habitats
The importance of defining a landscape, reminded me about the importance of the definition for critical habitat. In 2018 the dusky gopher frog lost a battle between a logging company, and if i interpreted the case correctly, if the court took more time to clearly define critical habitat the gopher frogs would of had a better chance of winning.
https://wildlife.org/frog-case-settled-with-no-decision-on-habitat-definition/
Box 14.4 further explicatesthe role of religion in conservation biology)
I wonder that with many people moving away from religion, if religions role in conservation will decrease?
The real challenge is forconservation scientists to translate theirfindings into better land planning and forestprotection strategies, whilst accounting forsocial, economic and political realities
This is so important. Once scientists are able to better translate their ideas into digestible words for the general public, more people will be able to recognize the issues at hand.
swidden
I wasn't sure what this term meant. Swidden is the act of cutting and or burning vegetation
Flagship species areused in most of the marketing materialsproduced during aPridecampaign, includingbillboards, posters, puppet shows, songs,videos, etc.
I think that there is a flaw with flagship species. These flagship species are often loved by communities for their beauty and mesmerization like Tigers and sea turtles, but this disregards other species that may need even more attention. Birds, reptiles, insects, and amphibians are in dire need of conservation, but since they aren't "pretty" or "cool to look at", they get pushed under the rug and forgotten about, while mammals get the limelight and used as flagship species.
and demand for training
Does this mean there is a high demand to train people in this field and they can't keep up? Or is it the other way around, not enough demand for training. If its the latter, how can we have more people interested in the IUCN Red list or even conservation as a whole?
. However, it is animperfect metric, because it is difficult to assess inxeric and aquatic systems, it ignores threats suchas invasive species and hunting, and it is retro-spective rather than predictive
I'm surprised by this. Im surprised because I would have thought that these threats would have been included when measuring vulnerability, which would in turn give us a more accurate conclusion whether to conserve an area or not.
Finally, there are simply anomalies: the Appa-lachian mountains of the eastern USA generateconcentrations of small-ranged salamander spe-cies, but not birds or mammals.
Wow this is really interesting! I never knew that the AT was predominately filled with amphibians like salamanders. I wonder what the ratio of amphibian to bird/mammal is for this location?
earlier melt of thesnow pack
This earlier melt of snow pack has also influenced the migration and mating patterns of wood frogs in New Hampshire and other frog species in other states.
Amphibians are expected to breed earlier due to earlier snow pack melt and this can put amphibians at risk of becoming exposed to future freezing (i.e thawing on a hot evening in march but days later the night temperature reaches below freezing once again).
I read this proposal last semester for my ecology and Dev. class about phenological delay in amphibians and its connection to climate change.
the entire human enterprise isbased on a freak stretch of relatively unchangingclimatic conditions.
This sentence is vital for the major population to understand. Too many people assume that these events wont happen in their lifetime or aren't even a concern to think about. In reality however, we've just been super lucky that the world hasn't imploded yet.
In geology an Hydrology, flood events and earthquakes are on a 100 year scale meaning that theres a 1 in 100 chance of a major flood or earthquake occur each year. Climate change is not too different from this idea in where our chances of severe climate shifts are becoming more and more probable, and the time for our "100-year-flood" or our major natural disaster is coming closer and closer.
We as humans have been pushing our luck for far too long, and our chances of these severe climate effects will continue to increase if further disregard of climate change continues.
while virtually all seedsfalling underneath the parent’s canopy succumbto density-dependent mortality—caused by fun-gal attack, other pathogens, and vertebrate andinvertebrate seed predators
This is most likely to increase as well with climate change. Many fungal attacks thrive on the increased temperatures and droughts allow for the fungus to prey upon weakened seedlings.
boom in the use of homeopathic remediessustained by over-collecting therapeutic and aro-matic plants is threatening at least 150 species ofEuropean wildflowers and plants and drivingmany populations to extinction
There is a constant struggle to find new cures for illnesses, but these struggles are increasingly becoming more difficult with the loss of biodiversity. As more of these areas are destroyed, over hundreds of potential cures are disappearing due to the degradation of flora in the area.
In other instances, achange in the physical or biotic environment canaccount for a sudden explosion of a formerlyrestricted introduced species.
I believe that Lag times will become more of an issue as climate change continues to rise. Many invasives thrive on warmer temperatures, and with these temps becoming more and more common, these invasive species are able to reproduce even more rapidly than before.
the same introduced species can haveminimal effects on native species and ecosys-tems in one region but can be devastatingsomewhere else.
I find this very interesting because in New Hampshire and most of the northeast one of the biggest invasive plant species is Japanese barberry, but on the west coast this plant species causes no trouble. Most likely this is because of the types of ecosystems in the west, but I wonder what the specific variables are that allow barberry to be regulated at a normal rate. Is it the soil? Are there animals that eat the barberry? How do they not spread like wildfire?
tundra is a vast ecosystem(spanning 9–13 million km2globally) that hasbeen little exploited historically (Figure 4.4)(Whiteet al.2000). Unlike permafrost areas, tun-dra ecosystems thaw seasonally on their surface,becoming important wetland habitats for water-fowl and other wildlife.
It's nice to see that the tundra has not been exploited to the extent of other biomes, but that does not mean the Tundras are safe from human impacts. Temperatures are rising, raising risks of high snow melt, melting of permafrost, and high rates of avalanches. Some scientists have said that this change in temperature in the tundra biome may cause tundras to become boreal biomes with shrubs as high snow melt exposes the hidden soil.
Most of the biodi-versity hotspots occur in areas with high humandensity (Figure 4.3) and many still have rapidpopulation growth (
It's unfortunately difficult for us to protect these biodiversity hotspots as they are in costal areas that are often the most densely populated with people. This brings up a lot of questions in my head like; Has there been any polices put in place to minimize human activity on these hot spots? Is it even possible to conserve these areas as they may have already been destroyed to human interaction?
Protecting pollinators, seed dispersers, predators,scavengers, nutrient depositors, and other mobilelinks must be a top conservation priority to preventcollapses in ecosystem services provided by thesevital organisms
Yes yes yes!! Its important to see just how connected everything is to each other and that without one of them an ecological collapses could occur. A well known example is the wolves from Yellowstone.
Their signifi-cance lies not, however, in the overall numbersof extinctions for which they account (over thelast 500 Myr this has been rather small), but in thehugely disruptive effect they have had on thedevelopment of biodiversity
Yes. Once an important species on the top of the food chain becomes extinct or less abundant, a trophic cascade can occur causing an ecological imbalance, affecting not only the tertiary consumers but the primary producers and consumers as well.
ichness (and some other elements of organismaldiversity) towards lower (tropical) latitudes.Several features of this gradient are of note:(i) it is exhibited in marine, terrestrial and fresh-waters, and by virtually all major taxonomicgroups, including microbes, plants, invertebratesand vertebrates (Hillebrand 2004; Fuhrmanet al.2008); (ii) it is typically manifest whether biodi-versity is determined at local sites, across largeregions, or across entire latitudinal bands;
I wonder how this richness will be affected by the upcoming affects of climate change. Being so close to the equator, species are at higher risk of natural disasters as well as increase in temperatures without sufficient water supplies. Are northern latitudes less or more likely to be affected?
making EE2 a top EDC of concern for the public and a significant threat from an ecological perspective
Do other forms of birth control have this effect? Should doctors tell patients about this to sway patients towards other birth control?
A portion of the EE2 entering a woman's body through birth control pills is excreted in her urine and then carried through sewage treatment plants into bodies of water
woah, thats wild! I never would have thought about that.
Epigenetics, just like genomic approaches, are currently mainly confined to academic research and may appear at a first glance inaccessible to conservation managers.
I think that once the bridge is made between conservation managers and epigenetic researchers, the effectiveness of conservation will increase.
Interestingly, some emerging epigenetic modifications can be associated with adaptive phenotypes and hence contribute to the maintenance of populations in changing environments
For my report, what is already known is that histone methylation can be associated with adaptive freeze tolerance.
Despite the undeniable input of these genetic tools in conservation biology, we can identify at least four major gaps:
These gaps are important to grasp in order to fully understand the role epigenetics has on biodiversity conservation
epigenetic variation, and more particularly DNA methylation, represents a molecular component of biodiversity that directly links the genome to the environment.
In short this is what our class is about. As more studies are being made, the idea of epigenetic variation linking to environment continues to grow
To what extent isplasticity adaptive? What are the costs and limitations ofplasticity? What environmental and organismal character-istics favour the evolution of plasticity (cf. [85])?
All very good questions. I will most likely tie these into my term paper.
nuisance’ to an acceptance of itsfundamental role in an organism’s response to changingenvironmental condition
Plasticity is not a nuisance! its crucial to the development of species
a widerunderstanding: not just the response of a single population,but of the numerous populations that make up a species.
Would this mean taking data from the same species across different environments/biomes?
sexual selection and mate choice asan understudied, yet crucial, aspect of determining the role ofphenotypic plasticit
Would Darwin's Finches be apart of this theme, or one of the others? Or a mix of the four?
andspace
oooooo spooky!
adaptive evolution and plasticity, placing themtogetherin the context of environmental change.
I agree that plasticity and evolution work together. Evolution cannot begin without the start of plasticity.
most costly and slow-acting form, resultingin less pronounced evolutionary response
What do they mean by costly? They mentioned high-cost and low-cost previously but I am still a bit unsure what they mean by it.
thusshielding genes from natural selection
What are the negatives to this? Could it be that invasive species would adapt to their environment and would be increasingly more difficult to be rid of them?
biologists have only recently begun to ad-dress the molecular mechanisms for these phenomena.
What are these molecular mechanisms?
lichens are constructed by a singlefungus with differentiated cell types
It is very interesting knowing that the biology of lichen is like this. Super cool knowing that they are constructed by a single fungi!
Our initial microscopic imaging failed to reveal any cells that we could assign to Basidiomycetes with certainty. Fur-thermore, attempts to culture the basidiomycete from fresh thalli were unsuccessfu
Was there a reason why their first tests failed?
vulpinic acid
Definition: "a naturally occurring methyl ester derivative of pulvinic acid found in several lichen species, as well as some non-lichenized fungi...It is bright yellow, and relatively toxic."