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Tewksbury esa2015 centennial lecture
- 1. Ecology and Natural History in the Anthropocene Photo: Sun on earth from the International Space Station © ESA / NASA Joshua Tewksbury Walker Endowed Professor of Natural History Department of Biology and College of the Environment University of Washington
- 3. A good time to be alive The past 100 years have been very good for people Human population3.5x Take of terrestrial biomass production2xonly Per capita GDP4x Sources: UNPD, The Madison Project, Krausmann et al. 2012 PNAS. Photo: Borneo © WWF-Canon
- 4. Conservation Science for the 21st century: boundaries, transformations and bringing science to the table Josh Tewksbury Director Luc Hoffmann Institute decline in poverty50% decline in malnourishment33% 2x Real income, low & middle income countries Sources: Mercedes de Onis et al. 2000, UN Millennium Development Goals Photo: Greenland © Wim van Passel / WWF-Canon A good time to be alive The past 20 years have have been even better
- 5. Of terrestrial surface of the earth50%We use Of all freshwater54%We use Sources: Hooke and Martin-Duque 2012, Postel et al. 2012, Unicef, world energy outlook Photo: Hong Kong; © Global Warming Images / WWF-Canon People without enough water1 bl + 1.3 bl Lack electricity Challenging Earth Systems Increasing resource scarcity and inequality
- 6. Added to the middle class3 bl 7 8.1 9.3 10.6 1950 1975 2000 2025 2050 2075 2100 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 billions Fertility assumption High Medium Low 5 Billion 2 Billion 1 Billion 203020101990 Source: OECD 2010 Sources: UNPD 2013, OECD 2010 Photo: Hong Kong; © Global Warming Images / WWF-Canon And more challenges to come Human demand shifting into high gear
- 7. Science in the Anthropocene Photo: Sun on earth from the International Space Station © ESA / NASA
- 8. Lubchenco ‘98 Entering the century of the environment: A new social contract for science Photo: Jane Lubchenco © BDSJS
- 9. The Social Contract: How can ecology and natural history most effectively embrace 21st century challenges?
- 10. Theory Description Experimental Manipulations Comparison (correlation) Observation Natural History: Attention to nature, from the scale of the organism to the scale of the landscape, and the body of honest, accessible work that comes from this attention. “Ecology is a new name for a very old subject. It simply means scientific natural history” -Elton 1927
- 12. Lu et al. 2009 Ciais et al. 2005 Diuk-Wasser 2012 IPPC 2007 Dry Days Δ NPP summerΔ NPP
- 13. Lu et al. 2009 Ciais et al. 2005 Δ NPP summerΔ NPP
- 15. Brazil China Egypt India South Korea USA* 0 20 40 60 80 100 Academia Business Civil Service¥ Diplomacy Economics Engineering Law Medicine Military Teaching Others Politicians by tribeThese are not ecologists Sources: Economist, International Who’s Who, Congressional Research Service
- 16. Collaboration and Collective impact: boundary organizations and trans-disciplinary research Ecology and sustainability Photo: Fishing at sunset on the Mekong river, Vientiane, Laos; © Michèle Dépraz / WWF-Canon Ecology and Natural History: rooted in observation, focused on prediction
- 17. Photo: Fishing at sunset on the Mekong river, Vientiane, Laos; © Michèle Dépraz / WWF-Canon
- 18. Photo: Fishing at sunset on the Mekong river, Vientiane, Laos; © Michèle Dépraz / WWF-Canon Science Capacity Policy / Practice Capacity Evidence Direction and Focus Boundary Organizations
- 19. Governmental Natural Science Social Science Non-Governmental Convention for the Conservation and Management of the Vicuña International Agreement on Polar Bears Boundary Organizations in international Science and Conservation
- 20. Global Change Research Programs: a brief history
- 21. • Deliver knowledge for sustainability • Build capacity to deliver solutions • Engage young scientists and developing countries scientists • Expand the involvement of social scientists and economists • Involve stakeholders and decision- makers
- 22. Photo: Fishing in the Mekong © Tan Someth Bunwath / WWF-Cambodia Focal Challenges Food, Energy Water Climate Change Natural Assets and Ecosystem Services Resilient Cities Viable Rural Futures Human Health Sustainable Consumption and Production Risk Management
- 23. Deliver water, energy, and food for all, and manage the synergies and trade-offs among them, by understanding how these interactions are shaped by environmental, economic, social and political changes. Sources: International Energy Agency, FAO Photo: Modern irrigation for alfalfa fields. Najd, Saudi Arabia; © Bruno Pambour / WWF-Canon Safeguard natural assets underpinning human well-being by understanding relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services; and developing effective valuation and governance approaches. Focal Challenges • International • Interdisciplinary • Trans-disciplinary (knowledge to action) (co-creation)
- 24. How international is Ecology? Co-Authorship analysis Source: Elsevier Research Intelligence: SCOPUS data 80 60 40 20 0 %ofpapersinEcologyJournals withinternationalcollaborators % of ALL papers with international collaborators Ecology papers more likely to have international collaborations 10 20 30 40 50 60 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0CitationImpactInternational collaborationsinEcology 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 Citation Impact All Ecology Ecology papers with international collaborations are cited more often 2009 20092013 2013
- 25. How interdisciplinary is Ecology? Citation analysis 12.5 10.0 7.5 5.0 2.5 0 Shareoftop10%of Interdisciplinarypapers(%) Ecology All Disciplines 2 1.8 1.6 1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.3 0CitationImpact Top10%Interdisciplinarypapers 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 Citation Impact all papers Interdisciplinary papers in ecology are cited less often than average papers Ecology papers are less interdisciplinary than The average SCOPUS paper Source: Elsevier Research Intelligence: SCOPUS data from 2009 through 2013
- 26. How does the science get used? Where does the evidence for action come from? Source: Guizam, Brooks and Tewksbury - unpublished 9 report series 316 reports 44,038 citations
- 27. An alternative evidence ecosystem? Majority of evidence is not from the peer reviewed literature Source: Guizar, Brooks and Tewksbury - unpublished Avg. % of citations from peer reviewed sources 19-25 60 40 20 0 Percentofcitationsfrompeer reviewedliterature TNC Ecoregional Assessments IUCN Ecosystem Manage IUCN Environ. Law IUCN / WCPA Protect. Area Best Practices WWF Living Planet Report IUCN Species Survival Commission UNEP Year Book State of the Worlds Birds Advances in Applied Biodiversity Science n=3 3 6 11144 2376106
- 28. Source: Guizar, Brooks and Tewksbury - unpublished NumberofReports 90 60 30 0 0 100 200 300 400 Which journals get cited? Conservation and Ecology Conservation Biology Number of Citations Biological Conservation Science Nature Bioscience Ecological Applications Ecology Oryx Journal of Wildlife Management PNAS 324 most cited journals in 316 reports; 8327 citations (80% of total)
- 29. Source: Guizar, Brooks and Tewksbury - unpublished Which fields inform conservation? Ecology, and more Ecology. NumberofJournals 75 50 25 0 0 500 1000 1500 Number of Citations 324 most cited journals in 316 reports; 8327 citations Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Ecology Animal Science and Zoology Nature and Landscape Conservation Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law Aquatic Science Agricultural and Biological science General Science Citations from ecology subject areas vs. citations from all social science subject areas combined 10 to 1
- 30. Challenges are • International • Interdisciplinary • Trans-disciplinary (knowledge to action) (co-creation) Photo: palm tree fruit collected in Borneo, Malaysia© naturepl.com / Christophe Courteau / WWF-Canon
- 31. Oil Palm as a socio-ecological system Co-creating locally-relevant solutions across countries
- 32. Oil Palm as a socio-ecological system Co-creating locally-relevant solutions across countries Photo: First meeting of the Oil Palm Adaptive Landscapes (OPAL) project
- 33. Photo: Fishing at sunset on the Mekong river, Vientiane, Laos; © Michèle Dépraz / WWF-Canon Science as Service Science as service Trans-disciplinary User-focused Co-created Solution oriented Scalable and transportable Challenges Food, Water, Energy, Cities, Consumption & Production, Climate, Sustainable Use and Protection of Aquatic and Terrestrial Ecosystems Service Science, Information, Collaboration, Innovation, Education, Engagement Solutions Healthy landscapes, freshwater systems and oceans; clean air; just, equitable societies; livable cities; healthy people
- 34. Collaboration and Collective impact: boundary organizations and trans-disciplinary research Ecology and sustainability Photo: Fishing at sunset on the Mekong river, Vientiane, Laos; © Michèle Dépraz / WWF-Canon Ecology and Natural History: rooted in observation, focused on prediction
- 35. Natural History: perpetually on the verge of extinction
- 36. Exposure: minimum natural history required for a BS in Biology
- 37. Year: P < 0.0001 (LRT test) (GLLM w/ 35 institutions; institution as random effect, Poisson error structure) 2.25 2.0 1.0 0.5 0.0 0.0 is declining Exposure Tewksbury et al. 2014, Bioscience
- 38. Natural history in introductory biology texts from 1930 to 2011 Exposure
- 39. 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 Naturalhistorymaterialincollege biologytextbooks(prop.oftotal) Modified Logistic [y =y0 + a/(1+(x/x0)b)] w/ 38 texts): RSS / TSS = 0.92 3 2 1 Minimumnaturalhistory coursesforaBSinBiology Exposure is declining Tewksbury et al. 2014, Bioscience
- 40. “Do black grapes of the desert have a basic thirst for tears?” -P. Neruda US and Europe have been losing herberia since 1990 Global North America Europe “Do black grapes of the desert have a basic thirst for tears?” -P. Neruda Consolidation of collections Europ e US Access B. Thiers, in New York Botanical Garden's Virtual Herbarium. (2012)
- 42. Future: A prescription for 21st century natural history and ecology 21st century – Collaboration and Curation – Transparency and Technology
- 43. Collaboration: Working as a community
- 44. 0.20 0.15 0.10 0.05 0 %ofpapersbytopicCollaboration: Organizing amateur naturalists Theobald et al. 2015 Biological Conservation 200 150 100 50 0 CitizenScienceProgramInitiated Biodiversity Natural History Climate change Invasives Land use change Overexploitation citizen science programs growing faster than peer reviewed literature
- 45. A lot more than birds Theobald et al. 2015 Biological Conservation Gathering a wide swath of Natural History data
- 46. Industrial Scale Natural History Theobald et al. 2015 Biological Conservation > 1.3 million people and > $1.4 billion in spending each year 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1000000 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 Spatial Extent (“up to” km bins) CurrentParticipants(valueormedian) fine grain, broad extent
- 47. Consistency matters Theobald et al. 2015 Biol. Conservation and unpublished data Long term participants collecting long term data-sets 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1000000 1 10 100 1000 Longevity (years) 25+ years CurrentParticipants (valueormedian) 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 1-4 6-12 24+ Var %ofProjects Samples / year 4+ 3 2 1Years with project:
- 48. Future: A prescription for 21st century natural history and ecology 21st century – Collaboration and Curation – Transparency and Technology Professional ecologists are exceptionally well placed to lead
- 49. Much of the data we collect never gets shared – 57% of papers from NSF funded grants in Ecology share no data – Very little of the data shared is outside of molecular and phylogenetic data repositories Hampton et al. Front Ecol Environ 2013; 11(3): 156–162
- 50. We are building the stadiums, but most of us are not going to the games • Getting out of the dark will require – More transparency and collaboration (within and across disciplines) – More incentive structures that reward the collection and curation of natural history – A flattening of ecology (more amateur experts, treating natural history as civics)
- 51. Photo: Oliver Tewksbury © Benj Drummond BDSJS.com
Editor's Notes
- Lets start by stating the obvious ----- Meeting Notes (09/08/15 15:46) ----- Thank you Natural History Section, you are 5 this year. And thank you ESA.for making it 100 years! These are both big accoumplishments. I want to talk about Ecology and Natural History in the Anthropocene. What they look like, what they could like like, and where they fit into a broader fabric of work. This means I am not going to talk about the I am doing, or the science of the Luc Hoffmann Institute. This is the 100 year anniversary, and it is a good time to take stock. ----- Meeting Notes (10/08/15 19:37) ----- Some of this will be about sustainability science and the role of Ecology and Natural History within these disciplines, and some of this will focus on the present and future of natural history and how this discipline fits into a larger picture within the anthropocene. That said, I want to start with the anthropocene itself
- Environmental challenges are diverse and the world is changing faster than it ever has been before.
- This is the Anthropocene, and it is a good day to be human. The human footprint is everywhere, and all this influence has had a powerful, positive impact on how we live, allowing more people to live longer and better lives than in any time in human history. And because we have gotten better at quite a few things in the past hundred years, we have managed to quadruple the human population, increase global GDP 17 fold, and dramatically reduce extreme poverty while only increasing our “take” of terrestrial biomass production (called Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production), from about 13% to 25%. Sources: POP: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm, GDP per capita: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10324.full
- And rhe past two decades have been particularly good for people around the world, with unprecedented economic and social progress. Real incomes in low- and middle-income countries have doubled and poverty rates have halved. Two billion people have gained access to improved drinking water. Maternal mortality has dropped by nearly half, and the share of those who are malnourished has fallen by a third. This has been one of the greatest and most rapid transformations in human history.
- But we are not gathered here in celebration. These are the number that keep us up at night. These and many others like them. Numbers at a more granular scale that affect our part of the ecosystem. And as scientists, we are always looking forward, and we are worried about where we are headed. ### SKIP THE REST – JUST SHOW. We have converted a tidy 50% of the total terrestrial land area of this planet for our use, we use over 55% of the fresh water and many fundamental planetary processes are profoundly influenced by, and in many regions, dominated by human activities. Ans And the pressues are increasing – Over 1 billion people already face water scarcity, and this may triple by 2025 At the same time, more than 1.3 billion people lack access to affordable, reliable electricity http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/22/12/article/i1052-5173-22-12-4.htm http://www.sciencemag.org/content/271/5250/785.abstract
- Because what we are looking at today is just a rumbling of what is to come. We have not yet hit peak population, and we are in the midst of the biggest expansion of the middle class in the history of the planet, with 3 billion people entering the middle class in the next 20 years. How can we do this responsibly? How can this transformation be sustained – for us, and for the planet? More importantly, for this gathering, what is our role – as scientists, as ecologists, as naturalists? What we are feeling now is perhaps best thought of as an apartif, or a first course at best. There are lots of reasons to believe that we are at a turning point…. Kick away the ladder… Rich economies maintain position, poor economies settle for less… Business as Usual… World becomes more volatile and hostile… Contract and Converge… Rich countries contract allow poor to grow… Transformation for Sustainability 9 Billion people living with an acceptable standard of living Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (2013). http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Documentation/pdf/WPP2012_HIGHLIGHTS.pdf ----- Meeting Notes (21/04/15 04:53) ----- And these debates can be seen in the shaky nature of the debates around the sustainable development goals that are happening right now, or the feverish runup to the climate COP in paris this fall.
- Lets start by stating the obvious ----- Meeting Notes (09/08/15 15:46) ----- Thank you Natural History Section, Thank you x and y, and a big thank you to ESA...for making it 100 years! ----- Meeting Notes (10/08/15 17:10) ----- How old is the Natural History Section?
- The paper I keep coming back to on this is Jane’s paper – now 15 years old, but as timely and important today as it was 15 years ago. Before most folks were talking about science in the Anthropocene, Jane laid out the arguments for the responsibility of science in a human dominated world. And while the urgency of that responsibility has only become greater – figuring out how we can be as effective as possible as individuals, collectives and institutions, is still a big problem for most of us. ----- Meeting Notes (11/08/15 04:46) ----- As the pace of change has increased, the urgency of that responsibility has also increased, and each discipline is seeking to be as relevant as possible. When I was moderating the QandA for the first plenary, I got this question: what is the role of basic ecological research in the world of 11 billion people in a changing climate? I wonder sometimes if trying to understand how nature works is like working on home renovations while the house is burning down. Is there a better analogy, or should we all pause the basic research and put our concerted efforts toward figuring out how to live sustainably on our planet?
- What is our social contract – as ecologists, as naturalists?
- 9 minutes here? so lets start with some definitions: what do we mean by natural history (maybe put in lions here). do some definitions. Walk through the slide When we depict the field of ecology, we often represent the field as a pyramid. Observation and descriptipon at the botto,m up throughb comparisons, experiments and theory. And one thingI will suggest in my talk is that some of us might have becomes perhaps a bit too invested in the top of the mountain. Natural History, on the other hand, forms the foundation of ecology – but if I am honest in reflecting on what I do as an ecologist, I have to come back to Elton – “ecology is a new name for a very old discipline. It simply means scientific natural history.” , Even when I am deeply engaged in complex experimental manipulations, the vast majority of what I do is natural history – we control one or more aspects of a system to better observe the natural history associated with other aspects –the patient observation of the landscape, the attention to the details, that is the practice of natural history. ----- Meeting Notes (10/08/15 16:29) -----
- And there has never been a better time to doing this work. More and more sectors of society are now paying attention. energy policy, Disease, or food and water security, As individuals and institutions, we are being asked to help build scenarios and predictions linking our actions to their ecological and economic consequences. But along with this new found relevance comes questions: How do we do our work? How and how much do we work together? Is our field cohesive, inclusive, representative, nimble enough? Do we play well with other disciplines, can we integrate across scales? Is our work accessible to the public? In addition, how good are our incentive structures? What parts of society should we be interacting with? How well do we communicate our findings? Where is our data? We are being asked to build an action-oriented, use inspired ecology and natural history that is more effective, more predictive, more responsive to the needs of society than it ever has been before. This is a question of how we move from organisms and landscapes like these
- To models like these, Whether we are moving from the study of Lymes disease to models of prevalence, or the study of interactions on crops to predicting changes in yield, our capacity to model the complexities of ecological systems is now greater than ever before. But our models are only as good as the evidence we build into those models. We are increasingly being asked to predict how the world will actually look? To do this, our models have to embrace the complexity of ecology, and complex predictive models are hungry for data, for details. In ecology, these details are natural history. And this requires us to work together more than ever. This is not an easy task, but it is still only half the task we face. The other half, is how we move from models like these to changes in policies, practices and behaviors.
- We need to get these results and implications to decision-makers in private and public sectors – in a form they can digest, at the time when they need it. … and you are saying … “Seriously?” I am still trying to figure our Tick behavior… Fair point. 16 min here.
- So here is the world – with its population growing, with its 3 billion being added to the middle class, with its uarter of a million being added to cities around the world every DAY, CLICK: and here is us. Ecologists. 9000 in ESA, perhaps 30,000 globally. CLICK: We are mostly academic (about 70% of ESA are academics) and with about we are about 0.5% of the academics in the world – which number roughly 1.5 million in the US, perhaps 6 or 7 million in the world. CLICK And we are, more or less, all Scientists. So we are a small part of a relatively big academic ecosystem.
- But put in perspective, and thinkign about this social contract to influence society, the route is not a clear one. Because our job. CLICK is to influence theese guys, and the people like them. And while our president does seem generally happy to be holding Tony’s Koala here, CLICK these guys are not ecologists. And in fact, very few academics or scientists get anywhere near the national decision-making space. Here is a sample… Oh, wait, look at the US. In the senate, - no scientists. No academics. in the house, there are 3 – two physicists, and a microbiologist, and 6 engineers…. In the US congress as a whole – all in the house. more people stopped education at high-school than have a PHD.
- And for me this gets back to two difffernet issues… And yes, you see, I AM going to bring this all the way back around to Natural History. But let me first explore this concept of collective impact.
- We spend most of our time in our box. Natural science. There is so much to learn in this box, we don’t have a lot of time to get out of it. And when we do, it is a lot easier to work within academic institutions than across the boundaries that seperates our work from dicisionmakers in government, the private sector. This, I think, is not only okay, it is Necessary. The trick is to figure out how to use the capacity we have more effectively.
- In an effective knowledge ecosystem, our work as scientists is influenced by boundary organizations, and
- There are lots of boundary organizations… at the global scale, they look like this… 24 to here.
- Lets take one of these organizations that is probably not too well known to folks here, FUTURE EARTH, because it represents the product of a 35 year evolution within the global change research programs.
- Deliver knowledge enabling countries, regions, and communities to transition to sustainability. Build the capacity to deliver solutions. Engage young scientists and developing countries scientists. Expand the involvement of social scientists and economists. Involve stakeholders and decision-makers across governments, businesses, and civil society. For anyone wanting to hear more about the history of the Global Change Programs, I would strongly recommend Hal Mooney’s paper in PNAS in 2013 International Concil for Science International Social Science Council Belmont Forum Sustainable Development Solutions Network United National Env. Program United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) United Nations University World Meteorolofical Organization
- 27.5 at end 1. Deliver water, energy, and food for all, and manage the synergies and trade-offs among them, by understanding how these interactions are shaped by environmental, economic, social and political changes. 2. Decarbonise socio-economic systems to stabilise the climate by promoting the technological, economic, social, political and behavioural changes enabling transformations, while building knowledge about the impacts of climate change and adaptation responses for people and ecosystems. 3. Safeguard the terrestrial, freshwater and marine natural assets underpinning human well-being by understanding relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services, and developing effective valuation and governance approaches. 4. Build healthy, resilient and productive cities by identifying and shaping innovations that combine better urban environments and lives with declining resource footprints, and provide efficient services and infrastructures that are robust to disasters. 5. Promote sustainable rural futures to feed rising and more affluent populations amidst changes in biodiversity, resources and climate by analysing alternative land uses, food systems and ecosystem options, and identifying institutional and governance needs. 6. Improve human health by elucidating, and finding responses to, the complex interactions amongst environmental change, pollution, pathogens, disease vectors, ecosystem services, and people’s livelihoods, nutrition and well-being. 7. Encourage sustainable consumption and production patterns that are equitable by understanding the social and environmental impacts of consumption of all resources, opportunities for decoupling resource use from growth in well-being, and options for sustainable development pathways and related changes in human behaviour. 8. Increase social resilience to future threats by building adaptive governance systems, developing early warning of global and connected thresholds and risks, and testing effective, accountable and
- There were about 40,000 papers published in ecology journals each year from 2009 through 2013. And when we compare these papers with the papers published in the 20,000 journals in other fields in the same years, and look at lead authors, and collaborating authors, here is what the data look like in 2009 (I’ll show 2013 in a moment). Across each of these countries (defined by affiliation of lead author), our field is MORE international than papers from all fields combinred. A lot more. And it turns out, we are rewarded for this behavior. CLICK. Shown here is the Field Weighted Citation Impact of all papers in Ecology (this axis) with first authorship affiliation defining which country each papers goes, and the Field weighted citation impact of papers with international colaborations, for each country. citation impact is basically the number of times each paper is cited – so these are means across all the papers in a country.. Now, when we move this forward to 2013, the data shifts like this CLICK but because SCOPUS works across disciplines, the number is weighted based on differences in citation patterns across disciplines.
- We can use the same SCOPUS data to ask similar questions about interdiscipinarity. This analysis is done by looking at the spread of fields cited by each paper. So a more interdicsipinary paper cites papers in more fields than a less interdisciplinary paper. If we then take all the papers in SCOPUS from 2009 through 2013, and find the top to% that make up the most interdiscipinary papers, you can then ask – how many of those interdisciplinary papers are published in Ecology Journals. By this measure, we are not too interdisciplinary. Papers in Ecology Journals tend to cite papers in our own field. More so than a host of other disciplines. And it turns out, this is also a smart thing to do from a purely selfish standpoint. CLICK: The most interdisciplinary papers in Ecology Journals tend to be cited less often than those with a stronger discipinary focus. So what can we take from this? Well, incentives matter, and while we get out across bourders in geography, we do not get out as well across disciplines…
- So how does this all get used?
- If we remove the IUCN Env. Law series, which sits in a slightly different culture, our average goes up to 25%. Collected Governance data on hundreds of MPAs and Ecological data from over 14,000 surveys across 250 MPAs in 45 Counties When you do the overlap, there are fewer than 100 MPAs where both data are found. But this is the BIGGEST dataset ever collected on the effectiveness of a primary conservation program
- 3% going for 10% Collected Governance data on hundreds of MPAs and Ecological data from over 14,000 surveys across 250 MPAs in 45 Counties When you do the overlap, there are fewer than 100 MPAs where both data are found. But this is the BIGGEST dataset ever collected on the effectiveness of a primary conservation program
- When you apportion the citations to each journal according to the journal subject areas – based on CROSSREF – and sum these numbers, Ecology, and fields related to Ecology, are absolutely dominant, with 10 times the citations of Ecology journals than there are citations to all the social sciences combined.
- I want to step back to this problem of science to action, however, and say just a bit about co-creation. 43 minutes to here Cities: C40, ICLE…. Lund Palm Oil: Logos for ETH, EPFL, ICRAF, IRD, CIFOR ZSL… etc Drivers: ….
- We propose that the resilience of a socio-ecological system can be improved by (1) integrated models of the future of biodiversity and ecosystem services at the landscape level over a decadal time span, that are (2) informed by multiple stakeholder perspectives and developed through participatory modelling approaches and (3) embedded in the decision making processes at different levels, encompassing interrelated district, national and international scales. These will help local stakeholders navigate and explore possible alternative futures and make more informed decisions. We draw on the expertise and interdisciplinary nature of our consortium, and our collective presence in several countries, to undertake a long-term comparative project that spans regional contexts. T Certification: Steve Polasky, Paul West (photos) - logos for Coke, Minn IE, etc. Cities: C40, ICLE…. Lund Palm Oil: Logos for ETH, EPFL, ICRAF, IRD, CIFOR ZSL… etc Drivers: ….
- And I think it is helpful to think of Science as Service. We are in the Survice Industry. If we are attempting to use our discipline to help us get from these types of challenges… to these type of solutions, I think it is key to think about what we do as service. CLICK. This is our role. We provide the science, the information, we help build the collaborations, and we engage from our knowledge base. And this creates a new way of thinking about what we do. Because our Clients are often not other ecologists. They are often in other disciplines, they are quite often in other parts of scoiety. So Science as service is about working across disciplines and sectors of society, it is user focused, co-createiojn, solution orientedl, scalable and transportable. And non of this happens without us paying attention to it. Finally, most of the solutions we are going for are NOT meant for presidents and prime ministers. There are very few silver bullets out there. We are instead tasked with looking for silver buckshot
- And for me this gets back to two difffernet issues… And yes, you see, I AM going to bring this all the way back around to Natural History. But let me first explore this concept of collective impact.
- 8 min To assess exposure, we focused on changes in the minimum amount of natural history an undergradute needs to graduate with a BS in Biology In the US. To do this, we randomly sampled from all 4 year institutions offering BS degrees in Biology, For each institution selected, we assessed whether catalogs were available from at least 4 of 5 decades spanning the 1950’s to the present. We then examined the course requirements for all tracks leading to a BS to biology, assessing the minimum number of natural history courses one needed to take to graduate. Natural history courses were defined as you might expect: courses in zoology and botany, field courses in similar areas, and any taxonomically related course, from ornithology to the plant systematics.
- To date we have sampled 35 colleges and universities, and we see a strong
- So the median number of courses devoted to NH that one needs to take to get a degree in biology is now zero. But that does not mean students are not being exposed to NH. For example, introductory biology classes often contain significant amounts of organismal-level material. To look at NH material in these classes, we examined 38 popular biology texts published between 1930 and 2011. For each text, we looked at the proportion focused primarily on whole organisms in their environment (Anatomy, Diversity and Taxonomy, Evolution, and Ecology and Behavior), to see if there are changes in the treatment of organismal material in the past 80 years.
- There are. Here I have overlayed the textbook data (in red) on the data on course requirements (in black). We see a strong decline in the proportion of NH related material between 1950 and 1990, and this decline is well characterized by a modified logistic function which is strongly supported by the data (1- (Residual Sum of Squares / Total sum of squares) = 0.92). Textbooks published before 1955 were dominated by natural history: on average, 65% of their material focused on Anatomy, Diversity, Taxonomy, Evolution, Ecology and Behavior. In contrast, texts published after 1985 devoted only 39% of their content, on average, to natural history related material. This shift in emphasis was driven entirely by large increases in content devoted to molecular biology, cellular biology and physiology causing the total size of introductory texts to increase by 91% over the same period. As David Star Jordan wrote, in 1916 “[Natural history]…at once the beginning and the end of biological study’” (David Star Jordan 1916). That was largely true. It is not true today. In spite of this increase in textbook length, the average number of pages devoted to natural history has not changed in the past 60+ years.
- One more framing that is critically important: museums. I am only showing data here for herbaria, as it is the only class of NH museum for which global numbers are available. What we find is that globally, the net jncrease in the number of herbaria around the world – the increase in the number of places you can go and explore plant specimens - has fallen to almost zero in the last 20 years – the golden age of herberia was in the 70s and 80s. And if we look at absolute numbers, both the US and europe have each lost about 45 herberia between the 1990 and 2010 census.
- But, as Richard Conniff puts it in an article coming out in the fall issue of Conservation Magazine, we need a natural history upgrade
- Review: First, A lack of natural history knowledge may often be the most important factor limiting the development of predictive, evidence-driven policies that maintain human well-being and environmental health, and second, exposure, access and experts in natural history ain’t what they used to be. That said; natural history is far from extinct. The questions that society requires science to answer now and in the coming decades are increasingly complex, and at the same time, the tools of science are becoming increasingly accessible to the broader public. What were previously activities restricted to a few are now being enriched by significant citizen participation, even in the garages of science-interested citizens exploring their curiosities in a DIY—do it yourself—way. And that is happening not just in the United States. We live in an increasingly globalized world, with greater accessibility to some scientific tools and data than ever before. “The technological and cost barriers are dropping rapidly, which changes the innovation ecosystem of biology—who can play and what is possible” (David Rejeski, Wilson Center, Washington, DC, personal communication, 10 September 2013).
- Biodiversity – a new term for natural history…….. Natural history would not even fit on this chart on a title search…
- Biodiversity – a new term for natural history…….. Natural history would not even fit on this chart on a title search…
- Annually
- Annually
- Long term projects AND long term, consistant data collection
- Ecologists are leading this revolution, and they are exceptonally well placed to do this: Issues such as study design, quality control, error checking, integration and scaling are all best handled by professional ecologists, and scientists are the people to extract key insights from the data, get the information into the scientific literature and bring these data to decision-makers.
- And it is not as if there are not good places to put the data… The issue is not access, it is one of cultural norms and incentive structures…
- Ultimately, the Natural history Initiative has more to do in capturing the next generation and Bringing the true diversity of folks practice Natural history to the table. This is where we hope to grow and expand our conversation.