Andes and Amazon Blog

Tropical Forests in Copenhagen

noreply@blogger.com (Noah) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:32:00 +0000

The future of our planet's forests ultimately depends upon the monetary motivation provided to leave them standing. If the only thing standing between a family and their dinner is a couple of trees, the forests will never survive. Releasing a quarter of all anthropogenic CO₂ emissions, there is no doubt that offering incentives to curb deforestation is the simplest way to go about decreasing humanity’s carbon footprint (compared to changing global patterns of consumption or the energy infrastructure of entire countries). Today in Copenhagen, the EU pledged $2.12 billion over the next 3 years to help reduce deforestation around the globe. Another important policy was proposed to provide $25 billion to 10 tropical nations in order to assist their efforts in saving their forests. We should hope that this policy comes to fruition while keeping a watchful eye on whether or not the rest of the world jumps on board as well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8407112.stm

http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2934

Perturbation and Species Diversity

noreply@blogger.com (Jesse) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:49:00 +0000

I discovered an interesting article that was recently published in the Journal of Ecology. The authors’ research highlights the importance of species diversity on ecosystem perturbation. Focusing on the insurance hypothesis, they demonstrated that species diversity was correlated with the recovery of a grassland ecosystem after drought. However, they were not able to find a direct correlation with species diversity and resistance to drought.
van%20Ruijven%20and%20Berendse%20JofEcology%202009%20resistance%20after%20drought.pdf

Test

noreply@blogger.com (Miles Silman) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:28:00 +0000

A test

Extinction

noreply@blogger.com (Miles Silman) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:24:00 +0000

Tying climate change to biodiversity change is tough. We are good at estimating temperature changes under different climate change scenarios, pretty bad at estimating precipitation changes. The predictions get worse the finer the spatial scale too. People argue about climate change at length in the popular press, but there is one kind of headline that always seems to float to the top without much comment. Something like, "Thirty-percent of Amazonian Tree Species Extinct by 2100" or any of the other famous extinction estimates. Don't get me wrong--it is great that we do this exercise--there is a slug of papers coming out of the lab doing exactly this--but no one is really happy with the results. What we've tried to do in our work is to consistently set the "book ends" of expected change, knowing full well that any of our answers are going to be gussied-up guesses. But at least we know the boundaries of the playing field given some assumptions.

Kathy Willis had a nice little overview article on extinction in last week's issue of Science that is well worth reading. She hits a lot of the high points in the recent literature.