Biology 1001 - Conservation and Restoration Ecology 2

[00:00:00]okay now I want to turn from single species conservation to conserving whole habitats one-seventh of the earth's surface is currently protected as national parks reserves and Wilderness areas these are areas that we can expect for their plants and animals to persist into the foreseeable future but this is only a small proportion of global biodiversity there's many more plants and animals that are unique to areas outside those national parks how can we try to save the rest one way to go with this is to look at our different biomes that we have across the Earth's surface and then prioritize which are the ones that we need in order to preserve representative habitats from each one of these ecoregions and focus on those most at risk so remember we have these different biomes depending on average annual temperature and rainfall ranging from the warmest wettest at the tropical rainforest and the driest coldest with the Tundras if we look at what is happening each one of these different areas we see that some areas like the tundra down here we have very little of it has been converted so nobody has really moved into these northern areas and converted them into agriculture or mining or whatever else and in comparison to what's been lost or is at risk by the year 2030 that's this light gray we have a lot that are already pretty well protected but at The Other Extreme we have the tropical subtropical dry forest that's these right here and again there's just about the same total amount of area that's protected but it's a very small proportion compared to what's been converted to agriculture what's been converted to parking lots in human occupied areas and this is expected to continue to grow over the next decade or so so these are areas that we really want to try to put a lot of effort in before they're lost and so these particularies that dry broadly forests are found in certain parts of South America and Mexico southeast Asia and in India and the nature of this is really emphasized by this image here which shows the human population density India has a billion people in an area about the size less than the U.S southeast Asia has very dense human populations so these areas it makes it very very difficult but where you can somehow protect areas within those highly occupied areas would have a disproportionate impact with that whole biome going forward one of the ways that we try to deal with this massive problem of how we're going to try to protect biodiversity is to focus on biodiversity per se look at those areas that are naturally the hot spots for remaining biodiversity this shows across the planet that there's some areas that have much higher biodiversity than others and if we focus on those areas and we can protect more species per dollar of conservation funding then if we just randomly try to go out protect any kind of habitat but I want to focus here on this one small country in Central America Costa Rica which has within it the one Acosta Conservation Area the northwest corner up there in the red circle that one small area just a few kilometers wide has an extraordinary diversity of habitats so you have that very critically threatened dry forest here yellow but it also has rainforest it has cloud forest there's also a marine sector out here protecting reefs coral reefs Etc so this area is extraordinary biodiversity seven thousand different species of plants 900 different species of amphibia reptiles birds mammals it's amazing so putting a lot of effort into that one small area can make a huge difference to our Global biodiversity the other is to focus on ecosystem processes themselves so one of these that's really at risk given the island nature of our protected areas is the fact that animals may move outside the national parks and go from one area to another and so a good example of this is the corridor between Yellowstone and Wyoming and the Yukon up in Canada just east of Alaska there's an archipelago of protected areas but they're all these spaces between and the Animals the large ones anyway move between needs so we have the Caribou migration in Canada it goes extraordinarily large areas we have mule deer that come down out of the mountains as it snows looking for something to eat during the winter and we have the pronghorn antelope which again move from Snowy areas to drier areas so they can keep feeding throughout the year now in the case of the pronghorn antelope this is one that I want to focus on in particular this is Grand Tetons National Park just south of Yellowstone these animals move south in the winter over 100 kilometers okay and so they're leaving National Parks they're going through national forests which is protected habitat in some way onto private land there are other kinds of areas down here and they have to cross several roads and so this is a problem for them because there's a lot of roadkills in these areas and sometimes the antelope will reach the road and just stop and not go and so you're going to have animals that starve to death because they can't get to the winter range before they get snowed in so in this area of Wyoming there has been an effort to build assisted infrastructure that allows the animals to cross the roads this is an overpass over a highway here in this area here built just for the migrating pronghorn antelope so they can make it across and then their underpasses underneath the road so again they can make it so there are ways that you can work you can actually help out these animals to maintain their migration even as they move from one protected area out into unprotected areas so summarizing habitat conservation there are many benefits and serves a large number of species protects a broad range ecosystem functions and it may require less invasive forms of management you don't have to go out and put a radio collar on every single individual of a species you're protecting its habitat so it doesn't get into trouble but we still are faced with how do we prioritize which areas there's only a certain amount of money going around for conserving habitats how are we going to decide where we're going to go and a lot of these are involved working with people outside of protectors on their own private property and not everyone may agree that they want to have antelopes crossing their back 40.

[00:07:38]so we have to deal with those issues and there's always constant pressure from Real Estate Developers from people wanting to expand their agricultural Holdings to try to protect that land I mean this has to be done but it's a challenge to be successful okay what about areas that have been apparently lost that look like Devastation after some sort of conflict what can we do to restore these areas so there's a whole new field now called ecological restoration that's growing and we're going to see a lot more of this in the coming years we can still take a species approach we may want to reintroduce species to an area where they're locally extinct but they're still a source population you can move from one place to another the other is called de-extinction where the whole species has gone EXT has gone extinct but we're somehow going to revive them and bring them back then we have habitat approaches and this can include reforestation assisted planning so we're not talking about animals here we're talking about plants but a whole Suite of plants that kind of brings back the suite of species that used to occupy that area we might even want to be working as Farmers to use artificial selection to guide Evolution to bring back a habitat that now can cope with whatever new kind of temperatures of rainfalls Might exist in that area we can also look at our own Urban spaces what we can do to make life better for our own species living in our modified environments okay what we all know about the successful reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone where animals were brought in from Canada and far-flung areas to Northern Wyoming they were let loose they went out and they've thrived in the national park and even in areas outside of Yellowstone in in Idaho Montana and Wyoming this has also been the case where any number of other species and I want to focus on this unlikely candidate for reintroduction the Rhino that is a rhino that's being moved from one part to another in Africa by helicopter okay this is in fact one of the first and best examples of a successful reintroduction the White Rhino was poached nearly to extinction by the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s to the point that only one small population of White Rhino still persisted and this is this area right down here in South Africa and so there was a concerted effort beginning in the early 1960s to take animals from this one source population move them to other parts of South Africa over to Mozambique Namibia Botswana Etc and so they actually restored much of the historic range of the White Rhino through this deliberate effort of reintroductions and in one place it was extraordinarily successful the largest protected area in southern Africa is called Kruger National Park and just a few dozen animals being brought into Kruger in the early 1960s that population did what classically happens the population well below its carrying capacity grew exponentially okay until there were over ten thousand White Rhino in that one park by about 2010.

[00:11:14]so we have even though this was very successful we have to be aware of the forces that caused the Rhino to go nearly extinct in the first place and that was the downward pressure from poaching for their horns and so the rhino in Kruger are still being have coaching has gotten really bad in the last 10 years or so and that's caused the population to come back down quite considerably but people have learned from what happened and so the hope is the population will stabilize somewhere still in the thousands because now we know there has to be incredible law enforcement effort to protect these animals almost on an individual basis each Rhino needs to have its own law enforcement team that goes around with it to prevent it from being sharp the other thing that people have recognized is since Rhino horn is just hair it grows continuously you can actually chop off their horn and it doesn't make much difference at all to the health of the animal but you're cutting down the value of the horn to poachers so these efforts we hope will mean that the Rhino despite the fact that they're still subject to a lot of poaching will persist at much higher levels than they did in the 1940s or 50s okay this brings us to the most extraordinary idea of all which is de-extinction there are several species that have gone extinct just in the last species for which we actually have some biological samples left over there's skins of Tasmanian Tigers there's the passenger pigeon that used to block the sky in such vast flocks over the Midwest over Ohio and places and the last one died in the early 1900s there's the quagga a kind of zebra that went extinct again in the early 1900s and then oh there's the woolly mammoth which went extinct tens of thousands of years ago but there's reason to think you know we maybe could do something with them let me give you an example where people have successfully if only temporarily brought a species back from Extinction this is about an animal that's related to the goat it's an ibex it lives in the Pyrenees which is a mountain range between France and Spain and in this species there was one individual left a female who died in the year 2000. but before she died she was possible to get some living tissue from her and this was then cultured when from these cells they were able to extract the nucleus and then they found a domestic goat which provided a donor egg removed the nucleus from the goat egg and replaced it with a nucleus from the ibex this was then prompted to develop as an embryo inside of a surrogate goat mother and it was born so it made it but it only lived for a few minutes because it died of serious heart defects well the idea is to try this with something like a baby mammoth here is a specimen that was exposed by the retreating Arctic Ice a few years ago and it was frozen in permafrost for about 45 000 years so the idea is again take tissue sample extract the nucleus and this time use a donor egg from an Asian elephant and see if this can happen now obviously this could be much more difficult because even with living tissue with the perinean ibex there was serious birth defects this will have a lot of damaged DNA so you're going to have to use crispr and any number of other genetic techniques to try to give a reasonable chance for something like this to actually grow up and become a living mammoth okay now I'm going to turn to Habitat restoration because this is going to have to happen there are a number of projects out there globally that are trying to bring in enough trees in converted land to help with the carbon dioxide reduction in our atmosphere so this one is called the trillion tree community and if you can imagine trying to plant a trillion trees around the world to help pull down the carbon dioxide but I want to focus here because it's a way of restoring habitat likewise with restoring mangroves with other kinds of forests on burnt areas we have a lot of that up in the Colorado Rockies and other parts of the western U.S where land has been destroyed by fire try to accelerate its recovery even grasslands I want to give an example of the seagrass in Chesapeake Bay this is a success that derives from ultimately the loss of seagrass due to eutrophication because of all the fertilizer runoff into Chesapeake Bay decades ago this seagrass provides important habitat but it got clobbered by all the algae and microorganisms that thrived and had caused all those problems of eutrophication we discussed before so deliberate effort this is the Chesapeake Bay here and we have four different experimental plots it's green orange dark orange and blue we're beginning in about 2000 they started planting and bringing in the seagrass to regenerate and this is the cumulative total so an enormous increase just a few hundred acres or hectares here to thousands over this period of time and you can see how it grew out so this is parts of the area with just very little sea grass left here here and here in year 2001 they expanded out and now you have very dense stands of seagrass over a large area here here and here so this is excess in terms of getting the seagrass to come back but what's good about this example is it shows how bringing back that lowest trophic level The Producers helps with the higher trophic levels as well crabs are very important commercial product that comes out of Chesapeake Bay something that's been tallied monitored for some time we can see that as the grasses came back so too did the invertebrate biomass including the crabs and so did the fishes so what was good for the grass was good for everything else this brought back the whole habitat and now I want to turn to an example where we're doing more than just bringing it back but we're actually helping to adjust for whatever changes have occurred in that environment that caused the loss in the first place as seawater warms corals are very sensitive to this higher temperature changes in acidity in the water and they get bleached and the bleached Coral is actually a dead curl all that's left is the skeleton these are Colonial organisms that build this as scaffolding that they can then thrive on so if you see these white ghostly coral reefs they're dead so what you can do is take the living Coral grow it in tanks of seawater at various different temperatures and do the kind of directional selection artificially favoring certain kinds of conditions for these corals to live in and so if you take those that are better able to deal with warm water more acidic water select them let them reproduce year after year you've now got genetic modification sort of in the usual way for domestication in the coral through areas where the coral has been so destroyed that there's not even a skeleton anymore it's even possible to manufacture fake coral skeletons using the 3D printing so that when that's put in place there's the scaffolding that will allow the colonial Coral to re-establish itself and then start growing its own and so these have been reseeded in several areas coastal areas around the world so you have a potential Reef site but now you've got Coral that can cope with a higher temperature and now you're growing back a heat resistant Reef final thing I want to discuss is our own immediate environment our own Urban spaces many of the larger cities in U.S Europe Asia elsewhere have parks and a lot of these were artificially planted back in the day or their Relic little forests that are left over and as people become more and more tolerant and more engaged with the idea of there being nature in urban settings we're seeing animals coming back even so they're coyotes that live in weird places like Los Angeles Atlanta all over the country and so we're seeing kind of a agreeing happening in these areas but one of the things that's very conspicuous in any large city anywhere on Earth is that this has gone furthest in well-to-do communities in wealthier suburbs wealthier urban areas even that's where the Shady trees are that's where it's less hot because of the shade of the trees that's where the air is somewhat cleaner because of the filtering effects of the plants but on the bottom right these are the poorer parts of town and they don't get those benefits so these are actual ecological deserts now efforts can be made to try to make for a more Equitable life in an urban setting and this has been done in Portland Oregon we're beginning in 1990 it was a program that eventually planted 50 000 trees throughout the urban area of Portland there's a number of trees per year that were planted some years thousands and thousands so all together quite a number of trees were grown in this had clear effects so it takes a few years for the trees to grow and so if we wait six or ten years or 11 or 15 years later we're seeing significant Improvement in the life expectancy of people in those neighborhoods that receive the trees and so this is the number of deaths averted lives saved per hundred thousand people in that part of town it's like 20 20 plus people per year from growing those trees and we can also see that there's an actual specific effect cardiovascular cvd was the primary mortality factor that was decreased by having the presence of these trees so people either they were less stressed or their hearts were less stressed because they weren't as hot not exactly clear why these benefits were there but they're real and they're measurable that in areas that receive more trees more lives were saved from Bad health so what I want to come to an end for this whole semester is to just remind you that for the entire time we've been talking about living systems we've been talking about biological systems and things may seem pretty bleak right now in the news whether things are going to work with climate change biodiversity etc etc but know this there's a lot of people out there working on it and it has finally received the attention of the world leaders and the thing to remember about any biological system whether we're talking about Conifer forests we're talking about tropical jungles but they were talking about savannas whether we're talking about the deserts they'll all grow back there's still time we can still make a difference there are techniques that we're learning about there's more and more resources going towards this effort to conserve and restore the planet and we can help to speed things up