The past week or so has seen a lot of articles about endangered species: turtle harvesting, poaching tigers, hunting rhinos. Many of them report the problem (awesome) and some talk about potential solutions. I strongly advocate looking for solutions (who doesn’t, though?). But (oh geez there is always a “but”). BUT, the articles keep leaving out a key piece of science: the minimum viable population (MVP).

The minimum viable population is going be old hat to some of you and common sense to all of you, but bear with me because it is really important (I’ll get there in a moment) and yet doesn’t get discussed explicitly when the media reports animal extinction. 

To make this easier on me, let me take a huge step back and define extinction. Extinction occurs when there are no more individuals of a certain species. They’re all gone, dead. That species is no more. It is, to paraphrase Monty Python, an ex-species. Off to the fossil record with you! Defined like that, extinction is pretty clear cut.

However, just having members of a species around isn’t enough: you have to have enough of those individuals around. The minimum viable population is the number of individuals needed to ensure that the species does not go extinct. When a species falls below this number, things start to get really sticky: populations are vulnerable to disasters, to random fluke events, to just blipping out of existence. Even if a species’s numbers can be pumped up after hitting MVP, there are often residual effects, such as low genetic diversity leading to increased vulnerability to disease.

So when I read articles about there being only four members of a species in the wild, or how tigers are predicted to go extinct in our lifetimes, it bums me out. But it bums me out to know that we reached this tipping point a while back – why didn’t we act sooner?

In part, it’s because problems in the future are never given their true weight, but more than that, it’s hard to know what to do. It’s easy to say “save the tigers” without considering the damage caused by tigers and elephants on farmlands. It’s easy to ask for land to be set aside for conservation, but it’s hard to actually set that land aside. It’s easy to tell people to keep the MVP in mind, but it’s hard to find the money to fund the studies that would determine what that threshold is.

findout:

From the series Rubish Dump 2.0, smoke from burning e-waste.

The suburb of Agbogbloshie in Ghana’s capital Accra, has in recent years become a dumping ground for computers and electronic waste fro Europe and the US.  Hundreds of tons of e-waste end up here every month as countries in the West attempt to unload their ever increasing stopiles of toxic junk.  Of the 20 to 50 million tons of electronics discarded each year 70% will end up in poor nations, and in the EU alone 6.6 million tons of e-waste are unaccounted for every year.

Andrew McConnell, photographer

This makes me think of a recent article in PCWorld - 5 Reasons Why You Don’t Need an E-Reader. Relevant part quoted below:

4. E-books Are Not More Eco-friendly Than Paper Books

A recent Cleantech report says that a traditional book has less of an impact on the environment than an e-reader. As long as the owner of a Kindle reads at least 23 books, he or she is out of the red for CO2 emissions.

However, electronic components require mining of nonrenewable minerals, often in unstable countries, and then there’s the question of electronics waste. E-waste is often sent to developing countries where hazardous materials are often broken up by hand and incinerated, releasing toxins into the air. The California Department of Toxic Substances Control reported that e-waste, including laptops, LCD monitors, and plasma TVs were shown to exceed safe limits in copper, mercury and lead. A greener bet? Use your local library.

(via wearetheearth)

Women and children are expected to be disproportionately affected by the extreme weather events in places like Ghana brought on by global climate change. There is already a huge injustice at play when one considers that the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to the developed world while the majority of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions will be felt most strongly by members of the developing world. Climate change is not just a scientific issue, but a social justice one as well.

Women and children may hold one of the keys to addressing climate change. A very recent study by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer finds evidence that female education and family planning may help decrease carbon emissions. What makes these findings even more exciting is that since women and children would be disproportionately affected, educating these groups may lead not just to abatement, but also to an effective response to climate change. While this study should not result in an abandonment of alternative fuel options and other climate change proposals, it should emphasize the role of education and outreach as well as bring the role of women and children in the context of climate change sharply into focus. 

Fun Friday!

• A San Francisco Bay area man wants to put a wind turbine in his front yard. Neighbors are objecting because they say it will be a bird-killing, disruptive eye-sore. The man responded by saying that if we want energy independence, we have to change what we find aesthetically pleasing.

• The presence of top predators alters the behavior of their prey! Top predators are the Big Bananas of the ecosystem…think sharks and wolves. The prey-animals change how and where they look for food if they think that a top predator might be snooping around. This shift in behavior has a ripple effect that gets felt through the whole food web.

For example, if sharks are around, dugongs (bitchin’ name!) avoid shallow areas because they are more likely to get eaten there. When the dugongs avoid those areas, the sea grasses that grow there don’t get eaten, so they grow thick and luxurious. If, however, sharks aren’t around, then those dugongs hang out in shallow areas and eat all of the sea grasses. Indirect effects are so cool.

The best part – the term “ecology of fear”, which sound like it’d be a great band name.

Click through for picture source, original picture caption: “These Tebunginako villagers, standing the sea where their village used to be, had to relocate their village because of rising seas and erosion.”

With the fight for leadership of the House Energy Committee heating up, climate change legislation is finding itself in a precarious spot. Four of the Republican candidates for the position are climate change deniers and would use their position to repeal limits and regulations that have been placed on the fossil fuel industry.

These stories are coming out just as representatives from Kiribati, a small nation located on an island in the Pacific, are coming forward to talk to the United Nations about the effects that their nation is feeling from climate change. If current forecasts of the impact of climate change are accurate, Kiribati will be the first nation to be completely submerged. Two Kiribati islets are already submerged, disappearing into the ocean in 1999. The nation of 100,000 are seeing water levels creep up, flooding villages and farmlands. Fresh drinking water in streams is becoming salinized and areas which once could support crops are now inundated with salt water. People are already being forced to leave their homes on Kiribati.

So as nations are disappearing, people like congressman John Shimkus (R-Ill) are claiming that climate change legislation will be worse for the USA than 9/11 and that God will save us from climate change. It’s scary that a person with those views is in such a position of power over climate change legislation, but it’s not surprising: only 57% of Americans understand the “greenhouse effect” and only 25% have ever heard of issues like coral bleaching or ocean acidification.

It’s a luxury to feel like we do not have to think about climate change and it’s one that the climate-change-deniers are peddling with great zeal. The consequences of climate change are real and we cannot allow our representatives to promote practices that only exacerbate its effects. 

(PS If you have specific questions about any of the science processes I mention, drop me a line and I will answer them.)

meloukhia:

The researchers looked at a sample of more than 2,800 homes in the Portland, Oregon, area and associated crime data from 2005 to 2007. There were 394 property and 37 violent crimes at those 2,813 single-family homes during that time period.

Researchers then looked at aerial photos and ground surveys to gauge the number and size of trees associated with the properties.

“We believe that large street trees can reduce crime by signaling to a potential criminal that a neighborhood is better cared for and, therefore, a criminal is more likely to be caught,” lead researcher Geoffrey Donovan said in a statement. “Large yard trees also were associated with lower crime rates, most likely because they are less view-obstructing than smaller trees.”

(via Andrea)

Three days ago, the United Nations marked the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict. This day has been in place since 2001 and it aims to “consider that damage to the environment in times of armed conflict impairs ecosystems and natural resources long after the period of conflict, often extending beyond the limits of national territories and the present generation.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon shared a message to make the day, emphasizing the direct reliance of over half the rural poor on natural resources for sustenance and income. Ban Ki-moon noted that “40 per cent of internal conflicts over the past 60 years were associated with land and natural resources” and that environmental issues must be kept in mind if we are to build peace.

For over a decade, the role of environmental degradation in conflict has begun to receive more attention; however, the majority of this attention comes from academia and policy groups. While it’s great that the people who should be in the know are, there is a shocking amount of disconnect between them and the general public. 

I mostly bring up the message from Ban Ki-moon and the UN’s marking of November 6 to raise awareness that environmental issues are intrinsically tied up with human issues. The inability to make this link relevant to people indirectly affected is a failure on our part. I have no great insights to offer - I mean, it’d be rad as hell for me personally and for the world at large if I could suggest some way to make important issues seem relevant to everyone. But, I would be interested in knowing who knows about this UN initiative. Leave a response in the box?

I’m a graduate student in ecology and evolution. I am working towards my PhD and one thing is becoming clear to me as I go through this process: the things that I find so important are not being communicated to the public in an effective way. I’m not sure what causes the roadblock – people are more than capable of understanding environmental issues such as pollution, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Somehow, though, the fact that issues have real implications for the lives of millions of people gets forgotten.

We’re at a point where talking about the environmental impact of our actions is no longer completely abstract. People are dealing with the fall-out of decades of environmental degradation. We have to talk about these matters in concrete terms and I would like to do that here.