Musings, Explorations, and Announcements

I just read a great paper by Michael Soulé et. al. discussing the management implications some ideas in ecology that have outpaced environmental policy. The authors, a mix of ecologists and conservationists,  argue that some species, which they call "strongly interacting species," deserve higher priority in conservation because of their unique roles in ecosystems.  These species have gone by many names in the ecological literature, including "keystone species," and "ecosystem engineers.

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In Wasior, Papua New Guinea, flash floods have killed well over 100 people.  Conservation groups blame illegal logging activities in the Wasior area for exacerbating the flooding, and the Indonesian government is investigating this possibility. While this case is still uncertain, it is clear that deforestation leads to increased flood risk.  CJA Bradshaw and colleagues published an article in Global Change Biology showing that at 10% increase in deforestation leads to a 4%-28% increase in flood frequencies in developing countries.

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A number of news outlets have picked up on a new article in Environmental Research Letters by Andy Challinor and a team at the University at Leeds.  The standard headline is "Crop Failures to Increase With Climate Change," but I think the much more interesting part of the research is the author's creation of a vulnerability index based on the historical crop data in China.  Essentially, they looked at periods of drought in the past, and examined how well farmers were able to mitigate the drought's effects through additional labor or technology:

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My first published article examined implications of the massive collapse of honeybee populations on business, so I feel compelled to comment on the latest development in the hunt for the cause of colony collapse disorder (CCD). There is a new article out on the subject by a team led by University of Montana researchers and the US Army Chemical Biological center.  Using proteomic sequencing, they found two culprits in the bodies of dead bees: invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV), a long-stranded DNA virus, and Nosema, a fungal spore.

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One of the emerging themes of my course in rapid environmental change is how humans have accelerated natural processes to a pace never seen before in earth's history.  For instance, climate change has in the past occurred at scales of tens of thousands of years or longer, but man-made climate change in happening at the pace of decades or centuries. Less well-known is the effect we can have on the speed of evolution.

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