ShatteredSky wrote:
Jorginho wrote:
A large part of the feared mass extinction hinges on two factors:- Rapid global warming, whichis undisputed and scientific sound proven. Climatologists in their papers are clear about what they do and don't know
Agreed.
- Habitatloss (which is more difficult to prove even if it seems so selfevident)
There is no doubt about habitat loss. But let us not forget that at least in Middle Europe the diversity is higher due to the patchwork of agricultural, pastural, forest etc. land. That is the reason why there are initiatives to preserve all these aspects. Problem here was rather the creation of large monocultural land.
Well this is about the worst thing possible we can do. This patchwork costed nothing, it was natural development based on changed behaviour (landuse) of Homo sapiens partly hand in hand with the introduction of some species (rabbits which originate from Iberia spread by the romans apparantly and actively kill seedlings systematically since they not like forests).
This anthropogenic landscape of course changed habitats on an almost continental wide scale. But humans changed their ways. So alpine pastures now become colonised by what once was there: Abies alba. Which now is cut back in for instance Switserland to prevent the natural succession from meadows to forrests (!!). And in NL we see Scots pine, Psuedotsuga and Betula species meeting the same end...the nonnative rabbit is now cherished as the gardener of the Dutch dunes 'cause god forbids they might turn into a forest.
The basic reason for this is what it virtually always is when it comes to nature: the only thing that rules all is not biodiversity (this is even countering it). it is preference for the old over the new. Conservation indeed is extremely conservative. There are very clear xenophobic traits and what most of these people despise in cultural they apply 1:1 when it comes to nature.
Innature one thing counts: not where you are from, nature is not patriotic, nationalistic, xenophobe or racist at all. It is open to everyone that can make a living in some place.
It has been like this for 1 billion or more years and it worked fine without us. Mass echanges are nothing new; when land or seabridges formed there was a mass exchange and very rapid ones are known (like a prehistoric horse from the USA entering Iberia in a matter of a few years). There is no indication that such exchanges has led to a loss in biodiversity (I think James Brown has reseached this).
So,.,Europe and its patchwork of meadows, some forests etc. We are not talking about some land here in there, in Iberia alone we are talking about 125.000 km2 that they want to be managed that way. That is 1/5th of the peninsula. I think gouvernments like this for another reason: vast areas become unihabitable because too few people sustain the villages and small towns. Just look at places like Beja in Portugal and loads of others: the numbers took a downturn somewhere in the1960s and 70s. My manager is involved in such projects in Germany where similar things happen.
This whole project, I suspect is a way toi subsidise people to stay there. But there is no real economic motor behind it.
So this landscape, which was selfsustained due to the natural behaviour of mankind, can no longer sustain itself without its keystone species (us). It would also never came to life without us,,,,
Now the to my mind very logical and better alternative is letting those vast areas be. so it can sustain itself, but also it can evolve and adapt to climate change. it is not depending on any money at all. it depends on the acceptance of change in people to let nature take its coarse. Butr precisely those that many people see as the ones who love the natural world are there to prevent exactly this to happen.
Their reason is the value they attach to historical compostions and almost exclusively use this asa guideline. And so this landscape lacks the flexibility to adapt to the now ever changing current environment.
when we look at how species move all over the world 98% is moving poleward, whereas 2% is either static or moving towards the equator. this simply means that species ranges change. In Iberia a rise of average summertemperatures is expected to reach 8K in 2100. Which is what we can expect on continents: a more rapid warming than average (counterbalanced by a more modest rsie over the oceans). Which of the current species will survive in such warmer climates?? what use it is to try to freeze landscapes in times of such unprecedented change (for most of these species)?
On top of that: how does this ensure maximum biodiversity. Whenever I mention that local diversity in almost any place in the world has sharply risen, rather than declined due to human dispersal of species almost every ecologist.conservatiobnalist discards this as worldwide the spread of species has lead to a small fall in species numbers (never on continenets though). But now apparantly we must look at local diversity. Why? This costs biodiversity more likely.
The problem is that this money, which we need time and time again is not spend in biodiverse or and vulnerable hotspots which can be found in the tropics. there are by far more species per km2 in an Indonesian or Congolese rainforest than anywhere in the temperate zone.
African parks allow hunters to shoot all kinds of wildlife because otherwise these park cease to be. Why is money put by the billions in europe with not one proven extinction prevented, when we can prevent it with that money in Indonesia and other biodiverse parts fo the world?
Or indeed the Siberian tiger...?
Also that money is not spend on a worldwide driver of species loss: curb climate change.
People who say they like nature in this case want a garden and hire gardeners to keep that place in some idealistic state. How sensible is it to make a landscape over vast stretches of land depending on humans? On economy?
this is completely beyond me. The natural selfsustaining state of europe is no longer that anthropgenic one, we shoud and could rejoice; for christ sake there is a place where the population goes down and nature can take its course again but nooo....now we need human interference constantly? Directly or indirectly by introducing large mowing machines like Highland cattle and the like? and then...wolves return, decimating the ungulates. and with them bears and lynx, Jackall is already in The Netherlands again too. those mowing machines will no longer be able to doas they please. We have seen this in Yellowstone where the return of the wolf gave way to Aspen regeneration. Prarie becoming a forest again.
why not let Brazil have its own seminatural (anhtropogenic) landscape by cutting down its forrest. I am quite sure some species willl thrive and when a new balance is found there, we will have a tropical agricultural landscape. why shouldn't they when we allowed ourselves to this in the past for OUR economy and refuse a natural state to return and at the same time deny them their economical growth at the expense of the natural landscape?
- Invasive species (apart from islands and islandlike habitats there is zero proof for that).
I think that one problem here is that there research is very manpower-hungry, and thus not well-financed in our time of ratings and reducing results to simple (black and white) numbers. I published three short records of non-indigenous species in the Mediterranean, and got a short glimpse about the huge problem of quantifying and verifying the data.
non indigenous to what? To a place based on history? Many species, like sitka spruce, tsuga heterophylla, American oak, prunus serotina are perfectly native to the NW european climate. Currently. I have seen how tsuga and sitka spruce, but also Psuedotsuga menziesii are prolific over here. In some Sitka spruce forests the amount of ferns (amount and also species richness) is unparallelled by any so called native forests. I have been in these forests and they are very diverse and resemble the NW Pacific ones a lot (according to research).
BUT, I have to agree that there is a constant change anyway, so we might just see this a s a global experiment playing before our eyes.
Well it is not an experiment. Experiments are intentional. It is to my mind a very natural evolutiuon: Human are very good in dipsersing things unintentionally. it is that some people dislike the outcome..And so come the double standards because there is no logical reasoning behind it.
Very few humans set out to get trees and species and have them colonise a country or continent. It just happened. The exception are probably Polynesians who took plants and animals with them to various Islands to grow and more than just one...and very recently some ecologists have started experimenting with tree species in new places. I know of experiments with the torreya moving up from Florida to North carolina as well as Picea breweriana, I think Picea martinezii (Mexican spruce) and so forth. many more of such projects at least have been proposed and this of course is met with opposition from conservationalists.
But this is what I miss in ecology: there seems to be very little interest in research on novel ecosystem or may be recombinant ecosystems. usually these are considered worthless.
With our influence on some of the factors we however seem to accelerate some parts of the issue. I think the subliminal fear is that in accelerating species extinction and climatic shifts we ourselves are possibly in danger (at least part of us) in being wiped out. As you have always to point out: we do not have the capacity to destroy the planet (yet), and the biosphere readily bounced back after all of the past (and the big five) waves of extinction.
5 seemsa conservative amount, Depending on the defintion we can even come to 20 massextinctions. But yes: we are not going to destroy life and I completely agree with you: i think the driving factor behind it is our fear that we might be a species becoming extinct. Quite a few point to Easter island where something like this happened on a small (Island) scale.
You might also say that there are areas like the eastern Mediterranean that since the Messinian salinity crisis is still below its “normal" diversity, with some of the species introduced vie the Suez Canal and/or ballast water/aquarium "escapes" now settling in open or still not fully used niches. But there is no consensus how much any of these species influences others or "destroys" / occupies habitats (some algae come to mind).
Yes. And ecology is very bad in predicitng the outcome of such immigrants. Sometimes their numbers rise fast followe d by a steep decline wherafter they just become one of tghe many species in some area. I think this happened with the Argentinian ant in Texas. It became very abundant and raided other ants and they seemed to become a very significant part of at least that region. In 1989. Just 10 years or so later scientists returned. there were still Argentinian ants but they did not become as dominant as predicted or feared.
Another example is Prunus serotina. There was this forest in belgium that was in a moreless natural state because it was situated on a militairy terrain used for huge transimtters (radio, radar etc). In 1975 Prunus serotina entered this forest on its own. It was predicted to become very dominant like it became in many other forrests., In 2005 the site was revisisted. there was Prunus serotina but it was far from abundant. Just here in there...
myh wish for ecology.biology is that it returns to the scientific world and gets rid of all the values it constantly introduces, where students are infected with so they can precisely not be what they should be: unbiased gatherers of data providing sopceity witrh facts and if they can't indicate their findings are not significant hence no proof for some development etc.
Regards
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"Blue for the shattered sky"
regards.
