Ecology

A Comment article in Nature Climate Change argues that coral reefs are best saved by enabling natural recovery, rather than through “heroic interference” that involves manually outplanting coral fragments (R. P. Streit et al. Nature Clim. Change 14, 773–775; 2024). Meanwhile, in this journal, Lisa Carne argues that, in her coral patch in Belize, outplanted corals grow well, so maybe manual restoration is worth the effort (L. Carne Nature 634, 755; 2024).
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“In this photograph, I’m installing a chlorophyll fluorometer into a Scots pine tree (Pinus sylvestris) at a forest station in Hyytiälä, Finland, which is 200 kilometres north of the main campus at the University of Helsinki. I’m 20 metres above the ground, on a scaffold.The tool records the light emitted by leaves or needles in the far-red part of the spectrum. Almost every chlorophyll-containing organism creates this light. The intensity is very low — only about 1% of absorbed light is emitted as fluorescence – but its variations make the signal informative.Measuring the wavelength and intensity of this light, and comparing them with changes in carbon dioxide levels and the emissions of some volatile organic compounds from plant leaves, might make it possible to draw a relationship between them. Eventually, fluorescence data obtained remotely, from towers, drones, aircraft or satellites, might lead to a better understanding of how trees and plant ecosystems are responding to a rapidly changing environment.My colleagues and I have placed fluorometers and automated chambers in this hectare of forest to measure gas exchange. The area is filled with the sound of machinery — the hissing of the pumps that operate the gas-exchange chambers, the humming of small motors and the beeping of detection equipment. These aren’t the sounds of a normal forest, but they are the sounds of our science.My work is all about zooming in and out to understand plants at different scales, and how they interact with the environment on a local to global scale. Future work might move towards a detailed understanding of a single leaf or chloroplast. In many respects, the complexity inside a leaf is comparable to what we find in a forest ecosystem, but it is much more difficult to measure.” More

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When Amanda Black started university in New Zealand in 1995, she got her first taste of discrimination. Black is an Indigenous person to New Zealand who comes from a rural community, and several wealthier, white students told her that she must have received special privileges to attend university, that her ability was inferior and that she was stupid and had little to offer scientifically. She says she has faced similar attitudes throughout her career, sometimes from fellow academics — despite receiving multiple awards for her research as a soil ecologist, including a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2021. In 2020, she became the director of Bioprotection Aotearoa in Canterbury, one of New Zealand’s National Centres of Research Excellence.The centre’s mission is for its scientists to conduct environmental research guided by Indigenous values, which Black says are grounded in te pono (truth, honesty and integrity), te tika (doing what is right, in the right way) and te aroha (respect and reciprocity). Researchers are expected to engage with Indigenous communities to co-create research opportunities and share knowledge.As director, Black facilitates opportunities for the centre’s scientists to engage with Indigenous communities and encourages researchers to attend gatherings called noho marae, at which attendees stay in traditional Māori meeting houses, hear about local Indigenous communities’ aspirations and offer ideas for co-designing research programmes. Black supports Indigenous sovereignty over human and non-human genomic data that originates from Indigenous communities or lands and, under her leadership, the centre provides its researchers with guidance on data sovereignty and intellectual property when working with Indigenous Knowledge.Black encourages a diverse mix of students and researchers who have a range of perspectives about bioprotection, and she works to ensure that early-career, female and Indigenous researchers receive deserved promotions. She tells Nature that she sees her role as developing the next generation of researchers to be not only scientifically competent, but also ethical and culturally responsive.What’s the coolest discovery that’s come out of your work?A lot of conservation is geared around saving one species, but we have to start looking at saving whole ecosystems. When you bring back keystone species, those that drive the system, the theory is that that should increase the resilience of ecosystems. We’re trying to understand which key parts of the ecosystems need saving to, in turn, help restore the entire ecosystem. Then it becomes a habitable place for the taonga, or treasure, species — those that we hold dear — that we’re trying to conserve, as well as our other birds, plants and animals.A New Zealand example of this is that seabirds are keystone species for forest resilience because they provide nutrients for healthy soil through their droppings, leftover scraps of food and burrowing. If we bring these birds back, we’ll help forest ecosystems to withstand climate change and maybe even biosecurity threats, such as weeds and pathogens.Why is diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work important to you?For many years, research was done in a Western, colonialist way. Research outcomes were paramount. It was ‘get it done’ by any means necessary — without consultation with people in the communities where scientists were working. Museums took artefacts and the labs that sequenced the genomes of many of New Zealand’s endemic species were based overseas. Ethics, data sovereignty and the rights and interests of Indigenous Peoples weren’t a priority or even considered.But we deal with global problems these days and I don’t think one knowledge system or approach is going to be able to solve them all. We need multiple perspectives on very complicated problems. That’s where DEI comes in. We make space for those with different perspectives. Because of their experiences and the challenges they have faced, they’ve often got quite innovative solutions to problems. We need new approaches because our one way of thinking hasn’t got us very far with these global problems. It’s certainly not going to hurt if we reach out to encourage different people to share their thinking with us.I have to deliver research, but my role is also to create an institute where people from all sorts of backgrounds can thrive — a place for thinking, a place for collaboration, a place for innovation.What’s the biggest Indigenous stereotype that you’d like to dispel?It’s that Māori get special privileges. In fact, we do double duty in our institutions, in that we do all the cultural stuff, we have to be role models, we have to comment on everything, we get asked to do interviews like this one and we counter misinformation about our communities. We are expected to be knowledge and community brokers, whereas a lot of our colleagues simply get to focus on their research. I get paid because of the outputs on my CV, not because I am Māori.How have you dealt with issues of racism in your personal and professional life?At university, we Māori students had to deal with the attitude that we were stupid, lazy and had nothing to offer scientifically, and I’ve had to deal with that kind of attitude all my life. Nowadays, I just let my work speak for itself. As I’ve got older, I’ve cared less and I’ve found my voice. I focus my attention on what’s important. If someone wants to give me their opinion, that’s fine, but don’t expect me to engage if it’s not a well-constructed argument. I am an academic — I construct arguments based on evidence. I’m not going to engage with a diatribe, especially a racist diatribe.The critics are getting used to me. Being opinionated and standing up for myself, I am getting a bit of a reputation for being kind of scary. That’s because people who choose to work with me see me as a very capable person, who doesn’t take BS and has an uncanny ability to cut to the chase. These characteristics are what make me successful, and they are desirable traits — in a man. But when these traits are seen in an Indigenous woman, they are scary to those who don’t like the status quo being challenged, because then their own privileges and entitlements show up.What’s the biggest misconception about a career in science?There’s an assumption that scientists are not creative people, which is wrong. We just express it in a different way. And there’s a massive misconception that scientists are unemotional, unfeeling human beings. Often, scientists are highly sensitive people who take a lot of things to heart and who will overanalyse every aspect of their lives.I was working with a non-Indigenous colleague, who was given one of our endangered snails so that he could sequence its genome. But he just couldn’t bring himself to kill it. I suggested that giving it a karakia, a prayer, would be a nice thing to do. For Māori, the snail is a treasure and a gift, and if we are going to sacrifice it for research, then it would go with a karakia to wish it well in its transition. So he did, and that says a lot.What do you do to get away from science?I like to travel, experience new cultures and try new foods. I typically go to countries where English is not the main language, because I like to fully immerse myself in a culture and experience everything it has to offer. One of my favourite immersions was in Fiji. I was working with a PhD student to scope out field sites — away from the tourist resorts — getting to know real Fijian life, the people’s struggles and aspirations. I love challenging myself in different environments and listening to different kinds of people. I find it all fascinating. More

In 1874, Nature published a book review by the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace of The Naturalist in Nicaragua, in which author Thomas Belt hypothesized that leafcutter ants cultivate fungi in their nests (A. R. Wallace Nature 9, 218–221; 1874). Later that year, it published a letter from German biologist Fritz Müller to Charles Darwin, confirming that leafcutter ants rely on fungal symbionts to digest the plant material they collect (F. Müller Nature 10, 102–103; 1874).
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Dasheng Liu observes how taxonomy teaching and research has declined, with devastating consequences for biodiversity conservation (D. Liu Nature 633, 741; 2024). He refers to how “credit hours for botany and zoology modules have halved at many universities in China”.
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Before They Vanish: Saving Nature’s Populations — and Ourselves Paul R. Ehrlich et al. Johns Hopkins University Press (2024)Biologist Paul Ehrlich has a history of failed predictions. For example, his 1968 book The Population Bomb forecasted mass famine around the world owing to growth in human numbers outpacing food production. In Before They Vanish, however, it’s hard to see him being wrong. Ehrlich and his colleagues present powerful evidence of global wildlife decline and more extinctions to come. Yet, it’s a pessimistic portrayal, which undersells reasons to be optimistic about conservation. This matters because optimism has a contribution to make in slowing extinctions.Conservation policies must address an overlooked issue: how war affects the environmentThe book opens with the story of the Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), an eight-metre-long mammal, which was described in 1741 by a German zoologist marooned in the Bering Strait. Within just 27 years, it was extinct. The authors use this well-known example to explain how extinctions can cascade through an ecosystem, by showing how the local extinction of sea otters (Enhydra lutris), which were hunted for the fur trade, contributed to the sea cows’ demise. The loss of the otters allowed a population explosion of their sea urchin prey, which overgrazed the kelp forests on which the sea cows depended.A reader new to the science of extinction will learn a lot from this book. Many underpinning concepts in conservation biology are expertly explored, and the authors take a novel angle by emphasizing the role of population extinction as a step to species extinction. They go on to present a compendium of extinctions, from birds to bivalves, pangolins to pandas, and marine fish to microorganisms.Grief for what has been lost permeates the book. And the authors, whose careers have spanned a period of dramatic wildlife decline, use personal anecdotes and rich imagery to powerful effect. Wholescale destruction across evolutionary relationships is described as “mutilation of the tree of life”. Individuals who remain in a landscape long after their population is doomed to extinction are “the living dead”.Yet, I found the book unsatisfying and, worse, it misses opportunities to inspire readers to support conservation action.‘Cocaine of the seas’ — how a luxury food is wreaking ecological mayhemIt is unsatisfying because it avoids tackling difficult questions about the extent to which human well-being really depends on the persistence of threatened species, and it fails to address trade-offs that must be made on a crowded planet. It misses opportunities because, despite the cover blurb promising insights into how species and ecosystems can be saved, it lacks a positive vision for the role of conservation and does little to showcase conservation successes.The authors shy away from addressing, or even acknowledging, the environmentalist paradox: that human well-being, by most measures, has increased even as we have destroyed natural ecosystems1. They argue that extinctions erode the conditions that make life on Earth possible, talking about “existential threats” and “a ghastly future”. However, it is difficult to argue that this is true for the extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), for example, a rodent found only on an uninhabited island off Australia. Do we really need to say that extinctions of populations threaten humanity’s existence to make a case that they matter?The authors don’t explore the difficult trade-offs that need to be negotiated to ensure the 8.2 billion humans that currently share this planet can thrive. When criticizing the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s massive infrastructure programme, they ignore why many leaders of low- and middle-income countries, desperate for better transport links and energy security, have embraced it. Similarly, biologist Edward Wilson’s controversial calls to protect half of Earth for nature, are presented as a solution to the pressures on remaining wildlife, with no discussion of what this means for people in rural areas who inhabit much of this land.Once the most endangered bird species, Mauritius kestrel (Falco punctatus) numbers are bouncing back through conservation projects.Credit: Fabrice Bettex Photography/AlamyThe authors mention that they themselves will find it difficult to make the behavioural changes needed to reduce their personal impacts on nature (the use of the future tense is interesting here), but how much more difficult is this for people living at the other end of the global income distribution?Across the environmental movement in general, and in conservation specifically, there are increasing calls for more optimism. Marine ecologist Nancy Knowlton has emphasized the value of sharing stories of conservation successes, rather than writing ever-more-sophisticated obituaries for nature2. Although bad news attracts attention, it does not tend to empower or inspire action3.Why repairing forests is not just about planting treesI would have liked to see the authors explore conservation success with the same narrative flair as the descriptions of extinction that make up the bulk of the book. There are so many examples of conservation efforts preventing extinction of populations and even species. To list just a few: the recovery of the saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), resulting in it being downlisted from critically endangered to near threatened last year; the recovery of the Mauritius kestrel (Falco punctatus) from four individuals in 1974 to a thriving population today; or the rebuilding of breeding bird communities following rat eradication on numerous offshore islands around the world.Ehrlich and his co-authors rightly dismiss de-extinction efforts as being a costly distraction. But they seem overly negative about other approaches to conservation that they cover. Even the rare positive cases they mention are quickly turned around. For instance, the reintroduction of the extinct-in-the-wild Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) ends with concerns over rising poaching and habitat destruction. The section on legal measures is largely a critique of the implementation of the US Endangered Species Act rather than summarizing where legal protection has contributed to the effective conservation of threatened species.Most frustratingly, despite a revolution in conservation evidence over the past 15 years, there’s little reference to evaluating the impact of different approaches or synthesizing such evidence4. Tools such as the Conservation Evidence database are making it easier for conservation practitioners to access information on the impact of interventions on ecological outcomes, and there is a rapidly expanding literature using causal-inference methods to evaluate the impact of conservation policies at scale5.The book dismisses out of hand many actions that, although not solving underlying drivers of extinction, can make an important local contribution to conservation. Certification schemes, such as those that charge a premium for coffee grown in ways that retain some natural tree cover, are apparently an “industry ploy”. Perhaps no coffee production would be better for biodiversity in these landscapes, but given that a lot of people really like coffee, might certification have a part to play?Fall of the wild: why pristine wilderness is a human-made mythComments about former US president Donald Trump will date the book and risk perpetuating unhelpful and untrue ideas that biodiversity conservation is associated with a particular political position. Perhaps more off-putting for many potential supporters of conservation is the undertone of environmental misanthropy. The authors sound almost ambivalent about a future collapse of human civilization. They acknowledge that collapse owing to climate change would be catastrophic for biodiversity as well as for humanity, but imply that such a collapse caused by the “crumbling of the debt pyramid”, would be welcome because it would take the pressure off of nature.The authors’ central thesis is that only economic and demographic transformation can ultimately prevent continued extinction. This is manifestly true. However, conservation science, policy and practice need to ensure that as much nature as possible makes it through to that time when human populations have stabilized, extreme poverty has been eradicated and technological and social changes have reduced pressures on the natural world6.Although I share the authors’ grief for the natural wonders that have been lost, I think that hope is a more powerful emotion. I want anyone interested in the extinction crisis to know about the successes that conservation is having, the increasingly sophisticated use of evidence to improve effectiveness, and the dedication of people from all walks of life and corners of the planet who are committing their energy to nature recovery. Because, ‘before they vanish’, there is still so much we can do. More