Deforestation in Indonesia referred in the Guinness Book

In the Guinness Book of Records (GWR) 2009 Edition released this month, Indonesia is once again referred to as the country with the world’s highest rate of deforestation. Citing the FAO’s State of the World’s Forests 2007 (SOFO), the country has “destroyed” its forests at a rate of 1.8 million hectares annually during the period 2000 to 2005. Indonesia was also listed with the record in the previous edition. Last July, Indonesia also placed poorly at 102 of 149 countries in the 2008 Environmental Performance Index published by Yale and Columbia Universities.

The poor position is mainly due to the minimum score for forest management as deforestation in the country was seen as very massive. Jakarta has been angered by such notorious images and subsequently questioned the validity of data and methodology used. It hit back that neither were based on scientific merit, and were only a “piece of sensationalism” for political agitation.

The Forestry Ministry officially released the country’s annual deforestation in its 2006 Forestry Statistics of only 1.08 million hectares over the same period. Interestingly, the data was developed based on FAO’s definition of forests — the same data used in the GWR and SOFO 2007. Judging whose arguments are scientifically sound should be based on precise use of some key terms, such as “forests”, “deforestation” and “degradation”. However, various attempts to define those terms result in unclear definitions. It is not uncommon for different agencies to selectively adopt, use and interpret different definitions and information depending on their tastes and values, even for tendentious purposes. Let us start by recalling the definitions of important terms by some agencies.

First, it is worth to compare the extent to which a particular canopy cover is classified as a forest. The FAO in its final definition in the Global Forest Resources Assessment Update 2005 uses “more than 10 percent”. On the other hand, environmental groups usually adopt more stringent criteria. For instance, Greenpeace in its “World Intact Forest Landscape” adopts “20 percent or more”. Also in some cases, they do not refer to “plantations” as “forests”, but “wood gardens”.

Clearly, due to the different definitions of “forests”, the forest tracts a particular country has will be different. It is also worth noting that there is a spectrum of values on “deforestation”. First, instead of “deforestation” or “forest loss”, such emotive terms as “assault” and “destruction”, are nonexistent in the FAO and “forestry societies” across the globe, while they are employed by many environmental groups, to psychologically touch and raise concerns amongst contemporary society.

via The Jakarta Post

Posted in Alarm signals | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

From Trash to Treasure to Hero

Last week HSUS staff hosted a private awards ceremony for the family of Buffy, a German Shepherd from Oakland Calif. , who was posthumously named the Valor Dog of the Year, the highest honor in the companion dog category of The HSUS’s inaugural Dogs of Valor Awards.

Buffy’s intervention during a robbery saved her owner’s life but ultimately claimed hers. You can read Buffy’s touching story on Humane Society’s website, and also in the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune, where her heroic tale was recently recounted.

So many of the Dogs of Valor stories received are testaments of devotion and courage. I have long believed that rescue dogs have a special devotion to the people who adopt them, and in reviewing these cases, I was not surprised to see that so many heroic dogs had been adoptees. For instance, Jack, a finalist in the Dogs of Valor companion dog category—and your pick for People’s Choice—was adopted from the Humane League of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania after being found in a dumpster.

The family that eventually adopted the abandoned terrier mix visited the shelter on several occasions, looking for its perfect match. When they met Jack, they knew they had found exactly who they were looking for. After joining his new family, this little dog—who someone had once deemed disposable—ended up saving their little girl’s life when he alerted her sleeping parents to her first grand mal seizure.

No animal needs to be a hero for us to love them, but these stories remind us that animals come with rich emotional lives, and that the differences between us and them are ones of degree and not kind.

Posted in In The Field | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Fragile Fish

Bruce MacFarlane has been studying salmon for 25 years, and he still sounds amazed when he talks about their evolutionary adaptations.

“It’s a brilliant survival strategy,” he says. “They spend most of their lives in the ocean–it’s a nutrient-rich environment. There’s loads of food. But it’s also a predator-rich environment. So where do they go to lay their eggs? To these inland streams, where there aren’t as many predators. But there isn’t as much food, either, so at some point they have to return to the ocean. By the time they hit the ocean in April, May, June, you’ve got a bustling farm out there for them.”

As MacFarlane says this, he’s standing next to a swimming pool-size tank at the NMFS Terrace Point complex where nearly grown coho are flitting among shadows. Some of them will eventually be transported to a hatchery on Big Creek just off Swanton Road where their eggs will be harvested and fertilized.

The Central California coho exist in such low numbers south of San Francisco that without a hatchery program they might not be here at all. Santa Cruz County is at the southernmost end of the coho’s historic range, and populations at the edge of their range are never very stable, says MacFarlane. Add to that the fact that the coho are the hothouse flowers of the salmon world, and it all spells trouble. Coho aren’t able to tolerate fast-moving water. They require deep, shady pools for spawning. Their strict three-year life cycle means they can’t breed with older or younger fish, which makes year lineages vulnerable. Nature did deal them one good card; up to 30 percent of coho migrate to other streams to spawn. Indeed, recently a handful of coho have popped up in Soquel and Aptos creeks–places they’ve never been documented before. It gives the species a little flexibility.

Jonathan Ambrose, a Santa Rosa-based biologist with the NMFS (and the husband of Charlotte Ambrose), says coho have evolved to be able to survive catastrophes like landslides, wildfires and even a spate of poor ocean condition years. But that only works if their habitat is healthy.

“They’re remarkable in the sense that one female can carry 5,000 eggs, and she can re-enter a stream and if the instream conditions are good, she can quickly repopulate it. That’s show these fish have evolved,” he says.”But what we’re realizing is, the instream conditions across the range of the Central California coho are in poor shape. Even if the fish make it back from the ocean, if the instream conditions aren’t there, the fish can’t do what they’ve evolved to do, and that’s quickly recolonize.”

Scientists point to a variety of factors in the destruction of coho habitat. The main one, in Jonathan Ambrose’s view, is urbanization. As an example, he offers up the San Lorenzo River, which had coho until 1982 (and had a few again in 2005).

“The San Lorenzo comes up as probably the watershed in the overall worst condition,” he says. “And why is that? Because you have an incredibly high density of roads. Lots are not properly maintained. Dirt bleeds into the creek. All kinds of people are living on the river because, what a beautiful place.

“But what happens is, this fish needs to have complex instream habitat, and in Santa Cruz County that’s primarily formed by trees falling into the creek, creating deep pools. But in Santa Cruz, the county funds the removal of large woody debris in the stream–and no other county does this–and if you don’t have large woody debris in the water, you won’t have fish.”

Drought and water diversion wreak havoc, too, says MacFarlane, and it could worsen. “If climate change has an adverse impact on the hydrological cycle here, what’s going to happen to the fish?”

via Traci Hukill for Metro Santa Cruz

Posted in Endangered species | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Nearly One In Four Of World’s Mammals At Risk Of Disappearing Forever

The most comprehensive assessment of the world’s mammals has confirmed an extinction crisis, with almost one in four at risk of disappearing forever, according to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, revealed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.

The new study to assess the world’s mammals shows at least 1,141 of the 5,487 mammals on Earth are known to be threatened with extinction. At least 76 mammals have become extinct since 1500. But the results also show conservation can bring species back from the brink of extinction, with five percent of currently threatened mammals showing signs of recovery in the wild.

China’s Père David’s Deer (Elaphurus davidianus), is listed as Extinct in the Wild. However, the captive and semi-captive populations have increased in recent years and it is possible that truly wild populations could be re-established soon. It may be too late, however, to save the additional 29 species that have been flagged as Critically Endangered Possibly Extinct, including Cuba’s Little Earth Hutia (Mesocapromys sanfelipensis), which has not been seen in nearly 40 years.

Source: Wayne McLean via Wikipedia
Source: Wayne McLean via Wikipedia

Nearly 450 mammals have been listed as Endangered, including the Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii), which moved from Least Concern to Endangered after the global population declined by more than 60 percent in the last 10 years due to a fatal infectious facial cancer.

Habitat loss and degradation affect 40 percent of the world’s mammals. It is most extreme in Central and South America, West, East and Central Africa, Madagascar, and in South and Southeast Asia. Over harvesting is wiping out larger mammals, especially in Southeast Asia, but also in parts of Africa and South America.

full details on Science Daily.

Posted in Endangered species | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lichens and Nitrogen Air Pollution in Forests

Scientists have found lichens can give insight into nitrogen air pollution effects on Sierra Nevada and San Bernardino mountain ecosystems, and protecting them provides safeguards for less sensitive species.

Their findings are presented this month in the international journal Environmental Pollution and are significant because nitrogen from air pollution causes detrimental chemical and biological effects to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Other harmful effects include elevated nitrate concentrations in streams and groundwater, and weakened California forests more susceptible to bark beetle infestations and fires.

[...]

According to the scientists, nitrogen pollution that has virtually eliminated lichen species in the Los Angeles Basin and San Bernardino Mountains is now exceeding critical loads over much of the Western Sierra Nevada as far north as Lake Tahoe. Other areas in corridors of polluted air such as the Central Valley are also exceeding nitrogen critical loads.

more details here.

Posted in Endangered species, In The Field | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Project 10 to the 100th

May Those Who Help The Most Win

“Project 10 to the 100th is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible.

1. Send us your idea by October 20th.
Simply fill out the submission form giving us the gist of your idea. You can supplement your proposal with a 30-second video.

2. Voting on ideas begins on January 27th.
We’ll post a selection of one hundred ideas and ask you, the public, to choose twenty semi-finalists. Then an advisory board will select up to five final ideas. Send me a reminder to vote.

3. We’ll help bring these ideas to life.
We’re committing $10 million to implement these projects, and our goal is to help as many people as possible. So remember, money may provide a jumpstart, but the idea is the thing.

Good luck, and may those who help the most win.”

A Google supported programme.

Full details and how to participate, here.

Posted in In The Field | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Pain experts say greater focus on high-tech non-animal research could help thousands of patients

Science’s understanding of human pain remains simplistic, with no safe and effective analgesia for chronic pain despite decades of animal experiments, according to an article published in international peer-reviewed journal Neuroimage, collaboratively authored by leading pain experts and the Dr Hadwen Trust. Advanced non-animal technologies such as human brain imaging could offer greater hope for a pain-free future for people living with diseases such as osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia.

Thousands of pain experiments on animals are conducted every year across the world, including purposely inflicting pain on conscious animals such as rodents, sheep and primates. Such experiments are conducted mainly on rodents in Britain by drug companies like AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline as well as universities across the country. As well as being unethical, animal models of pain are simplistic and fail to replicate the multi-dimensional experience of human pain with its complex genetic, biological and psychological aspects.

[...]

Non-invasive human neuroimaging technologies are relatively new but they are being rapidly developed, and their capabilities are improving with lightning speed. Advanced techniques such as fMRI, PET and MEG are already revolutionising medical research by identifying the brain areas involved in human pain processing, those affected by analgesics, and the duration and nature of these effects.

“It’s clear that experimenting on animals isn’t an ethical or even relevant route to study the complexity of human pain.” says Dr Gill Langley of the Dr Hadwen Trust, “It is critical that these often simplistic experiments are replaced with more advanced techniques that don’t involve inflicting animal suffering. Powerful brain imaging machines could help revolutionise pain research globally and speed up the development of pain-killing drugs, providing much needed hope for chronic pain sufferers. But the enormous potential of imaging approaches will only be realised if the government and the research funders make a concerted effort to invest in these human-focused technologies.”

One of the major advantages of these advanced techniques is that the species of relevance (humans) is studied and that volunteers are able to verbally communicate their experience of pain and pain relief in a way that is impossible with animals. Patients can also be stratified into sub-groups, to help develop more specific treatment strategies. For example, human studies are revealing gender differences in pain processing, and showing that painkillers appear to work differently in men and women.

We recommend replacing animal experiments wherever possible with an expanded programme of human-based pain research. We would like to see: the establishment of co-ordinated regional human tissue banks to make human tissues and cells more available for research, as well as a UK Human Pain Research Network to encourage collaborative research, greater dialogue and a strategy for multi-disciplinary human volunteer studies.

Full article on Dr Hadwen Trust.

Posted in Programmes | Tagged , , | Leave a comment