There is a considerable degree of spatial overlapof poverty, inequality and biodiversity with highlevels of biodiversity occurring in some of theworld’s poorest countries
This is super interesting and a little unfortunate. It seems that the argument against biodiversity will always be a better economy or vice versa. I hope someday we can find a way to pave the future for conservation practices whilst creating a strong economy.
In the broadest terms, working acrosscultures is a high risk‐high rewardsystem. Although there are complex obstacles,the ultimate litmus for biodiversityconservation might be our ability to learn andwork together across cultures to preservenature.
A year ago I'd have said this would be impossible. I'm glad to see people, even just on social media, are attempting to bridge gaps between cultures more and more these days. It is something that genuinely gives me hope, for both the state of cross cultural affairs and the planet we inhabit.
Earth’shabitats(e.g. ocean depths and tropical forest canopies)
This is so insane to me, because we grew up in a culture enforcing the idea that as humans we are at the "top of the food chain" simply because we're "smarter" than other animals, when in reality we still haven't found a way to categorize species in the deep ocean. Not to mention how scary some of the creatures down there seem. If you want to take a look at some of the cool stuff we do know about, you can look here:
These ideas rest on aperceived separation between humans and na-ture, a sentiment that appeals to many NorthAmericans (Cronon 1995).
This is really interesting to me because its similar to how people keep us separate from animals, and that expression "were you raised in a barn?"
Oftentimes I notice people do this, and I can't help but wonder if the purpose is to give into "us and them" rhetoric. Its a justification of the actions we take to destroy our planet by calling ourselves smarter than them (For example, we urbanize landscapes because we weren't raised in a barn and have "better" technology)
Just some food for thought!
Second, evidence of historical recovery in areasthat once hosted high levels of human activityillustrates that while long-time scales are ofteninvolved, the biotic impacts of many types ofdisturbance might not be completely irreversible
Honestly, reading this is a huge relief. Obviously we as humans have a lot of work to do to help restore, it is good to know that these populations do stand a chance. I hope to see and be a part of more efforts to help in my lifetime!
ee-hunting is another interesting and contro-versial incentives program that has been used inparts of Africa to raise revenues and build localsupport for wildlife conservation. A limited num-ber of licenses to hunt game animals are sold,with a portion of the revenues being returned tothe local communities on whose land the huntingoccurs.
This is interesting! It reminds me a bit of how moose hunting permits in Maine are sold. Last year, there were only 3078 permits issued out of 65,361 applications. To even get one, you have to enter a lottery where you pay $15 per entry, and the chances you'll actually get one are slim - and then, you pay an additional $52 for the permit itself. If you are not a resident, both of these costs are higher. The funds collected go toward preservation of Maine wildlife!
If you're a statistic geek like me, you can find more of those numbers here:
https://www.maine.gov/ifw/hunting-trapping/moose-permit.html
This is because site vulnerability inter-acts with irreplaceability: where irreplaceability ishigh (e.g., in AZE sites), the most threatened sitesare priorities, while where irreplaceability is lower,the least vulnerable sites should be prioritized.
I'd never really considered how they actually calculated which species to prioritize when it comes to this topic, I just always went along thinking "they know best," and they do, but it was super interesting to actually read about species prioritization!
Data limitation
What kind of data limitations?
. For example, inNorth America, the Wildlands Project has as one ofits objectives connecting largely mountainous re-gions from Yellowstone National Park (roughly42oN) to the northern Yukon territory (roughly64oN)—areas almost 3000 km away (Soulé andTerborgh 1999)
This is great! Regional conservation is a bit tricky due to all the politics of state borders and things like that. I read an article that was written in July 2020, that talks about such disparities. However, it seems that programs like this one are helping to coordinate across jurisdictional lines. If you re interested, it talks specifically about the Crown Managers Partnership, or the CMP, which is working to protect the Crown of the Continent ecosystem across Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia.
uch an ancient feature tothe lineage suggests that eucalypts had devel-oped a vegetative response to landscapefire,which appears to have become more common inthe Australian environment associated with a dryclimate and nutrient impoverished soils.
I took a seminar course at another university about aboriginal Australians, and in one sessions we covered the native species of plants and animals that reside there now and originally. I had previous knowledge that some plants there had adapted to fire in the landscapes, but I did not know how long that had been a thing. Its interesting to view the same content from a biological perspective rather than social!
methane release from thawing perma-frost in the tundra–another dangerous positivefeedback loop. Thefirst signs of this have beenobserved in Siberia and Alaska.
Around 40% of the earths total of permafrost could disappear by the end of the century if we continue at the rate we are going. The article below links to a first person account of researching permafrost thawing in the Yana River Basin in Siberia. I hadn't realized that with the thawing of permafrost, estimated gigatons of carbon would be released, nearly twice as much as what is currently contained in the atmosphere.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-melting-permafrost-is-beginning-to-transform-the-arctic
Caulerpataxifolia(Figure 7.1), an alga from the tropicalsouthwest Pacific Ocean, replaces seagrass mea-dows over thousands of hectares, greatly changingthe animal community (Meinesz 1999)
I thought this was interesting, since I always read about how the world needs more or less algae in certain areas, so I did some research, and didn't find much on that, but I did get to reading about how plants react to each other in these situations. It never occurred to me that plants have 'defense mechanisms,' like increasing the size of their leaves/fronds
https://bmcecol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6785-8-20
1990, over 20 million hunters in the United Statesspent over half a billion days afield in pursuit ofwild game, and hunting licensesfinance vastconservation areas in North America.
I grew up in Maine, and some of my teachers would tell us about how there is an overpopulation of Whitetail Deer, especially in southern Maine. One of their solutions to the ecological problems of overpopulation of deer was to allow hunters more access to the land where they are overpopulating. It's interesting to see the flip side of that where animals are overexploited and how that is affecting the economy
xamples ofboom-and-bust economic cycles following theemergence, escalation and rapid collapse of un-sustainable industries fuelled by raw renewableresources
I wanted to know a bit more about this, since I don't know all that much about economics, so I did some looking into how Boom and bust economic cycles are connected to conservation. It was really interesting to read more about how when the economy goes sour, investors get nervous and pull funding from things like sustainability.
Here's a link to an article describing a bit more of boom and bust in case you. like me, didn't know about it:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/boom-and-bust-cycle.asp
Long‐lived organisms such as trees may persist formany decades before disappearing withoutreplacement; small local populations of animalsgradually decline before being lost; andecological processes in fragments are sensitiveto long‐term changes in the surroundings
This was really interesting to me, so I decided to do a bit more research. I came upon a study that stated that habitat fragmentation occurs at the earliest and least understood part of endangerment before a species goes extinct. It's absolutely insane how people can think that as long as they're leaving a bit of the habitat untouched that it isn't a bad thing.
Here's a link:
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/07/as-habitat-fragmentation-increases-so-does-extinction-risk-study/
at least three different overlapping humanstressors, with most coastal areas experiencingover a dozen, especially near centers ofcommerce like the ports of Los Angeles andSingapore
I wonder too, if any of the stressors have been adapted for in terms of evolution for species. In that case, would removing such stressors help some species and harm others? Is there a clear line? Or are all human stressors 100% negative to every part of marine life?
Most of the biodi-versity hotspots occur in areas with high humandensity (Figure 4.3) and many still have rapidpopulation growth
This is pretty interesting, because I can't help but wonder why this the case when, as stated earlier in this passage, most areas of high human density suffer habitat destruction. This may be naïve thinking, but usually it feels as though things happen for a reason in nature, so I can't help but be curious about this!
289 000 invertebrate speciesare involved in pollinating over 90% offloweringplant species (angiosperms) and 95% of foodcrops.
My limited knowledge is that Bees were the majority, but I would love to know more about what kinds of other species pollinate plants! I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the general public thinking that honey bees are the ones going extinct when in reality it is pollinator bees (Personally I find it super frustrating).
and eliminationof oxygen in water bodies.
This is very interesting - I would love to know more about how this affects surrounding ecosystems! As well as this, is there a way to introduce oxygen back into the water? And where can we look to prevent this?
microorganisms typically remain insufficientlydocumented even in otherwise well studiedareas),
I wonder how we currently document microorganisms and how we can improve upon this so that they can be more widely known per area, and how that can help us outside of additional knowledge
aquatic systems can be divided into bio-geographic realms.
I'm not that knowledgeable on ocean exploration, but I do know that roughly only 35% of the ocean has been explored. This makes me curious - how many more terrestrial biomes could there be in unexplored portions of the ocean? Or is it all currently already estimated due to what we do know (i.e. deep ocean is very cold and very dark).
Here's a short article on ocean exploration:
Theaccuracy of thisfigure is essentially unknown,with major uncertainties at each step of the calcu-lation, but the ease with which populations can beeradicated (e.g. through habitat destruction) sug-gests that the total is being eroded at a rapid rate.
This is interesting to me - I wonder who came up with this method of estimation if it's so uncertain. Moreover, how is this useful in arguments for preservation/promotion of biodiversity
Conservation biology emerged in the mid-1980sas a newfield focused on understanding, protecting,and perpetuating biological diversity at all scalesand all levels of biological organization
I had no idea that it was so recent, so it was interesting to learn about how it grew as a field! For some reason I'd imagined it being a big deal in the 70's.
Much of the early energy—and de-bate—in conservation biology focused on ques-tions of the genetics and demographics of smallpopulations, population and habitat viability,landscape fragmentation, reserve design, andmanagement of natural areas and endangeredspecies.
I'd be curious to know more of the specifics of this!
Environmental conservation basedon ecological knowledge and social understand-ing is required.
This!! Too often these days we see matters of science politicized - it skews the perspective of what is necessary and what is actually true. Covid-19 and Conservation become interesting parallels here, as both have gotten further from science in the public mind and closer to politics. If we are to get any further we MUST acknowledge it is a scientific issue.