All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Visualization

Ice minima

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Arctic sea ice has reached record low coverage in 2007.

Ice minima

From NASA EOS:

This image shows the Arctic as observed by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on September 16, 2007. In this image, blue indicates open water, white indicates high sea ice concentration, and turquoise indicates loosely packed sea ice. The black circle at the North Pole results from an absence of data as the satellite does not make observations that far north.

Three contour lines appear on this image. The red line is the 2007 minimum, as of September 15, and it almost exactly fits the sea ice observed by AMSR-E. Depending on the calculations, the minimum occurred on September 14 (one-day running average) or September 16 (five-day running average). The green line indicates the 2005 minimum, the previous record low. The yellow line indicates the median minimum from 1979 to 2000.

Cities, Ecosystem services, General, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Society and Environment (ENVR 201) reading list

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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)

Adaptation

Adaptive invasions

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From Conservation magazine’s Journal Watch Online

Revved-up evolution allows invasive species to rampage through new habitat, a study published in Molecular Ecology shows. The seeming ease with which chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha colonized New Zealand in the early part of the twentieth century was a complex combination of ecology and evolution, according to University of Maine biologist Michael Kinnison and colleagues.

Studies of biological invasions have often considered ecology — freedom from predators and/or parasites, lack of competition and so on — but evolution on a short timescale has seldom been seen as a major factor. Kinnison’s neat experimental approach, which involved releasing captive-bred salmon to several NZ river systems, showed that substantial and rapid evolutionary change has taken place among populations with differing local ecological conditions. The ever-worsening threat that invasive species pose to global biodiversity suggests the need to take evolvability very seriously, and these findings raise many questions about how we tackle the problem.

Source: Kinnison MT, Unwin MJ & Quinn TP (2007) Eco-evolutionary vs. habitat contributions to invasion in salmon: experimental evaluation in the wild. Molecular Ecology DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03495.x

General

Suggested papers for social-ecological PhD students

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From the Natural Resources Management group at Systems Ecology at Stockholm University, which does a lot of research on social-ecological resilience, suggested papers for doctoral students:

  1. Adger W.N. 2000. Social and ecological resilience: are they related? Progress in Human Geography 24(3): 347-364.
  2. Becker, C. D., and E. Ostrom. 1995. Human-Ecology and Resource Sustainability – the Importance of Institutional Diversity. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 26:113-133.
  3. Bengtsson, J., P. Angelstam, T. Elmqvist, U. Emanuelsson, C. Folke, M. Ihse, F. Moberg, and M. Nyström. 2003. Reserves, Resilience and Dynamic Landscapes. Ambio 32:389-396.
  4. Berkes F, Hughes TP, Steneck RS, Wilson J, Bellwood DR, Crona B, Folke C, Gunderson LH, Leslie HM, Norberg J,. Nyström M, Olsson P, Österblom H, Scheffer, M, Worm B. (2006). Globalization, roving bandits and marine resources. Science 311: 1557-1558.
  5. Bodin Ö., Crona B. and Ernstson H. 2006. Social networks in natural resource management: What is there to learn from a structural perspective? Ecology and Society 11(2): r2. [also available at: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss2/resp2/]
  6. Costanza, R., M. Daly, C. Folke, P. Hawken, C. S. Holling, A. J. McMichael, D. Pimentel, and D. Rapport. 2000. Managing our environmental portfolio. Bioscience 50:149-155
  7. CS Holling, and G. K. Meffe. 1996. Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management. Conservation Biology 10(2): 328-37
  8. CS Holling. 2001. Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological and social systems. Ecosystems 4: 390–405.
  9. Daily, G. C., T. Soderqvist, S. Aniyar, K. Arrow, P. Dasgupta, P. R. Ehrlich, C. Folke, A. Jansson, B. O. Jansson, N. Kautsky, S. Levin, J. Lubchenco, K. G. Maler, D. Simpson, D. Starrett, D. Tilman, and B. Walker. 2000. Ecology – The value of nature and the nature of value. Science 289:395-396.
  10. de la Torre-Castro, M. (2006). Beyond regulations in fisheries management: the dilemmas of the “beach recorders” Bwana Dikos in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Ecology and Society 11(2): 35. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss2/art35/
  11. Díaz S., Fargione J., Chapin III F.S. and Tilman D. 2006. Biodiversity Loss Threatens Human well-being. Vol 4, issue 8, e277. PLOS Biology open access on-line, www.plosbiology.org
  12. Elmqvist, T., C. Folke, M. Nyström, G. Peterson, J. Bengtsson, B. Walker, and J. Norberg. 2003. Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1(9):488-494.
  13. Fischer, J., D. B. Lindenmayer, and A. D. Manning. 2006. Biodiversity, ecosystem function, and resilience: ten guiding principles for commodity production landscapes. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 4(2):80-86
  14. Folke, C. 2006. Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses Global Environmental Change 16 (2006) 253–267
  15. Folke, C., S. Carpenter, B. Walker, M. Scheffer, T. Elmqvist, L. Gunderson, and C. S. Holling. 2004. Regime shifts, resilience, and biodiversity in ecosystem management. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 35:557-581.
  16. Goodstein, E. S. Economics and the environment. 2nd ed. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. New York. pp. 485-488, 495-510
  17. Holling, C. S., L. H. Gunderson and D. Ludwig. 2002. In Quest of a Theory of Adaptive Change. In: Gunderson, L.H. and Holling C. S. (Eds). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press, Washington DC.
  18. Holloway, M. 1998. Trade rules: a World Trade Organization decision about sea turtles raises doubts about reconciling economics and the environment. Scientific American. Vol. 279, No. 2, pp 33-35.
  19. Kremen, C. and R. S. Ostfeld. 2005. A call to ecologists: measuring, analyzing, and managing ecosystem services. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Vol. 3, No. 10, pp. 540–548.
  20. Olsson, P., and C. Folke. 2001. Local ecological knowledge and institutional dynamics for ecosystem management: A study of Lake Racken Watershed, Sweden. Ecosystems 4:85-104.
  21. Ostrom, E., J. Burger, C. B. Field, R. B. Norgaard, and D. Policansky. 1999. Sustainability – Revisiting the commons: Local lessons, global challenges. Science 284:278-282.
  22. Peterson G., C.R. Allen, and C.S. Holling. 1998. Ecological resilience, biodiversity, and scale. Ecosystems 1:6-18.
  23. Richard J.T. Klein, Nicholls R.J., and Thomalla F. 2003. Resilience to natural hazards: how useful is the concept? Environmental hazards 5: 35-45.
  24. Scheffer, M., S. Carpenter, J. A. Foley, C. Folke, and B. Walker. 2001. Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems. Nature 413:591-596.
  25. Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, Paul C. Stern. 2003. The Struggle to Govern the Commons. Science. Vol. 302. no. 5652, pp. 1907 – 1912.

via Maricela de la Torre Castro

Update:

Any further suggestions would be great. If you have any additional suggestions of readgins, leave a comment, with the reference and a note explaining why the reading is interesting.

Ecosystem services, Greenlash, Regime Shifts

Eutrophication creates deformed frogs

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Pieter T. J. Johnson et al have a new paper in PNAS Aquatic eutrophication promotes pathogenic infection in amphibians.

That shows how nutrient runoff from agriculture increase algal growth, which in turn leads to increases in snail populations that host parastites.  These parasites can then infect and deformed  frogs. What is particularly important is eutrophication, which is expected to increase with increased agricultural production, could enhance the spread of other diseases that harm people as well as wildlife.  The authors write:

Our results have broad applicability to other multihost parasites and their hosts. Recent increases in a variety of human and wildlife multihost parasites have been linked to eutrophication, including cholera, salmonid whirling disease, West Nile virus, coral diseases, and malaria.

Trematode parasites similar to Ribeiroia that use snails as intermediate hosts also infect humans, ranging from the nuisance, but relatively innocuous, cercarial dermatitis to the pathogenic schistosomiasis, which is estimated to afflict 200 million people across Africa and Asia.  If the life cycles of Schistosoma spp. are similarly affected by eutrophication, forecasted increases in agricultural nutrient applications in developing countries where schistosomiasis is endemic could hinder or inhibit efforts to control this disease.

For more see Wisconsin State Journal.

Adaptation, Networks, Visualization, Vulnerability

Scholarly networks on resilience, vulnerability and adaptation – update

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Marco Janssen has updated his 2006 analysis of scholary networks in global change resilience, vulnerability and adaptation research. For his new paper in Ecology and Society (Janssen 2007) Janssen added more than 1000 new publications to the database, to analyze a total of 3399 publications from between 1967 and 2007. His analysis shows both rapid increase in the publications in the field, as well as increased integration of the three knowledge domains

Janssen mapped the co-author network of the almost 7000 unique authors in the data set. He selected the 16 most productive authors with a minimum of 15 papers. Both sets make up the set of 17 authors who are very productive and/or collaborative. Next, we determined all co-authors for those 17 authors, but kept only the 69 authors who had published a minimum of six papers.

figure 2

The figure above shows the most productive and best connected authors with the strongest co-authorship relations. Circles denote author nodes, and are labeled by the author’s last name and initials. Legend: Node – author; Node area size—# of publications; Node area color—# of unique co-authors.

Also, interestingly, three of the journals that contain the most articles in this field were newly founded in the past decade: Global Environmental Change, Ecology and Society, and Ecosystems. Ecology and Society is the most journal with the most papers in the resilience domain and the 4th greatest number of citation.

Key works that are heavily cited across research communities are:

Burton, I., R. W. Kates, and G. F. White. 1978. The environment as hazard. Oxford University Press, New York, New York, USA.

Holling, C. S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:1–23.

Visualization, Vulnerability

Seasonal Rain Floods the Sahel

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From NASA Earth Observer Seasonal Rain Floods the Sahel:

The Sahel region gets most of its rainfall between June and September when the band of near-perpetual thunderstorms that hover around the Equator shifts north. In 2007, the final months of the rainy season brought unusually heavy rainfall to East, Middle, and West Africa, causing floods in river basins from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean coasts of the continent.

sahel flooding

This image illustrates how extensive the extreme rainfall was. The image was made with data collected by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite between August 20 and September 21, 2007. The average daily totals recorded during this period are compared with average rainfall totals recorded during the same period since TRMM’s launch in 1997.

Regions that received more rain per day than average are blue and green, while places that received less rain would be red, orange, or yellow. The image reveals that most of the Sahel received more rain per day than average in August and September. Some places, marked with pale blue, got as much as 15 millimeters more rain than average per day. The northern Sahel, by contrast, was slightly drier than average, as indicated by its pale yellow tint.

The unusually heavy rains caused flooding in as many as 17 countries and affected more than a million people across Africa. … For those areas that escaped flooding, the rains were beneficial, since farmers in the Sahel rely on rain to water their crops, reported the Famine Early Warning System Network on September 19.

For more on the flooding see BBC news Sept 19th, and BBC news Sept 21st.

Adaptation, Vulnerability

A damaged world vs. a severely damaged world

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The full report from the IPCC Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability working group is now available (it can be downloaded from their website). Martin Parry, co-chairman of the working group says:

“The choice is now between a future with a damaged world and a future with a severely damaged world,” said Professor Martin Parry, of the Met Office and joint chairman of [IPCC working group 2 – Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability]. “It’s quite striking how big the challenge is. It’s not so long ago that we were all talking about how our children and grandchildren would be affected by climate change. Now, looking at this evidence, it’s in our own lifetimes.” (via 3quarksdaily)

In the report Chapter 20: Perspectives on Climate Change and Sustainability contains Table 20.8 and 20.9 that summarize some of the expected amount of climate change expected for different emissions scenarios and the consquences of those those changes. Click on the images below to see the fullsize versions.

highway to hell

Table 20.8 – global impacts

highway to hell - regional version

Table 20.9 – regional impacts

General

Malacca Strait Pirates

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piracy google mapBoats transport a huge portion of global trade. A shadow side to this trade is the persistence of pirates. The international Martime Bureau records istances of piracy worldwide, and display their data on a google map. Along with West Africa, Somalia, and South India, the Strait of Malacca, between Indonesia and Malaysia, is a piracy hotspot. About 50,000 vessels travel through the staits each year carrying a major part (40%?) of the world’s sea trade.

In the October National Geographic, Peter Gwin writes about on the Malacca Strait Pirates, who are known as lanun.

…The 21st-century inheritors of their tradition continue to hunt these waters, mainly in three incarnations: gangs that board vessels to rob the crews; multinational syndicates that steal entire ships; and guerrilla groups that kidnap seamen for ransom.

Modern lanun have no shortage of targets. Each year, according to Lloyd’s of London, some 70,000 merchant vessels carrying a fifth of all seaborne trade and a third of the world’s crude oil shipments transit this critical choke point in the global economy. The strait’s geography makes it nearly unsecurable. It passes between Malaysia and Indonesia, known for thorny relations, further complicating the security picture. Some 250 miles (400 kilometers) wide at its northern mouth, the strait funnels down to about ten miles (16 kilometers) across near its southern end and is dotted with hundreds of uninhabited mangrove islands, offering endless hideouts to all manner of criminals.

Since 2002, the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) has recorded 258 pirate attacks in the Malacca Strait and surrounding waters, including more than 200 sailors held hostage and 8 killed. The insurance arm of Lloyd’s classified the strait as a war zone in June 2005. Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia responded by bolstering security in their respective waters, and Lloyd’s suspended the rating in August 2006.

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