Notes for March 29th

• I'm a major foodie.  Jamie Oliver is not quite my hero, but he's definitely out there trying to do god's work.  Too bad nobody seems appreciative.
• Seems like I talk about a lot of dinosaurs on this blog.  Does that count as being interested in birds?  If so, a lot of people will be confused about who is writing this thing.  Anyway, Australian T-Rex!
• Dark flow?  Wha?  Wow.  It is increasingly difficult to believe we know anything about anything.
• The value of a positive mental attitude.
• Expect lots of slightly older links this week.  I missed a big chunk of last week with site visits and I'm struggling to keep up with everything this week.  So I'm going to probably be slow to run through my cycle of sites and I may miss my favorite activity:  Paper of the day!
• On another note:  I've been rejected on my last three papers.  In two of the cases, I can't really get anything useful out of the rejection (the comments were either bizarrely out of left field and I have no idea how they relate to my paper, or they are just minor things that I can't change).  If you are out there reviewing papers:  FOR THE LOVE OF MONKEYS, please try constructive criticism.

Riparian Restoration: More important than ever with climate change

For people in the conservation/restoration community, trying to deal with climate change is a tough assignment.  Years and years of training and conventional wisdom preaches the value of restoring habitat to a 'pristine' state.  In the U.S., that usually translates into Pre-European settlement.  However, the reality is that the pre-settlement environment may simply no longer exist.  Even if those conditions do exist, there's no guarantee that it is even possible for those ecosystems to be recreated (some species may now be extinct or extirpated, or those genotypes may be extirpated, or the particular sequence of events that allowed those ecosystems to persist may never again occur).

Getting past the goal of pristine restoration is not easy, in part because what goals are you going to use instead of pristine?  Obvious (to many research ecologists) is the use of various ecosystem services or functions as replacement goals.  Equally obvious is the conservation of particular endangered species.  However, doing this without realizing the rapidity with which environmental conditions are changing is likely to result in poor results.

Seavy et al. (2009; full cite below) recently published a paper in Eco Restoration that discusses some of these issues in relationship to the restoration of riparian areas.  They further argue that restoring riparian areas will provide benefits beyond the boundaries of the areas being restored.  Specifically, they argue that restoring riparian areas will improve overall ecosystem resilience in the face of changing climate.  Resilience (as defined by the authors) refers to the ability of an ecosystem to withstand disturbance without changing 'state', recover after disturbance, and the way an ecosystem responds to gradual changes.  Resilience is a tricky concept (over a large enough time scale, every ecosystem is in constant flux), but for timescales relevant to wildlife management, this is probably a useful idea.

Essentially, Seavy et al. (2009) argue that restoring riparian areas is likely to improve the ecosystem resilience of surrounding areas because 1) riparian areas are naturally very resilient, 2) riparian areas improve connectivity between ecosystems (aquatic and terrestrial; along longitudinal migration corridors), 3) riparian areas are natural thermal refugia, and 4) there are lots of flood-related benefits to "natural" riparian areas. So lots of benefits, but achieving those benefits (in spite of major climate change) will require some fancy work.  For instance, restoration plantings typically use seeds from species on-site or nearby.  However, if environmental conditions are likely to change, then those species (or those genotypes) may not be successful, and noxious or non-native species would have the opportunity to invade.

Ok, so that all sounds really good.  Some issues:

1)  There's a real emphasis in this paper on riparian woodlands, but there are some places where woodlands are rare, or absent entirely.  Should we plant woodlands along areas that haven't had them historically?  I don't know, but I don't know if we should, or if we should even encourage it.

2)  The authors talk about riparian areas being naturally resilient, but this is only really documented for persistence in the face of hydrologic variability (flood and, to a lesser extent, drought).  I'm not aware of any literature documenting any particular resilience of riparian ecosystems to disturbances related to temperature, invasive species, pollution or eutrophication.

3)  The primary benefit, that I can see, to prioritizing riparian restoration above other areas, is the reality that you are benefiting both terrestrial and aquatic habitats at the same time.  However, I think this ignores the integrated nature of watersheds.  I suspect that if you improve the non-riparian terrestrial components of a watershed, you're going to have similarly dramatic (if potentially different) positive effects on streams.  I guess I'm not convinced that it is a good idea to make riparian restoration a priority without consideration of what else is going on in the watershed.

Having said that, the paper does make a compelling case that riparian areas are really important, and that we need to adjust how we restore them, and that some important questions need to be answered if we are going to be effective at restoring these ecosystems in the future.

Summary:

Restoration of riparian areas will likely provide a lot of benefits in light of the rapidly changing global climate, even beyond the strict borders of these areas.  However, different techniques need to be employed to realize these benefits.

Seavy, N., Gardali, T., Golet, G., Griggs, F., Howell, C., Kelsey, R., Small, S., Viers, J., & Weigand, J. (2009). Why Climate Change Makes Riparian Restoration More Important than Ever: Recommendations for Practice and Research Ecological Restoration, 27 (3), 330-338 DOI: 10.3368/er.27.3.330

Notes for March 24th

• Is this interesting?  Kinda.  The longest unbroken record of daily temperatures in the Americas.  Big surprise:  The mean is temperature has increased about 1.5 degrees since 1855.  
• The amount of food depicted by artists painting the "Last Supper" has increased over the past thousand years, possibly mimicking a trend in food consumption in the societies in which the artists lived.
• No, seriously, lay off the saturated fats.  Other fats...eh...probably keep them around.  Some help for those that need it..
• Underwater caterpillars.  Really.  I don't know if I can be surprised by anything anymore.
• Ancient sea monsters.  Just an interesting read.  And no, I don't think 'oceanic reptiles' is more appropriate...If you were alive then, you wouldn't call them 'oceanic reptiles', you'd call them terrifying monsters of the sea.  In fact, if you saw one, you'd probably be more like "oh %#*@!" 

Notes for March 23rd

• Prior to reading this post, I was unaware of the "ecology of fear".
• A review of studies documenting various aspects of why women are less represented in math and science.
• Something every rancher seems to know intuitively but has never been shown with any evidence to the public/research community:  Managing for the highest quality grasslands in the plains seems to reduce the profitability of the land.  The authors modified grazing to produce 'poor', 'good' and 'excellent' grassland quality.  But, as we've discussed previously, quality is a subjective term, and grazing is just one management tool for grasslands.  I'm also wondering whether the lower quality grasslands are sustainable (the authors investigated over a 34 year period, which is a long time for humans, but not a long time for a grassland), or if they will degrade over time.  (via Conservation Maven)
• Predicting extinction risk in carnivores.  (via EEB & Flow)
• Gliding ants.  With videos! (via Arthropoda)

Aquatic Invasive Species and the Effectiveness of Education and Outreach

Apparently my friends from Notre Dame are continuing to publish at a feverish rate, because I keep stumbling onto their papers.  The latest is by Rothlisberger, Chadderton, McNulty and Lodge, and is all about aquatic invasive species (full cite is below), and I think this paper really throws into question the value of education and outreach.

There are a lot of big questions out there regarding invasive species (IS).  IS cause all kinds of economic damage and are a big cause of native species being threatened.  Yet this is a very artificial classification structure for biota.  Invasive species aren't defined by their evolutionary history or morphology, but rather by the impact they have on human-centric ecosystem services.  I think that has caused a lot of confusion in the way we research the subject.  However, I'm just rambling a bit here, the focus of this paper is a lot more pragmatic.  Essentially this paper looks at how aquatic IS are being spread by boats.  And man, it looks like they could be spread really easily.

Essentially, we know that boats moved around by recreational boaters are causing IS to be moved around.  As a result, there are all kinds of efforts out there to prevent that from happening.  For the most part, those efforts center on 2 approaches:  1)  Educate the public and 2) boat inspections.  95% (maybe more) of the effort goes into the first of these categories.

And this is where it all goes wrong.

There probably isn't anywhere in the country that has been more inundated by the 'prevent the spread' of invasive species message than the Great Lakes Region.  Since the 1930s, the Great Lakes have been subject to an increasingly devastating series of invasions by non-indigenous species.  This has devastated economic and environmental interests throughout the region.  So the residents of Wisconsin and Michigan (particularly those who are targeted by these educational efforts) should be more aware of the problems and what they can do to help than anyone else.

And yet they don't seem to be all that aware or all that interested in doing much.

"68% of transient boaters did not always was or dry their boat when moving it overland between waterways...27% did not always remove aquatic weeds they saw attached to their boat and trailer."  p 125 (Rothlisberger et al. 2010)

I'm reminded of a talk I saw at NABS '08 by the state malacologist of Missouri.  Missouri did a similar survey with a bunch of boaters, and got similarly miserable responses (most people had never heard of IS or zebra mussels in particular, and didn't realize they could do anything to help prevent their spread).  These respondents were then asked what the state should do.  The responses were things like put ads on TV, put ads in magazines, put up signs at boat ramps, etc.  After going over these responses, the malacologist sighed heavily and brought up the next slide:  That's what Missouri had just spent millions of dollars doing over the previous X number of years.  Sometimes you just can't win.

There's more in this paper.  For instance, the authors also tested the effectiveness of the boat inspection and wash stations.  For some of the smaller organisms (crustaceans and seeds), visual inspection just wasn't very effective.  Even a high-pressure wash was only about 90% effective at removing these organisms, and according to the methods, even a ten-minute delay was enough for boaters to become unwilling to participate in a high-pressure wash.

The authors also quantified the amount and type of material being moved around by these recreational boats.  On average, they found 37 species per boat, indicating a large potential for this vector to be spreading invasive species.

Summary:
Despite massive educational efforts over the past 20 years, a majority of boaters don't seem to be taking the basic steps necessary to prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species.  Additionally, it now seems clear that these boats do possess the ability to transport a significant variety of aquatic organisms (although it isn't clear how long these species would remain viable out of the water).

Rothlisberger, J.D., Chadderton, W.L., McNulty, J., & Lodge, D.M. (2010). Aquatic invasive species transport via trailered boats:  What is being moved, who is moving it, and what can be done American Fisheries Society, 35 (3), 121-132

Notes for March 22nd

• Why does asparagus make your pee smell funny?
• A cool paper, interpreted by GrrlScientist (on Nature?).  Whoever GrrlScientist is, she is awesome.  I seriously love the way she 'translates' papers.  I couldn't possibly encourage you enough to go read a lot of what she's written.  Which is why it amazes me that she apparently is "under employed".  Man, if she can't make it...who the hell can?  Actually, now that I go look for the link to here discussing being under employed, I think it is no longer present.  So maybe she's now got something permanent?  Yay!
• New velociraptor-esque species of dinosaur found.  YES!  Although I am sometimes really glad I didn't live in the late cretaceous.  Although other times I wish I could have seen some of these things in real life.
• I concur, this is one of the most awesomely named papers ever: Assessing the apparent imbalance between geochemical and biochemical indicators of meso- and bathypelagic biological activity: What the @$! is wrong with present calculations of carbon budgets? (via Deep Sea News, which includes discussion/explanation)
• For some reason the formatting of this post has been all wacky.  So I'm stopping right here before it gets worse.  At least right now it is borderline legible.

Notes for March 19th

• This was everywhere yesterday...apparently people love dogs?  Anyway, they were domesticated in the middle east, not asian, according to the best available science.
• Two of my absolute favorite things:  Basketball and science.
• An ongoing public debate is about whether the use of fructose (i.e., high fructose corn syrup) is somehow worse for the public health than the use of other sugars (sucrose primarily among them).  My experience has been that most scientific studies have not indicated anything of the sort (we're just consuming more sugar in general).  It isn't clear to me that the study referenced here changes that scientific perception, but I imagine it will definitely be interpreted that way by those fighting the high fructose corn syrup battle.  My 2-cents:  Stop consuming high fructose corn syrup and you'll be healthier, simply because that's what is in all those junk foods that you shouldn't be eating anyway.
• The ongoing difficulty in weighing different human concerns.  I dispute the assertion by many that there is a conflict between environmental concerns and human concerns:  Both are human concerns.  A weakened or destroyed environment isn't going to do humans any good.