Low impact blogging

As a form of communication, blogging (and all that other stuff on the internet) is fairly environmentally friendly. Trees are not cut down to produce paper to print our posts, fuel-hungry trucks are not used to deliver these articles and stories to our many(!) readers and there is no trash to add to landfills. However, there is still the unappreciated cost associated with energy consumption for all the hours of researching, writing, and being read. The energy for all this electronic activity mainly comes from fossil fuels, meaning that my blogging has a carbon footprint.

Not anymore. No, we did not go nuclear. Rather, the ingenious people behind Mach's grun have started a great program. For writing this post about them, their 'make it green' campaign and the Arbor Day Foundation will plant a tree in Plumas National Forest in northern California. In 2007, a devastating forest fire destoyed 65,000 ha. By choosing to blog green, at least one more tree is planted. I will feel better knowing that there will be tree exhaling oxygen for our blog.

Ecology and industry: bridging the gap between economics and the environment

Applied ecology is the science of minimizing human impacts and of supporting ecological systems in an economic landscape. Often though, applied ecologists work in isolation from those economic forces shaping biological landscapes, not really knowing what businesses would like to accomplish for habitat protection or sustainability. At the same businesses are seldom aware of the knowledge, tools and insight provided by ecologists. And perhaps, greater interaction could help turn ecology into a science with direct impact into how human activities proceed and how we manage the impacts of those activities.

This is the premise of a paper by Paul Armsworth and 15 other authors on the ecological research needs of business, appearing in the Journal of Applied Ecology (for an interview with Paul, by yours truly, please go to the podcast, and I should point out that I am an Editor with this journal). The authors include academics, NGOs and industrial representatives, and they've come together to analyze patterns of cooperation and to discuss ways forward.

They reviewed papers appearing in the top applied ecology journals and grant proposals to the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) in the UK to measure the degree and type of interaction between ecologists and different industries. Ten to 15 percent of publications in applied journals showed some business involvement -mostly from the traditional biological resource industries (farming, fishing and forestry). Further, 35% of NERC proposals included some business engagement, but only 1% had direct business interaction.

Further, the authors reported on a workshop where ecologists and business representatives discussed a number of topics. This included how to minimize negative biodiversity impacts and for industries, such as mining, to consider ecosystem function, and how to develop new ecologically-based economic opportunities, such as insurers managing environmental risk. While there were some challenges identified (such as differing time frames of business needs versus scientific research), the authors note the positive atmosphere and the spirit of collaboration.

The research in this paper should be emulated elsewhere. A better understanding of business needs and desires can only inform and offer opportunities for applied ecological research. Top-down governmental regulation can only take conservation and ecosystem management so far and those who are directly involved in altering and managing ecosystems must articulate goals and desires in order to successfully apply ecological principles to biodiversity protection in an economic landscape.

Armsworth, P., Armsworth, A., Compton, N., Cottle, P., Davies, I., Emmett, B., Fandrich, V., Foote, M., Gaston, K., Gardiner, P., Hess, T., Hopkins, J., Horsley, N., Leaver, N., Maynard, T., & Shannon, D. (2010). The ecological research needs of business Journal of Applied Ecology, 47 (2), 235-243 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2010.01792.x

Competitive coexistence, it's all about individuals.

Understanding how species coexist has been the raison d'etre for many ecologists over the past 100 years. The quest to understand and explain why so many species coexist together has really been a journey of shifting narratives. The major road stops on this journey have included searching for niche differences among species -from single resources to multidimensional niches, elevating the role for non-equilibrial dynamics -namely disturbances, and assessing the possibility that species actually differ little and diversity patterns follow neutral process. Along this entire journey, researchers (especially theoreticians) have reminded the larger community that that coexistence is a product of the balance between interactions among species (interspecific) and interactions among individuals within species (intraspecific). Despite this occasional reminder, ecologists have largely searched for mechanisms dictating the strength of interspecific interactions.

Image used under Flickr creative commons license, taken by Tinken

In order for two species to coexist, intraspecific competition must be stronger than interspecific -so sayeth classic models of competition. While people have consistently looked for niche differences that reduce interspecific competition, no one has really assessed the strength of intraspecific competition. Until now that is. In a recent paper in Science, Jim Clark examines intra- vs interspecific interactions from data following individual tree performances, across multiple species, for up to 18 years. This data set included annual growth and reproduction, resulting in 226,000 observations across 22,000 trees in 33 species!

His question was actually quite simple -what is the strength of intraspecific interactions relative to interspecific ones? There are two alternatives. First, that intraspecific competition is higher, meaning that among species differences only need to be small for coexistence to occur; or secondly, that intraspecific competition is lower, requiring greater species niche differences for coexistence. To answer this he looked at correlations in growth and fecundity between individuals either belonging to the same or different species, living in proximity to one another. He took a strong positive correlation as evidence for strong competition and a negative or weak correlation as evidence for resource or temporal niche partitioning. What he found was that individuals within species were much more likely to show correlated responses to fluctuating environments, than individuals among species.

This paper represents persuasive evidence that within-species competition is generally extremely high, meaning that to satisfy the inequality leading to coexistence: intra > inter, subtle niche differences can be sufficient. These findings should spur a new era of theoretical predictions and empirical tests as our collective journey to understanding coexistence continues.

Clark, J. (2010). Individuals and the Variation Needed for High Species Diversity in Forest Trees Science, 327 (5969), 1129-1132 DOI: 10.1126/science.1183506

Check out the carnival of evolution and be sure to vote for your favorite blogs

Be sure to check out this month's Carnival of Evolution (number 21) posted at Mauka to Makai. The Carnival is a monthly digest of recent evolutionary musings from around the blogosphere. This month's edition includes a number of interesting posts, as well as one of our posts on what evolution offers conservation.

Also, Research Blogging has announced finalists for various blogs awards. If you are eligible, please vote, there are a lot of great blogs vying for these awards. Also, The EEB and Flow is among the finalists for best biology blog. And to the people we nominated us, thanks again for nominating our blog.

New Tool Reveals Where Ticks Eat Breakfast

You have a much greater chance of getting sick from a tick bite today than you did 30 years ago. But a new tool might allow researchers to better understand why more ticks are making people sick.

“If you’re a health inspector and a bunch of people get food poisoning, the first thing you’d want to know is where they ate last. If you’re a disease ecologist and a bunch of ticks have a pathogen, the first thing you’d want to know is where the ticks ate last,” said Brian Allan, a post-doctoral researcher at the Tyson Research Station in St. Louis.

Allan led a team of researchers in developing a novel technology that probes the genetic contents of ticks’ gut. The tool can determine which wildlife species provided the tick’s last meal and which pathogens came along with that meal.

In the first study to use the new technology, Allan and his colleagues focused on several rapidly emerging diseases transmitted by the lone star tick. These include two pathogens responsible for a potentially fatal bacterial infection known as ehrlichiosis [ur-lick-ee-oh-sis]. In Missouri, over 200 cases of ehrlichiosis were documented last year.

Allan et al.'s study showed that about 80 percent of pathogen-positive ticks had fed on white-tailed deer. They also found that squirrels and rabbits were capable of infecting ticks at a higher rate than deer. However, since the lone star tick feeds on squirrels and rabbits less frequently, they account for a smaller percentage of infection.

Allan and his colleagues hope that the technique will shed light on theoretical questions in the field of ecology. They are especially interested in testing whether biodiversity is good for your health, a hypothesis known as “the dilution effect.”

Allan, B. F., L. S. Goessling, G. A. Storch, and R. E. Thach. 2010. Blood meal analysis to identify reservoir hosts for Amblyomma americanum ticks. Emerging Infectious Diseases 16: 433-440. DOI: 10.3201/eid1603.090911

How can evolution inform conservation decisions?

First of all, let me apologize for the lack of blog posts over the past 2 weeks, I've been busy visiting the Olympics and reading a couple of hundred blogs, judging them for the Research Blogging awards.

The conservation of biological diversity is a major imperative for biologists. International agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and intergovernmental exercises, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, call upon scientists to provide evidence on the current state of biological diversity and to evaluate solutions for reducing diversity and ecosystem function loss. Critical to these efforts have been the work of ecologists, conservation biologists and ecological economists. However, seemingly missing from the conversation about the state of biodiversity knowledge has been evolutionary biologists. Are they primarily concerned with describing historical processes and mechanisms of biological change, or do they have substantive knowledge and ideas that should be viewed as a critical component of any scheme to conserve biological diversity?

In a recent paper in Evolution, Hendry and a number of coauthors convincingly make the case that evolutionary biology is a necessary component for conservation. Evolution offer four key insights that should inform conservation and policy decisions. First, they point out that evolutionary biologists are in the business of discovering and documenting biodiversity. They are the primary drivers behind long-term, sustained biological collections, because they need to know what exists in order to better understand evolutionary history. With millions of species awaiting scientific discovery, their efforts are critical to measuring biodiversity. But not only are they discovering new species and enumerating them, they are uncovering their evolutionary relationships, which gives conservationists better information about which species to prioritize. What Vane-Wright famously called 'the agony of choice', with limited resources, we need to prioritize some species over others, and their evolutionary uniqueness ought to be a factor. More than this, evolutionary biologists have developed pragmatic tools for inventorying and sharing data on biodiversity at all levels, from genes to species, which is available for prioritization.

The second key insight is that by understanding the causes of diversification, we can better understand and predict diversity responses to environmental and climatic change. By understanding how key functional traits evolve, we can develop predictions about which species or groups of species can tolerate certain perturbations. Further, research into how and why certain evolutionary groups faced extinction can help us respond to the current extinction crisis. For example, the evolutionary correspondence between coevolved mutualists, such as plants and pollinators, can be used to assess the potential for cascading extinctions. These types of analyses can help identify those groups of related species, or those possessing some trait, which make species more susceptible to extinction.

Thirdly, evolution allows for an understanding of the potential responses to human disturbance. Evolutionary change is a critical part of ecological dynamics, and as environment change can result in reduced fitness, smaller population sizes and extinction, evolution offers an adaptive response to these negative impacts. Knowing when and how populations can evolve is crucial. Evolutionary change is a product of genetic variation, immigration, population size and stochasticity, and if the ability to evolve to environmental change is key for persistence, then these evolutionary processes are also key.

Finally, evolutionary patterns and processes have important implications for ecosystem services and economic and human well-being. Both genetic and evolutionary diversity of plant communities has been shown to affect arthropod diversity, primary productivity (including work by me) and nutrient dynamics. Thus understanding how changes in diversity affect ecosystem processes should consider evolutionary processes. Further, exotic species are often cited as one of the major threats to biodiversity, and evolutionary change in exotics has been shown to increase exotic impacts on native species.

All together, these key reasons why evolution matters for conservation, mean that developing sound management plans requires considering evolution patterns and processes. We can use evolution to our benefit only if we understand how evolution shapes current dynamics. The challenge to evolutionary biologists is the same as it was for ecologists perhaps 15 to 20 years ago, to present their understanding and conservation ideas to a broader audience and to engage policy makers. To this end, the authors highlight some recent advances in incorporating evolutionary views into existing biodiversity and conservation programmes –most notably into DIVERSITAS.

Just like ecological processes and dynamics cannot be fully understood without appreciating evolution ancestry or dynamics, developing an extensive, expansive conservation strategies must take into account evolution. I hope that this paper signals a new era of a synthesis between ecology and evolution, which produces precise, viable conservation strategies.

Hendry, A., Lohmann, L., Conti, E., Cracraft, J., Crandall, K., Faith, D., Häuser, C., Joly, C., Kogure, K., Larigauderie, A., Magallón, S., Moritz, C., Tillier, S., Zardoya, R., Prieur-Richard, A., Walther, B., Yahara, T., & Donoghue, M. (2010). EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY IN BIODIVERSITY SCIENCE, CONSERVATION, AND POLICY: A CALL TO ACTION Evolution DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2010.00947.x