Date published: 2008/07/07
The University of Cambridge School of the Biological Sciences holds an annual Scientific Advisory Board Symposium, whose first half was today, which focussed on conservation biology and in particular on biodiversity.
Now these days "biological" generally means "molecular biological", and so non-experts have no way of understanding what is going on. But with the focus on conservation and biodiversity, almost none of this was molecular in any deep sense. So it was science the old-fashioned way, of collecting data out in the field and trying to interpret it.
There were ten speakers, which in some sense gave what amounted to sales pitches, but that is the way it goes these days and in spite of that there were some interesting talks.
Bill Sutherland (Department of Zoology) was the first speaker and talked about "making conservation science more relevant to policy makers". As an example of the problem, he mentioned that Bush had elevated biofuels as an important policy in his 2006 State of the Union address, that the EU had been pushing biofuels, etc., and that conservation biologists were caught unaware and did not have firm data about, or publicise, how much damage biofuels actually cause. (Tom Blundell picked him up a bit on this later. So Sutherland tried to pretend that the biofuels craze was all down to Bush when of course it was not.)
So it seems that the buzz word conservation biologists are now using is "horizon scanning", i.e. crystal ball gazing, trying to identify potential looming "threats", in particular with regard to biodiversity. So, for example, Sutherland set up a discussion with 37 organisations and 654+ people where they came up with the "100 ecological questions of high policy relevance for the UK" (e.g. nanotechnology "debris", artificial life as invasive species, etc.).
And apparently this proved a big hit in the media, which seems to count for more in conservation biology than almost anything else. So we are now onto round two, where he is doing the exercise all over again but now with a global outlook. So this seems to be the latest trick of conservation biologists to make a splash: make a list.
He mentioned that for people actually on the ground working in conservation, all the academic work was, well, a bit academic. So in particular it was hard to get hold of scientific information that might be relevant, e.g. because journals are not free online. So he publicised a new online journal, Conservation Evidence which he hoped would help.
But he didn't mention that one of the biggest problems in conservation biology is that scientists are ridiculously protective of their data. There is no requirement to make your data freely and publicly available (unlike in stuctural biology, where you cannot publish your results unless you have deposited some specified information in a public database). Valuable data, which has generally been paid for by the taxpayer, is just lost. Conservation biologists always complain about the lack of data, but they have been more part of the problem than part of the solution.
The most amusing thing Sutherland said was that conservation was "underfunded". Well, name anybody on the face of the earth who doesn't think that their pet interest is "underfunded".
Julian Drewe (Departments of Zoology and Veterinary Medicine) was next. He spoke about TB in meerkats, which apparently kills about 25% of meerkats in the Kalahari. His main point was that disease in wild animals needed to have an "ecosystem health" approach, rather than just looking at an individual or a given species in isolation. Well, this is ecology 101, and although he had made great progress understanding the disease mechanics of TB in meerkats, he still had a lot of work to do to understand how it was related to TB in cattle and humans.
David Coomes (Department of Plant Sciences) spoke next, about deforestation, and how this resulted in potential problems with fragmentation of ecosystems. So one thing he was interested in was a measure of fragmentation, where he showed one graph which showed there was some weak relationship between forest "similarity" and the distance from the edge of the forest. But then he showed a map (of some part of New Zealand) with "similarity" overlaid and it was not obvious that there was much of a relationship with distance from the edge of the forest.
Even worse, he looked at how Hawkweed invaded into these forest habitats. Apparently conservationists believed that the more species there were in an area (so, in some sense, the more biodiversity) the less likely that an invading species would take hold. Well here they found the exact opposite. Whoops, one argument against biodiversity. (And nobody throughout the entire symposium gave any convincing reason why biodiversity was allegedly so inherently worthwhile.)
Rhys Green (Department of Zoology and the RSPB) talked about the dramatic decline of vultures in South Asia, so from tens of millions down to thousands, and with the annual percentage of decline a remarkable 15 to 50 percent. Well, vultures do (or rather did) so well in India because dead cows are just dumped, so providing lots of food for vultures. So in some sense the tens of millions was a number which was pushed up by humans.
But now the same food source is causing the problem. It seems that the culprit is a specific drug called Diclofenac, which is used as an anti-inflammatory drug in cattle. Apparently it went off patent and so Indian drug companies started to massively produce it and very cheaply. Anyway, this is an example where some scientist(s) did the hard work of finding the cause, and it was banned in 2006.
However, the problem has not yet gone away because farmers are still using the drug illegally. Apparently there is an alternative, but it is (currently) twice the cost and also does not act quite so quickly. Whatever, even if Diclofenac disappeared tomorrow, it would take decades for the vulture population to recover.
Ed Turner (Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Peterborough Wildlife Trust and Department of Zoology) talked about whether oil palm plantations are the "green deserts" that many people claim they are. And the bottom line was that in some regards they were, but in some regards not.
David Aldridge (Department of Zoology) talked about a specific aquatic invader, the zebra mussel (Dreissera polymorpha). They orginate in the Black and Caspian Seas and apparently cause 2 or 3 billion dollars of damage per year in America. Apparently the current favoured eradication method was chlorination, but this was not very effective because the mussel detected the toxin and so stayed shut for 2-3 weeks, and that amount of continual chlorination would cause serious side effects.
So instead Aldridge (and presumably others) came up with a way of coating toxins in a nice tasty package (well, tasty to zebra mussels, at least). This is now a commercial spin-out (BioBullet) so not all details were forthcoming. Some graphs he presented showed it was relatively effective but it wasn't clear whether it was effective enough, and safe enough. (Time will tell.)
Mike Brooke (Department of Zoology) talked about eliminating "alien" vertebrates from the world's islands. Apparently if you throw enough money at it you cannot wipe out certain species (rat, cat, goat) on islands up to size 1000 km2. Brooke is a bird man and bird people hate mammals, especially mammals associated with humans. Brooke provided no motivation why he should be given money to wipe out animals (through shooting and poisoning) to allegedly help some random rare bird species survive. It is just supposed to be accepted as fact that rare birds justify mass murder of mammals.
And he had also cottoned on to this idea of making a list. So he has made a list of islands in some order of priority for his mass murder of mammals, based on cost divided by the alleged benefit. Well, the cost is a real number, even if it is based on estimates. But the benefit is something arbitrary, based, in this case, on some weighting dependent on how rare a given bird species was, how much impact an "alien" species was allegedly making, and how many islands the bird had as habitat.
The bottom line is that Brooke loves his list, because he can now go around to funding sources and tell them these are the priorities and they should now fund it. It turns out that on his benefit to cost ratio, in general smaller islands are higher up the list, because the cost increases for larger islands faster than the alleged benefit.
It is a pity that so many conservation biologists spend so much of their time trying to kill plants and animals they don't happen to like.
Ana Rodrigues (Department of Zoology) talked about the 2007 Potsdam Initiative on Biodiversity, which conservation biologists hope will do for conservation biology what the Stern Report did for climate change. So conservation biologists for years have been claiming that if only mankind did X, Y and Z (which generally involves humans disappearing from somewhere or other) then mankind would miraculously accrue much more benefit than the cost of taking the action.
Well, nobody has paid them much attention. So it seems they are hoping that some economist can take sums they are giving him and turn it into a new Stern-like report, complete with lots of publicity in the media.
The immediate contribution here was to define a conceptual framework and also provide an overview of the state of play in ecological knowledge. The conceptual framework is the usual. You take costs and benefits in the "business as usual" scenario, and then look at the alternative costs and benefits in the "business as conservation biologists would like it" scenario (i.e. no business at all). Given the existing scientific papers on the subject, it is 99.999% certain that they will show that the alternative scenario is far better.
Mark Avery (RSPB) talked about non-university conservation work in the Cambridge area.
Andrew Balmford ended up the day by talking about the so-called Cambridge Conservation Initiative. One of the remits will be more "horizon scanning". But the main point seems to consist of constructing a grand new building next to the World Conservation Monitoring Centre up Huntingdon Road. This will house not only university but also non-university organisations involved with conservation work. The architect is Edward Cullinan and it seems that the budget is going to be vast (apparently conservation is flavour of the minute in the university). There will be a master programme in "conservation leadership" from 2010, with about 10-20 students per year.
Balmford apparently wants this initiative to help with getting researchers more closely communicating with government policy makers, i.e. to put conservation higher up the priority list in decision making than it currently is. Whether this works remains to be seen. Apparently they have hired some (presumably senior) civil servant to act as a bridge (at some crazy salary?), but he didn't mention her name.
Anyway, it seems that conservation is not so "underfunded" after all, at least in Cambridge.
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").