introduction Flashcards
Health: examples: predicting zoonosis niches and hotspots
Mapping the zoonotic niche of Ebola from climate predictions (https://elifesciences.org/articles/04395 - DOI: 10.7554/ELIFE.04395)
Predicting zoonoses –predictions of mass epidemics disease transfer from animal to human
(Gruber, K. Predicting zoonoses. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0098 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0098)
Predicting hotspots – areas where risk of zoonotic events are high
(e.g. Covid-19 shows hotspot area around Wuhan China)
Wealth : example : the value of large predators
Yellowstone Park – Wolf Reintroduction
* Wolf depredation of livestock, loss levels = $63,818 per year.
* Changes in visitor spending in the local economy due to wolf presence = $35,500,000 per year
^profit far outweighs livestock loss (similarly large savannah mammals attract more tourism money than the combined value of crop and livestock losses)
We should also take into account the ecological impact and not just the tourism economic benefit (consider how excess elephants had to be culled in multiple conservancies in Africa)
Comparitively in the UK the culling trophy reward is £200 for a stag and −£50 for culling a hind. In the situation with no wolves, hinds are culled at approximately 11%, the rate needed to keep the deer population at roughly six deer km−2. In the situation with wolves, no hinds are culled
Wellbeing
The clean-up costs for flooding in 2014 for UK alone were £1bn
Planting trees in upland areas take up excess water in flood pulse and spreads water reducing flooding – financial and wellbeing improvement + ecological benefits
A link between green spaces and mental wellbeing
has been observed
See: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/224/4647/420/tab-pdf
& See:
Houlden V, Weich S, de Albuquerque JP, Jarvis S, Rees K. The relationship
between greenspace and the mental wellbeing of adults: A systematic review.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/224/4647/420/tab-pdf
^ A reduction in pain killer use when provided a view on nature.
Self preservation
Farms across the planet produced 3.8 percent less corn and 5.5 percent less wheat than they could have between 1980 and 2008, thanks to rising temperatures
Human induced climate change
Conservation efforts have been shown to have a positive impact
e.g. sparrowhawk population recovery in South England
Human population boom worldwide has resulted in increased human-wildlife conflict
see for human pop. boom: https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Highest levels of biodiversity occur in the developing countries
Industrialised countries have already extremely depleted biodiversity and it is in continual decline
Human survivorship is also increasing over time resulting in higher levels of survival into old age
This is resulting in increased human-wildlife conflict:
see:
Balmford et al. (2001)
Cincotta et al. (2000) for a global perspective.
Why do we need Conservation Biology?
We are living in a time of mass extinction,
conservation biology aims to address this problem.
>It is a crisis discipline; a multidisciplinary science; an inexact science.
Problems to overcome:
* Traditional disciplines tended to work in pristine areas
* Little communication between academics and practitioners (e.g. farmers)
* Placing realistic long-term value on resources
see: fig. 1 for extant megafauna loss in Malhia, Y. et a. (2016) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 113 (4), 838–846
Rewilding
A means to return function to an ecosystem, by reintroducing former species or even by using surrogate species.
Originally, the concept of rewilding was associated with the restoration of large, connected wilderness areas that support wide- ranging keystone species such as apex predators
(Soulé & Noss, 1998)
Mosaic or patchy habitats tend to support more species and more ecological processes
Conservation biology has two main aims:
To investigate human impacts on biodiversity
To develop practical approaches to prevent deleterious effects of humans
Modern conservation biology provides a link between academic and applied disciplines - see diagram in notes
Conservation biology is a fusion of the following
- Basic Research
- Applied Research
- Theory
- Simulation Modelling
- Public Education e.g. Yao Ming Public campaign against shark fin soup
conservation affects everyone
e.g.
BBC article 2008: Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’
The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.
It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7662565.stm
e.g.
BBC article from 2010:
Nature’s sting: The real cost of damaging Planet Earth
For the first time in history, we can now begin to quantify just how expensive degradation of nature really is.
A recent, two-year study for the United Nations Environment Programme, entitled The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), put the damage done to the natural world by human activity in 2008 at between $2tn (£1.3tn) and $4.5tn.
At the lower estimate, that is roughly equivalent to the entire annual economic output of the UK or Italy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11495812
Module 1
*Introduction to Conservation and Biodiversity
- Why do it
- Extinction and extinction drivers
module 2:
*The Individual Species in Conservation
*conservation genetics
The Individual Species in Conservation:
- Successes and failures + the role of population modelling
Conservation genetics:
- Fisher’s rule
- Evolutionary significant units
- Management units
- Phylogenetic diversity
- Effective population size
- Genetic diversity
- Individual fitness
- Population bottlenecks
Reintroductions - Outbreeding depression
- Captive breeding programmes
module 3:
* Multi-species & Landscape-scale Considerations
* Designing protected areas: Size, Shape, Proximity/distribution, Effective preservation
- Prioritisation: Systematic conservation planning:Triage and optimisation, How to prioritise conserving species
- Exploitation versus sustainability: Wildlife and ecotourism, Flagship and umbrella species
Costs and benefits, Wildlife Utilisation and Ecotourism - Fisheries and marine conservation MPA’s covered 6% of the oceans in 2017
^ perhaps the most important human impact on marine life
