Queen of the Prairie (Photo/cm195902 wikimedia commons)
The last time someone found the Queen-of-the-prairie — a pretty, pink rose-like flower — growing in Indianapolis, Indiana, was in a small damp spot at the edge of Water Canal and 52nd Street. The time was July 1935.
Urbanization has had an untold impact on local wildlife. Of the 700 plus species of plants found in Indianapolis, native species have long been replaced by invasive ones. What we see today makes it hard to imagine what we might’ve seen 50 years ago. But a new study, that also happens to be a fantastic premise for a local conservation photography project, might help with that.
Ecologists at the Friesner Herbarium in Butler University, Indianapolis, compared species composition of 2,800 dried plant specimens predating 1940 to plants collected by students between 1996 and 2006. They found a floral community drastically changed from pre-urbanized days. While the number of species was similar, about 700, about 168 (if my math is correct) native plants, including the Queen-of-the-prairie, have been replaced by non-native ones, such as the amur bush honeysuckle.
Honeysuckles don’t sound so bad, and the US Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service actually promoted the planting of it as a means to prevent erosion and feed wildlife. The plant has proven to do neither. The invasive honeysuckle now proliferates throughout the city along banks and wetlands and land managers pay hand over fist to eradicate it.
Perhaps the big take away from the study is that the plant changes caused by urbanization, at least in Indianapolis, is taking away their floral individuality, said the researchers in a press release.
So how does this turn into a photo project? The project by Butler University just screams visualization. I’m betting most urban areas have universities or museums with historical plant collections. They might even consider well-done portraits of these collections an asset to their archival and educational endeavors. Just think who you could partner with and what you could illustrate by creating a series of floral portraits comparing past and present plant communities in your city.
If you think a project like this isn’t important, keep these words from study lead and Director of Friesner Herbarium Dr. Rebecca Dolan in mind. “As cities continue to grow, urban green spaces are becoming important refuges for native biodiversity and for people. In coming decades, most people’s contact with nature will be in urban settings, so the social importance of urban plants has never been greater.”
You can find the study in the current issue of the Journal of Ecology.
“As cities continue to grow, urban green spaces are becoming important refuges for native biodiversity and for people. In coming decades, most people’s contact with nature will be in urban settings, so the social importance of urban plants has never been greater.”
In Norfolk, Virginia, some residents are raising their houses in order to fight flooding and counteract sea-level rise. (Photo/Morgan Heim)
Chesapeake Bay residents can breathe a little sigh of relief. The magnitude of absolute sea-level rise, the volume and mass of sea water, happening along its coastlines is a mere fraction of the global average, according to a new study. That’s a break the highly populated coastline needs because the other half the study shows that the land around the Chesapeake is sinking, a lot.
New research led by John Boon with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) found that absolute sea-level along the Chesapeake Bay is rising on average 1.8mm per year, about 50 percent of the global rate. “The bad news,” said Boon in a press release, “is that local subsidence more than makes up for it.”
Development and land use practices, such as increased population and groundwater withdrawals, are putting the pressure on the Chesapeake, literally causing the land to sink. In fact, the land is subsiding so much that it leads to an overall picture of sea-level impacts that outstrips many other regions around the world, said the study.
On average, relative sea-level rise – the amount of water rise in relation to land – for the Chesapeake is between 2.91 and 5.8 millimeters per year. To put that in perspective, either of those values is higher than the highest rates recorded for many other places, according to the press release. And while, 5.8mm per year might not sound like much, this adds up to about a 2-foot rise over the course of 100 years.
A flooded neighborhood in Virginia Beach, Virginia, after a July 2010 rainstorm dumped a month's worth of water in a 2-hour perioed. (Photo/Morgan Heim)
This is especially important news for Bay communities already threatened by increased flooding hazards from hurricanes and Nor’easters, said the study. Boon encourages further monitoring and mapping of sea-level trends that could aid in the adjustment of emergency response plans.
There’s only so much room on the endangered species list, and greater sage grouse will have to wait in line a little longer to receive protection. A report released today by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declares that the bird is heading towards extinction and warrants listing, but does not take priority for designation as about 250 other species are in more immediate danger.
The announcement serves notice to land managers and the energy industry to bulk up conservation efforts for the grouse, but these efforts will take place without the backing power of listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.
“Voluntary conservation efforts on private lands, when combined with successful state and federal strategies, hold the key to the long-term survival of the greater sage-grouse,” said Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Tom Strickland in a press release.
Across the West, greater sage grouse populations dwindled to about 56 percent of their former range. In places like Wyoming’s Red Desert, key habitat for the grouse and an energy development hotspot, populations dropped 90 percent in the last 50 years, according to Lorraine Keith, public affairs officer with the Rock Springs office of the Bureau of Land Management. This 90 percent drop isn’t just because of energy development, the decline started before the energy boom, said Keith. But if the trends of the last 50 years continue, many populations will disappear in the next 30 to 100 years, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The downside of the ruling is that precluding the grouse from listing relies on industry and state agencies to take the necessary management steps to stop the bird’s decline, a practice which so far has left sage grouse shaking in their leks. But the ruling does make conservation efforts for the bird a priority, especially if industry would like development to continue in the West.
“The sage grouse’s decline reflects the extent to which open land in the West has been developed in the last century,” said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in a press release. “This development has provided important benefits, but we must find common-sense ways of protecting, restoring, and reconnecting the Western lands that are most important to the species’ survival while responsibly developing much-needed energy resources. Voluntary conservation agreements, federal financial and technical assistance and other partnership incentives can play a key role in this effort.”
Though not listed this time, the federal government has their eye on greater sage grouse. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is adding the greater sage grouse to the endangered species candidate list and will undertake annual reviews of the bird in an effort to make sure it doesn’t slip over the edge to extinction.
While not a perfect outcome for the conservation community, the ruling gives them hope for the bird. “Up to this point we’ve seen plans that predict continued sage grouse declines,” said Erik Molvar, wildlife biologist with the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, “but hopefully this decision will be the wake-up call that’s needed to turn things around and compel corporate interests like the oil industry to start using advanced technologies to achieve major reductions in impacts on the sage grouse, other wildlife, and the American West as a whole.”
The second wave of oil and natural gas exploration is headed for the Peruvian Amazon, a boom so massive it threatens an unprecedented amount of rain forest in the region.
“More of the Peruvian Amazon has recently been leased to oil and gas companies than at any other time on record,” states a press release by the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.
Exploitation of the Amazon’s natural riches is nothing new. More than a billion barrels of oil have been extracted there since the 1940s. And now an old practice returns with vigor as a new report reveals oil and gas leasing is on track to take over about 70 percent of the Peruvian Amazon, endangering biodiversity and indigenous cultures alike.
Martí Orta, a researcher with the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals in Spain, and Matt Finer with the U.S.-based Save America’s Forests released the first ever complete history and projection of hydrocarbon exploration in the Peruvian Amazon, published this month in the journal Environmental Research Letters. They analyzed 40 years of government energy records and used Geographical Information Systems to show the overlap of energy development with protected and indigenous lands. What they found was nothing short of alarming.
Here’s a little breakdown.
The proposed development has already spurred conflict. In 2009, a deadly clash between indigenous people and government enforcement in Bagua, Peru, was largely attributed to anger over plans to lease or sell indigenous lands without the peoples’ consent.
As unsettling as the study sounds, Orta and Finer don’t just present a picture of gloom and doom for the rainforest and its inhabitants. They name a few policy and grass-roots actions to consider. In particular, Orta and Finer draw attention to the efforts of the Yasuni-ITT Initiative in Equador, which campaigns for international donations that will help stop oil exploration by purchasing protection for threatened rainforest. The authors mention a similar effort could be made for the Peruvian Amazon.
At the very least, I wouldn’t be surprised if this report is cited throughout the policy debates that I am sure will ensue.
American Beaver, (Photo/Steve in Washington D.C., Wikipedia)
A St. Francis' satyr butterfly (Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
Bambi and Thumper best move over. There’s a new BFF dynamo in the animal kingdom – the ever-industrious beaver and a rare butterfly fluttering dangerously close to extinction. But the gig’s not up for the butterfly just yet if the beaver has anything to do with it.
St. Francis’ satyr butterfly is appallingly rare. Somewhere between 700 and 1,400 individuals exist in the wild, scattered in a few small pockets of wetland meadow around North Carolina. But new science reveals that the well-known engineering nature of the American beaver has the bonus application of creating food and habitat for the vulnerable butterfly. The study is the first of its kind to demonstrate the combined benefits of an ecosystem engineer fostering biodiversity and abundance of plant species vital to the survival of a critically endangered species.
Lead-author of the study Rebecca A. Bartel, ecologist and post-doctoral student at the University of Georgia, looked at 48 sites on the Fort Bragg Military Reservation in south central North Carolina that ran the gamut of beaver occupation. She and her colleagues surveyed vegetation and butterflies between 2005 and 2006, and found that where beavers stirred things up with their beavering ways, plants species thrived, more than 180 species, several of which were imperative to the butterfly’s survival.
The relationship is not so cut and stacked, situations are optimum when habitat has a combination of different stages of beaver renovations. But Bartel’s results indicate that fostering native ecosystem engineers can not only improve species diversity, but help conserve habitat for critically endangered species. It’s a potentially powerful tool for conservation and managers.
At the very least, Bartel’s results spell a little bit of hope for St. Francis’ satyr butterfly, and another reason to up the awe factor of beavers and butterflies. And who doesn’t like that?
You can tell when someone puts their heart into something. And young conservation photographer Hunter Nichols is one of those people. The camera is but a tool to help save a place that he loves, Alabama’s Cahaba River, an ecosystem falling apart under the stress of increasing urbanization.
Conservation photography goes beyond iconic beauty shots of nature, connecting us with these places and their struggles for survival. Nichols not only takes us through a dream-scape river echoing with a cacophony of birds and wildlife, but shows us the active clear-cutting, new neighborhoods and environmental consequences of rapid urban sprawl. As Nichols says in his video, “we never miss something we never knew, but we suffer from what we’ve lost.”
Then again because of people like Nichols, we not only learn of the unknown places, but just might get to one-day experience them for ourselves. Watch this short video to see what Hunter is trying to protect, and learn a little something about conservation photography.
My first taste of reclamation came as a grad student while on a fieldtrip along Colorado’s “Uranium Highway.” We stopped in the ghost town of Uravan, a former Uranium/Vanadium boomtown. And except for a couple buildings, everything had been torn down, the tailings ponds evaporated, land reclaimed or in the process of being so. It was then that I learned that reclamation and restoration were not the same thing. Above the once upon town sat tailings sites. Instead of a rust-colored desert environment, meticulous patterns of white and black rock zig-zagged across the hilltop, laid out like some sort of interpretive landscape project.
Reclamation, I thought, was supposed to help clean up after we’d finished using the land. It was supposed to help return the land to itself. I’ve seen many reclaimed sites since that fieldtrip, and have yet to come across one that resembled nature’s design.
That’s not to say that reclamation is a lost cause or a sham, just that it can be better. Now scientists are trying to help make that happen with arguably one of the most destructive and controversial mining practices at work today, mountaintop removal. Sarah Hall, of Kentucky State University, and her colleagues Christopher Barton and Carol Baskin, of the University of Kentucky, have discovered a new method of replanting mined Appalachian sites, one that gives native landscapes a leg up at renewal. (You can find their study in the online early edition of Restoration Ecology)
Mountaintop removal reclamation projects often involve planting blasted and terraced mountainsides with non-native grasses. (Early surface mine reclamation would sometimes simply abandoned the site.) Perhaps one of the more unexpected outcomes of reclamation comes from Mingo County, W. Va., where reclamation turned a blast site into what’s now known as the Twisted Gun Golf Course.
Rather than seeding mined areas with grasses, which tend to stunt recovery of native species, Hall sought to test the possibility of replanting mountaintop removal sites with the trees and forbs kin to the forests that had existed before the mines. Hall’s idea seems in hindsight to be quite obvious. Put back the original topsoil scraped away when creating the mine. This soil she found was rich with the seeds and microbial recipe that could help re-establish forest. Where Hall and her team tried the method, the plants started to grow, including arrow-leaved asters, Virginia pines and blueberry.
The method is not enough to completely recover the forest, but it’s a start, and a step up from the grassy slopes that have come to replace so many of Appalachia’s mined mountainsides. Hall’s research highlights a two-fold lesson – we need to recognize that reclamation is not restoration, and there are practical ways to make reclamation better. Then maybe these environments that have given us so much of their riches at least have a chance to return to themselves, even if it’s just a little.
Only about 500 of the birds remain in the world, making the white-shouldered ibis a creature that flirts dangerously
A white-shouldered ibis in Cambodia. Human impact on this critically endangered bird can be beneficial rather than destructive, and could even save it from extinction. (Photo/Hugh Wright)
with extinction. The once common bird’s number is not up just yet however, as the ibis’ saving grace may lie in their relationship with small-scale farmers of Cambodia, a partnership likely to help save both the bird and a traditional way of life in Southeast Asia.
A new study published in the journal Animal Conservation highlights the work of the University of East Anglia and BirdLife International as they look at the benefits of traditional small-scale farming to survival of the critically endangered white-shouldered ibis. Farming and cattle grazing create ideal forage land for the birds and opens a clean line of sight for spotting predators and prey. These findings draw attention to the friendlier side of human impacts. But plans for large-scale development in western Siem Pang, Cambodia, threaten both the farmer’s way of life and the ibis’ last hope for survival.
Scientists, conservation groups and the Cambodian government are currently looking at ways to mediate impacts. “The Forestry Administration in Cambodia is supportive of a proposal to make the area a protected forest,” said Hugh Wright, lead author of the study, in a press release “and we believe that this – along with the continuation of local farming methods practiced for generation after generation – will be crucial in saving this once common species from extinction.”
To find out more about the plight of the white-shouldered ibis, check out BirdLife International.
Journey into Wyoming’s Red Desert, a little known wilderness the size of Denali National Park that brings the steppes of Mongolia to America’s backyard. Here, energy companies vie for the desert’s riches in a world of 50,000 pronghorn, herds of wild horses and some of the most unforgiving landscapes of the West. Come learn of this place and the struggles to protect it as you travel Into the Big Empty.
The terror of lodgepole pine forests across the west may face the ultimate KO thanks to a commonly used ingredient of herbal tea. As if to add the final insult, this anti-beetle ingredient originates from the offending mountain beetles themselves. When a beetle suspects too many of its kind moving into the neighborhood, it releases a chemical telling others to stay away. The message is so strong, beetle numbers dropped three-fold in treated areas. Now scientists have figured out how to apply the natural repellent over thousands of acres of infected forest by dropping chemically-laced flakes out of a plane.
Nancy Gillette, a Forest Service scientist at the Pacific Southwest Research Station, thought of the idea to release the flakes by air and has already used the method to treat two areas around in the West, Mount Shasta and portions of Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains. Where they dropped flakes, beetle infestations fell to 30 percent. Now her research team is looking into upping the environmental friendliness of the treatment by creating a biodegradable version.
The Nature Files 