Category: Environment

{For more than 20 million years, the ups and downs of diversity in terrestrial large mammals were determined by primary production, i.e. net production of plant biomass. This pattern changed with the onset of the ice ages. The reason for this is likely the beginning of human impact on nature, according to a team led by Dr. Susanne Fritz at Senckenberg. The findings were published recently in the scientific journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.” Based on 14,000 fossils, the scientists reconstructed the diversity of terrestrial large mammals and compared it with data on the biomass production of plants during the same time period.}

Whether used as food, fire wood or fodder for domestic animals – mankind would not be able to survive without plants, and we use them in manifold ways. But what impact does this use have on the evolution of mammals? The answer can be found in a recent study that correlates the biomass of plant resources with the diversity of large mammals, i.e., the number of genera of ungulates, carnivores, apes and elephants. “For 20 million years, from the early Neogene approximately 23 million years ago until the Pleistocene started around 2 million years ago, this rule applied: The larger the amount of biomass produced by plants, the higher the diversity of terrestrial mammals that evolved. And of course, the reverse is true as well: A decrease in biomass production was accompanied by a decrease in the number of different mammals,” explains the study’s lead author, Dr. Susanne Fritz of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre.

Fritz and her team are the first to confirm this correlation on such a large spatial and temporal scale – for North America as well as for Europe. The onset of the ice ages (Pleistocene) put an end to this, as since then the species diversity in North America and Europe is correlated to other environmental conditions. This is the exact point in time when humans appeared on the scene in these regions and presumably began to extract biomass from the nutrient cycle. But the abrupt change in pattern also concurred with another event: Large mammals such as mammoths, cave bears and Saiga antelopes underwent a mass extinction in the study areas. Whether humans or climatic changes were responsible for this remains a controversial question to date.

“The diversity of mammal species in Europe and North America today is much lower than in the past. For example, Europe now hosts a mere 51 species of large mammals in 27 genera; 10 million years ago, there were 130 to 200 genera. As documented by our study, humans at least contributed to the fact that the diversity of species and genera was never able to recover after the mass extinction. Today, only Africa and Asia still host any significant numbers of large mammal species,” says Dr. Christian Hof, also a scientist at Senckenberg and the study’s co-author. Nowadays, humans extract up to 30 percent of the biomass from the global nutrient cycle – and the trend is rising. However, it is difficult to ultimately evaluate what this means for the future of speciation in large mammals.

“The farther back we travel back in the past, the fewer traces we find of the animals that lived in those days, which makes it difficult to directly compare correlations between the rather extensive time period we examined and the situation today. However, it is clear that in the world dominated by humans certain ecological ‘rules,’ such as the correlation between large mammal diversity and plant biomass, no longer apply in the same way as they used to do for millions of years. The consequences of the ever increasing human impact are therefore unique in geological history and difficult to predict,” Fritz sums up.

For the study, the scientists evaluated more than 14,000 fossils from North America and Europe. These fossils represent over 1,600 different species of large mammals from approximately 1,500 sites. They cover the period between 23 and 1.8 million years ago. The results were subsequently compared with data on the primary production of plants from the same time period, which could be deduced from fossilized plant remains. In terms of temporal extent, this constitutes the largest set of data analyzed in this context to date.

The study is an international collaboration project of researchers from the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research (Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung), the Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Helsinki (FIN), Brown University and Stony Brook University (USA), the University of Bristol (UK) and Leipzig University. A constituent workshop for all project participants was held at the Synthesis Center (sDiv) of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig.

{An international team of scientists and conservation experts has discovered that the critically-endangered Hawaiian crow, or ‘Alalā, is a highly proficient tool user, according to a paper published today in the scientific journal Nature.}

For decades, another species — the famed New Caledonian crow — had baffled researchers with its remarkable tool-using skills. These birds, which only live on the remote South Pacific island of New Caledonia, use tools to winkle insects and other prey from deadwood and vegetation, exhibiting an astonishing degree of dexterity. The big question was why they, but apparently no other members of the crow family (‘corvids’), had evolved such technological prowess. But without other tool-using crow species for comparison, the New Caledonian crow remained a puzzling oddity.

There are over 40 species of crows and ravens in the world, and many of them — especially those living in remote tropical locations — remain poorly studied. “This raises the intriguing possibility that there are some undiscovered tool users out there,” explains the study’s lead scientist, Dr Christian Rutz, from the University of St Andrews, UK.

“We had previously noticed that New Caledonian crows have unusually straight bills, and wondered whether this may be an adaptation for holding tools, similar to humans’ opposable thumb,” Rutz elaborates. By searching for this tell-tale sign amongst some of the lesser-known corvid species, he quickly homed in on a particularly promising candidate for further investigation — the ‘Alalā.

Following a population crash in the late 20th century, the ‘Alalā is now sadly extinct in the wild. In a last-ditch effort to preserve the species, the remaining wild birds were brought into captivity, to launch a breeding programme. “Later this year, in collaboration with our partners, we will be releasing captive-reared ‘Alalā on Hawai’i Island, to re-establish a wild population,” says Bryce Masuda, co-leader of the study and Conservation Program Manager of San Diego Zoo Global’s Hawai’i Endangered Bird Conservation Program.

Masuda was excited when the St Andrews scientists got in touch with his team: “We had occasionally seen birds using stick tools at our two breeding facilities, but hadn’t thought much of it.” The St Andrews and San Diego teams quickly agreed to conduct a collaborative project, to examine the tool-using skills of ‘Alalā under controlled conditions.

“We tested 104 of the 109 ‘Alalā alive at the time, and found that the vast majority of them spontaneously used tools,” says Masuda. Current evidence strongly suggests that tool use is part of the species’ natural behavioural repertoire, rather than being a quirk that arose in captivity, according to Rutz: “Using tools comes naturally to ‘Alalā. These birds had no specific training prior to our study, yet most of them were incredibly skilled at handling stick tools, and even swiftly extracted bait from demanding tasks. In many regards, the ‘Alalā is very similar to the New Caledonian crow, which my team has been studying for over 10 years.”

Experts have applauded the ‘tour de force’ of controlled experiments. “Most studies in our field investigate just a handful of subjects, so it is truly mindboggling to see an entire species tested,” comments Professor Thomas Bugnyar, a corvid expert at the University of Vienna, Austria, who was not involved in the study.

Dr Sabine Tebbich, an expert on animal tool use, also based at the University of Vienna, is similarly impressed by the scope of the study: “It was important that the authors took on the extra challenge of investigating how the behaviour develops in juvenile ‘Alalā. Their results show that the species has predispositions that allow chicks to ‘discover’ the behaviour independently, without ever observing tool-proficient adults.” Interestingly, study co-author Dr Richard James, Director of the Centre for Networks and Collective Behaviour at the University of Bath, UK, could demonstrate through extensive computer simulations that it is unlikely that a single bird once had a smart idea, which subsequently spread across the captive population through social learning.

The discovery of a second tool-using crow species finally provides leverage for addressing long-standing questions about the evolution of animal tool behaviour. “As crow species go, the ‘Alalā and the New Caledonian crow are only very distantly related. With their last common ancestor living around 11 million years ago, it seems safe to assume that their tool-using skills arose independently,” explains Rutz. “It is striking that both species evolved on remote tropical islands in the Pacific Ocean that lack woodpeckers and ferocious bird predators — perfect conditions, apparently, for smart crows to become accomplished tool users!”

According to Douglas Myers, President and Chief Executive Officer of San Diego Zoo Global, the study marks an important milestone for the long-running ‘Alalā recovery programme: “This is a wonderful example of how scientific research can contribute to conservation efforts. The discovery that ‘Alalā naturally use tools is of great significance, especially at this critical stage of our recovery efforts, as it provides completely unexpected insights into the species’ ecological needs. After more than 20 years of hard work, we are finally ready to release birds. I am confident we will manage to bring this iconic Hawaiian bird species back from the brink of extinction.”

In 1964, world-renowned primatologist, Dr Jane Goodall DBE, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace, provided the first detailed report of tool use in wild chimpanzees. Her landmark paper, published in the journal Nature, categorically refuted the long-held idea that only humans are gifted tool users. Two years later, along with Hugo van Lawick, she described in Nature the first recorded observation of the use of rock tools by Egyptian vultures to open ostrich eggs.

Goodall is excited about the ‘Alalā study: “I love learning about the discovery of tool use behaviours in other species of animals. This latest finding is especially ​ wonderful. With two tool-using corvids, the well known Galapagos finches, and one vulture in the list of tool using birds, we can now make comparisons with avian and primate tool using. Each of these discoveries shows how much there is still to learn about animal behaviour, and it makes me re-think about the evolution of tool use in our own earliest ancestors.”

But Goodall cautions: “Let this discovery serve to emphasise the importance to conserving these and other animal species so that we can continue to learn ever more about the range of their behaviour before they vanish for ever in the 6th great wave of extinction. We owe it to future generations.”

{In today’s oceans, larger-bodied marine animals are more likely to become extinct than smaller creatures, according to a Stanford-led report. It’s a pattern that is unprecedented in the history of life on Earth, and one that is likely driven by human fishing.}

Stanford Earth professor Jon Payne puts modern extinction in context by comparing them with Earth’s five previous mass extinctions.

“We’ve found that extinction threat in the modern oceans is very strongly associated with larger body size,” said Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “This is most likely due to people targeting larger species for consumption first.”

In a new study, to be published in the Sept. 16 issue of the journal Science, Payne and his colleagues examined the association between extinction threat level and ecological traits such as body size for two major groups of marine animals — mollusks and vertebrates — over the past 500 years and compared it with the ancient past, stretching as far back as 445 million years ago and with a particular emphasis on the most recent 66 million years.

“We used the fossil record to show, in a concrete, convincing way, that what is happening in the modern oceans is really different from what has happened in the past,” said study co-author Noel Heim, a postdoctoral researcher in Payne’s lab.

Specifically, the authors found that the modern era is unique in the extent to which creatures with larger body sizes are being preferentially targeted for extinction. “What our analysis shows is that for every factor of 10 increase in body mass, the odds of being threatened by extinction go up by a factor of 13 or so,” Payne said. “The bigger you are, the more likely you are to be facing extinction.”

The selective extinction of large-bodied animals could have serious consequences for the health of marine ecosystems, the scientists say, because they tend to be at the tops of food webs and their movements through the water column and the seafloor help cycle nutrients through the oceans.

Judy Skog, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research, said the findings should be incorporated into decisions about how we manage ocean resources like fisheries. “These results show that larger marine animals are poised to disappear from the seas faster than smaller ones,” Skog said. “Studies of the fossil record indicate that this trend didn’t exist in the past — it’s a new development in today’s world.”

While Payne and his colleagues did not directly examine why large modern marine animals are at higher risk of extinction, their findings are consistent with a growing body of scientific literature that point to humans as the main culprits. “It is consistent with the tendency for fisheries to first exploit larger species and subsequently move down the food web and target smaller species,” said study co-author Matthew Knope, a former postdoc in Payne’s lab who is now an assistant professor of biology at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo.

{{Science & Technology}}

It’s a pattern that scientists have seen before. On land, for example, there is evidence that ancient humans were responsible for the massacre of mammoths and other megafauna across the globe. “We see this over and over again,” Heim said. “Humans enter into a new ecosystem, and the largest animals are killed off first. Marine systems have been spared up to now, because until relatively recently, humans were restricted to coastal areas and didn’t have the technology to fish in the deep ocean on an industrial scale.”

If there is one silver lining in the troubling new findings, it’s that there is still time for humans to change their behavior, Payne said. “We can’t do much to quickly reverse the trends of ocean warming or ocean acidification, which are both real threats that must be addressed. But we can change treaties related to how we hunt and fish. Fish populations also have the potential to recover much more quickly than climate or ocean chemistry,” Payne said. “We can turn this situation around relatively quickly with appropriate management decisions at the national and international level.”

Other co-authors on the study, titled “Ecological selectivity of the emerging mass extinction in the oceans,” include Andrew Bush of the University of Connecticut and Doug McCauley of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

{How do you tell if an elephant is having a good day? Or spy on the nocturnal squid-catching skills of the albatross?}

This week at the British Science Festival, Prof Rory Wilson of Swansea University has been divulging the secrets of the animal kingdom, including penguin diving habits, albatross hunting methods and the emotional states of elephants.

“The problem with animals is we often want to know things about them that they don’t want to tell us or that aren’t easy to find out. The only way to do it is to put something on [the animal] that will accompany it,” Prof Wilson said.

Leaving the bustling hub of the festival, which has taken over the Swansea campus all week, I was shown into the nerve centre of Prof Wilson’s animal surveillance operation. The room is dominated by a huge, 2m-by-3m screen displaying all sorts graphs that wouldn’t look amiss in a Nasa control room.

Addressing a crowd of journalists, Prof Wilson said his work was all made possible by a small electronic chip his team developed specifically to stalk animals in their private hours.

This chip contains accelerometers, magnetometers, pressure, temperature and light sensors – offering an unprecedented view of an animal’s life.

The tag, Prof Wilson explained, essentially does exactly what our smartphones or fitness monitors do, continually tracking and recording the wearer’s position and movements.

“This is a novel written by an animal. It’s very exciting to be the first person to open that novel.”

So far the group at Swansea has chronicled the lives of more than 1000 animals and 100 different species including penguins, cheetahs, sloths, albatrosses, elephants, cormorants and leopards.

“Our current understanding of animal behaviour is biased by what we perceive animals to be capable of, and what we see them doing,” said Prof Wilson, alluding to a world of hidden behaviour.

“Elephant seals are big fat lumps of jelly on the beach, but become beautiful ballerinas in the sea.”
{{
Flight of the condor}}

Dr Mark Holton developed the data-logging chip. He showed me the team’s original “daily diary”, explaining how it was created to track the flight paths and energy expenditure of condors.

This earlier chip was about five times larger than the current version, which Dr Holton has shrunk to just 27mm across and 4mm thick – and weighing 1.2g.

“I love the challenge within this work, but with this original chip I pushed it right to the limit,” he said.

“I only actually completed [the tags] at 18:30 the night before the researchers were flying out to put them on the birds.”

The tags on the condors used technology normally found on the nose of an aeroplane to measure the flight velocity of these birds.

The data the group got back showed for the first time that the condors would regularly fly directly up into the sky, at staggering speeds of 47km/h (29mph).
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Penguin parade}}

Prof Wilson said the whole enterprise was a team effort. His group consists of academics, postdocs and students, who spend months trawling through all the data collected by the tags.

Displaying results from a tag on a penguin in Argentina, he said the penguin was a personal favourite; he still analyses these birds’ data himself.

Looking at the huge screen in Prof Wilson’s lab and zooming in on regions of the tag plots, we could see the penguin’s individual steps and flipper beats.

A change in movement and a drop in temperature pinpoints the exact moment of a dive into the water.

Several kilometres of swimming later, an explosion of movement on the graphs indicated the cleaning habits of the penguin, showing how it would roll in the water rubbing one flipper then the other.

Further observation revealed its diving practice and hunting manoeuvres; the penguin would glide to the surface, but suddenly dart back down with head movements signifying a catch.

{{Dazzling dance}}

The group regularly has moments of “Errrr, what’s happening there?” Prof Wilson said, where they are left scratching their heads.

“The most surprising thing that we have discovered was from wandering albatrosses.”
The general consensus, he continued, used to be that these birds would fly huge distances to find and eat dead squid, since such large birds would be unable to catch squid alive.

“We saw that the wandering albatross would swim at night in crazy circles for periods from 40 seconds up to seven hours, continuously, and then they’d suddenly be eating.”

Confused by this previously unobserved behaviour, the group eventually discovered that the birds were in fact luring the squid to their doom.

“What we think they’re doing is, when it is very dark in parts of the ocean, they’re swimming to agitate bioluminescent plankton, causing a bright glow. The squid, attracted like a moth to a flame, will then swim to the light and get eaten,” Prof Wilson said.

“That’s something that’s really cool. It’s one of those moments where you’re flipping through the book and go: What?!”

{{Emotional elephants}}

The sensors within the tag are so accurate they can easily detect behaviours that humans might not notice – even offering insights into some animals’ emotional state.
Think of the way we humans walk. If someone is happy, this can manifest in our physical behaviour – it is often said that they “have a spring in their step”.

To observe if this sort of phenomenon also occurs in animals, Prof Wilson’s team analysed the walking movement of elephants in a zoo.

They realised that an elephant walking towards something it liked, such as a mud bath or hay, would walk in a particular way. When that same elephant though was made to go away from the thing it liked, by a dominant matriarch, it would walk in a different manner.

Prof Wilson said he hopes to use the principle with wild elephants in Africa, which may exhibit stress in particular locations due to previous encounters with war zones.

“The implications of this for understanding animal state, and stress, are huge.

“The endgame for me is predicting animal behaviour. It would be lovely to say, that penguin is going to turn left down there, stop and rest for 12 minutes and then jump in the water.

“How well you can predict the behaviour of animals and animal movement is dependent on how well you understand the rules by which they’re working.”

{Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology show catastrophic declines in wilderness areas around the world over the last 20 years. They demonstrate alarming losses comprising a tenth of global wilderness since the 1990s — an area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon. The Amazon and Central Africa have been hardest hit.
}
The findings underscore an immediate need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness areas and to address the unprecedented threats they face, the researchers say.

“Globally important wilderness areas — despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting many of the world’s most politically and economically marginalized communities — are completely ignored in environmental policy,” says Dr James Watson of the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. “Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development. We probably have one to two decades to turn this around. International policy mechanisms must recognize the actions needed to maintain wilderness areas before it is too late. We probably have one to two decades to turn this around.”

Watson says much policy attention has been paid to the loss of species, but comparatively little was known about larger-scale losses of entire ecosystems, especially wilderness areas which tend to be relatively understudied. To fill that gap, the researchers mapped wilderness areas around the globe, with “wilderness” being defined as biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance. The researchers then compared their current map of wilderness to one produced by the same methods in the early 1990s.

This comparison showed that a total of 30.1 million km2 (around 20 percent of the world’s land area) now remains as wilderness, with the majority being located in North America, North Asia, North Africa, and the Australian continent. However, comparisons between the two maps show that an estimated 3.3 million km2 (almost 10 percent) of wilderness area has been lost in the intervening years. Those losses have occurred primarily in South America, which has experienced a 30 percent decline in wilderness, and Africa, which has experienced a 14 percent loss.

“The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering” Dr Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Colombia. “We need to recognize that wilderness areas, which we’ve foolishly considered to be de-facto protected due to their remoteness, is actually being dramatically lost around the world. Without proactive global interventions we could lose the last jewels in nature’s crown. You cannot restore wilderness, once it is gone, and the ecological process that underpin these ecosystems are gone, and it never comes back to the state it was. The only option is to proactively protect what is left.”

Watson says that the United Nations and others have ignored globally significant wilderness areas in key multilateral environmental agreements and this must change.

“If we don’t act soon, there will only be tiny remnants of wilderness around the planet, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and for some of the most vulnerable human communities on the planet,” Watson says. “We have a duty to act for our children and their children.”

{Up until now, scientists had only recognized a single species of giraffe made up of several subspecies. But, according to the most inclusive genetic analysis of giraffe relationships to date, giraffes actually aren’t one species, but four. For comparison, the genetic differences among giraffe species are at least as great as those between polar and brown bears.}

The unexpected findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 8 highlight the urgent need for further study of the four genetically isolated species and for greater conservation efforts for the world’s tallest mammal, the researchers say.

“We were extremely surprised, because the morphological and coat pattern differences between giraffe are limited,” says Axel Janke, a geneticist at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre and Goethe University in Germany. Giraffes are also assumed to have similar ecological requirements across their range, he added, “but no one really knows, because this megafauna has been largely overlooked by science.”

Giraffes are in dramatic decline across their range in Africa. Their numbers have dropped substantially over the last three decades, from more than 150,000 individuals to fewer than 100,000. Despite that, the researchers say that there has been relatively little research done on giraffes in comparison to other large animals, such as elephants, rhinoceroses, gorillas, and lions.

About five years ago, Julian Fennessy of Giraffe Conservation Foundation in Namibia approached Janke to ask for help with genetic testing of the giraffe. Fennessy wanted to know how similar (or not) giraffes living in different parts of Africa were to each other, whether past translocations of giraffe individuals had inadvertently “mixed” different species or subspecies, and, if so, what should be done in future translocations of giraffes into parks or other protected areas.

In the new study, Janke and his research group examined the DNA evidence taken from skin biopsies of 190 giraffes collected by Fennessy and team all across Africa, including regions of civil unrest. The extensive sampling includes populations from all nine previously recognized giraffe subspecies.

The genetic analysis shows that there are four highly distinct groups of giraffe, which apparently do not mate with each other in the wild. As a result, they say, giraffes should be recognized as four distinct species. Those four species include

(1) southern giraffe (Giraffa giraffa),

(2) Masai giraffe (G. tippelskirchi),

(3) reticulated giraffe (G. reticulata), and

(4) northern giraffe (G. camelopardalis), which includes the Nubian giraffe (G. c. camelopardalis) as a distinct subspecies. The elusive Nubian giraffe from Ethiopia and the South Sudan region was the first described some 300 years ago, Fennessy says, and is now shown to be part of the northern giraffe.

The discovery has significant conservation implications, the researchers say, noting that the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Species Survival Commission Giraffe and Okapi Specialist Group recently submitted an updated proposed assessment of the giraffe on the IUCN Red List taking into consideration their rapid decline over the last 30 years.

“With now four distinct species, the conservation status of each of these can be better defined and in turn added to the IUCN Red List,” Fennessy says. “Working collaboratively with African governments, the continued support of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and partners can highlight the importance of each of these dwindling species, and hopefully kick start targeted conservation efforts and internal donor support for their increased protection.

“As an example,” he adds, “northern giraffe number less than 4,750 individuals in the wild, and reticulated giraffe number less than 8,700 individuals — as distinct species, it makes them some of the most endangered large mammals in the world.”

Janke and Fennessy say that they are now analyzing the amount of gene flow between the giraffe species in greater detail. In addition to expanding the ecological and species distribution data, they want to better understand the factors that limit gene flow and the giraffes’ differentiation into four species and several subspecies.

{After years of environmental destruction, China has spent billions of dollars on the world’s largest reforestation program, converting a combined area nearly the size of New York and Pennsylvania back to forest.}

The government-backed effort, known as the Grain-for-Green Program, has transformed 28 million hectares (69.2 million acres) of cropland and barren scrubland back to forest in an effort to prevent erosion and alleviate rural poverty. While researchers around the world have studied the program, little attention has been paid to understanding how the program has affected biodiversity until now.

New research led by Princeton University and published in the journal Nature Communications finds that China’s Grain-for-Green Program overwhelmingly plants monoculture forests and therefore falls dramatically short of restoring the biodiversity of China’s native forests, which contain many tree species. In its current form, the program fails to benefit, protect and promote biodiversity.

Following a literature review, two years of fieldwork and rigorous economic analyses, the researchers found the vast majority of new forests contain only one tree species. While these monocultures may be a simpler route for China’s rural residents — who receive cash and food payments, as well as technical support to reforest land — the single-species approach brings very limited biodiversity benefits, and, in some cases, even harms wildlife.

The researchers conclude that restoring the full complement of native trees that once grew on the land would provide the best outcome for biodiversity. If native forests are unachievable within the current scope of the program, the researchers recommend mixed forests — which contain multiple tree species and more closely resemble natural forests — as a second option. Mixed forests better protect wildlife than monoculture forests, and would not financially burden farmers participating in the program. Both native and mixed forests also help to mitigate climate change.

“Around the world, people are leaving rural areas and moving into cities, potentially creating new opportunities to restore forests on abandoned farmland,” said co-author David Wilcove, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and public affairs in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

“In many places, we’re seeing efforts to reforest areas that have once been cleared, and China is the first country to do it on this large of a scale,” he said. “The critical policy question is how to restore forests that provide multiple benefits to society, including preventing soil erosion, providing timber and sustaining wildlife. China has an opportunity to do it right and turn these monocultures into mixed or native forests that will be more valuable for wildlife in future years.”

“If the Chinese government is willing to expand the scope of the program, restoring native forests is, without doubt, the best approach for biodiversity,” said lead author Fangyuan Hua, a postdoctoral research associate in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. “But even within the current scope of the program, our analysis shows there are economically feasible ways to restore forests while also improving biodiversity.”

During the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, China converted millions of hectares of native forest to cropland. The country’s unprotected forests continued to be heavily exploited in the decades that followed, but without an effective conservation system in place. After a series of powerful floods in the late 1990s, China’s government launched a series of landmark ecological initiatives aimed at controlling soil erosion, including the Grain-for-Green Program.

The program is in place in 26 of China’s 31 mainland provinces and, while its central goal is to prevent erosion, most of the reestablished forest is now used for the production of timber, fiber, tree fruits and other cash crops. Rural residents are encouraged with cash and food incentives to plant forests, shrubs and grasslands, but there seems to be little consideration for biodiversity in determining what is planted.

The research team — which included scholars from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sichuan University, the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and the University of Vermont — wanted to investigate how these approaches to planting influenced biodiversity. They examined four specific questions.

“We asked: What types of forest are being established by the program across China?” Hua said. “Then, focusing on a particular region, we asked: How does the biodiversity of the new forests compare to the biodiversity of the croplands they are replacing? How do the new forests compare to native forests? And, would planting more diverse forests result in any biodiversity benefits while also being economically feasible?”

The team examined 258 publications, most of which were written in Mandarin, to determine the current tree composition within forests planted by the program. Although the program included a large number of species across China as a whole, they found that the majority of individual forests were planted with only one tree species, such as bamboo, eucalyptus or Japanese cedar. Only three locations actually planted forest native to the area.

“To our knowledge, this is the first nationwide synthesis of the tree-species composition of forests reestablished under the program,” Hua said. “This is essential to understanding the program’s biodiversity implications.”

Next, the team zeroed in on Sichuan Province in south-central China and conducted fieldwork on bird and bee diversity across all seasons. Birds and bees are good indicators of the overall biodiversity of a particular area, the researchers noted.

“Birds are sensitive to the types of trees, the overall age of the forest and the insects within the forest, and bees depend more on resources like pollen or nectar from the understory. Together, these two taxa provide a well-rounded picture of biodiversity within a forest,” Hua said.

Birds were surveyed using point counts. This measurement entails counting the birds seen and heard from a grid of points placed in the forests and cropland that are separated by certain distances. The bee species were collected and identified using DNA barcoding. All fieldwork was conducted across different types of land including monocultures, mixed forests, cropland and native forest.

The researchers found that reforesting land with monocultures resulted in more harm than good for birds. In regions with monocultures, there were fewer bird species, and birds tended to be less abundant. Mixed forests, however, harbored more bird species and similar overall numbers of birds compared with cropland. The bees suffered from reforestation regardless, which was likely caused by the lack of floral resources in replanted forests. Overall, the best environment for birds and bees is native forest, the researchers found, as opposed to the forests reestablished under the Green-for-Grain Program.

“Together, our findings point to the enormous potential of biodiversity benefits that China’s Green-for-Green Program has yet to realize,” Hua said.

In the final part of the study, the researchers conducted economic analyses in order to understand the economic impacts of reforestation. They interviewed 166 households and asked what percentage of household income came from forest production. The researchers also calculated the average annual cost of — and income from — forest production per hectare across different types of forests.

The median and mean percentages of annual household income contributed by forest production were 5 percent and 12.8 percent, respectively. The net annual profits were not that high, hovering around $400 per hectare (roughly $160 per acre). In terms of profit, mixed forests yielded gains similar to those derived from monocultures. Therefore, switching to a mixed forest, which would improve biodiversity, is unlikely to pose economic risks to households, the researchers concluded.

“The work done by Fangyuan and her team is an enormous task,” Wilcove said. “These data are crucial. Restoring forests is a tremendously positive thing to do for the world, but you can get a lot more bang for the buck in terms of benefits to society if you know how to do it right based on sound biological and economic data. Fangyuan’s work provides this type of keen analysis.”

{Ocean warming is affecting humans in direct ways and the impacts are already being felt, including effects on fish stocks and crop yields, more extreme weather events and increased risk from water-borne diseases, according to what has been called the most comprehensive review available on the issue, launched today by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawai’i.}

The report, Explaining ocean warming: Causes, scale, effects and consequences, reviews the effects of ocean warming on species, ecosystems and on the benefits oceans provide to humans. Compiled by 80 scientists from 12 countries, it highlights detectable scientific evidence of impacts on marine life, from microorganisms to mammals, which are likely to increase significantly even under a low emissions scenario.

“Ocean warming is one of this generation’s greatest hidden challenges — and one for which we are completely unprepared,” says IUCN Director General Inger Andersen. “The only way to preserve the rich diversity of marine life, and to safeguard the protection and resources the ocean provides us with, is to cut greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and substantially.”

Ocean warming is already affecting ecosystems from polar to tropical regions, driving entire groups of species such as plankton, jellyfish, turtles and seabirds up to 10 degrees of latitude towards the poles, causing the loss of breeding grounds for turtles and seabirds, and affecting the breeding success of marine mammals, according to the report.

By damaging fish habitats and causing fish species to move to cooler waters, warming oceans are affecting fish stocks in some areas and are expected to lead to reduced catches in tropical regions, the report states.

In East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean, for example, ocean warming has reduced the abundance of some fish species by killing parts of the coral reefs they depend on, adding to losses caused by overfishing and destructive fishing techniques. In South-East Asia, harvests from marine fisheries are expected to fall by between 10% and 30% by 2050 relative to 1970-2000, as the distributions of fish species shift, under a high ‘business as usual’ greenhouse gas emission scenario, the report states.

“Most of the heat from human-induced warming since the 1970s — a staggering 93% — has been absorbed by the ocean, which acts as a buffer against climate change, but this comes at a price. We were astounded by the scale and extent of ocean warming effects on entire ecosystems made clear by this report,” says Dan Laffoley, Marine Vice Chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas at IUCN, and one of the lead authors.

The report also highlights evidence that ocean warming is causing increased disease in plant and animal populations, and impacting human health as pathogens spread more easily in warmer waters, including cholera-bearing bacteria and harmful algal blooms that cause neurological diseases like ciguatera.

Warming oceans are also affecting the weather, with a range of knock-on effects on humans. The number of severe hurricanes has increased at a rate of around 25-30% per degree of global warming, the report states.

Ocean warming has led to increased rainfall in mid-latitudes and monsoon areas, and less rain in various sub-tropical regions. These changes will have impacts on crop yields in important food-producing regions such as North America and India, according to the report.

The protection against climate change offered to us by oceans and their ecosystems — such as absorbing large amounts of CO2 and sheltering us from storms and erosion — is also likely to reduce as the ocean warms, according to the report.

The report’s recommendations include recognising the severity of ocean warming impacts on ocean ecosystems and the benefits they provide to humans, expanding marine protected areas, introducing legal protection for the high seas, better evaluating the social and economic risks associated with warming oceans and continuing to fill gaps in scientific knowledge, as well as cutting greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and substantially.

Ocean conservation is one of the major themes addressed by the ongoing IUCN Congress, where IUCN Members will vote on motions related to protecting the high seas and protected areas in Antarctica among many others.

{Belgian site is first evidence of shared armored fish ‘nursery’.}

An international team of scientists has described a rare fossil site that is believed to be among the earliest evidence of different fish species using a common nursery — much like ones utilized by some fish today.

A quarry in Strud, Belgium, that was excavated between 2004 and 2015 yielded fossils of multiple species of placoderms, which are extinct, armored fish that represent some of the earliest jawed vertebrates on Earth. Dating back to the Devonian period, an era predating the dinosaurs by hundreds of millions of years, the site yielded smaller-sized fossils that show immature placoderms occupied the area. At the same time, larger placoderm fossils, indicating mature fish, were not found.

“These sorts of juvenile-only assemblages are rare in the fossil record,” said Ted Daeschler, PhD, vice president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, who served as a co-author on the study published in PLOS ONE. “We are quite sure that the juvenile-only placoderm assemblage is not the result of sorting of small material by water currents because there are larger skeletal elements of other kinds of fish. We believe this points to a nursery.”

The study was led by Sébastien Olive, a vertebrate paleontologist in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences who is now on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. By studying a site like Strud, Olive feels it will help give a more complete picture of ancient life.

“Reconstructing life histories of extinct organisms is a rare opportunity to go beyond simply describing the anatomy of ancient life,” Olive said. “With these sorts of records, we can actually begin to understand aspects of behavior and life history of organisms that went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago.”

The Strud site, which dates to the late part of the Devonian period (more than 360 million years ago), features many pieces of immature fish skeletons that were largely intact despite being small and fragile. As such, this pointed toward slow-moving and shallow water. An environment like that would have been — and remains, for present-day fish — ideal for the development of the young.

“Adult placoderms may have used the nursery of Strud only to lay eggs and/or give live birth, and would have generally lived away from the nursery in deeper waters,” wrote the research team, which also included paleontologists Gaël Clément of the Museum national d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and Vincent Dupret, of Uppsala University in Sweden.

An added benefit of the nursery site would have been its protection from predators, thanks to the “large, hard and sometimes spiny” vegetation that was found fossilized on-site.

While the find at Strud is now one of the oldest-known nurseries in the world, similar records exist in Pennsylvania, especially at a site called Red Hill. During the Devonian period, the Pennsylvania and Strud sites would have been relatively close to each other since the Atlantic Ocean hadn’t begun to open to separate them. Daeschler and Olive’s work focused largely on comparing the Red Hill site to Strud, noting many similarities between the two and using the size and shape of placoderm fossils from Red Hill, housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences, to establish the relative maturity of samples found in Strud.

With three different types of placoderm fossils discovered at Strud — Grossilepis rikiki, Turrisaspis strudensis and Phyllolepis undulata — it opens a question for scientists like Daeschler.

“This is the first time that it can be demonstrated that several species seem to have used a common nursery,” Daeschler said. “It makes us wonder: Has that always been a common reproductive strategy?”

Although placoderms are long extinct, getting glimpses of their lives puts more pieces together in the evolutionary puzzle.

“In the case of placoderms like these, we’re looking at some of the earliest jawed vertebrates,” Olive said. “Understanding their life history can give us an idea of the primitive condition from which all other jawed vertebrates evolved.”

Ultimately, Olive and Daeschler hope the Strud site provides a lens through which scientists can study current conditions.

“By studying the past, with the ability to see a moment in time and changes through time, we are better able to understand ecosystems and the organisms that live in them today,” Olive said. “Geologists say that the present is the key to understanding the past. But we can also say that the past is the key to understanding the future.”