General documents to help with the lessons:
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Powerpoints for each lesson:
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Rewilding Scotland: some thoughts
Is the reintroduction of large mammals to Scotland realistic?
To answer this question, we need to fully understand what rewilding aims to achieve, and the consequences that go along with it. As a general term, rewilding is the restoration of ecosystems to their natural state without human influence. This involves the restoration of the landscape’s natural greenery and reintroduction of keystone species, such as top predators or ecosystem engineers.
The Scottish Highlands has been transformed by human activity from a forested landscapes supporting wolves, beavers, and red squirrels, to a region dominated by sheep farming.
Recently in the Scottish Highlands, beavers have been reintroduced and these ecosystem engineers have successfully returned their territories to a natural state, supporting a new diversity of species. A further project, the Trees for Life restoration of the Caledonian Forest, has started to bring back the native forest habitat that was removed by human deforestation, giving endemic Scottish species a place to thrive.
Reintroduction doesn’t come without its problems.
Many species, especially top predators, face opposition from the public and landowners. Wolves and bears, famed for their ferocity, are the least popular as they are viewed a threat to public safety and to the economic livelihood of grouse moorland owners and livestock farmers. Perhaps the most suitable carnivore for reintroduction to the Highlands is the lynx, as it inhabits high mountain tops, avoiding human contact.
In Norway and Sweden farmers are compensated for the loss of animals to wolf packs. A similar tactic could easily be applied in the Scottish Highlands, but to add some difficulty, it would need governmental support to fund the compensation. The situation becomes more complex in the case of grouse, as the profitability of the land doesn’t depend on individual grouse, but instead on the attractiveness of the area as a hunting resort. In this case, compensation schemes would be hard to promote among the stakeholders.
All in all, the reintroduction of large wild animals to Scotland is a topic that will never be fully agreed on. In spite of this, the cause has garnered some unexpected support from the public and landowners alike, making further reintroductions a possibility in the near future.
Assisted Colonisation – A High Risk Strategy to Save Species from Climate Change
Species extinctions are occurring at rates of up to 1,000 times that of natural levels, owing to habitat fragmentation, pollution, climate change, introduction of alien species and numerous other drivers.
In her recent talk, Fiona Plenderleith discussed one threat in particular; globally warming climates causing species range shifts. This is the idea that as the Earth warms, due to the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions, the normal habitat range of a species becomes unsuitable. Species caught in this predicament face three choices: move, adapt, or die. Evidence of adaptability is sparse with only a few species, such as the European larger banded snail (Cepaea nemoralis), clearly displaying such capabilities. Therefore, in order to avoid extinction, species must move to different latitudes to cope with the changing climate. Fiona addresses the proposal that assisted colonisation could be used as a method of conservation for those…
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The Return of the Wolf
Emma presented her opinion piece on whether wolf reintroductions are feasible conservation tools in the USA. Although controversial, reintroducing top predators like the wolf can facilitate widespread ecosystem change through trophic cascades and their position as a keystone species. She talked us through case studies where Mexican wolves (Canis lupus baileyi), Red wolves (Canis rufus) and Grey wolves (Canis lupus) have been reintroduced, and compared their long-term effects on the ecosystem and interactions with humans.
Grey wolves have been successfully reintroduced in the Northern Rocky Mountains (National Wildlife Federation https://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Wildlife-Library/Mammals/Gray-Wolf.aspx)
The Red wolf had gone extinct in the wild, and only 11 reintroduced Mexican wolves remained, so their future depended on captive breeding and reintroductions. For a reintroduction to be successful the wolves must be able to establish self-sustaining populations; while the extinction of Mexican and Red wolves have been prevented, their populations…
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Its Us or Them: the Conservation Trade Off
“Conservation. The act of conserving; prevention of injury, decay, waste, or loss; preservation: conservation of wildlife; conservation of human rights.”1
Human kind has had a massive impact on the biodiversity of our earth through exploiting resources for our ever changing life styles2. It seems like every corner of the earth has been affected2. If humans are causing ecosystem destruction, surely the route to restoration is to remove the risk of people to safeguard pockets of our endangered world? This traditional view of conservation is based on the idea of ‘intrinsic value’; that every organism has an equal right to exist3. However, here lies the fundamental problem with traditional conservation theory; the creation of these nature reserves and national parks often comes at a price to indigenous people who have lived off the land for generations4. Expulsion and exclusion from…
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Greening brownfield sites can enhance urban biodiversity
Really important to consider in Scotland too! Not just the wilds!
Brownfields have a long history of neglect – it is after all abandonment that led them to the state they are in now. Characterised as areas where industrial activity has ceased1, brownfield sites have recently stirred a fair bit of controversy in the UK.
Their future is one of the current hot topics in both conservation and urban planning. There is ongoing debate about the proposed redevelopment of brownfield sites into housing. The arguments of conservationists highlight the importance of brownfield sites for biodiversity in an urban setting2. Further insight on the issue was presented by Cameron Campbell at our Conservation Science conference.
Brownfields like this are returning to a more natural state, which can support diverse urban wildlife. © Copyright Oast House Archive and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence.
When urban sites are abandoned with no further human interference, what was…
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Please get in touch
You can contact myself: hannah.louise.stevens@gmail.com for more information about the lessons, powerpoints, lesson plans, worksheets and other great ideas. I can send you any of these documents along with suggested development plans for the lessons.
I’m really passionate about sharing scientific knowledge with young children and from my experience kids can really get excited and stimulated by this stuff!
Should we BEE more concerned about our pollinators?
Pressure on wildlife and their habitat has intensified as the global human population has increased. Conservationists believe that humans are obliged to safeguard the diverse range of species on the planet due to the negative effects we have had on them; however, this is not a simple task. Where do we start and how much effort should we place on each species? Following a talk by Natalie Cristo, an Undergraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, the importance of, and services provided by, honey bees became overwhelmingly apparent.
It is important to conserve species that are endemic, endangered and provide ecosystem services (discussed by Groot, et al., 2002). It is often the services or usefulness of a species that gains it the most attention. The usefulness of bees to humans should really be thought of as dependence, and not be so readily overlooked as their numbers are decreasing and without bees we would lose 1/3 of the food produced in the UK.
It is hard to imagine a world without bees or pollinators, because they are vital for the fertilisationof many food crops. Despite this importance they have been declining for decades due to habitat loss and fragmentation, flower decline, pesticide use and disease. More than 1 in 10 honeybees is at risk of extinction according to the IUCN Red List for Bees. These factors lower the vitality and genetic diversity of bees meaning that they are even less resistant to environmental stressors.
A positive feedback loop denoting the challenges and threats to honeybees and a visual display of the importance of honeybees in a variety of different commercial operations.
In China, people now have to pollinate crops and fruits using hand pollination because bee numbers are so low. In a world with such a vastly growing population, we are so heavily reliant on insect pollinated crops that we are forced to go to such extents as these. Visiting thePopulation Institute website gives you an idea of how many people our earth is trying to feed and this should highlight the importance of pollinators.
Chinese hand pollination, carried out because of the lack of insect pollinators.
One of the main problems bees face is the overuse of pesticides, such as neonicotinoids. Neonicotinoids are the world’s most widely used insecticides and are thought to be the main driver of the huge losses in the number of queen bees although they have now been banned by the EU. More countries banning these chemicals and switching to alternative methods of pest removal would mean that we see a less rapid decline in bee populations. It seems counter intuitive and counterproductive to spray the crops to increase yield if that stops our crops being pollinated altogether.
We need to take responsibility for the damage we are doing to local biodiversity, crops and to the humble honey bee and take action in order to conserve them, especially considering human population growth. What would the world be without the bees?
Bringing the pack back: reintroducing wolves to Scotland.
Before considering if we can sustain wolves in Scotland, we must first consider the red deer (Cervus elaphus) which is the most the most prevalent large herbivore. Inflated deer populations degrade the natural environment through excessive grazing, preventing woodland regeneration, promoting soil erosion and competing with livestock for food. Deer are culled to check the population, but is not always effective; since the 1960s, the red deer population has grown by 75-80% despite culling and trophy hunting efforts. Reintroducing the grey wolf (Canis lupus) could provide a solution by predating deer, potentially reducing their population by 50%.
Aside from a moral motivation to reintroduce wolves on the grounds that we caused them to go extinct, the reintroduction of wolves to Scotland would satisfy an important and utilitarian conservation goal. By reducing deer populations, wolves would return the ecosystem to a state more akin to that which was present before human influence. Evidence for this comes from Yellowstone National Park where wolves were re-introduced in 1995, a reduction in deer population and herd behaviour shifted the entire ecosystem, see below.
Figure 1 – A flow diagram describing the ecosystem changes following wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park (a), and visual evidence of wetland regeneration (right) due to decreased browsing pressure (b). Adapted from Ripple & Beschta (2004).
However, it is important to consider that Yellowstone is very different to the Scottish Highlands, especially from a societal perspective. The Highlands have a much higher human population density (~9.1 km-2) than Yellowstone (~0.2 km-2), increasing chances of interaction between wolves and humans.
The Highlands are used extensively for livestock grazing and wolves kill livestock, causing economic loss to both farmers and governments who may be compelled to provide compensation. Over 10 years in Bulgaria, 2,268 livestock were killed by wolves, this undoubtedly had a negative economic impact on the farmers affected.
Figure 2 – Evidence of wolf attacks on sheep near Oslo, Norway.
In Italy compensation for livestock loss costs the government ~1.3 million euros per annum. Additionally, while wolves are unlikely to attack humans, in the past aggressive individuals have had to be shot when they venture too close to civilisation for human safety, this costs money and exemplifies the potential risks wolves pose to humans.
Although… In Yellowstone, eco-tourism brought about by wolf reintroduction has been valued at $35.5 million (£23.3 million), surely this could cover the cost of management of wolf populations, any livestock compensation and still generate a profit. Furthermore, while the overall human population density is higher in the Highlands than Yellowstone, the Highlands are also around three times the size, with a much more clustered population, meaning interactions between wolves and humans may not actually be as frequent or detrimental as suggested.
Ultimately the question boils down to a cost-benefit analysis, should wolves be reintroduced to improve the natural environment, but to the potential detriment of the traditional upland farming community. After all, isn’t this why we drove wolves to extinction to begin with?
Adapted from a post by John Godlee
Further Reading:
Is biodiversity increasing or decreasing?
Biodiversity is the variety of species of living organisms of an ecosystem. Biodiversity is thought to boost ecosystem productivity where each species, no matter what shape, size, how rare or abundant they are have a role to play in their ecosystem.
Whether or not biodiversity is increasing or decreasing depends on the timescale in which you are looking as well as the spatial scale (e.g. local, regional, global). This makes it difficult to truly assess whether we have more, less or the same number of species. We based our discussion on: Dornelas et al., 2014, Vellend, et al., 2013, Brooks, et al., 2006, Hooper, et al., 2012 andMcGill, et al., 2015.
We analysed the paper by Dornelas et al., 2014 which covered 35,613 species in their study. Although we decided with our critically thinking minds that when you initially read this figure of over 35,000 species it does not seem like that many relative to the 8.7 million eukaryote speciesthere might be on Planet Earth! However, when put in perspective, we decided that the study does have value. It includes data from more species than a lot of studies to date have managed to compile and realistically you don’t need every single species to draw valuable conclusions. Overall, we thought that it would have been more precise if Dornelas et al. 2014 had just focused on marine studies than to try to include terrestrial species as well, as we weren’t sure how comparable the marine and terrestrial data sets were in these analyses.
A concern of ours was that large geographic regions of the world absent due to data collection bias. This moved us on to discussing the repercussions of sampling biases. In the Vellend paper and Dornelas’ date came mostly from temperate, well developed areas where active ecosystem management has occurred for a number of years as shown in the following two maps.
The first map is from Vellend et al. 2013 and the second from Dornelas et al. 2014 paper showing the areas where spatial gaps in biodiversity data occur. Seeing these gaps made us think about where biodiversity research occurs globally and how certain regions are probably under represented in the ecology literature, such as for example Sub-Saharan Africa. We also pondered how the spatial biases with climate data are similar to those in ecology (third map), and how the same regions of the world are often understudied in a variety of different fields.
Although the results from the underrepresented areas seem to be consistent with the patterns found in well-studied parts of the world. We were unconvinced that we definitively know what biodiversity changes at local scales might be across the planet as a whole without data from the regions with the fewest studies due to the vastly different ecosystems found in these locations.
An overarching problem in these global analyses is that, even analyses that are as holistic as these, have a bias of data collection in terms of what taxa were sampled. Microorganisms make up the vast majority of the species on earth, yet they are vastly underrepresented in the ecological literature because generally there is less interest in studying them (sorry microbes!). We agreed that we are very appreciative of the folks who go out to study microbial biodiversity out in the real world! Thanks you guys!
The reduced emphasis on microbial ecology is likely because it is time consuming research, where species identification is very tricky and with many species that carry out the same or similar functions within an ecosystem. For example, if you removed a microbe from a system, it is likely that another will fill the niche and there will be no change in the overall ecosystem function. On the other hand, if you altered the top of a trophic pyramid by removing an apex predator the cascade of effects would be more noticeable. We discussed the concept of functional redundancy (which you can read more about here) and that it could be used to disperse conservation resources based on the usefulness of a species within an ecosystem.
To summarise, many scientists have attempted to track biodiversity increase and decrease and many of them come to different conclusions depending on the scale at which they conduct their study, as shown in the following graph. We agreed that an important thing to take away from this discussion is something highlighted in the Dornelas paper; it is important to think about biodiversity change, and it is not necessarily the increases or decreases that we should care about, but the effect that biotic homogenisation could have on our world.
Are biodiversity changes the same across different scales or do we see different patterns depending on which scale we look at? (Figure from Isla’s Conservation Science Lecture on Biodiversity Changes)
Biodiversity in Scotland: Primary Schools 
