Archive for the 'Ecosystem services' Category Page 2 of 3

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Coral Reefs in the Anthropocene

Published by Garry Peterson on February 26, 2008 in Ecosystem services and Regime Shifts. 0 Comments

Plos OneIn a commentary Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs in PLoS Biology coral reef ecologists Nancy Knowlton and Jeremy Jackson write:

Imagine trying to understand the ecology of tropical rainforests by studying environmental changes and interactions among the surviving plants and animals on a vast cattle ranch in the center of a deforested Amazon, without any basic data on how the forest worked before it was cleared and burned. The soil would be baked dry or eroded away and the amount of rainfall would be greatly decreased. Most of the fantastic biodiversity would be gone. The trees would be replaced by grasses or soybeans, the major grazers would be leaf-cutter ants and cattle, and the major predators would be insects, rodents, and hawks. Ecologists could do experiments on the importance of cattle for the maintenance of plant species diversity, but the results would be meaningless for understanding the rainforest that used to be or how to restore it in the future.

…

This lack of a baseline for pristine marine ecosystems is particularly acute for coral reefs, the so-called rainforests of the sea, which are the most diverse marine ecosystems and among the most threatened [4–8]. Most of the world’s tropical coastal oceans are so heavily degraded locally that “pristine” reefs are essentially gone, even if one ignores changes associated with already rising temperatures and acidity [3]. Most modern (post-SCUBA) ecological studies have focused on reef ecosystems that are moderately to severely degraded, and we have a much better understanding of transitions between human-dominated and collapsed reefs than between human-dominated and quasi-pristine reefs.

Knowlton and Jackson’s essay is a comment on an article in PLoS One Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands by Stuart Sandin and others that describes a large scale marine community assessment across a gradient of human dominated to relatively little impacted reefs in the Pacific. The study found that large predatory fish and reef-building organisms dominated the reefs around unpopulated islands, but around populated islands the reefs were dominated by small planktivorous fishes and fleshy algae. The reefs around populated islands exhibited more coral disease and less coral recruitment, suggesting that protection from overfishing and pollution may increase the resilience of coral reefs. The authors write:

Thus, local protection from overfishing and pollution may enhance ecosystem resilience to warm episodes and coral bleaching that result from global warming. To test this we need to determine how do coral recruitment, growth, and survivorship respond to changes in local community structure due to fishing, and how do these responses interact with episodes of warming measured by DHW. We also need to determine how fish productivity, i.e., the key currency of fisheries management, varies with changes in food web structure such as those observed between Kingman and Kiritimati. The only way to answer these questions is by investigation of reefs like the northern Line Islands that have remained remarkably intact in comparison to the global norm. They are among the only baselines that remain.

Continue reading ‘Coral Reefs in the Anthropocene’

Nitrogen transfer from sea to land via commercial fisheries

Published by Garry Peterson on February 1, 2008 in Ecosystem services and Greenlash. 0 Comments

Roxanne Maranger an ecologist at the University of Montreal and other have a neat paper in Nature Geoscience Nitrogen transfer from sea to land via commercial fisheries that shows that commercial fishing removed substantial amounts of nitrogen from coastal oceans. They show that while fertilizer run-off into the ocean and fishery removal of nitrogen have increased over the past forty years, the increase in nitrogen inputs has been faster. Consequently the proportion of nitrogen removed from coastal zone has dropped from a global average of about 60% in 1960 to about 20% in 2000. This trend as well as the spatial pattern of nitrogen withdrawal are shown in figure 1 of their paper:

Nature GeoScience

Figure 1. a, Total amount of N in fertilizer run-off (Tg N yr-1=1012 g N yr-1) delivered to the global ocean (left axis, blue line) and N returned as fish biomass (left axis, red line) per year over time. The orange line (right axis) is the proportion of fish N removed relative to fertilizer N exported (ratio fish N:fertilizer N) reported as a percentage. b, The ratio of fish N removed to fertilizer N entering 58 different large marine ecosystems (LMEs) for the year 1995.

The paper shows that fishing can help reduce the impacts of nitrogen pollution. But that nitrogen pollution that destroys fisheries, through the creation of anoxic “dead zones”, can make nitrogen pollution even worse by removing a major source of nitrogen withdrawals. Similarly, overfishing the reduces the amount of fish biomass that can be removed from a system will make the system more vulnerable to eutrophication.

Mapping Coastal Eutrophication

Published by Garry Peterson on January 28, 2008 in Ecosystem services, Greenlash, Regime Shifts and Visualization. 6 Comments

Current industrial agricultural practices produce a tradeoff between agricultural production and the quality of coastal ecosystems, because agricultural fertilizers that increase crop yields lead to the creation of low oxygen hypoxic areas in areas which receive a lot of nutrient rich runoff.

The World Resources Institute and Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has updated Diaz et al’s recent map of coastal eutrophication. They identify 169 hypoxic areas, 233 areas of concern, and 13 systems in recovery.

Coastal Eutrophication WRI 2008

The WRI Earthtrends weblog writes about the project:

The map shows three types of eutrophic zones:

(1) Documented hypoxic areas - Areas with scientific evidence that hypoxia was caused, at least in part, by an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus. Hypoxic areas have oxygen levels low enough to inhibit the existence of marine life.

(2) Areas of concern - Systems that exhibit effects of eutrophication, including elevated nitrogen and phosphorus levels, elevated chlorophyll levels, harmful algal blooms, changes in the benthic community, damage to coral reefs, and fish kills. These systems are impaired by nutrients and are possibly at risk of developing hypoxia. Some of the systems may already be experiencing hypoxia, but lack conclusive scientific evidence of the condition.

(3) Systems in recovery - Areas that once exhibited low dissolved oxygen levels and hypoxia, but are now improving. For example, the Black Sea recovery is largely due to the economic collapse of Eastern Europe in the 1990s, which greatly reduced fertilizer use. Others, like Boston Harbor in the United States and the Mersey Estuary in the United Kingdom also have improved water quality resulting from better industrial and wastewater controls.

Given the state of global data, the actual number of eutrophic and hypoxic areas around the world is likely to be greater than the 415 listed here. The most under-represented region is Asia. Asia has relatively few documented eutrophic and hypoxic areas despite large increases in intensive farming methods, industrial development, and population growth over the past 20 years. Africa, South America, and the Caribbean also have few reliable sources of coastal water quality data.

A more detailed analysis of this data set will be available in February 2008 in a policy note entitled Eutrophication and Hypoxia in Coastal Areas: A Global Assessment of the State of Knowledge (a list of related publications can be found here.

Rural ecosystem service transition

Published by Garry Peterson on January 22, 2008 in Ecosystem services. 0 Comments

Rich people moving to attractive rural areas are transforming the economy of those areas from resource extraction to an experience economy (see also Inequality and an ecosystem service transition). A Wall Street Journal article The New American Gentry (Jan 19th) describes this trend, and includes a large map that highlights areas that have experienced large increases in people who live off investment income rather than salaries. These areas include parts of the inland west, N Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, the New England.

Affluent retirees and other high-income types have descended on these remote areas, creating new demand for amenities like interior-design stores, spas and organic markets. … With the Internet allowing people to work from almost anywhere, the distinction between first and second homes has become blurred. Many people are buying retirement property while they’re still employed. Millions of soon-to-retire baby boomers, say demographers, will propel this trend for years to come.”What we’re seeing is a class colonization,” says Peter Nelson, an associate professor of geography at Middlebury College and an expert on rural migration. “It really represents a shift in the nature of the economy from a resource-extraction economy to an aesthetic-based economy.”

…

Rural America makes up about three-quarters of the nation’s land mass, but has just 17% of the population, about 50 million people. Many mining towns and Great Plains’ farming communities have stagnating or shrinking populations while more scenic communities are soaking up new residents.

One indicator of rural gentrification: An increase in residents’ total dividend, interest and rent income. That measurement, tracked by the Commerce Department, is a sign that new residents — usually retirees — are living off their investments rather than salaries. In Teton County, Wyo., home of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, total dividend, interest and rent income has risen 177% between 1996 and 2005, one of the largest increases in rural America.

Mapping the Anthropocene: Anthropegenic Biomes

Published by Garry Peterson on December 13, 2007 in Ecosystem services and Visualization. 3 Comments

Humanity is now a geological force reshaping the Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and biogeochemistry. This reality has lead Earth System Scientists to argue that we are living in a new geological era - the Anthropocene.

Recently Navin Ramankutty, a colleague of mine here at McGill, and Erle Ellis, from the University of Maryland, have developed a map of the world the acknowledges that we are in the Anthropocene by identifying the anthropogenic biomes that are currently found in the world.

Anthro biomes in E NA from google maps

anthro biomes legend

They define an anthropogenic biome as:

Anthropogenic biomes describe globally-significant ecological patterns within the terrestrial biosphere caused by sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems, including agriculture, urbanization, forestry and other land uses. Conventional biomes, such as tropical rainforests or grasslands, are based on global vegetation patterns related to climate. Now that humans have fundamentally altered global patterns of ecosystem form, process, and biodiversity, anthropogenic biomes provide a contemporary view of the terrestrial biosphere in its human-altered form. Anthropogenic biomes may also be termed “anthromes” to distinguish them from conventional biome systems, or “human biomes” (a simpler but less precise term).

The maps can be viewed as PDFs, or interactively using Google Maps or Google Earth. Links to these files can be found in the article in their article Anthropogenic biome maps in the Enclyopedia of the Earth.

The McGill website has a a ten-minute interview with Prof. Ramankutty, and both authors wrote a follow up article Conserving Nature in an Anthropogenic Biosphere on Earth Portal, where they write:

If we say that most ecosystems are now anthropogenic, does this devalue the conservation and protection of “Nature”? Have we given those who oppose conservation a new tool to eliminate conservation altogether? Though this was never our intention, it seems to be a potential repercussion of our work.

Here is our defense.

On the one hand, we are convinced, as are many, that it is time to give up on the “protecting fragile nature” approach to conserving a desirable environment. Managing nature in preserves and leaving the rest of the world to its own devices does not and will not achieve our objectives.
…
It is our hope that in this century we can improve our environmental governance by building a citizen’s “morality of nature” through education and participation, rather than by fear of the consequences. Indeed, there are many indications already that we are getting better at managing the environment, and that the regenerative powers of nature are cleaning our rivers, regrowing our forests, and healing the ozone layer.

We are already in the driver’s seat. If our collective desire leads us to conserve, preserve, and restore “Nature”, we will all be the better off for this. But managing nature as if everything we touch is destroyed just will not get us to where we want to go.

They describe their map in the paper:

Ellis, E. C., and N. Ramankutty. In Press. Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:XXX. doi:10.1890/070062 . (which is available online before publication).

Food prices rising due increases in meat consumption and biofuels

Published by Garry Peterson on December 9, 2007 in Ecological Economics and Ecosystem services. 2 Comments

The Economist (Dec 6th 2007) writes about how global agricultural prices are Cheap no more:

economist on food prices

…what is most remarkable about the present bout of “agflation” is that record prices are being achieved at a time not of scarcity but of abundance. According to the International Grains Council, a trade body based in London, this year’s total cereals crop will be 1.66 billion tonnes, the largest on record and 89m tonnes more than last year’s harvest, another bumper crop. That the biggest grain harvest the world has ever seen is not enough to forestall scarcity prices tells you that something fundamental is affecting the world’s demand for cereals.

Two things, in fact. One is increasing wealth in China and India. This is stoking demand for meat in those countries, in turn boosting the demand for cereals to feed to animals. The use of grains for bread, tortillas and chapattis is linked to the growth of the world’s population. It has been flat for decades, reflecting the slowing of population growth. But demand for meat is tied to economic growth (see chart 1) and global GDP is now in its fifth successive year of expansion at a rate of 4%-plus.

Higher incomes in India and China have made hundreds of millions of people rich enough to afford meat and other foods. In 1985 the average Chinese consumer ate 20kg (44lb) of meat a year; now he eats more than 50kg. China’s appetite for meat may be nearing satiation, but other countries are following behind: in developing countries as a whole, consumption of cereals has been flat since 1980, but demand for meat has doubled.

Not surprisingly, farmers are switching, too: they now feed about 200m-250m more tonnes of grain to their animals than they did 20 years ago. That increase alone accounts for a significant share of the world’s total cereals crop. Calorie for calorie, you need more grain if you eat it transformed into meat than if you eat it as bread: it takes three kilograms of cereals to produce a kilo of pork, eight for a kilo of beef. So a shift in diet is multiplied many times over in the grain markets. Since the late 1980s an inexorable annual increase of 1-2% in the demand for feedgrains has ratcheted up the overall demand for cereals and pushed up prices.

Because this change in diet has been slow and incremental, it cannot explain the dramatic price movements of the past year. The second change can: the rampant demand for ethanol as fuel for American cars. In 2000 around 15m tonnes of America’s maize crop was turned into ethanol; this year the quantity is likely to be around 85m tonnes. America is easily the world’s largest maize exporter—and it now uses more of its maize crop for ethanol than it sells abroad.

Ethanol is the dominant reason for this year’s increase in grain prices. It accounts for the rise in the price of maize because the federal government has in practice waded into the market to mop up about one-third of America’s corn harvest. A big expansion of the ethanol programme in 2005 explains why maize prices started rising in the first place.

Ethanol accounts for some of the rise in the prices of other crops and foods too. Partly this is because maize is fed to animals, which are now more expensive to rear. Partly it is because America’s farmers, eager to take advantage of the biofuels bonanza, went all out to produce maize this year, planting it on land previously devoted to wheat and soyabeans. This year America’s maize harvest will be a jaw-dropping 335m tonnes, beating last year’s by more than a quarter. The increase has been achieved partly at the expense of other food crops.

…

Guess who loses
According to the World Bank, 3 billion people live in rural areas in developing countries, of whom 2.5 billion are involved in farming. That 3 billion includes three-quarters of the world’s poorest people. So in principle the poor overall should gain from higher farm incomes. In practice many will not. There are large numbers of people who lose more from higher food bills than they gain from higher farm incomes. Exactly how many varies widely from place to place.

Among the losers from higher food prices are big importers. … some of the poorest places in Asia (Bangladesh and Nepal) and Africa (Benin and Niger) also face higher food bills. Developing countries as a whole will spend over $50 billion importing cereals this year, 10% more than last.

…

In every country, the least well-off consumers are hardest hit when food prices rise. This is true in rich and poor countries alike but the scale in the latter is altogether different. As Gary Becker, a Nobel economics laureate at the University of Chicago, points out, if food prices rise by one-third, they will reduce living standards in rich countries by about 3%, but in very poor ones by over 20%.

Farming the World for Food and Feed

Published by Garry Peterson on December 8, 2007 in Ecosystem services and Visualization. 2 Comments

Croplands and pastures cover about a 1/3 of the Earth’s ice free surface. Foley et al in their PNAS commentary Our share of the planetary pie illustrate the uses of this agricultural production. Their map shows the percentage of crop NPP used to produce food that humans consume directly (blue) or indirectly in processed products (orange-red). The majority of the nonfood portion is feed for livestock, but also includes fiber or luxury crops, such as cotton and coffee. Note the differences between agriculture is rich (feed for livestock) and poor countries (food).

Foley et al PNAS Fig (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/31/12585)

Click on map for a larger verison.

The map is based on data from:

Monfreda, C., N. Ramankutty, and J. A. Foley (In Press), Farming the Planet. 2: The Geographic Distribution of Crop Areas, Yields, Physiological Types, and NPP in the Year 2000, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, doi:10.1029/2007GB002947.

Coral Reef Futures and Resilience Economics

Published by Garry Peterson on October 20, 2007 in Ecosystem services and General. 3 Comments

At Crooked Timber, Australian economist John Quiggin reflects on the recent Coral Reef Futures Forum, which was recently organized by Resilience Alliance member Terry Hughes group at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reefs Studies in Australia. The forum aimed to discus how global changes such as fishing, climate change, and ocean acidification are threatening coral reefs. John Quiggin writes:

I spent the last couple of days in Canberra at the Coral Reef Futures Forum, as part of my new Federation Fellowship is to look at economic approaches to management of the Great Barrier Reef. As one of the speakers said, a lot of the talks had people staring at their shoes in gloom, though the tone got a little more positive towards the end. …

The most hopeful view is that, if we can fix the local threats like overfishing and poor water quality, the resulting increase in resilience (part of my project is to develop a more rigorous understanding of this popular buzzword) will offset moderate global warming, so that if we can stabilise the climate (an increase of no more than 2 degrees) we might save at least some reef systems.

It will be interesting to see what type of resilience economics John Quiggin develops. Several other economists have been working on the economics of resilience, such as Wisconsin econmist Buz Brock, Charles Perrings at Arizona State U, as well as Anne Sophie Crepin and others at the Beijer Institute, but the there is a lot that needs to be done to create a broadly useful resilience economics.

Inequality and an ecosystem service transition

Published by Garry Peterson on October 14, 2007 in Ecosystem services and Inequality. 2 Comments

Privately owned forests in the US are being increasingly converted to housing for the wealthy as the demand for cultural ecosystem service, such as recreation and beauty, is out-competing demands for provisioning services such as timber and pulp. These changes are having extensive effects on conservation and forest management practices. They are also resulting in a loss of public access to private forests.

These changes are described in a Oct 13th NY Times article As Logging Fades, Rich Carve Up Open Land in West:

With the timber industry in steep decline, recreation is pushing aside logging as the biggest undertaking in the national forests and grasslands, making nearby private tracts more desirable — and valuable, in a sort of ratchet effect — to people who enjoy outdoor activities and ample elbow room and who have the means to take title to what they want.  Some old-line logging companies, including Plum Creek Timber, the country’s largest private landowner, are cashing in, putting tens of thousands of wooded acres on the market from Montana to Oregon. Plum Creek, which owns about 1.2 million acres here in Montana alone, is getting up to $29,000 an acre for land that was worth perhaps $500 an acre for timber cutting.

Continue reading ‘Inequality and an ecosystem service transition’

Society and Environment (ENVR 201) reading list

Published by Garry Peterson on October 10, 2007 in Cities, Ecosystem services, General and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 0 Comments

This semester I am co-teaching the first year course Society and the Environment in the McGill School of Environment. I teach a diverse set of lectures that are mainly focussed on commons, urban ecosystems, and resilience, but also include cost-benefit analysis and ecological futures. My colleagues cover a whack of other topics. Below are the assinged readings for my sections of the course.

Making environmental decisions: Assessing costs & benefits (1)

  • Leung, B., Lodge, D.M., Finnoff, D., Shogren, J.F., Lewis, M, Lamberti, G. 2002. An ounce of prevention or a pound of cure: bioeconomic risk analysis of invasive species. Proceedings: Biological Sciences 269:2407-2413

Managing the Commons (3)

  • Hardin, G. 1968. Tragedy of the commons.. Science, 162(1968): 1243-1248.
  • Feeny, D, et.al. 1990. The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited: Twenty Years Later. Human Ecology. 18:1-19
  • Dietz, Thomas., Elinor Ostrom, Paul C. Stern. 2003. “The Struggle to Govern the Commons.” Science. 302(5652): 1907-1912.

Urban Ecosystems (3)

  • Davis, M.. 2004. Planet of slums. New Left Review 26, March-April.
  • Lee, K. N. 2006. Urban sustainability and the limits of classical environmentalism. Environment and Urbanization; 18(1) 9-22
  • Jannson et al 1999 Linking Freshwater Flows and Ecosystem Services Appropriated by People: The Case of the Baltic Sea Drainage Basin. Ecosystems 2(4) 351-366.
  • Colding, Johan, Jakob Lundberg, and Carl Folke. 2006 Incorporating Green-area User Groups in Urban Ecosystem Management AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment: 35(5) 237–244.

Resilience and Surprise (4)

Ecological Futures (1)

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »