Biodiversity Asia 2012 : Day 2 : Talking Science

Day two of the SCB Asia regional conference brought with it a packed schedule and much running around as a few of us attempted to make it to various talk in parallel sessions. Some even tried this between the speed talks (!). Today for me turned out to be all about megafauna - the BIG animals. Tigers - Indian and Siberian, elephants, dholes, leopards their distributions, their populations, degrading connectivity and maintaining genetic pools. Very heavy with models and statistics that conclusively provide enough scientific motivation to employ these results in policy.

Talking (yes, still) about the snippets that I noted and remember will be a jumble if we do this chronologically. So instead I am going to go topic wise.

Tigers - Russian conservation efforts need to see that large biomass prey base remains intact because these cats cannot afford to spend energy to hunt the required number of smaller prey across a year. Tigers in India - they traverse across the larger agricultural matrix quite well and novel ways are being used to look at the existing populations. The routes they take are sometimes quite surprising with a few protected areas for tigers being completely avoided (!) and some parks behaving like a "bus stop" with a large amount of inflow - outflow. Connectivity will have to be more seriously looked at and factors defining some protected ares not being used must be addressed to have a better handle on the conservation of the same. Also in tiger habitats a great deal can be and has been achieved through local peoples trained in survey methods.

Leopards - exist in extensive farmland and may be culture shocked when caught and relocated to a forest where they must learn what is prey and deal with forest structural factors of a thick canopy or non-crop vegetation. Maybe even the total absence of people may throw them off track. Maybe this happens only in India. We should remember cats are territorial and empty lots get taken off the market - so relocation may just swap individuals around. Relocation we're now finding may increase human-big cat conflict (at least with leopards). Townie leopards should probably not be released in the wild.

Elephants - populations being blocked in by private estates and corridors shrinking seasonally may not be the only changes they are finding hard to cope with. A road that is almost entirely as a linear barrier (too steep sides + human settlement concentrations) may require us to build viable overpasses. Needless to say - science must govern the placement of such measures, not administration and certainly not human convenience.

Other large carnivores - Canids being threatened by distemper carrying stray dogs and roaming outside of parks are often the very populations that provide for genetic mixing. Populations within parks also are increasingly being affected by hard edge affects - much larger for some taxa (sometimes extending beyond 6kms inside a forest from the edge). Conservation for large mammals across the region will have to consider measures that involve human dominated landscapes in a bid for healthy populations of large carnivores.

Peppered among the 'big carnivore day' today were science findings such as - 
- Economic approaches to solving people-park situations fail in long term as attachment to land and way of life are rarely adequately compensated.

- Biodiversity of taxa like birds and amphibians largely fall through the net of protected areas and have have a lot less ability to bridge fragmentation gaps. These taxa therefore are under great peril even and especially in biodiversity hotspots where human pressures on non-protected land are converting as much habitat as legally possible.

- Vultures: the fight against Diclofenac use for cattle continues unabated and must remain the top priority for the many species of vulture to survive.

- Lion Tailed Macaques are in dire need of canopy connectivity between populations especially to facilitate males to get around.

- A study on forest and tea estates in Manipur found that ambient air temperature warming causes more carbon flux. (Initial findings that need more spatial and seasonal replicates that may point to these key habitat's source and sink functions for carbon storage)

A take-away from yesterday that got reiterated at the closing of today's sessions after a ride of different species and places and wholly ecological in nature: Politics, Economics, Society, Cultures - ALL of this has to be the purview of conservationists. The science has to play out in policy and governance (see what I did there for this regional's theme?). Maybe tomorrow will be a day of acting on all the parallel, collaborative and required momentum today generated to crystallize ideas and future course of conservation in the region.

Also most posters went up today (click the image to view pdf):

Biodiversity Asia 2012: Science, Policy, and Governance - Day 1

The 2nd Asia Regional Conference of the Society for Conservation Biology – Asia Section kicked off today. I can only represent here the bits I attended and / or was part of so bear with some missing parts from this conference in blog posts over the next few days (read - till I keep writing / maintain a semblance of daily reporting)...

Attending a great pre-inauguration workshop on criteria for identifying Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) set the stage of what I am expecting for the rest of the conference. The 3 speakers were Tom Brooks, Diego Juffe and Jagdish Krishnaswamy. The session was chaired by Dr. Vinod Mathur who managed the time and a long and interesting Q &  A session - excellent.

Going over the main driver of biodiversity extinctions - habitat loss, the history of taxa specific site identification criteria - BirdLife's Important Bird Areas (IBAs), Important Plant Areas, Prime Butterfly Areas and the Alliance for Zero Extinction as a starting point of information that already exists gave a good idea that KBAs were not set to be the new improved system, but a framework to provide a global standard way to identify critical sites for biodiversity conservation. Add to this irreplaceability of a species, ecosystem or space and vulnerability measurements and you have the crux of the argument for KBAs.

Sure, there are limits to using KBAs as a biodiversity conservation approach - clearly elucidated by Tom in his presentation. Using KBAs as a box to put all biodiversity in and expecting that to work would be disastrous - imagine trying to fit migrations, source and sink locations of a threatened species (and maybe even getting that the wrong way around due to the criteria largely being for a congregation / large abundance - present both at source and sinks ! ), the choices we make using available data vs actual data and the turnaround time updating a large number of local sites may require if the criteria / data change over time... 

But my fundamental reservation lies elsewhere with the idea of KBAs and is borne out of advocating for IBAs (successfully in regions with strong legal support or local community buy in, dismal in ignored or prime large development real estate)...

Part of the work undertaken in forming KBA criteria will also evaluate how well we have done for species using protected areas. There are only two ways this study could go (assuming it won't be inconclusive) -

If we've done far worse than we thought we would - then does it make sense to layer another framework over the existing ones that are flawed (in their inherent mechanisms / their implementation)?

OR 

If we've done better than we thought we would - how are non official frameworks contributing to this conservation of biodiversity?

I suspect in a country like India, as across much of Asia, hungry for economic growth - integrated planning is far removed from involving corporate sector, government, large development, peoples with even a a passing thought for biodiversity. EIA clearances are formalities and the increasing pressures of large development dwarf the chance for ecologists to make their foot-in-the-door remarks about ecosystem functioning / services and biodiversity value.

It would be very interesting to compare conservation results from places that have afforded frameworks like Key Biodiversity Areas official and legislative importance with places that have spent a bulk of their scientific and policy resources in solely strengthening existing protected areas conservation. That would make clear if we need to invest more in evaluating our present systems and then may be providing an adequate amount of scientific study to solving these roadblocks through good practice and maybe even global standards.

**  This part between the morning session and the evening public lecture provided a little rain, a lot of foraging exploration around the conference venue and setting up my poster (more on that later)**

Evening public lecture: A real treat of a talk filled with witty jokes and more importantly the passion to drive home the point of largely how we react as humans / as a society to something as abstract and destructive as global climate destabilization by Dr. David Orr. I particularly loved his analogy of how if a tiger walked on to the inaugural stage we'd get pumped, use our fight vs flight instincts and DO something. But a slide clearly stating that food will get undoubtedly scarce if we allow the next 30 yrs to go by as BAU (business as usual) doesn't bring forth any fidgeting, mad screaming, running out of the doors or pushing someone else into the "tiger's mouth" !   :D

Gharials Reclaiming River?

 © Sanjib Chaudhary

Gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), Critically Endangered

The Gharial, a critically endangered crocodilian, survives only in fragmented habitats throughout India and Nepal. In the past, it also occupied rivers in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Myanmar. It's current population is thought to be a mere 200 individuals.

Good news then, that it has recently been seen in places where it hasn't been for 40 years or more--the Hooghly District (near Kolkata) on the Ganges River in India.

iREBEL, a conservation organization, and Innovative India Tourism Pvt. Ltd, teamed up with other partners to conduct surveys in the area after hearing Gharials had been sighted there. They discovered a viable breeding population in a 170 km stretch of the river.

The group hopes to establish reserves along the river to protect the Gharials, as well as Gangetic Dolphins and other species living in the area, as many threats still face these nearly extinct and beautiful crocodilians.

The main threats to Gharials are outlined in a report published by the group:

1. Fishing – especially with gill nets and set nets. Juvenile gharials often become entangled and die.
2. Destruction of sandbanks for use in brick factories
3. Disturbance by humans while basking in the sun
4. Industrial pollution
5. Perception that gharials are man-eaters like other crocodiles

If you want to help, you can support the gharials through eco-tourism. You can sign up for wildlife tours with iREBEL, Innovative India Tourism Pvt. Ltd, or WWF-India, or even volunteer to help with their work.

You can also support the Gharials through the Gharial Conservation Alliance.

Lost and Found

Forest Owlet (Athene blewitti), Critically Endangered

Happy new year! 2010 and I write about a species lost and found again!

The Forest Owlet existed for only a decade after it was first described before being rediscovered113 (!) years later in 1997. I had the priveledge to attend a talk by one of the discoverers, rather re-discoverers, a few weeks back here in New Delhi.

Pamela Rasmussen is like an adventure book come to life - filled with a long tale of controversies, mysteries and finally the finding of a SPECIES! A dream all nature explorers and adventurers carry from childhood. So here is the story of the Forest Owlet as I recollect it.

This Owlet was never prolifically observed and a tumbling and twisting tale of specimens follow its course in history. The search only had a few specimens in various museums to follow as a lead. So put on your Detective Cap and follow on - soon these specimens were studied and a tangled web of specimen fraud was unraveled starring in the lead role a Colonel Richard Henry Meinertzhagen a British soldier, an intelligence officer and an ornithologist. Once the truth slipped out and after many a long and hard survey a few tiny patches of forest in India in the Satpuras were found to house these beautiful birds. Its habitat is largely protected in Melghat Tiger Reserve, Taloda Reserve Forest and Toranmal Reserve forest. The key differentiation between notified reserves and reserve forest is the level of actual protection. All 3 places are however under the IBAs of India, broadly strewn across the country and under surveillance by hawk-eyed (or should I say Owlet-eyed) IBCN members. Critically endangered and with ever increasing habitat reduction the Forest Owlet is as closer than ever to vanishing once more than it was a hundred years back!

If you see any Owlet near your garden sunning itself you'll realize the joy of seeing an intelligent predator at their most relaxed... I saw Spotted Owlets (not in danger of becoming extinct) in my garden the other day and it made me think of the Forest Owlet once more.

It would indeed be a shame to lose this bird again after so painstakingly finding it. After all, this time round we may not be as lucky as a hundred years back to see it re-surface again!

You can even adopt this and a few other birds here! This photograph is by Nikhil Devasar.