
- educational products for students and wildlife enthusiasts
- wildlife and habitat research projects
“Keeping common species common:” I like that.
Last year, when I was working onsite, I got a message from my colleague Erin, who was prepping a move to the Pacific Northwest. She wrote something to the effect of “I have this book about birds that’s too big for me to pack; would you like it?” Figuring it was some inconsequential coffee table book but to be gracious about a gift, I replied, “sure, thanks.” It turns out that the volume in question was a copy of the National Audubon Society/Peterson and Peterson reprint of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. This book is gorgeous. It’s also huge: it weighs 18 pounds. It’s a good thing that my own coffee table has a top made of two inches of solid walnut. Thank you, Erin!
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Habitat Conservation
Tagged photo
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Some links: 72
Many conservation-oriented links piling up on my virtual desk, unremarked—so this needs must be a roundup post.
- Sharman Apt Russell describes her experiences collecting phenology data for Nature’s Notebook.
- Caren Cooper summarizes the findings in her recent paper in the Journal of Wildlife Management: birders and hunters alike are more likely to engage in conservation-supporting actitivies. Cooper’s “conservation superstars” are birders who are also hunters: these people are even more likely to donate money for conservation and do other things to preserve our legacy.
- Jason Goldman sings the praises of shade-grown coffee from an unexpected part of the world: Ethiopia, the land where Coffea was first domesticated.
- And Goldman summarizes a paper by A.M.I. Roberts et al., working with 222 years of phenology data collected by Robert Marsham and his descendants from the family estate in Norfolk, UK. For certain tree species, “winter chilling” turns out to be a more important factor determining leaf out than the warmth of “spring forcing.”
Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Citizen Science, Habitat Conservation
Tagged hobbyhorse
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Three-way argument
I posted some notes on Perfecto, Vandemeer, and Wright, Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation, and Food Sovereignty (2009) to my Goodreads account.
Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Habitat Conservation
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Wild! Life!
Brandon Keim explores vacant lots and bits of waste ground in New York, and likes what he sees (even the non-natives), ruderal plants bursting with life.
… verdancy is not the result of careful management, but life’s inexorable course, present wherever we don’t suffocate it.
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Gotham
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Mixed effects
A recent paper by Jason M. Gleditsch and Tomás A. Carlo explores the impact on nesting success of Gray Catbirds (Dumetella carolinensis) breeding in Pennsylvania landscapes dominated by invasive Asian honeysuckles (Lonicera sp.). It turns out that they found little evidence to support the claim that honeysuckle represents an “ecological trap” of increased predation risk and poor nutritive value from fruits, contrary to the results of other researchers. Adult birds may have made more trips to the nest, bearing what some have called “junk food,” but body mass measurements of the nestlings, in this study, show that they grow up just fine.
Our results show that relationships between introduced fleshy-fruited plants and native birds are complex and not easily characterized as purely harmful or beneficial because they can include negative, neutral, or positive outcomes.
Sometimes, in the authors’ view, using an alien species is the best the birds can do, under the circumstances.
… the traditional and widespread categorical approach to invasive species management should be revised to prevent harming certain communities and ecosystems, especially areas in a process of self-recovery from heavy human disturbances.
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Botany
Tagged open_access
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Marginal utility
Richard Conniff is tired of apologizing for protecting wildlife because it’s economically valuable:
Wildlife is and should be useless in the same way art, music, poetry and even sports are useless. They are useless in the sense that they do nothing more than raise our spirits, make us laugh or cry, frighten, disturb and delight us. They connect us not just to what’s weird, different, other, but to a world where we humans do not matter nearly as much as we like to think.
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation
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Shakespearean skeptic
Rick Wright isn’t so sure that blame for the swarms of Sturnus vulgaris that plague the New World can be laid at the feet of a well-meaning 19th-century drug magnate:
Is there any documentation, from [Eugene] Schieffelin or his contemporaries, that the release of starlings in Central Park in 1890 was inspired by a line in Henry IV? I’d be happy to know about it.
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Literature
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No control without measurement
Blackburn et al. propose a categorization system to understand the nature and extent of damage caused by non-native species. Their “semi-quantitative” (their word) metric bins species (within a defined area, small or large) into one of five levels of impact, from Minimal (“unlikely to have caused deleterious impacts”) to Massive (“leads to the replacement and local extinction of native species”). They also identify 12 categories of impact, ranging from effects we see frequently in the mid-Atlantic (Competition, Parasitism) to some more obscure ones (Flammability, Bio-fouling).
Good stuff. This is a lot more sophisticated than just tarring everything with the broad brush of “non-native invasive.” And, as the authors point out,
invasiveness… is a characteristic of a population rather than a species.
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation
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Out with the goldeneye, in with the Canvasback
My 2014-2015 Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps (Duck Stamps) arrived in the mail today. Have you bought yours?
Posted in Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Habitat Conservation
Tagged photo
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Some links: 70
A roundup of conservation and natural history links:
- A team at Towson University has launched a microsite and apps (for Android and iOS) for tracking the spread of the highly invasive Wavy-leaf Basketgrass (Oplismenus hirtellus ssp. undulatifolius).
- Janet Fang summarizes a paper by Railsback and Johnson: simulations of coffee plantation activity indicate that 5% land coverage in trees maximizes coffee yields. The overstory of trees reduces the amount of space for coffee shrubs, but it invites birds, who forage on destructive borer beetles.
- Nancy L. Brill describes the survey that a team of entomologists made of invertebrate life in 50 ordinary Raleigh, N.C. homes. The typical house was host to 100 different species of arthropod.
Several families were found in more than 90 percent of homes: gall midges (Cecidomyiidae), ants (Formicidae) and carpet beetles (Dermestidae), along with cobweb spiders (Theridiidae), dark-winged fungus gnats (Sciaridae), cellar spiders (Pholcidae), scuttle flies (Phoridae) and book lice (Liposcelididae). Most houses also had dust mites (Pyroglyphidae).
Pics and interpretation at Arthropods of Our Homes.
- Tovar Cerulli argues that hunters and non-hunters have more in common than they might think.
When clashes occur, it is all too easy to fall back on reductive notions about liberal, elite environmentalists and conservative, redneck hunters—the “greens” versus “the hook-and-bullet crowd.” With partisans on both sides invoking stereotypes and the media portraying hunters and environmentalists as opponents, it is tempting to imagine stark lines between the two.
But such divisions are too simplistic.
- An American Bird Conservancy post makes the connection between coffee farming… and hummingbirds!
- The Birding Wire picked up my profile (for Friends of the Migratory Bird [Duck] Stamp) of Quivira National Wildlife Refuge.
- A leader in Nature highlights a paper by Joshua J. Tewksbury et al., which calls for a revival in the practice of natural history. (I have the Tewksbury paper bookmarked but haven’t read it yet.)
As natural history has been de-emphasized, molecular biology, genetics, experimental biology and ecological modelling have flourished. But here is the problem: many of those fields ultimately rely on data and specimens from natural history….
No biology student should get a diploma without at least a single course in identifying organisms and learning basic techniques for observing and recording data about them.
↬ Leta
Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity and Species Preservation, Birds and Birding, Citizen Science, Entomology, Habitat Conservation, Natural Sciences
Tagged hobbyhorse
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