Here’s a great write-up in Science on the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), a definitely bold and exciting project to create a nation-wide ecological monitoring program. The authors start with Lewis and Clark and end with kids in 2020 creating biodiversity tours of their lcoal area for classes thousands of miles away. Sick.

Lowman, M. et al. “A National Ecological Network for Research and Education.” Science. 323: 1172-1173. (doi: 10.1126/science.1166945)

• Science recently published further evidence of the “broken window” theory, which suggests that people act badly in degraded environments. These studies are about human-dominated environments, but it seems likely that the same is true for more “natural” areas, too.
• Christopher Dunn argues in Nature that cultural diversity ought to be preserved alongside biodiversity. He even suggests that maps of hotspots of the two tend to overlap. Okay, so let’s make a deal: people can stay in and around areas of high biodiversity if they agree to live according to their “traditional” culture — any development or significant growth and you’ve got to move to the city. Fair?
• Yesterday I mentioned some worry about homogenizing landscapes in rural areas. There was a paper published in Conservation Biology by Rahmig et al. recently that suggested exactly that: homogenization of farming practices has led to declines in avian diversity.
• Also in Cons Bio, Ben Collen and colleagues at ZSL take a closer look at the “Living Planet Index,” one of the 22(!) headline indicators established by the Convention on Biological Diversity used to assess trends in biodiversity loss. Their conclusion: it’s good, but we need more data.
• Kindberg et al. have shown that hunter-reported observations of moose in Sweden were (if corrected) a pretty good method of monitoring.

In “When to stop managing or surveying cryptic species,” Chades et al. present decision making tools for managers concerned with what conservation action to take. How long should you spend time, money and effort managing a species that might not even be there? Long story short managing is the best approach if it’s a high value species, but if management continues without any sign of a population, it’s worth switching your resources to surveying. If nothing shows up, move on. But before you do any of that, be sure to use a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process to know when those benchmarks occur.

Chades, I. et al. When to stop managing or surveying cryptic threatened species. PNAS, in press. (doi: 10.1073/pnas.080526510)

It’s been said, repeatedly, that the single most important advance in environmental science was the development of a global observation system. Through the combination of satellites and regional and locally-scaled observations, environmental scientists are now able to study the earth as a whole, in real time. Any number of metaphors are available, but the power of having that kind of technology should be obvious. At any given time, we can know how much the ice caps have melted this summer; what the air quality is like in Beijing; how big the next hurricane will be. The Global Earth Observatory System of Systems is, quite simply, awesome.

But with the biodiversity crisis, there is no concomitant global observation system. We can’t say, on any given day, how much habitat has been lost; how many insects have gone extinct; where people are hunting. There’s plenty of data available in individual pieces, at different scales, covering different time periods, but it isn’t collected together in one place in a meaningful way. People are trying to change that, however. This piece in the Policy Forum of Science gives a nice introduction at efforts underway to create the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network  (GEO BON) (no doubt located in the Department of Redundancy Department, yuk yuk.) Bad jokes aside, the GEO BON is “a new global partnership to help collect, manage, analyze, and report data relating to the status of the world’s biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, here’s a more nitty-gritty paper in Conservation Letters that details development of the new IUCN Red List Index measuring extinction risk for taxa through time. The authors address

selecting the taxonomic groups to be included in the index, determining the minimum sample size (number of species) necessary to provide robust trends, determing a sampling strategy to ensure sufficient geographic and taxonomic representation, establishing methods for aggregating data and weighting the index, and estimating confidence intervals.

Such an effort is good and necessary. If what I’ve heard about some IUCN Red List groups is true, developing a robust and transparent strategy for determining extinction risk can only improve current efforts. However, one of the things that really stood out to me from the recent SCB conference is that people’s efforts to identify key indicator taxa has sort of stalled. All the talks I attended that addressed this issue concluded that it wasn’t working. I suspect that results from a simple evolutionary / ecological fact: diversity exists because of empty niches. The hope in identifying an indicator group is that there’s some correlation between that particular taxon, but biodiversity is on a very basic level inherently un-correlated. Now, that’s not to say I think developing these methods is a waste of time, merely that as we move forward we must always be cognizant of the fact that focusing on one area of biodiversity, whether it’s at the genetic, species, ecosystem or landscape level, we will necessarily ignore other parts of the whole. I’d like to refer to this as the Whack-a-Mole dilemma.

Scholes, R. et al. Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System. Science, 321: 1044-1045. (doi 10.1126/science.1162055)

Baillie, J. et al. Toward monitoring global biodiversity. Conservation Letters, 1:1, 18-26. (doi: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00009.x)