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Conserving the Stage: Climate Change and the Geophysical Underpinnings of Species Diversity
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Conservationists have proposed methods for adapting to climate change that assume species distributions are primarily explained by climate variables. The key idea is to use the understanding of species-climate relationships to map corridors and to identify regions of faunal stability or high species turnover. An alternative approach is to adopt an evolutionary timescale and ask ultimately what factors control total diversity, so that over the long run the major drivers of total species richness can be protected. Within a single climatic region, the temperate area encompassing all of the Northeastern U.S. and Maritime Canada, we hypothesized that geologic factors may take precedence over climate in explaining diversity patterns.
If geophysical diversity does drive regional diversity, then conserving geophysical settings may offer an approach to conservation that protects diversity under both current and future climates. Here we tested how well geology predicts the species diversity of 14 US states and three Canadian provinces, using a comprehensive new spatial dataset. Results of linear regressions of species diversity on all possible combinations of 23 geophysical and climatic variables indicated that four geophysical factors; the number of geological classes, latitude, elevation range and the amount of calcareous bedrock, predicted species diversity with certainty (adj. R2 = 0.94). To confirm the species-geology relationships we ran an
independent test using 18,700 location points for 885 rare species and found that 40% of the species were restricted to a single geology. Moreover, each geology class supported 5–95 endemic species and chi-square tests confirmed that calcareous bedrock and extreme elevations had significantly more rare species than expected by chance (P,0.0001), strongly corroborating the regression model. Our results suggest that protecting geophysical settings will conserve the stage for current and future biodiversity and may be a robust alternative to species-level predictions.
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Editorial: The “New Conservation”
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EDITORIAL: OPENING PARAGRAPHS A powerful but chimeric movement is rapidly gaining recognition and supporters. Christened the “new conservation,” it promotes economic development, poverty alleviation, and corporate partnerships as surrogates or substitutes for endangered species listings, protected areas, and other mainstream conservation tools. Its proponents claim that helping economically disadvantaged people to achieve a higher standard of living will kindle their sympathy and affection for nature. Because its goal is to supplant the biological diversity–based model of traditional conservation with something entirely different, namely an economic growth–based or humanitarian movement, it does not deserve to be labeled conservation.
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Effect of Risk Aversion on Prioritizing Conservation Projects
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Agencies making decisions about what threat mitigation actions to take to save which species frequently face the dilemma of whether to invest in actions with high probability of success and guaranteed benefits or to choose projects with a greater risk of failure that might provide higher benefits if they succeed. The answer to this dilemma lies in the decision maker’s aversion to risk—their unwillingness to accept uncertain outcomes. Little guidance exists on how risk preferences affect conservation investment priorities. Using a prioritization approach based on cost effectiveness, we compared 2 approaches: a conservative probability threshold approach that excludes investment in projects with a risk of management failure greater than a fixed level, and a variance-discounting heuristic used in economics that explicitly accounts for risk tolerance and the probabilities of management success and failure. We applied both approaches to prioritizing projects for 700 of New Zealand’s threatened species across 8303 management actions. Both decision makers’ risk tolerance and our choice of approach to dealing with risk preferences drove the prioritization solution (i.e., the species selected for management). Use of a probability threshold minimized uncertainty, but more expensive projects were selected than with variance discounting, which maximized expected benefits by selecting the management of species with higher extinction risk and higher conservation value. Explicitly incorporating risk preferences within the decision making process reduced the number of species expected to be safe from extinction because lower risk tolerance resulted in more species being excluded from management, but the approach allowed decision makers to choose a level of acceptable risk that fit with their ability to accommodate failure. We argue for transparency in risk tolerance and recommend that decision makers accept risk in an adaptive management framework to maximize benefits and avoid potential extinctions due to inefficient allocation of limited resources.
Keywords: conservation decisionmaking,cost-effectiveness analysis, management effectiveness,Project Prioritization Protocol, risk analysis, risk tolerance, threatened species, uncertainty
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Exponential Decline of Deep-Sea Ecosystem Functioning Linked to Benthic Biodiversity Loss
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Here, we present a global-scale study based on 116 deep-sea sites that relates benthic biodiversity to several independent indicators of ecosystem functioning and efficiency. We show that deep-sea ecosystem functioning is exponentially related to deep-sea biodiversity and that ecosystem efficiency is also exponentially linked to functional biodiversity. These results suggest that a higher biodiversity supports higher rates of ecosystem processes and an increased efficiency with which these processes are performed. The exponential relationships presented here, being consistent across a wide range of deep-sea ecosystems, suggest that mutually positive functional interactions (ecological facilitation) can be common in the largest biome of our biosphere.Conclusions: Our results suggest that a biodiversity loss in deep-sea ecosystems might be associated with exponential reductions of their functions. Because the deep sea plays a key role in ecological and biogeochemical processes at a global scale, this study provides scientific evidence that the conservation of deep-sea biodiversity is a priority for a sustainable functioning of the worlds’ oceans.
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Faustian bargains? Restoration realities in the context of biodiversity offset policies
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The science and practice of ecological restoration are increasingly being called upon to compensate for the loss of biodiversity values caused by development projects. Biodiversity offsetting—compensating for losses of biodiversity at an impact site by generating ecologically equivalent gains elsewhere—therefore places substantial faith in the ability of restoration to recover lost biodiversity. Furthermore, the increase in offset-led restoration multiplies the consequences of failure to restore, since the promise of effective restoration may increase the chance that damage to biodiversity is permitted. But what evidence exists that restoration science and practice can reliably, or even feasibly, achieve the goal of ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity, and under what circumstances are successes and failures more likely? Using recent reviews of the restoration ecology literature, we examine the effectiveness of restoration as an approach for offsetting biodiversity loss, and conclude that many of the expectations set by current offset policy for ecological restoration remain unsupported by evidence. We introduce a conceptual model that illustrates three factors that limit the technical success of offsets: time lags, uncertainty and measurability of the value being offset. These factors can be managed to some extent through sound offset policy design that incorporates active adaptive management, time discounting, explicit accounting for uncertainty, and biodiversity banking. Nevertheless, the domain within which restoration can deliver ‘no net loss’ offsets remains small. A narrowing of the gap between the expectations set by offset policies and the practice of offsetting is urgently required and we urge the development of stronger links between restoration ecologists and those who make policies that are reliant upon restoration science. Keywords:Compensatory habitat - Conservation policy - Mitigation banking - Environmental risk - No net loss - Restoration success
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Reconciling nature conservation and traditional farming practices: a spatially explicit framework to assess the extent of High Nature Value farmlands in the European countryside
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Over past centuries, European landscapes have been shaped by human management. Traditional, low intensity agricultural practices, adapted to local climatic, geographic, and environmental conditions, led to a rich, diverse cultural and natural heritage, reflected in a wide range of rural landscapes, most of which were preserved until the advent of industrialized agriculture (Bignal & McCracken 2000; Paracchini et al. 2010; Oppermann et al. 2012). Agricultural landscapes currently account for half of Europe’s territory (Overmars et al. 2013), with ca. 50% of all species relying on agricultural habitats at least to some extent (Kristensen 2003; Moreira et al. 2005; Halada et al. 2011). Due to their acknowledged role in the maintenance of high levels of biodiversity, low-intensity farming systems have been highlighted as critical to nature conservation and protection of the rural environment (Beaufoy et al. 1994; Paracchini et al. 2010; Halada et al.2011; Egan & Mortensen 2012).
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Schuette, Scott
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