Rewilding & Conservation News and Discussions

[wjfox]

Critically endangered antelope saiga makes comeback

3 days ago

The population of a rare type of antelope has more than doubled since 2019, in a remarkable turn around in fortunes.

According to the first aerial survey in two years, the number of saiga in their Kazakhstan heartland has risen from 334,000 to 842,000.

There were fears the animal was on the brink of extinction following a mass die-off in 2015.

Distressing images of carcasses strewn over the steppes made world headlines.

Following a series of conservation measures, including a government crackdown on poaching, and local and international conservation work, numbers have started to bounce back.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57688320

[wjfox]

Giant pandas are no longer endangered but remain vulnerable, China officials say

Friday 9 July 2021, 8:35am

Giant pandas have been downgraded from endangered to vulnerable, after their population in the wild reached 1,800, officials in China have said.

The animals were first reclassified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2016, when it removed the giant panda from its endangered species list.

The decision was met with backlash from Chinese officials, who argued at the time that it may lead people into believing that efforts to help increase the population could be relaxed.

The Chinese government ever since has been cautious in its welcome of the change in panda status, as they had maintained the animals were still under serious threat.

The latest classification developments "reflects their improved living conditions and China's efforts in keeping their habitats integrated", said Cui Shuhong, head of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment's Department of Nature and Ecology Conservation at a press conference.

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-07-09/gia ... icials-say

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Tuna bounce back, but sharks in 'desperate' decline

4 hours ago

Tuna are starting to recover after being fished to the edge of extinction, scientists have revealed.

Numbers are bouncing back following a decade of conservation efforts, according to the official tally of threatened species.

But some tuna stocks remain in severe decline, said the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which compiles the extinction Red List.

It said pressures on marine life are continuing to grow.

And almost four in ten sharks and rays are now threatened with extinction.

Meanwhile, on land, the Komodo dragon is moving closer to oblivion. The heaviest lizard on Earth faces threats from climate change, with fears its habitat could be affected by rising sea levels.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58441142

[caltrek]

Planting a Vision: Why the Secret to Rewilding Success is About People, Not Trees

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -trees-aoe

Introduction:

(The Guardian) A hunter, conservationist and psychologist are working on a rewilding project. It sounds like the start of a joke, though the antics of this unlikely trio have not ended in a punchline but one of the UK’s largest land restoration projects.

They have been collaborating on the Affric Highlands scheme, which covers an array of woodlands, peatlands, montane, river and coastal habitats between the west coast of Scotland and Loch Ness. The aim of the project, announced this week, is to rewild half a million acres (200,000 hectares) of land – by rewilding the people who live in it.

Conservation manager Alan McDonnell, who works for the rewilding charity Trees for Life, has been leading the project, formerly known as East West Wild. He has spent more than two years getting land managers, animal stalkers, millionaires and farmhands to sit around a table and talk about getting wildlife back to the land. “We wanted to speak to as many people as possible before making it a public thing, so that people didn’t feel as if they were pressured into being a part of it,” says McDonnell.

Rewilding is often perceived as trying to remove people – particularly farmers – from the land. In many rural communities, talking about rewilding gets a similar response to insulting someone’s mother. “For some people, just the Trees for Life badge, or the word ‘rewilding’, means that’s it … I might be here talking to you, but we’re not actually having a conversation,” says McDonnell, who called in psychologist Paul Howell to help.

[caltrek]

The following blog may have been written some time ago, but I only recently came upon it. I think it is a good example of "rewilding" success here on the central coast of California.

Sea Otter Savvy

https://www.seaottersavvy.org/ecosystem-superheroes

Introduction:

(Sea Otter Savvy) “With the near extinction of sea otters during the fur trade, our coastal ecosystems were radically downgraded and simplified. The organisms sea otters had evolved alongside suddenly lost the main predator that kept them in check. Subsequent generations of Californians didn’t know anything else, but as sea otters reclaim their historic range, I expect we will continue to discover far-reaching ecological effects that we hadn’t anticipated. The truth is, we don’t even really know what we’re missing.”-Lilian Carswell, US Fish and Wildlife Service Southern Sea Otter Recovery Coordinator.

High metabolism means they control numbers of their prey species

Sea otters live in a cold ocean environment and rely on two traits to keep warm: a dense fur coat for insulation and very high metabolism to generate body heat. This metabolism needs to be continually stoked with energy in the form of food, and sea otters must consume as much as 25% of their body weight each day in order to stay warm and survive. Sea otters are carnivores that feed on an array of marine species—mostly invertebrates like crabs, clams, urchins, snails and worms. Their appetite for these invertebrate species exerts a strong influence on prey size and number and how they live and move in their habitat.

Fragmentation and recovery from fur trade hunting created opportunity for scientific study

Sea otters were hunted to near extinction during the maritime fur trade of the 1700 and 1800s. A population that once extended continuously along the North Pacific Rim was reduced to a few small remnant colonies. In the 1970s, a scientist named Dr. James Estes recognized that he could study the influence of sea otters on other species in their environment by comparing the coastal habitats in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands where sea otters had recovered to similar places where sea otters were absent. Dr. Estes found that the presence of sea otters had a dramatic effect on coastal habitats (see case in linked article). Since then, this kind of comparative study has been carried out in other parts of Alaska, Canada, Washington state, Russia and California.

Image Credit: Moss Landing Marine Laboratories

[caltrek]

Turns out the role that Sea Otters play in fostering a healthy coastal environment may be even greater than the previous article would have you think.

Seagrass Has More Sex When Otters are Around
by Cathleen O'Grady
October 14, 2021

https://www.science.org/content/article ... are-around

Introduction:

(Science) When sea otters dig for clams in seagrass meadows, they leave a pockmarked “moonscape” in their wake. It’s “full of craters, just pits everywhere,” says Erin Foster, an ecologist at the Hakai Institute. But this rough treatment may be doing the otherwise lush meadows a reproductive favor: Foster and her colleagues have found the seagrass meadows in these areas are much more genetically diverse—and thus resilient—than they are in places without otters.

It’s a “major advance” says Dalhousie University marine ecologist Boris Worm, who wasn’t involved with the work. The study, he says, shows “large animals may help to actively maintain the quality and resilience of their habitat.”

Seagrass—a terrestrial plant that made its way back into the oceans—has two methods of reproducing. It can clone itself by sending out roots that pop up new shoots, which are genetically identical to the parent plant. Or it can reproduce sexually by flowering and dispersing seeds.

Foster and her colleagues were interested in eelgrass, a type of seagrass found in the cool waters of the North Pacific Ocean. They thought the stress of the otter disturbance might cause the eelgrass to flower more—which it tends to do under stress—and might also clear new spots on the sea floor where seedlings could flourish.

The researchers compared sections of DNA in 462 eelgrass shoots from 15 different meadows off the coast of British Columbia. In six of the meadows, otters had been living comfortably for more than 30 years; in six, the animals had been absent for more than 100 years, having never returned since being wiped out by human hunters; and in three, otter populations had only been re-established in the past 10 years.

An otter floats above an eelgrass meadow.
Joe Tomoleoni/USGS

[wjfox]

Norfolk white-tailed eagle reintroduction project cancelled

Mon 18 Oct 2021 13.36 BST

A pioneering project to return white-tailed eagles to Norfolk for the first time in 200 years has been cancelled at the last minute to the dismay of conservationists.

The UK’s largest birds of prey were to be released at Wild Ken Hill, the estate that is home to the BBC’s Autumnwatch programme, from next year, with plans to set 60 birds loose over 10 years.

A survey found 91% of local people supported the plans and almost £10,000 was raised through crowdfunding. The estate asked for money to relocate the birds from Poland and build them a temporary home in the grounds while they got used to their new habitat.

Natural England insiders said they were disappointed by the project’s cancellation and said the decision was not theirs.

Sources told the Guardian that local estate owners were worried that the eagles would predate rare wading birds on the wetlands in north Norfolk, as well as interfere with shooting interests by eating pheasants and partridge. There was also vocal opposition from some farmers, who feared the eagles would kill livestock including lambs and piglets.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... SApp_Other

[wjfox]

Extremely good news.

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Latin American countries join reserves to create vast marine protected area

Tue 2 Nov 2021 16.22 GMT

Four Pacific-facing Latin American nations have committed to joining their marine reserves to form one interconnected area, creating one of the world’s richest pockets of ocean biodiversity.

Panama, Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica announced on Tuesday the creation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR) initiative, which would both join and increase the size of their protected territorial waters to create a fishing-free corridor covering more than 500,000 sq km (200,000 sq miles) in one of the world’s most important migratory routes for sea turtles, whales, sharks and rays.

The move comes amid growing clamour for action to protect rare marine species and commercial fish populations against foreign fishing fleets exploiting the region’s rich marine biodiversity, as well as to limit illegal, under-reported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by local fishing communities.

The president of Colombia, Iván Duque, announced an additional 160,000 sq km of marine protected area on top of the country’s existing 120,000 sq km at Cop26 in Glasgow on Tuesday.

The day before, Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, took the first step by announcing the expansion of the current 133,000 sq km Galápagos marine reserve by 60,000 sq km.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... e-mega-mpa

[caltrek]

This next article potentially is a much more difficult issue than might be assumed on first glance. For many, lobstering is not just an industry, but a way of life. For purposes unrelated to saving whales, otherwise sustainable practices have been instituted by (or at least in coordination with) the lobstering industry itself. What is unclear to me is just how big an impact there will be on lobstering in Maine as a result of this particular court decision.

Ban on Lobster Fishing to Save Whales is Back, Court Rules
by Patrick Whittle
November 17, 2021

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireSto ... s-81227802

Introduction:

(ABC) PORTLAND, Maine -- A U.S. appeals court has reinstated a ban on lobster harvesting in hundreds of miles of productive fishing waters off the Maine coast to try to protect rare whales.

The Maine Lobstering Union had won emergency relief to stop the closure of lobstering grounds, which federal regulators ruled was needed to help protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from extinction.

But the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the closure is back on. Removing the ban prevents the government from performing its task of protecting the whales from death by entanglement in gear, the court ruled.

The government's role is “assuring the right whales are protected from a critical risk of death,” the court ruled.

The whales number less than 340 and are vulnerable to lethal entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with large ships. The New England lobster fishery has had to contend with a host of new restrictions to try to protect the whales. The new rules make an approximately 950-square-mile area of the Gulf of Maine essentially off limits to lobster fishing from October to January.

[weatheriscool]

After record low, monarch butterflies return to California
Source: AP

By HAVEN DALEY and OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ

PACIFIC GROVE, Calif. (AP) — There is a ray of hope for the vanishing orange-and-black Western monarch butterflies.

The number wintering along California’s central coast is bouncing back after the population, whose presence is often a good indicator of ecosystem health, reached an all-time low last year. Experts pin their decline on climate change, habitat destruction and lack of food due to drought.

An annual winter count last year by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Mendocino County to Baja California, Mexico, in the south in the 1980s. Now, their roosting sites are concentrated mostly on California’s central coast.

This year’s official count started Saturday and will last three weeks but already an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites, said Sarina Jepsen, director of Endangered Species at Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/climate-scie ... e00966d025

[funkervogt]

If anyone here is interested in doing his part to rewild the planet, consider donating to the World Land Trust. They're a very honest charity with minimal overhead costs, and they use donations to buy wild lands across the world to protect them from human development. Effective altruists endorse them.

I donated $100 to purchase 3/4 of an acre of land somewhere. With that action, I wiped out whatever negative effects my habit of chopping down trees near my property and burning the wood may have had on the environment.

https://www.worldlandtrust.org/

[caltrek]

Feds to Take New Look at Protections for Dwindling Grouse Species
by Erika Williams
November 19, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/feds-to- ... e-species/

Introduction:

(Courthouse News) — The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to consider extending protections for a declining type of grouse found in the U.S. West.

The Bureau of Land Management said it is starting a process to consider further protections for the greater sage grouse, a western game bird species suffering from critical habitat loss.

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey found this year that sage grouse numbers are down 65% from 1986.

The BLM attributes the chicken-sized bird’s decline to a variety of environmental pressures including development, invasive grasses, wildfire and drought made worse by climate change.

“Safeguarding sagebrush habitat is considered essential to the long-term health of sage-grouse populations as well as more than 350 other species,” the agency said in Friday’s announcement

The remainder of the article includes a review of this issue as it was handled in the Obama and Trump administrations. Another example of a fairly dramatic difference between Trump and Biden.

[weatheriscool]

Efforts to restore Indonesian peatlands could save billions in wildfire costs
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-efforts-i ... dfire.html
by University of Leeds

Plans to restore Indonesian peatlands are a cost-effective strategy for reducing the impacts of peatland fires to the environment, climate and human health, says a new study.

The analysis, led by the University of Leeds, demonstrates that the benefits of effective Indonesian peatland restoration will outweigh the cost of restoration, and provides evidence to support ongoing peatland restoration efforts in Indonesia.

Currently, the Indonesian government has committed to restore 2.5 million hectares of degraded peatland, with a projected cost of US$3.2-7 billion.

Published today in Nature Communications, the study uses satellite data and models to estimate that peatland restoration could have resulted in economic savings of US$8.4 billion for 2004–2015.

The 2015 fires in Indonesia, the largest in recent years, resulted in economic losses totaling US$28 billion, while the six largest fire events between 2004 and 2015 caused a total of US$93.9 billion in economic losses resulting from damage to plantations, forestry and agriculture, CO2 emissions and health impacts due to exposure to air pollution.

The study states that if restoration had already been completed, the area burned in 2015 would have been reduced by 6%, reducing CO2 emissions by 18%, and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions—which can penetrate deeply into the lungs—by 24%, preventing 12,000 premature mortalities.

[caltrek]

Ensia recently published on line an article that touches in shot gun fashion a wide variety of environmental issues. Included in that article was this brief discussion of mangroves.

Mangrove Revival
by Mary Hoff
November 29, 2021

https://ensia.com/articles/conservation ... sity-2022/

Introduction:

(Ensia) The mangrove forests that coat coastlines in the tropics and subtropics harbor abundant plant and animal species that thrive at the intersection of land and sea. In past decades development has decimated many, destroying the biodiversity-nurturing and carbon-sequestering services they provide. But in recent years that tide has turned. Conservationists’ efforts to restore and preserve these rich habitats have helped reduce loss. In addition, these wetlands are also the accidental beneficiaries of other ecosystem changes: As inland forests are cut, erosion moves soil toward the coast where it can nurture new mangroves, and climate change is creating more of the warm habitat they need. Together, these changes have reduced mangrove loss to near zero, though local areas of depletion continue.

[wjfox]

Tropical forests can regenerate in just 20 years without human interference

Thu 9 Dec 2021 19.00 GMT

Tropical forests can bounce back with surprising rapidity, a new study published today suggests.

An international group of researchers has found that tropical forests have the potential to almost fully regrow if they are left untouched by humans for about 20 years. This is due to a multidimensional mechanism whereby old forest flora and fauna help a new generation of forest grow – a natural process known as “secondary succession”.

These new findings, published in Science, could play an important role in climate-breakdown mitigation and provide actionable advice on how to act next. They also suggest that it is not too late to undo the damage that humanity has done through catastrophic climate change over the last few decades.

“That’s good news, because the implication is that, 20 years … that’s a realistic time that I can think of, and that my daughter can think of, and that the policymakers can think of,” said Lourens Poorter, professor in functional ecology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper.

This idea of natural regeneration is frequently disregarded in favour of tree plantations, but according to Poorter, the former yields better results than restoration plantings. “Compared to planting new trees, it performs way better in terms of biodiversity, climate change mitigation and recovering nutrients.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... terference



Photograph: Igor Dudkovskiy/AP

[caltrek]

American Buys Tree on Nagasaki Island to Stop It from Being Felled
by Takuya Miyano

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14489704

Introduction:

(The Asahi Shimbun) GOTO, Nagasaki Prefecture--For Nicholas Sutton, a banyan tree he passed by on his daily stroll on Fukuejima islet here is more than just an old piece of timber.

Touching the smooth bark, Sutton, 38, an English teacher, feels as if he could extract power from the massive tree, which stands on a narrow path in the local community with its boughs extending in all directions.

The American saw the tree on his daily walks on the islet in the Goto island chain off Nagasaki Prefecture, as well as when jogging around his neighborhood and going to and from the English school where he works.

In December last year, Sutton heard a cracking sound from the banyan while on his way home from a language class. He quickly turned the corner and found thick branches of the tree being cut down by heavy machinery.

Sutton asked the worker using the machinery “how much of the tree will you cut down,” and he learned that the property owner who resides outside of Nagasaki Prefecture wanted it completely chopped down.

[weatheriscool]

20 endangered sea turtles flown to Florida to avoid freezing
Source: AP

MARATHON, Fla. (AP) — Twenty critically endangered juvenile Kemp’s ridley sea turtles were flown from New England to the subtropical Florida Keys to convalesce at the Marathon Turtle Hospital after being rescued from Cape Cod Bay’s frigid coastal waters.

Each of the turtles suffers from “cold stunning,” a hypothermic reaction that occurs when sea turtles are exposed to cold water for a prolonged time, according to hospital manager Bette Zirkelbach. They arrived Friday by private plane.

“These sea turtles are at the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys to warm up just like the tourists that come to the Keys to warm up,” said Zirkelbach. “The Kemps ridley is the most critically endangered sea turtle in the world, so it’s important to help these little ones survive.”

The flight transport to Florida Keys Marathon International Airport was conducted in collaboration with Turtles Fly Too, a nonprofit group that engages general aviation pilots who donate their aircraft, fuel and time to provide emergency transportation for rescued sea turtles.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/science-flor ... 8d5e67afa7

[caltrek]

Horseshoe Crabs are in Danger Because Everyone Wants Their Blood
by Chris Lovenko
December 17, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/17/228 ... ontroversy

Extract:

(The Verge) Relying on horseshoe crabs for pharmaceuticals has knock-on effects to other species. As part of the bleeding process, Charles River Laboratories, one of the primary producers of LAL, sequesters crabs in holding pens away from the beach from May to June — the season when they lay eggs. During that window, a female horseshoe crab can lay as many as 80,000 eggs. Environmentalists contend that removing horseshoe crabs from the beach decreases the availability of horseshoe crab eggs as a food source for shorebirds such as the migratory red knot. The population of red knots, a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, has dropped 80 percent in recent decades. Conservationists maintain that this decline is linked to a diminished supply of horseshoe crab eggs.

As a result of this linkage, the environmental nonprofits Defenders of Wildlife and the Coastal Conservation League recently notified the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Charles River Laboratories of their intent to sue both entities for alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act. The lawsuit seeks to protect the red knot’s food source and habitat by asking the state to end Charles River Labs’ practice of penning horseshoe crabs.