Measuring Biodiversity Flashcards
Order of global biodiversity change and the Global biodiversity framework
conservation action –> observation & monitoring –> detection and attribution –> science to policy
what is biodiversity ?
number of entities (genotypes, species, or ecosystems), their relative abundance, and the difference in their traits and interactions
Quantifying biodiversity change
detection, prediction, and causal explanation of biodiversity and ecosystem change is central to biodiversity science and policy
how can we detect biodiversity change?
by satellites, drones, field work (ecology)
importance of prediction and forecasting
past and guess of the future –> accurate models and cohesive data
why does quantifying biodiversity change matter?
public communication, litigation in a contested contexts, restoration, and conservation of biodiversity, and improvement in our fundamental understanding of biodiversity change
examples of public communication of biodiversity changes
IPCC
litigation (development projects in the west)
restoration and conservation of biodiversity
trends in abundance : Hallmann et al (2017)
*flagship example to be careful in the way we study biodiversity + share information
‘more than 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas’
local trend extrapolated globally
rural landscape, systematic decline as national average
one variable in biomass and not biodiversity, trends measured with poor controls
essential biodiversity variables
minimums set of measurements, complementary to one another, that can capture major dimensions of biodiversity change
characteristics of EBVs
biological and policy relevant
sensitive to change
biological state variables
generalize across realms
scalable
feasible
example of EBVs
genetic composition
species populations
species traits
community composition
ecosystem structure
ecosystem functions
quantifying biodiversity change at fine scales
calculate species change at smaller scale ( ~1km) or local scale and project globally = ‘pixel by pixel’ map showcasing richness and abundance
set back of meta-analyses
no global biodiversity system
‘Stone Age’ of developing tech and roll-out new systems to eliminate bias in data collection
why does small scale change matter?
scale-up
easier to motivate conservation action if there is local action
human action can affect transformed landscapes
what is Canada missing to monitor change?
lack long-term, standardized, spatially complete, and readily accessible monitoring information… this significantly hinders our capacity to assess the status and health of Canada’s ecosystems
why do species change in a particular location?
move ( distribution shift = range shift)
colonization / invasion
extinction
adaptation (change in phenotype/ ecotype)
episodic rarity ( change in non consistent manner)
measuring biodiversity requires …
all factors to be considered at once, and focus on. the net outcome of all these differences
major drivers of change in canada
rates of climate change, human ecological footprint (affect lakes and forests) e.g. 500 species at risk in the south of Canada and how drivers are changing the species in this area
why is a standardized monitoring system missing from Canada ?
built on its natural ecosystem ( only observe marketable diversity)
look for things where we live, look, biodiversity studies also map roads
heavily biased data collection, constrained by accessibility
data collection but not in protected areas
There are two facets of detection and attribution for biodiversity
1- detection of anthropogenic signal (s) in spatial and temporal biodiversity dynamics of the focal ecological system, and attribution of the cause to one or more drivers
2- attribution of biodiversity change impacts on ecosystem functions and services (NCPs)
while detecting biodiversity change it is important to set the backdrop…
temporal variability in biodiversity must be considered to understand what affect human activities are having
trends in biodiversity change graphically
stationary ( biased understanding of change)
non stationary
- step change ( sudden loss or gain)
- shift in variance (mean squared variation, frequent measurements) = unstable / new extremes
detection of change def’n
the process of demonstrating that biodiversity or a process affected by biodiversity has changed in some defined statistical sense without providing a reason for that change
attribution def’n
the process of evaluating the relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change (trend) or event with an assignments of statistical confidence
How much is each thing affecting it
questions to ask while detecting biodiversity change
how did it vary in the past prior to impact? measures of uncertainty, confidence interval, strength of effect to uncertainty of the impact
detection and attribution: the inference claim OBSERVATION
-presence-absence of individuals across sites through time
-choice of sites, duration, frequency, effort and method used to survey individuals
-drivers across sites informs attribution step
detection and attribution: the inference claim ESTIMATION
- observations–> measures characterizing the state of biodiversity (e.g species richness)
-accounts for gaps and uncertainty in the observation step
-models to estimate metrics from incomplete surveys, accounting for sample size, biases, uncertainty and comparable across sites
detection and attribution: the inference claim DETECTION
- ## models to isolate the signal of change in the measure of biodiversity
detection and attribution: the inference claim ATTRIBUTION
relative magnitude of causal contributions to the detected change with an assignment of statistical confidence
- take into account inherent internal variability and uncertainties in observations and responses to external causal factors
alpha diversity
within assemblages
beta diversity
between assemblages
gamma diversity
summed over all assemblages
