Ecology

CAREER Q&A
22 February 2022

Marching in the streets for climate-crisis action

Conservationist Charlie Gardner explains why he joined Scientists for Extinction Rebellion and its civil-disobedience protests.

Christine Ro

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Christine Ro

Christine Ro is a freelance journalist based in Buenos Aires.

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Charlie Gardner speaks at an Extinction Rebellion protest.Credit: Louise Jasper Photography

Conservationist, consultant and activist Charlie Gardner is a lecturer in conservation biology at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. He regularly participates in protests with Scientists for Extinction Rebellion, an offshoot of a broader movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience to push for action on the climate and biodiversity crises. He has also advised on legislation such as the UK Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, which seeks to curb UK greenhouse-gas emissions and biodiversity loss, and is currently making its way through Parliament. What drove you to activism? Teaching. Five or six years ago, I was standing in front of a lecture theatre, full of young people who are going to suffer the consequences of climate change much more than I am. I couldn’t stand that I wasn’t doing everything I could. When Extinction Rebellion (XR) was launched in the United Kingdom in October 2018, it felt like the answer. As conservationists, we silently wish that members of the general public cared more about the destruction of nature. Now they are taking to the streets and I have this moral obligation to be there in support.How have you been working with Scientists for XR?In October 2019, a group of scientists came together to create Scientists for XR, which has carried out many actions. These include pasting scientific papers to the walls of the London headquarters of News Corp in 2021 in protest against inadequate climate-change coverage in the company’s newspapers. The group has different functions. One is to provide scientific support for the wider XR movement, so that it remains founded on solid scientific ground. And a second is to advocate. Scientists vocally supporting XR sends a powerful message. Society trusts scientists. A third function is direct action. Scientists for XR groups have been involved in a number of XR events, such as marches and roadblocks. For example, at the 2021 opening of a London Science Museum exhibition sponsored by oil and gas company Shell, some scientists locked themselves to parts of the exhibition in protest against the sponsorship, while our scientist group set up a table outside to demonstrate principles of atmospheric cooling to engage with the public. Events such as this serve to highlight the issue of science museums accepting sponsorship from fossil-fuel companies.How can scientists dip their toes into this type of work?What the public sees of these direct actions is the tip of the iceberg. For every person out on the streets, there are 20 more behind the scenes involved in other tasks: organizing, producing press releases, baking cakes for marchers. Whatever you enjoy doing and have skills in, there is a role for you. Taking part does not have to involve engaging in civil disobedience yourself, or putting yourself in a risky position. One of the most important jobs at a protest is for people to stand at the edges, engaging the public in conversations. That’s a role that scientists can perform fantastically.How have your advocacy and activism benefited you?There’s this crazy notion that scientists shouldn’t speak out because it will damage their reputations. But activism has had the opposite effect on my career. My research is based on conservation in Madagascar; it’s fairly niche. I previously had no global reputation. Since becoming a vocal scientist-activist, my reputation and my visibility as a scientist have soared. Also, activism is great for my mental health. Knowing I’m doing what I can is important to me. There are simply the best people in these movements, and there’s a sense of community. Does being a vocal activist diminish your scientific credibility?Popular perception holds that scientists must be neutral purveyors of information and not speak up about what that information means. Somehow, if we do so, it could damage our credibility.But when scientists take personal risks and make personal sacrifices, that communicates the urgency of the situation in an important way. If scientists are saying that it’s time for action, but not acting themselves, that undermines their own arguments. How do you balance your academic responsibilities with advocacy?For five years, I worked half-time at the University of Kent. I did this deliberately, to allow me the freedom to engage in other activities, including conservation consultancy, activism and writing popular non-fiction. I left that post last year, partly to focus on activism and writing, and partly out of frustration with the precarity of academic life.There are things that enable me to be less single-minded in the pursuit of my career: I come from a position of relative privilege; I’m not interested in accumulating money; and I don’t have children. So I think academia has been a good fit for me, but only because it doesn’t fill my life.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00518-4This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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CORRESPONDENCE
22 February 2022

Apply Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity at scale

Lena Chan

 ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7930-7678

0
,

Kenneth Er

 ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4485-7260

1
&

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema

2

Lena Chan

National Parks Board, Singapore Botanic Gardens, Singapore.

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Kenneth Er

National Parks Board, Singapore Botanic Gardens, Singapore.

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Elizabeth Maruma Mrema

Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Montreal, Canada.

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In the run-up to the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity has been updated to align with the post-2020 global biodiversity framework to halt biodiversity loss (see Nature 601, 298; 2022) and for application at scale (see go.nature.com/3cqrknw).

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Nature 602, 578 (2022)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00476-x

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Study islands and bird dataSystematic ringing in spring on Mediterranean islands has been promoted by the Piccole Isole project since 198826. Standard methods of the project involve ringing between 16th April and 15th May attempting to include the peak of the spring passage of long-distance migrants. Ringing is performed from dawn to nightfall using a constant number of nets within ringing stations placed at stable sites located at representative habitats in each island (Supplementary Table S1). The use of tape-lures is not allowed. We have compiled ringing data for all the Spanish Mediterranean islands that have been applying this methodology, with the exception of Mallorca and Menorca where the ringing stations were located in wetlands and captured a large percentage of local birds (Fig. 2, Table 1). The nine study islands are spread along a south-west to north-east gradient and, with the exception of Columbrets, they are distributed in pairs of similar longitude but different latitudes (Fig. 2). Ringing stations have been operating over a variable number of years (5–27 years), with the maximum number of ringing stations operating at the same time occurring between 2003 and 2010. To include between-year variation on islands that started ringing campaigns more recently we used data from the years 2003–2018.Figure 2Image source: Google Earth. Data SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO. Image Landsat/Copernicus.Geographical location of studied islands in the western Mediterranean.Full size imageTable 1 Period of activity of the ringing stations located on each island between the years 1992 and 2018.Full size tableThe ringing period within each spring also varied in most islands, owing to funding or logistic limitations; thus, to reduce the possible effects on migrant composition we only used data from the standard period of the Piccole Isole project and from years that included at least one week of ringing in the fortnight of each month within this interval. This procedure excluded the use of some years for several islands, and the final number of data years for islands ranged between 5 and 16 (Table 1).We used only data for trans-Saharan nocturnal migrant passerines, which form the bulk of species ringed on Mediterranean islands during the standard period. The standard ringing period only covers the tail end of the short-distance migrants’ passage; thus, these species were excluded as their contribution to composition of migrants could vary mainly due to between-year variation in migration phenology. Diurnal migrants, like hirundinids and fringillids, also represent a small fraction of birds ringed and may use different cues to select stopover islands. In addition, some of these species nest in some of the islands studied and birds ringed could include breeding birds. To avoid the distorting effect of species that are captured accidentally in very small numbers, we considered only the species that were ringed in at least five separate years, or on five different islands, which limited the species considered to 35 (Supplementary Table S2). This led to the exclusion of just two species (Ficedula semitorquata with three individuals ringed in two islands and Locustella luscinioides with one individual ringed in Aire island). In addition, we only considered the number of ringed birds, since the proportion of recaptures varies among islands, likely reflecting variation in the duration of stopovers21, which could bias the comparison of the patterns of migrant species composition.Island descriptorsWe obtained two groups of variables describing the characteristics of the study islands (Tables 2, 3): (1) Variables related to geographical location: latitude, longitude, straight distance and minimum distance to the North African coast, minimum distance to the closest large body of land (continent or large island) in any direction and to the closest large body of land situated in a southerly angle between SW and SE. (2) Variables related to the habitat characteristics of the islands: area, maximum altitude and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). We estimated NDVI from Landsat 8 Images taken during the standard ringing period in the years 2015 and 2016. Pixels containing shoreline were excluded and the average NDVI was calculated for the rest of the pixels.Table 2 Variables describing the characteristics of the islands that included the ringing stations studied.Full size tableTable 3 Values of the island descriptors (see Table 2) and two measures of temporal variability of migrant composition in each island: average local contribution of each island to beta diversity (LCBD) and beta diversity for each island (BDTi).Full size tableContinental abundance dataAbundance estimates for western Europe were obtained from the European Red List of Birds27. We used the mean of the minimum and maximum number of pairs estimated for the 27 EU Member States as a measure of continental abundance (Supplementary Table S2).Data analysisAll analyses were done using R 3.6.128. We built a matrix of island-year x species containing the number of individuals of each selected species ringed in the study period in each island and year. Average number of individuals of each species ringed at each island was calculated and was used (log-transformed) as a dependent variable in a linear model with continental abundance (log-transformed), island and their interaction as predictors. This model was simplified using AICc as criteria to identify the best model.To analyze variation of species composition, the matrix of island-year x species was transformed using the chord transformation29 with the function decostand in the vegan package30.Using the function beta.div of the adespatial package31 we calculated beta diversity, including temporal and between-island variability (BDI,T), as the total variance of the aforementioned transformed matrix (BDTotal in29), which varies between 0 and 1 when chord distance is used. Considering that yijk is the chord transformed abundance of the species j in the island i and year k and (overline{{y }_{j}}) is the mean for species j in all islands and years altogether, then:$${SS}_{Total}=sum_{i=1}^{n}sum_{j=1}^{p}{sum_{k=1}^{q}{({y}_{ijk}-{overline{y} }_{j})}^{2}}$$$$BD_{I,T} = , SS_{Total} /left( {N – 1} right)$$where N is the total number of samples. The function beta.div also provides an estimation of contribution of localities (LCBD) and species (SCBD) to beta diversity (Table 3). Yearly LCBD (log transformed because of skewed distribution) of each island were averaged and compared between islands using ANOVA and a post-hoc Tukey test.We partitioned the above sum of squares in several ways. First, we calculated a beta diversity that considered only between-island variability, excluding temporal variability (BDI), by averaging the chord transformed abundances of each species j in each island along study years (({overline{y} }_{ij})) and applying the same procedure, but using the number of studied islands (n):$${SS}_{I}=sum_{i=1}^{n}sum_{j=1}^{p}{{({overline{y} }_{ij}-{overline{y} }_{j})}^{2}}$$$$BD_{I} = SS_{I} /left( {n – 1} right)$$Second, we calculated a beta diversity due to inter-annual variation of migrant composition within islands (BDT) as:$${SS}_{Temp}=sum_{i=1}^{n}sum_{j=1}^{p}{sum_{k=1}^{q}{({y}_{ijk}-{overline{y} }_{ij})}^{2}}$$$$BD_{T} = SS_{Temp} /left( {Y – n} right)$$where Y is the total number of study years and n is the number of studied islands (9). We also calculated a temporal beta diversity for each island i (BDTi) as the sum of squares due to variation within the island divided by the number of the island study years (Yi) minus 1:$${SS}_{Temp,i}=sum_{j=1}^{p}sum_{k=1}^{q}{({y}_{ijk}-{overline{y} }_{ij})}^{2}$$$$BD_{Ti} = SS_{Temp,i} /left( {Y_{i} – 1} right)$$Differences in temporal variability between islands could be due to different predominance of species that are more or less variable between years. To check this, we calculated Spearman’s rank correlation between the percentage of captures of each species in the total ringed on each island and BDTi and LCDB indices, for species present on all islands.We tested for the existence of differences between islands in migrant species composition using Permutational Multivariate Analysis of Variance (PERMANOVA) using the function adonis2 in the vegan package. We performed a multivariate test of homogeneity of variances using the betadisper function (vegan package) with the adjustment for small sample bias, to test if temporal variability in species composition differed between islands. We made post-hoc comparisons between islands with False Discovery Rate (FDR) correction using the function pairwise.perm.manova of the package RVAideMemoire32.To identify gradients in migrant species composition and the island characteristics that were associated with them, we employed Redundancy Analysis using the rda function (vegan package). We used the chord transformed matrix of species x island-year as a response matrix. We used two explanatory matrices, one including variables of geographical location and the other the variables related to habitat characteristics of the islands. We evaluated the relative importance of each group of variables to explain migrant species composition by performing a variation partitioning analysis, using the varpart function (vegan package). For that analysis, we followed the steps and R scripts recommended in33.Variables describing island characteristics were transformed using natural logarithms and collinearity within each group was evaluated with variance inflation factor (VIF)34. All the habitat variables presented VIF  More

Eddy-covariance observationsWe used half-hourly or hourly GPP, air temperature, VPD, SWC and incoming shortwave radiation from the recently released ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System)44 and the FLUXNET2015 dataset of energy, water, and carbon fluxes and meteorological data, both of which have undergone a standardized set of quality control and gap filling19. Data were already processed following a consistent and uniform processing pipeline19. This data processing pipeline mainly included: (1) thorough data quality control checks; (2) calculation of a range of friction velocity thresholds; (3) gap-filling of meteorological and flux measurements; (4) partitioning of CO2 fluxes into respiration and photosynthesis components; and (5) calculation of a correction factor for energy fluxes19. All the corrections listed were already applied to the available product19. We used incoming shortwave radiation, temperature, VPD, and SWC that were gap-filled using the marginal distribution method21. The GPP estimates from the night-time partitioning method were used for the analysis (GPP_NT_VUT_REF). SWC was measured as volumetric SWC (percentage) at different depths, varying across sites. We mainly used the surface SWC observations but deeper SWC measurements were also used when available. Data were quality controlled so that only measured and good-quality gap filled data (QC = 0 or 1) were used.Analysis of the extreme summer drought in 2018 in Europe to prove nonlinearityTo analyze the effect of summer drought in 2018 on GPP in Europe, we selected 15 sites with measurements during 2014–2018 from the ICOS dataset, representing the major ecosystems across Europe (Supplementary Table 1). Croplands were excluded due to the effect of management on the seasonal timing of ecosystem fluxes, both from crop rotation that change from year to year and from the variable timing of planting and harvesting. In croplands, the changes of GPP anomalies across different growing season could be mainly depend on crop varieties and management activities. Information of crop varieties, growing times yearly and other management data for each cropland site should be collected in future in order to fully consider and disentangle the impacts of SWC and VPD on its photosynthesis. Wetland sites were also removed because they are influenced by upstream organic matter and nutrient input, as well as fluctuating water tables. Daytime half-hourly data (7 am to 19 pm) were aggregated to daily values. At each site, the relative changes ((triangle {{{{{rm{X}}}}}})) of summer (June–July–August) GPP, SWC and VPD during 2014–2018 refer to the summer average of 2014–2018 were calculated for each year. For example, the calculation of the relative change in 2018 is shown in Eq. (1):$$triangle {{{{{rm{X}}}}}}=frac{{X}_{2018}-,{X}_{{average};{of};2014-2018}}{{X}_{{average};{of};2014-2018}}times 100 %$$
(1)
where X2018 is the mean of the daily values of (X) (GPP, SWC, or VPD) during the summer of 2018, and Xaverage of 2014–2018 is the mean of the daily values of (X) over all the summers of the 2014–2018 period. The average (triangle {{{{{rm{X}}}}}}) across a certain number of sites at each bin were used for the results in Fig. 1a.Daily time series of GPP, SWC and VPD during summer for each site were normalized (z-scores) to derive the standardized sensitivity of GPP to SWC and VPD. For each variable, the mean value across the summer of 2014–2018 was subtracted for each day at each site and then normalized by its standard deviation. At each site, we used a multiple linear regression (Eq. 2) to estimate daily GPP anomalies sensitivities to SWC and VPD anomalies across 2014–2018 and 2014–2017, respectively:$${GPP}={beta }_{1},{SWC}+{beta }_{2},{VPD}+{beta }_{3},{SWC},times {VPD}+{beta }_{4},{T}_{a}+{beta }_{5}{RAD}+b+varepsilon$$
(2)
where ({beta }_{i}) is the standardized sensitivity of GPP to each variable; ({T}_{a}) represents the air temperature; ({RAD}) represents the incoming shortwave radiation;(,b) represents the intercept; and (varepsilon) is the random error term. We compared estimated sensitivities with and without 2018 data to quantify the impacts of extreme drought in 2018 on GPP sensitivity to SWC (Fig. 1d) and VPD (Fig. 1e). The slope was calculated at each site and then the distribution of slopes across sites were plotted in Fig. 1d, e.Global analysis of the sensitivities of GPP to SWC and VPDFor the global analysis, instead of summer, we focused on the growing season and days when the SWC and VPD effects were most likely to control ecosystem fluxes and screen out days when other meteorological drivers were likely to have a larger influence on fluxes. Following previous studies5,8,45, for each site, we restrict our analyses to the days in which: (i) the daily average temperature >15 °C; (ii) sufficient evaporative demand existed to drive water fluxes, constrained as daily average VPD  > 0.5 kPa; (iii) high solar radiation, constrained as daily average incoming shortwave radiation >250 Wm−2.By combining ICOS and FLUXNET2015 data, at the global scale, we evaluated 67 sites with at least 300 days observations over the growing seasons for the years available (Supplementary Table 2). We excluded cropland and wetland sites for the above-mentioned reasons. These 67 sites were used to calculate the relative effects of low SWC and high VPD on GPP following the approach of ref. 5 (see below sections). For 8 sites, the ANN results failed performance criteria (the correlation between predicted GPP and observed GPP is {{VPD}}_{0}\ {beta }_{0},,{VPD}le {{VPD}}_{0}end{array}right.$$
(7)
where β0 and k are fitted parameters and VPD0 is 1 kPa48. Following Luo and Keenan48, we applied this method to a short time window (2–14 days) of Fc depending on the availability of flux measurements and assumed that every day in the same time window has the same daily Amax. We retrieved the daily Amax by implementing Eqs. (6) and (7) using the REddyProc R package (https://github.com/bgctw/REddyProc)20.Vcmax represents the activity of the primary carboxylating enzyme ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase–oxygenase (Rubisco) as measured under light-saturated conditions. To evaluate the responses of Vcmax to SWC and VPD, we first calculated the daily internal leaf CO2 partial pressure (ci) in the middle of the day (11:00–14:00) via Fick’s Law (Eq. 8), excluding periods with low incoming shortwave radiation (0.7 at most sites. During the training process, weight and bias values were optimized using the Levenberg–Marquardt optimization58,59. The maximum number of epochs to train is 1000. An example to demonstrate the ANN training at one site was shown in Supplementary Fig. 3.At each site, ANN was run and sensitivities were calculated for all data within each SWC and VPD bin and the median value was used. For each of the five trained ANNs, one of the predictor variables was perturbed by one standard deviation (a value of 1 due to the initial input data normalization), and GPP was predicted again using the existing ANN with the predictors including the perturbed variable; this process was repeated for each predictor variable. The predicted values of GPP obtained with and without perturbation were then compared to determine the sensitivity values. The sample equation showing the calculation of the GPP sensitivity to VPD is shown in Eq. (10).$${{{{{{rm{Sensitivity}}}}}}}_{{VPD}}={median}left(,frac{{{GPP}}_{left({ANN};{VPD}+{stdev}left({VPD}right)right)}-{{GPP}}_{left({ANN};{all};{VAR}right)}}{{stdev}left({VPD}right)}right)$$
(10)
We repeated the ANN and sensitivity analyses five times and the median of these were used at each site. Across all sites, significances of the sensitivities for each bin were tested using t-tests (p  More