-- Os Schmitz, Professor Something I find very disconcerting these days is the increasing number of media reports about conflicts over renewable energy siting and biodiversity conservation. They make great stories because they typically portray them as David and Goliath-type encounters in which the interests of a small local conservation group or land trust that is trying to protect its favored species or place is set against a corporate giant—the renewable energy industry—whose putative sole interest is the generation of wealth. Oftentimes, these interactions end up in drawn-out court battles. But, what is neglected in these stories is that renewable energy sources like wind, solar and bioenergy are intended to increase the efficiency of energy use as well as help stem the rise in anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 emissions that are contributing to global warming. So, by becoming embroiled in conflict, conservation groups prevent climate action at the very time when action is urgently needed. It also prolongs the use of fossil-fuel energy with associated releases of CO2 to the atmosphere. So, when conservation groups take actions to prevent the siting of these sources of energy generation to prevent species or habitats of concern from being destroyed, they unwittingly, and ironically, end up increasing the long-term risk of destroying those species or habitats. This is not to say that there is no longer a place in ecology and conservation to understand and protect species and ecosystems from human land development. But doing that in a climate future requires that conservation changes how it goes about its business. It is becoming less and less tenable simply to try and protect species using just traditional approaches like parks and protected areas. Species are expected to move out of these areas as they adjust to changing climate. So, a more dynamic view of landscapes is called for in conservation, one that develops and implements conservation approaches that will enable species and the ecosystems they comprise to persist across landscapes both within and outside protected areas. Not considering dynamic landscapes and merely doing business as usual using traditional protected areas strategies risks painting the favored species into a proverbial landscape-corner. Science has much to offer as help. There are myriad spatially explicit landscape-scale approaches that can help land use planning for compatible uses. These include using existing conservation tools, like parks and protected areas, as a foundation. But they also include reconnecting those places to create wide-open spaces so that ecosystems may continue to function and provide services for human welfare. They also require imagining a climate future by creating, through the use of models, maps depicting scenarios about where species and the ecosystems they comprise are likely to end up. Our lab has been part of an effort to synthesize the different approaches and offer a flexible portfolio of options, with associated guidance on what different approaches entail and what information needs must be met in order to use them in land use planning for conservation (see http://yale.databasin.org). But ultimately, I believe that adapting landscapes for a climate future requires a new way of conducting conservation, one that avoids taking completely adversarial stances against any human land development to one that forges partnerships with myriad stakeholders across the landscape to encourage thoughtful, science-based land use planning for compatible uses.
In such partnerships, conservation values can become broader land-use planning values for renewable energy siting.
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--Kassie Urban-Mead, Undergrad I’ve finished my first round of sampling for this summer’s research, and it feels great to be in the swing of fieldwork adventures. During last week’s sampling I stumbled across both a nesting duck and a spotted baby fawn: the former—a Blue-winged Teal—flapped away briskly while the latter flopped and stumbled endearingly into a nearby shrub. I’ve also alarmed countless Red-Winged Blackbirds, and while making my way back to the truck on Tuesday I noticed a mid-sized woodchuck peering at me from beneath a guardrail. My search, though, is for smaller critters. I’m not tracking Orthopterans like Rob and Bryan are, but I am solidly in the invertebrate camp! My senior research as a Yale undergraduate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is on the unmanaged bee pollinator communities in twelve old-fields across Connecticut. I’ve selected fields that are surrounded by a gradient of land-use types. These categories include forested, suburban development and roads, and conventional agriculture. This summer I’m sampling the bees (and recording the flowers I find them on) to see if there are community and interaction differences that can be traced to impacts from surrounding land-use. I’ve made my first round through each field, and the next set of collections will go into full swing when the sun comes out next week. All of this rain has been getting in the way (though it’s keeping those flowers growing!). It’s far too early to say anything for certain, but there are certainly distinct communities from field to field. I look forward to seeing how the species compositions shift once the flower resources are more similar—the goldenrod that dominates all of my fields hasn’t yet begun to flower (mostly Solidago rugosa and S. altissima), and the milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) and thistle (Carduus nutaans) are just beginning.
I’ll keep you updated, but it’s safe to say that the summer is off to a great start! I’m so lucky to work in some truly beautiful fields (and to have some great books on tape to listen to as I drive about between them). I’m rapidly becoming more and more adept at naming the wildflowers to genus and species, learning which long-tongued or short-tongued bees prefer, and knowing more of my bee IDs on sight. But most importantly? I think that my dexterity wielding insect nets in thick vegetation is preparing me for an alternate career as a badminton player! --Jennie Miller, PhD Candidate
Classes have ended and we’re ramping up for summer fieldwork here in the Schmitz Lab. Five of the Schmitzers will be working in the field, carrying out innovative projects with lizards, spiders, grasshoppers and pollinators in Greece, Connecticut and Vermont. Colin departed three weeks ago for the islands of Greece, where he’s collecting preliminary data on lizard morphology in the presence of predators and rock wall refugia. Colin will be catching lizards and measuring every diagnostic metric he can think of to motivate his upcoming dissertation experiments. He left for Greece with some pretty cool field equipment, including snake tongs and a lizard bite balance. Hope the lizards are biting, Colin! Karin will be starting the sandbox experiment of her dissertation, which will run for the next few years. In June, she’ll transplant Solidago altissima plants from our greenhouse into cages in the fields of nearby Wallingford, CT. She’ll catch grasshoppers and stock the cages to examine their effects on the plants. Bryan will be studying how local adaptation in grasshoppers affects ecosystem response to climate warming. He’ll be comparing how grasshoppers from Connecticut (which likely adapted to handle warm temperatures) and grasshoppers from Vermont (expected to handle cooler temperatures) affect plant communities. Bryan plans to carry out a transplant experiment in which he’ll move CT grasshoppers to VT and likewise VT grasshoppers to CT and then examine differences in how the grasshoppers consume plants in field cages subjected to warmed conditions (simulating climate change). Bryan expects that the cool-adapted VT population of grasshoppers will be more phenotypically plastic in its response to warming. Rob has been prepping for fieldwork this summer by working in the lab, exposing Solidago plants to nitrogen and examining how the addition of nutrients to the soil impacts the rate of nitrogen cycling. He’ll be carrying out complimentary field experiments at the Yale Myers Forest, in which he’ll expose caged, old-field plots to different aboveground and belowground community compositions by altering the presence of herbivore grasshoppers, carnivorous spiders and microbial grazing springtails. Our undergrad Kassie will spend her first summer with the Schmitz Lab up at the Yale Myers Forest. She’ll be studying native pollinator community and plant-insect interaction webs across an anthropogenic impact gradient. Kassie is a big fan of native bees, which she believes are an important component of ecosystem health and are increasingly important as managed bee populations are in decline (especially the European honey bee Apis mellifera). This summer Kassie will spend her days watching bees, searching for correlative ecological, life history and landscape clues to the most important factors that support or disrupt pollinator communities. Good luck Kassie! Meanwhile, back in Greeley lab, Anne, Kevin and I will make ground-shaking progress in our spatial analyses of animal movement, distribution and predation patterns while sunbathing in the botanical garden to keep up with our labmates’ tans. Here’s to a fantastic summer! --Kevin McLean, PhD Candidate I looked at my calendar this morning and realized that it has now been over 7 weeks since I returned from my field season in Panama. Seeing as I was only gone for 12 weeks, I suppose it is about time that I stop telling people I am still “adjusting to being back.” With that out of the way, on to the fieldwork update! I departed for Panama in mid-December to finish up the necessary training and do a bit of testing and tinkering for my dissertation research. A portion of my project will involve monitoring arboreal (tree-dwelling) mammals in the rainforest canopy using motion-sensitive cameras, or “camera traps.” While I’ve spent a fair amount of time learning how to use camera traps on the ground, setting them up 6-10 stories above the forest floor was a whole new challenge. First on the agenda was learning how to actually get into the trees. I spent three weeks at the Institute for Tropical Ecology and Conservation (ITEC) taking a tree climbing course, which I sometimes refer to as “Canopy Access Techniques for Research” to sound unbelievably fancy. While three weeks may sound excessive, one of the many goals I set for myself while working on my dissertation was to not die, and my instructor Joe Maher played integral role in giving me the training necessary to succeed in that regard. The next step was figuring out how to mount the cameras in the trees. I had a fair amount of help with this from Dr. Tremaine Gregory, who was kind enough to share the designs she used for her work in Peru. I put together a set of six mounts using a couple different designs that allowed me to monitor animals on pretty much any branch size or angle. Once I got some initial troubleshooting out of the way, I was able to get some pretty great photos of the arboreal wildlife in Bocas del Toro. Some of the species that crossed the cameras included capuchin monkeys, green iguanas, woolly opossums, and climbing rats. After about a month in Bocas I traveled to the Canal Zone to set up my cameras in the forests in the Barro Colorado Island Nature Monument. Dr. Stefan Schnitzer, the primary investigator for the Liana Ecology Project was kind enough to allow me to set up cameras on his research plots on the Gigante Peninsula. I chose two trees on Gigante peninsula, one in a plot in which all the lianas had been removed, and another in a control plot. Once again it took a bit of fiddling to get things running smoothly, but after a several solid weeks I managed to get photos of more capuchins and woolly opossums, as well as some coatimundis, kinkajous, squirrels, and toucans.
I thankfully made it back to New Haven in one piece, where I will spend my time going through photos and working on the other pieces of my dissertation until I return to Panama January 2014. --Karin Burghardt, PhD Candidate
I just got back from a great experience at the Gordon Research Conference on Plant-Herbivore Interactions on the left coast. The conference focused on unpublished results, so while I can't talk about the specifics of research I saw (they have a social media gag order), I can say that it was a really positive experience. The conference had invited talks in the morning, free time after lunch to play volleyball on the beach (!), and then a poster session and more talks after dinner each evening. It was really interesting to see where research within my field is heading and to just geek out and talk science with folks thinking about the same issues. I presented the attached poster based on the 1st chapter of my dissertation and got some great ideas from fellow attendees. Basically, I would definitely recommend the Gordon Conference structure to fellow graduate students if there is one in your field. If not, new ones are always starting- for instance a Predator-Prey Interactions conference will be held from January 5-10, 2014. Why do species occur where they do? How do we accurately predict their occurrence? These questions have inspired naturalists and scientists for many years. Accurate species occurrence information can be used to select protected areas, identify movement corridors, and develop successful management practices. The research I conduct at Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia, Kenya investigates how environmental conditions and spatial scale influence species occurrence patterns. Both humans and animals are known to select resources at different spatial scales. For example, when choosing a city in which to live, I might consider weather patterns, local amenities, and job availability. When purchasing a home, I would want to know a house’s square footage, yard size, and safety. Animals respond to environmental conditions at different scales in similar ways. When selecting a home range, a bird might prioritize food resources, water availability, and nearby competitors. When selecting a nest site within a home range, ease of entry and shelter from predators may be more important. These habitat selection processes, combined across many individuals, determine a species’ local distribution. The first step in studying scale-dependent occurrence patterns is to measure the scales where habitat selection takes place. One method uses movements made by individuals over long time periods. Places where animals move short distances and turn in many directions likely contain important resources like food; places where animals move long distances over short time periods might be dangerous or contain less food or water. Recent technological developments make it possible for very small GPS tags (less than 20 grams) to collect a precise GPS location every 20 minutes, and run for months on solar-powered batteries. During August – October 2012, my team attached GPS tags (built by the University of Konstanz, Germany) to six adult Von der Decken’s hornbills at Mpala. One tagged hornbill often flies by the research station and dining area, showing off his GPS “backpack.” Movement data are collected by placing weatherproofed antennas, receivers, and memory units near where tagged birds roost at night (search www.movebank.org to see where tagged birds spend their time at Mpala Research Centre). After several months, we will collect enough movement data to identify important spatial scales for von Der Decken’s hornbills. Once these critical features are measured, we will build models that incorporate data on environmental conditions to understand how hornbills select habitat and resources across spatial scales. Measuring the scales that are important to different species will also help us understand how species coexist by splitting environmental resources. Together, a fuller understanding of scale dynamics and the detailed information collected by GPS tags will move us closer to understanding and predicting species occurrence patterns.
--Jennie Miller, PhD Candidate
Last winter in November 2011, I headed to India's Kanha Tiger Reserve to survey livestock attacked by tigers and leopards. What I discovered upon arrival shocked and compelled me: livestock die every day, yet local people are surprisingly tolerant of the large cats that kill their animals. The livestock compensation program within the boundaries of Kanha appears to be successfully abating tempers and minimizing retaliation against tigers and leopards. Three seasons, 484 dead livestock, 115 owner interviews and 152 stinky cat scat samples later, I returned to Yale in mid-October to analyze my data. To read more about my last year of fieldwork and the gist of my research, check out my guest blog on Scientists Without Borders and my just-released article in Yale's Sage Magazine. --Colin Donihue, PhD Student
Welcome to the Schmitz Lab Blog! Our lab is based at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and, led by Dr. Oswald Schmitz, we are 2 Post-docs, 4 PhD students and 4 Masters students. Our research ranges over 4 continents from grasshoppers in the grasslands of Connecticut to tigers in the jungles of central India. We dig on our hands and knees for goldenrod rhizomes and climb 100m in emergent rainforest trees. Tying together all of these species, systems and methods is our common passion for understanding how ecological communities function and how humans affect those dynamics. More technically, Os' research focuses on plant-herbivore interactions and how they are mediated by carnivores and soil-nutrient levels, both at the level of herbivore foraging ecology and plant-herbivore population dynamics. He'll tell you more about the details in future posts, but these kinds of questions permeate all of the lab's research. We use a combination of empirical research and mathematical modeling to understand ecosystem structure and function. This blog is our effort to reach out to a broader audience to talk about our research, our interests and our perspective on scientific news and discoveries. Our weekly blog will be updated occasionally with posts from lab members on their research, pictures from the field, not-to-miss links to scientific articles and our take on them and much more, so stay tuned! We're targeting anyone with an interest in the natural world and we'd love to spark discussion, so if we're not making sense or you want more information, respond with a comment or send us an email and we'll follow up with another blog post. In addition to this blog we'll be tweeting. Follow us on Twitter for more frequent updates on the Schmitz lab. |
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