Ecology

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Researchers have developed a way to forecast when whales and turtles are likely to get entangled in fishing gear — up to one year in advance. The technique, published in Nature Communications1 on 5 December, could protect animals and benefit fisheries.Researchers have previously developed ways to predict how heatwaves will affect the distribution of wild fish and the productivity of fish farms. But few forecasting tools have focused on protecting marine animals from hazardous human activities such as fishing.“There’s a lot of power in a forecast approach,” says marine ecologist Stephanie Brodie, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Brisbane, Australia. The technique that Brodie and her colleagues developed can help both conservationists and those trying to make fisheries sustainable, she says. It is also more accessible to researchers than previous methods.Ecological forecasting models can predict where marine animals are likely to be on the basis of sea-surface temperatures. Previous tools often required researchers to infer sea temperatures of a specific region from lower-resolution global data, which is a complex process that requires powerful computers, says Brodie.Rope injuriesInstead, Brodie and her team have shown that they can use widely available, low-resolution, global forecasts of sea-surface temperature to accurately predict when whales are likely to swim near the shore off the coast of California, where a local fishery lays down crabbing pots on the seabed from around November to June. Ropes extending upwards from these pots pose a risk to the animals.“That rope gear is what whales can get entangled in,” says Brodie. This can cause rubbing injuries on their fins, mouth or tail, preventing them from diving or feeding. It can sometimes even kill them, she says.To avoid this, the local crab fishery uses the past month of sea-surface temperatures in the region to make decisions on whether crabbing can go ahead, on the basis of whether a current of cold, nutrient-rich water — which attracts whales — has been compressed towards the shore.This phenomenon is quantified using a metric called the Habitat Compression Index (HCI). When this value falls below a certain threshold, whales are likely to move inshore, and so fishers are recommended to suspend crabbing. But this leaves little time for the fishers to adapt to the economic impacts of fishing closures, says Brodie.The team found that using global temperature forecasts to calculate monthly HCI — over the course of a 33-month heatwave during 2014 to 2016 — allowed them to accurately forecast when the whale’s habitat was compressed towards the shore, up to 11.5 months in advance.Protecting turtlesThe researchers also studied another local fishery that deploys floating fishing nets. It uses the past six months of unusual sea-surface temperatures to decide whether loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) are at high risk of getting caught in nets. Turtles tend to track warmer waters, so if the waters where people fish are warmer, the fishery might have to close, says Brodie. “When turtles get caught in those nets it could strangle them, or stop them being able to move and feed,” says Brodie.The team found that they could use forecasts for global sea-surface temperatures to accurately predict when closures were necessary to protect turtles during the 2014–16 heatwave, also up to 11.5 months in advance.“These results raise optimism for reliable ecological forecasts in regions for which high-resolution local ocean models may not be available,” says Kathy Mills, a marine ecologist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. “As ocean resource users, managers and communities make decisions, they need relevant, timely and reliable information,” especially amid climate change and increasingly frequent marine heatwaves, she adds. More

I work with the Pessamit band of the Innu First Nation in Nitassinan, the traditional land of the Innu Indigenous people. This is a vast boreal forest region in Canada, covering some 130,000 square kilometres northeast of Quebec City. It’s a fairly open landscape dominated by black spruce (Picea mariana), with some balsam fir (Abies balsamea). It’s not uncommon to find forests that are 300 years old here.I study the southern portion of these forests, an area of roughly 30,000 square kilometres, to see how their structure and diversity change over time and respond to disturbance. I did this first as a graduate student, and then as a forest ecologist for the federal government. Now, I’m employed by the Pessamit community.Logging started here in the 1920s and shot up in the 1970s; now, about one million cubic metres of logs, such as those pictured here, are cut each year. Logging has completely changed the age structure of the forest. Large tracts of old growth have declined from about 40% of the landscape 30 years ago, to less than 20% today.Moose enter the logged areas, where they feed on new deciduous growth. Wolves follow the moose, travelling along logging roads, and prey on caribou.I’m not against logging, but I’m against the speed with which it’s done here. Loggers have been moving from south to north, and in five to ten years they’ll reach the commercial-logging boundary. Then they’ll go back south and start again. Sustainable forest management means maintaining the species that are associated with these forests. And that’s not what is happening.Many groups are pushing for an Indigenous-led conservation area. The Innu are also interested in the possibility of carbon credits. They want to find ways to manage the forest, while continuing their cultural practices. I’m keen to contribute to something that I believe in. I feel that the Innu and I share the same ecological values. More

RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
29 November 2023

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Wildfires are a natural part of forest life that help to shape diverse habitats. But the extreme ‘megafires’ that ravaged California in 2020 (pictured) and 2021 were more severe and about ten times more widespread than the yearly average in the region since records began, as Ayars et al. report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (J. Ayars et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 120, e2312909120; 2023).
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests. More

Faced with the realities of meeting the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs), scientists will need to move beyond rescuing them (see S. Malekpour et al. Nature 621, 250–254; 2023). In my view, modifying those that inherently contradict one another is more likely to secure the protection of the planet’s ecosystems and resources.
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests. More

The Aral Sea, on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, almost completely dried up between 2000 (left) and 2018 (right).Credit: NASA

Last week, Samarkand in Uzbekistan hosted an important intergovernmental conference on how to halt the creeping spread of degraded land. The country was aptly chosen: only about 800 kilometres from the meeting, the Aral Sea spans the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, it has almost completely dried up because of excessive extraction of water for irrigation during the twentieth century. Its exposed, highly polluted lake bed is a large source of blinding sandstorms and emits more than 100 million tonnes of dust and toxic chemicals every year.Between 2015 and 2019, the world lost at least 100 million hectares of healthy and productive land a year, according to an analysis for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which organized the meeting. Human activities — including deforestation and agricultural practices — and climate change are among the main causes.As part of tracking progress towards the 15th UN Sustainable Development Goal, ‘life on land’, 115 countries reported ahead of the meeting on three measures for restoring degraded land and soil (see go.nature.com/3sqzxm2): the area used for agriculture or covered by forests, grassland or wetlands; productivity, the ability of land to support and sustain life; and above- and below-ground stocks of carbon. Reaching the target of ‘land degradation neutrality’ by 2030 means reversing a negative trend. The global share of land that is degraded increased from 14.7% in 2015 to 18.9% in 2019 (see ‘Land loss’), the last year for which comprehensive data were available. In Mexico, more than 71.9% of land was classed as degraded in 2019, up from 56.7% in 2015. During the same period, India’s fraction of degraded land more than doubled to 9.5%. And many countries in Africa reported considerable increases — in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Eritrea and Somalia, the area of degraded land was between two and eight times larger in 2019 than in 2015.

Yet there are some important signs of hope amid a mostly bleak outlook. The analysis enables countries to understand land degradation at a more-granular level than before. And the UNCCD’s science teams did not perform the study: they helped to train researchers in some of the most-affected countries, so that local scientists and policymakers could do the work themselves, including monitoring progress on a continuous basis, using open sources.This work is crucial for altering course. And some countries are moving in the right direction. In Ecuador, for example, the area of land classed as degraded went from 21.9% to 12.8% between 2015 and 2019. During the same period, the degraded area in Botswana decreased from 36.3% to 17.1%, and in Burkina Faso from 34.6% to 8.2%. In Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, improvements are made mainly by restoring tree cover; in Asia, gains also came from improvements in soil fertility.Land degradation is not a priority on the world’s environmental agenda. Although the UNCCD has the same status as the UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity, unlike them it does not have an autonomous body that provides independent scientific advice. Restoration projects also receive much less international funding — they attracted around US$5 billion between 2015 and 2019 — than do climate projects, which have yearly funds of close to $100 billion, and biodiversity programmes, which attract around $154 billion a year.This funding disparity illustrates just how little priority is given to restoring land and preventing further degradation. Yet the latest analysis shows what can be done even with limited resources. But not all countries are providing data. These nations, especially high-income countries, should start reporting their plans and actions, to raise the profile of land degradation and help reverse the trend. More