Conservation Issues and Management Flashcards
L—— et al. 201- - Most forests have already been…
Laurence et al., 2014 logged / modified globally
What three things can we consider about the effects of logging?
1. Effect on species c—–
2. Effect on IUCN r—l—— birds and such
3. Effect on species p——
- Composition
- Red-listed
- Persistence
Logging can change species composition
But most (75%) of primary forest species persists
Who did this study?
Edwards et al. 2011
Define RIL
a host of strategies designed to reduce damage to forest structure, release of carbon, and to increase viability of timber harvest in the long run.
Give some benefits of RIL
- Prerequisite for FSC
- Can increase timber price
What do people do in RIL before harvest?
A comprehensive market plan where they geolocate marketable trees, as well as vulnerable and rare tree species such as mature ‘seed’ species
What do people do during harvest for RIL?
Use directional felling and big tracked vehicles to reduce impact. Build roads efficiently towards the target tree species. May also cut lianas to stop other trees being dragged down too.
As logging intensty gets higher, species richness may fall for taxa like a—— and in—— and b—- too, but decline may stop after a certain extent leaving large proportion of initial species remaining
amphibians, invertebrates, birds
What is a disadvantage to lower intensity logging?
May have to go to wider area to meet timber requirements and logging intensity spread out.
Edwards et al. 2—-: Birds, dung beetles and a— do better under land s—– than land -s—-
2014, ants, sparing, sharing
——- et al. 20-1 does a meta analysis to show which uses of converted forests are most detrimental. A——-, b—– and p——- come out worst.
Gibson et al., 2011. Agriculture, burning and plantations
Discuss conservation purchases. Which are the most value for money? Which organisations are already investing in them? Is it better to protect bigger or smaller areas and why?
Investing in protecting secondary-logged forests is more worthwhile as most species are persisting but timber value has gone down. Organisations like the RSPB are already making these investments. Bigger areas being protected are better for meta-populations, buffering primary forests and increasing connectivity
How can cutting lianas and enrichment planting increase price under REDD+
Cutting lianas allows for more carbon sequestration as does planting trees of more varied species.
Cutting lianas can also increase t—– production and f—- production - Cerullo and E—– 2019
Cerullo & Edwards 2019: timber, fruit
Give some pros and cons of active restoration in tropical forests
Good - can accelerate carbon recovery of human-modified forests
Bad - susceptible species unaltered by restored vs naturally regenerating forest practices.
what are roads important for? How much have roads expanded in recent years?
Giving access to remote areas, cheap labour, and cheaper land clearance. Roads have doubled in size since 2003
Give the 4 ecological effects of roads
- Habitat loss
- Road mortality
- Edge effects
- Barrier effects and fragmentation
What study reinforces that road construction may facilitate further clearance
Laurance et al. 2009 - 95% of deforestation within 1km of a road
What animals may be susceptible to dying on cleared roads? Is species loss generally larger on wider or thinner roads?
Sunbathing lizards, species with large territories like ocelots, already rare species like the Florida panther. Amongst the taxa of amphibians, mammals, birds and reptiles, amphibians suffer the most losses, and losses are generally larger on THINNER roads
B——- also easier to detect near roads
Bushmeat
Give some examples of edge effects. What can change at the edge of a forest?
- Can be physical, chemical, strucutral, environmental and biological,
- Roads can change light levels, noise levels, increase pollution, wind speed and temperature, and can increase tree damage and death, and species turnover. Can also alter flow patterns of streams
Created study of a fake road with just noise. What was learnt?
Ware et al. 2015: 31% of birds avoided road, and birds that stayed had lower body condition
L——– et al. 2004 - did all bird species suffer from roads?
Laurence et al. 2004. No.Depended on niche. Edge loving / canopy bird species liked it, and terrestrial / solitary understory birds very much did not. Laurance et al. also found that some bird species would NOT cross roads thus becoming isolated
Roads can be barriers to g— f— and isolating populations can lead to higher extinction risk due to demographic and e——- stocaciticty and limits of a critical r—- like food
gene flow, environmental, resource
Give the two main mitigation methods for roads
- Reduce wildlife mortality
- Increase permeability to allow dispersal
Give some ways to reduce wildlife mortality
Barrier fencing
Road signs
Road closures (at key times such as crab migration)
Banning hunting
Under and overpasses
Rope bridges
Natural canopy connections
Give some ways to allow dispersal across roads
Overpasses
Underpasses
Rope bridges
Gliding poles
Natural canopy connections
What is the problem with mitigation methods for road planning? Give a citation - Ry——- et al. 2015
Rytwinski et al. 2015.
Often poorly tested and greenwashy. Need to test how many of these structures, if they work, where to put them etc.
We can combine priority road-free areas with priority a——— areas to try and find lowest impact place to put roads. Another Laurance study. R—+ could play a role in where these areas conflict.
agricultural, REDD
where is most human population growth now? Since when?
In urban areas, since 2005
Give some findings from the M———s et al. 2— study around urbanisation
Macdonald’s et al
2008 - 8% of IUCN red-listed species primarily threatened by urbanisation
- ecoregions of high biodiversity importance are being urbanised
- some species already extinct from it
- with urbanisation massively increasing, mean distance of a protected area to a city is decreasing (ie. in cape town)
at —– spatial scales, areas with higher biodiversity tend to have more people. This is as we too like the often warm wet environments that other species are enjoying. At —– spatial scales we also tend to develop areas with high biodiversity, as this is not ….
large, smaller, is not farmland / providing for us
Give 5 things which can change within urban environments compared to rural / natural ones
Type of green space changes in amount, type and fragmentation
Urban heat islands
Pollution
Disturbance
Biotic interactions - domestic cats, non-native species
Studies of UK urbanisation show species, including urban indicator species, to show a unimodal peak in numbers when plotted against housing density. Why is this? What is a problem here
Urban environments can often be more ecolgocially complex than our much depleted rural ones. Problematically UK legislation plans to build houses at these densities in which numbers are declining
——— species are often urban avoiders.
Specialist. Generalist ones often do well
In some areas, increase in ——— species compensates for loss of native species, thus species richness may appear to increase.
non-native / invasive
There may be new and strong selective pressure on species in urban areas. C—— et al. —- showed less seeds of a species germinated in an urban area, and thus selection was acting on this species over a relatively small number of generations
Cheptou et al. 2008
there may be more —pollination in urban areas, why?
self-pollination, as there are less pollinators
What may happen to clutch size in urban areas? what may stop this from happening?
It may decrease. Supplementary feeding (bird-feeding) may stop this, if it can compensate for the natural food sources unavailable in urban areas.
Recap: What are the 4 main ecosystem services
Cultural, provisional, regulatory and supporting (soil formation and nutrient recycling)
Give some cultural services of nature?
Less stress
faster recovery from surgery
higher focus
contact with it may be key to inspiring people to care about nature
People growing up in green areas less likely to develop mental health conditions
Give some regulatory services of trees in urban areas?
- Shade houses
- shade tarmac reducing heat island effect
- intercept rainfall & flood reduction
- store carbon - Davies et al. 2011 shows how if Leicester planted more trees then so much more carbon could be locked away in the city
what is the difference between urban sprawl and urban densification? what are the trade-offs between these as a policy for future building in the future
urban sprawl is spread out. this lowers flood risk but destroys more rural habitats
urban densification is closer together. it increases flood risk but lowers habitat loss. however, carbon storage is also lower under densification
in terms of agriculture, production of a—— products and c—— has increased due to g—— p——– and w—— diets
animal cereals, growing population, westernized
Crop yields of major crops like soy, wheat and maize could be reduced due to CC. Cite the study.
Lobell et al. 2020
Give the 4 main reasons for food price volatility
- Oil price volatility
- Food waste
- Reduced supply due to CC / pollution
- Commodity trading on the global market
G—— et al. 20– finds that a —– of all food worldwide is wasted, especially in Western countries
Godfray et al. 2020 - a third of all food worldwide is wasted
Around –% of urban expansion is expected to happen into cropland, reducing global crop yields by a small but significant percentage (1-4%) and agricultural expansion is generally happening in areas of h— importance for b——- such as SE Asia and Brazil
50%, high importance for biodiversity
Globally, we adquire –% of NPP, higher in Western countries
30% (Imhoff et al. 2004)
T/F area used to grow annual and perennial plants is expanding
TRUE, even in the tropics
Agriculture is the biggest threat to b— numbers and threatened species globally, and the biggest threat to –% of threatened v——–
bird, 80%, vertebrates
European bird populations show negative correlation with increased c—- y—-
Cereal yields
K—– et al. 2—- - Only organic farms NEAR natural areas had enough pollination by bees to produce marketable m—–, due to natural areas providing abundant and varied bee species
Kremen et al. 2001
Livestock found to outcompete wild ungulates (and other species) competing for the same food source. A solution to this may be eating the wild animals instead, but what are the downsides of this (4)?
- Need for legislative change
- Needs Enforcement
- Needs suitable quotas
- May lead to increase in bushmeat hunting
C——— can motivate countries to change, but must be p——
certification, precise
What bird species has benefited from UK compensation schemes for more environmental farming?
The cirl bunting, which needs stubble to feed on in winter and mixed grasslands paired with ripening cereals in the summer. These fell as farmland polarization increased, but are on the rise again.
Compare the entry-level stewardship handbook to the higher-level stewardship handbook in terms of uptake and success.
Reminder - these are now replaced with ELMs - environmental land management schemes
Entry level - higher uptake, broader aims, less specific to sites, no monitoring of biodiversity response
Higher level - more site specific, lower uptake, has project officers and more clearly defined objectives
ELMs are at risk from…
A changing government
Agri-environmental schemes only found to have mild-moderate positive impacts, and common species were benefitting more than rare ones.
What could improve this?
Must be more specifically tailored by habitat
Problems with assuming land-sparing always works best:
Assumes all species benefit more from this, which they do not
Assumes all inefficient farmland which is abandoned regenerates, which is not ALWAYS the case, ie. argentina, costa rica, Mexico etc.
in density-yield graphs, land-sparing is best if the line is c—— and land-sharing if the line is c—–
concave, convex
initially, PAs were created for r—— or r—— management purposes, then to preserve w——— (19th century) and nowadays to preserve s——, ha—— and e——– s——–
religious, resource, wilderness, species, habitat, ecosystem services.
Which is the modern IUCN definition of an ecosystem service?
1. ‘a clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values’
‘2. an area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means’
1 is the 2008 definition. 2 is the 1994 definition.
why do the IUCN categories exist? Give 4 reasons.
- To reduce confusion over PA purpose
- To encompass the many reasons we may have a PA
- To promote international standards
- To help with global accounting and comparisons
Fill in the gaps for these 7 IUCN categories:
Ia - S— N—– r——- : protected area managed mainly for science
* Ib - W——— a—: protected area managed mainly for wilderness protection *
II - N——– p—: protected area managed mainly for ecosystem protection and recreation
* III - N——- M——: protected area managed mainly for conservation of specific natural features e.g. Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
IV - H—–/S—— M——- Area: protected area managed mainly for conservation through management intervention
* V - P——– L——-/S——: protected area managed mainly for landscape/seascape conservation and recreation e.g. Dartmoor NP
* VI - M——- R——- P——- Ar—: protected area managed mainly for the sustainable use of natural ecosystems e.g. Kiunga Marine National Reserve, Kenya
Ia- Strict nature reserve
Ib - Wilderness area
II - National park
III - National monument
IV - Habitat / species management area
V - Protected landscape / seascape
VI - Managed resource protected areas
T/F increasing PAs has halted biodiversity loss
False
P—— et al. —– - Expanding PAs to 17% could greatly increase coverage of species range, but this would be reduced by projections of conflicting land use pressures. Calls for more global cooperation across countries
Pouzols et al. 2014
What is the PA coverage target by 2030? and 2050?
30% by 2030 for land and sea, and also discussion about 50% by 2050, for land and sea.
Is there enough valuable land left to protect with PAs? What proportion of ecoregions are already imperilled?
24% of ecoregions already imperilled. Some are well protected though (12%) and some could still reach the target with work (37%) - Dinerstein et al. 2017
There is a SIGNIFICANT trade-off between PAs and c——- loss. This does better under a land-s—— initiative, but as we know, this may not be better for nature
calorie, land-sharing (Mehrabi et al. 2018)
Give the 5 major problems for PA establishment
Remember:
B—–distribution
Overall c——–
- Overall coverage (too small)
- Increased isolation
- Decreasing size, especially in those newly established
- Insufficient protection
- Biased distribution
Give an example of biased distributions being a problem in PAs
Greenland - no competing land pressures but not especially biodiverse. Worldwide, not many endangered species are even represented in PAs
Give a statistic of size being a problem with PAs
more than 50% are less than 10km squared in size