Measuring Biodiversity

Question 1

Order of global biodiversity change and the Global biodiversity framework

Answer 1

conservation action –> observation & monitoring –> detection and attribution –> science to policy

Question 2

what is biodiversity ?

Answer 2

number of entities (genotypes, species, or ecosystems), their relative abundance, and the difference in their traits and interactions

Question 3

Quantifying biodiversity change

Answer 3

detection, prediction, and causal explanation of biodiversity and ecosystem change is central to biodiversity science and policy

Question 4

how can we detect biodiversity change?

Answer 4

by satellites, drones, field work (ecology)

Question 5

importance of prediction and forecasting

Answer 5

past and guess of the future –> accurate models and cohesive data

Question 6

why does quantifying biodiversity change matter?

Answer 6

public communication, litigation in a contested contexts, restoration, and conservation of biodiversity, and improvement in our fundamental understanding of biodiversity change

Question 7

examples of public communication of biodiversity changes

Answer 7

IPCC
litigation (development projects in the west)
restoration and conservation of biodiversity

Question 8

trends in abundance : Hallmann et al (2017)
*flagship example to be careful in the way we study biodiversity + share information

Answer 8

‘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

Question 9

essential biodiversity variables

Answer 9

minimums set of measurements, complementary to one another, that can capture major dimensions of biodiversity change

Question 10

characteristics of EBVs

Answer 10

biological and policy relevant
sensitive to change
biological state variables
generalize across realms
scalable
feasible

Question 11

example of EBVs

Answer 11

genetic composition
species populations
species traits
community composition
ecosystem structure
ecosystem functions

Question 12

quantifying biodiversity change at fine scales

Answer 12

calculate species change at smaller scale ( ~1km) or local scale and project globally = ‘pixel by pixel’ map showcasing richness and abundance

Question 13

set back of meta-analyses

Answer 13

no global biodiversity system
‘Stone Age’ of developing tech and roll-out new systems to eliminate bias in data collection

Question 14

why does small scale change matter?

Answer 14

scale-up
easier to motivate conservation action if there is local action
human action can affect transformed landscapes

Question 15

what is Canada missing to monitor change?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

why do species change in a particular location?

Answer 16

move ( distribution shift = range shift)
colonization / invasion
extinction
adaptation (change in phenotype/ ecotype)
episodic rarity ( change in non consistent manner)

Question 17

measuring biodiversity requires …

Answer 17

all factors to be considered at once, and focus on. the net outcome of all these differences

Question 18

major drivers of change in canada

Answer 18

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

Question 19

why is a standardized monitoring system missing from Canada ?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

There are two facets of detection and attribution for biodiversity

Answer 20

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)

Question 21

while detecting biodiversity change it is important to set the backdrop…

Answer 21

temporal variability in biodiversity must be considered to understand what affect human activities are having

Question 22

trends in biodiversity change graphically

Answer 22

stationary ( biased understanding of change)
non stationary
- step change ( sudden loss or gain)
- shift in variance (mean squared variation, frequent measurements) = unstable / new extremes

Question 23

detection of change def’n

Answer 23

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

Question 24

attribution def’n

Answer 24

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

Question 25

questions to ask while detecting biodiversity change

Answer 25

how did it vary in the past prior to impact? measures of uncertainty, confidence interval, strength of effect to uncertainty of the impact

Question 26

detection and attribution: the inference claim OBSERVATION

Answer 26

-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

Question 27

detection and attribution: the inference claim ESTIMATION

Answer 27

• 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

Question 28

detection and attribution: the inference claim DETECTION

Answer 28

• ## models to isolate the signal of change in the measure of biodiversity

Question 29

detection and attribution: the inference claim ATTRIBUTION

Answer 29

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

Question 30

alpha diversity

Answer 30

within assemblages

Question 31

beta diversity

Answer 31

between assemblages

Question 32

gamma diversity

Answer 32

summed over all assemblages