Numerous governmental organizations and NGOs devote themselves to the protection of biodiversity. It is difficult to know how much money is spent in these efforts, but some have estimated it to be $7-10B worldwide (source: IUCN). Even this is certainly insufficient for the need; some have called for worldwide investment of $20B or more.

Conservation and biodiversity organizations principally devote themselves to the protection of (and to a lesser extent the management of) wild lands (or at least as wild as continue to exist) or the restoration of lands to natural states that best support broad and species-rich habitats (that is, high richness with many rare and endemic species). This needs to change. 

Most big conservation organizations focus on the protection of lands that are remote from human population centers. The emphasis is on relatively unspoiled areas, or areas that can be restored to native states. Such efforts are certainly needed to protect many individual species — such as those that require specific features of wilderness habitat or are critically endangered — and to maintain generally high species diversity. It is also needed to protect vast critical ecosystems, such are marine habitats and large tropical forests.

However, critical biodiversity, and nature generally, also exists in urbanized and suburban areas. We neglect it’s protection at our peril.

As is often discussed today, more than 50% of the world’s population now lives in cities — up from less than 5% in 1900. More people move into urbanized areas every day. This is as true in United States as it is in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America — more than 75% of populations in developed nations live in urban areas, including in the USA.

What does that mean for biodiversity conservation? I believe that it means that a greater proportion of funds devoted to biodiversity should be directed at studying and protecting urban biodiversity and, more generally, “nature in the city.” The big conservation organizations have a crucial role to play.

Why?

First, significant biodiversity exists in urban areas. As urban areas grow in density and total footprint, this biodiversity will be put under increasing strain. In addition to resident biodiversity, many urban centers serve as critical migratory corridors. For example, the great green spaces in New York City serve at essential islands along migration routes during both spring and fall. Urban biodiversity is poorly understood, rarely quantified (a few scientists are working on it), and little appreciated. Consequently, it is not well represented in discussions of urban design. How much biodiversity exists? What drives variation in urban biodiversity? How significant are small spaces (e.g., green roofs, small parks) in creating effective green networks for biodiversity. What are effective designs of human landscapes that also protect (and even promote) biodiversity? Given the growth of urban areas this is a critical area for systematic investment in biodiversity — and an approach that could have lasting positive and leveraged impact.

Second, there is a new and exciting strain of thought in urban design devoted to sustainable cites (see Douglas Farr’s book Sustainable Urbanism, for just one review of the state of the field). It promotes modern ideas about walkability, density, ecosystem services, green space, and how economies and quality of life can be lifted together when they are planned in concert. Biodiversity won’t necessarily be the biggest driver in this design revolution — there are trade-offs required in these multidimensional designs — but it needs a seat at the table. If the big conservation organizations don’t get involved biodiversity will be, at best, an afterthought. Ideas about how to distribute green space in dense urban designs and its design — e.g., whether such space is concentrated or diffuse, structurally diverse, etc. — will have significant implications for biodiversity

Third, people want it. People are moving to cities, and they need and want livable urban habitats with green spaces, access to nature, and the positive effects on health and economies that ecosystem services provide. The Red Tail Hawks that nest and thrive in Manhattan receive enormous enthusiasm. So would butterflies, dragonflies, and Ovenbirds. People desire and respond to nature in the cities. Many conservation organizations have renewed their mission statements to include a central place for people (Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy most recently). Conservation organizations should increase investment in their missions in the cites, both for the benefit of the biodiversity they intend to protect, and the citizens that support their programs. The USDA Forest Service has recognized this and created a network of urban field stations designed to create partnerships that address knowledge gaps in urban nature (well beyond just biodiversity) and its place in society.

Fourth, are wild lands the arena in which biodiversity is most threatened in developed countries and so need the most investment? It probably depends on the exact goals of the protection, but in the US and the EU and other developed countries, protection schemes are quite strong, with well-developed systems of preserves, national parks, and wilderness areas. It is in urban areas that commitment to biodiversity is lagging. Certainly there are enormous conservation challenges in the world that involve protection of biodiversity though the protection and management of land, or actions directed at saving particular species or threatened ecosystems. But in many industrialized areas, where strong legal and social protections to biodiversity are in force, we need to invest more heavily in biodiversity protection in urban areas.

It’s time for the champions of biodiversity to get involved in one of the biggest challenges for our societies today — how to design effective and sustainable cities that are also biodiverse and thriving ecosystems.

Must deep and illuminating content be at odds with clear and effective communication? I hope not. Informed policy requires information and data needs to be effectively transformed into information that is appropriately delivered to various audiences. But scientists are sometimes awful communicators, and there is the seduction of “simple” messages that are sometimes just simplistic.

I attended a conference this week on the broad benefits of trees as infrastructure, something many people across the world are working on. The speakers included scientists, educators, policy makers, and communications experts. One of the latter gave an excellent and thoughtful presentation on the importance of clarity, content and communication in any endeavor. His greatest emphasis was on clarity and he is certainly right that clarity is critical as we, as a society, grapple with complicated and often contradictory information and opinion on our way to making policy.

Then he offered the following observation: “Sometimes a leader cannot make a decision because his head is too full of facts.”

Hold on. While clarity is important, so are facts and content. His observation is worrisome on three critical counts.

First, high quality information is the life blood, sinew, tissue and bone of any policy. Without information new policy cannot be designed to effectively address actual need and existing policy cannot be refined based on learning. Of course, many power point slides are hideously overstuffed and confusing – to the point of being useless as mechanisms to convey ideas. That doesn’t make fact the enemy of decision making. It means that technical people and scientists need to get better at communication and communications people need to help the audience understand appropriate content.

Second, the observation implies that policy makers, elected officials, and people in general, can’t handle complicated information. They can. They have a ear for unsubstantiated dogma and demand reliable and useful information to make their decisions. They deserve such information. To provide less than this is to dramatically reduce the probability that our message will be heard and incorporated into policy.

Third, some ideas actually are complicated and cannot simply be reduced to a few words or a slogan. Emotions and sales pitches can be effectively delivered on a taxi topper. The underlying “facts” that support policy and guide its design, not so much. Facts are required and they need to packaged and delivered effectively.

I am a great believer in the critical importance of good, effective, and stylish communication that is appropriately pitched to the specific audience being addressed. But while slogans are key components of any campaign, they are not substitutes for thoughtful, well crafted, and well communicated information. At the same time, piles of data are not useful information. Data must be translated into information that supports (or not) ideas. Scientists and technical people can be poor at such translations, and must become better. Communications people can be unsympathetic to content. So we must work together and insist always that the information that is delivered is real and useful. Strive to be understood and make sure to listen when people don’t understand the important point. Don’t “dumb it down.” Make the delivery of useful information better.

But the answer cannot be to abandon facts for slogans. That way lies poor, unsustainable policy.

As part of the New York Botanical Garden exhibit on the gardens of the Alhambra (Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra), the designers beautifully incorporate many of the poems of Spanish writer Fredrico García Lorca (1898-1936), among whose most famous works is “The house of Bernarda Alba.”

Photo David Maddox

His poetry delivers a strong and lyrical sense of place, and a vivid sense of the mystery of nature. Where do spectacular things come from? And how do they fit with the equally spectacular things that surround them?

How do we find our own place in the world and know it; recognize that it is there we belong? And once we know it, will the place recognize us and accept us to linger?

Árboles
1919

!Árboles!
¿Habéis sido flechas
caídas del azul?
¿Qué terribles guerreros os lanzaron?
¿Han sido las estrellas?

Vuestras músicas vienen del alma de los pájaros,
de los ojos de Dios,
de la pasión perfecta.
!Árboles!
¿Conocerán vuestras raíces toscas
mi corazón en tierra?

Trees
1919

Trees!
Were you once arrows
fallen from the blue?
What terrible warriors
cast you down? The stars?

Your music springs from the soul of birds,
from the eyes of God,
from perfect passion.
Trees!
Will your tough roots know
my heart in the soil?

(Translated by Catherine Brown)

Early references to “sustainability” in an ecological sense referred to sustainable harvests in agriculture. For example sustainable harvests of trees were those that did not exceed the replacement capacity of the forest. Similarly for harvests of food from agriculture fields or fish from oceans, if you take more than is being replaced the resource will eventually diminish to zero. In relatively simple contexts such as these, measurement is likewise relatively simple: measurements of harvests vs. replacement, at least over small scales, generally tell the story.

Since the 1970′s we have been interested in applying the idea of sustainability in a much broader way, to energy consumption or complex societal interactions such as those in cities. There were attempts to measure sustainability (or impact) in energy consumption as a function of human population, consumption rate (or affluence), and the pervasiveness of technology. Nonrenewable fuels are obviously, by definition, not sustainable in the long run, and with higher populations and higher rates of consumption the end comes sooner. Even for renewables high population and consumption can be unsustainable, depending on the technology used.

Generally, though, such systems of consumption and product are easily modeled.

For more abstract applications of sustainability, measurement, planning, and even understanding are a LOT more difficult. For example, in cities, with their immensely complicated interactions of green and grey infrastructure, ecosystem services, and diverse communities, it is difficult to conceive of a measure of sustainability. We can build equations that map the flow of energy and money within the urban “ecosystem” — are the costs of the stormwater management or energy intensive cooling matched by budgets, that is “sustainable”? — but a real model of an urban ecosystem requires something much more dynamic and complex. It is a state and transition model that would look like pasta. And an ecosystem model of human communities and the resources they use would typically would not take into account social aspects of the sustainability of the use of natural resources. For example, is the typical inequity we see in the distribution of parks and trees sustainable, either socially or ecologically?

We need to move towards a more sophisticated understanding of the word “sustainability” — one that includes the possibility of measurement. Of course this will require a complicated and controversial melding of models that describe ecosystem and human behavior, and also human values. What do we truly value as we map the costs and benefits of various grey-green infrastructure decisions? Making explicit models that describe these values and processes will be a necessary step in achieving a truly measurable concept of sustainability.

And a truly measurable concept of sustainability will be required if we want to win any of the important political battles over grey-green infrastructure integration that lie ahead.

Whether a work of art, the creation of a new business, or the development of a green city, all successful endeavors begin with a vision.  A clear vision of what one hopes to accomplish is paramount for success.

In the case of urban forestry, what do we want our cities to look like?  What do we want our urban canopy to accomplish in terms of human health and wellbeing, social justice, and ecosystem services such as storm water management, air quality, and biodiversity?  How should we manage and steward our investment in urban tree canopy for maximum benefit and increase public awareness of the urban forest?

Simply put, the principle reason that a vision of success – i.e., goals – is so important is that it enables us to communicate, discuss and negotiate ideas and qualities that are otherwise intangible.  Goals make it possible to plan focused and purposeful programs.  Goals give us the chance to evaluate various approaches, and offer a standard against which success and failure can be measured and demonstrated.  Such a match between goals and plans is the core idea behind the practice of adaptive management.

We need your voice.  The essential work of the VCUF Task Force is to identify 15-year goals for urban forestry and stewardship in the United States, and then produce recommendations for policies, programs and funding mechanisms that can achieve these goals.

Help us identify the best and most ambitious goals for advancing urban forestry and stewardship in our nation’s cities and urban centers.  Please click here and spend ten minutes to lend your insights, ideas and aspirations for urban forestry – both nationally and locally.

Your input is essential in shaping the future of our nation’s urban environments.  Let your voice be heard!

Global climate change refers to all of the possible changes in climate that may result from the addition of global warming gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. Some critics feel that changing the discussion from global warming to global climate change indicates a flaw in the argument. Since the discussion is now much more broad, scientists can cast a much larger net and find evidence of climate change and “blame” that on human actions when it may be part of some natural cycle. I believe the term global climate change is not broad enough and would suggest a new term: global chemical change.

Pick up a standard college text on biology and you will find sections on a host of chemical cycles including the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle and the sulfur cycle. All of these, and we should include the hydrologic cycle, have both physical and biological elements. We all know that carbon dioxide is taken up by plants and transformed through photosynthesis into materials the plant can use and releasing oxygen. Carbon dioxide spends a good deal of time in the atmosphere, but may also reside in the oceans and in pores within the soil. The focus of climate change has been on alterations in this cycle that increase carbon dioxide, which can trap heat, warming the air.

However, we are also altering other cycles. News reports during the gulf oil spill described the plight of the gulf as it faced not only the oil, but the constant input of soil and fertilizers washing down the Mississippi and tributaries. Fertilizing the ocean increases algae, which are limited by the availability of nitrogen and phosphorus. Add those to the mix and the algae increase dramatically. While they produce oxygen during the day, they use it up at night, depleting oxygen needed by aquatic organisms. We also send nitrogen into the air from power plants. Where this falls in precipitation, it represents a massive source of fertilizer to terrestrial systems. We also add sulfur to the atmosphere from these plants. Along with nitrogen oxides, the resulting sulfur dioxide increases the acidity of snow and rainfall. The result has been acidification of lakes in the Adirondacks, again reducing their ability to support aquatic life.

This all adds up to our treating the Earth as a giant chemistry set. When I was young, I sometimes followed the instructions in the set, but often as not, just mixed stuff together to see what happened. Mostly, I made gooey or smelly concoctions that I poured down the drain (I wonder where that all went). Now we are all creating concoctions that are altering chemical cycles operating at very large scales, well beyond the borders of states and nations. I participate when I mow my lawn, drive my car or fertilize my garden. Corporations and government agencies participate as they use resources and establish policies. As a collective body, we are engaged in a set of chemical experiments, the results of which are difficult to measure as well as predict. Clearly we need to broaden our perspective.

“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandilion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”

Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home.  His paintings are typically about nature: swamps and forests and backyards that include plants and birds and insects and rays of light.  They are full of shapes and living things.  His late period pictures, especially, are intense and even hallucinatory.  There is an exhibit of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York City this summer.

He was also a great journalist and over his lifetime wrote over 10,000 pages in various handmade volumes.  It is there, on 5 May 1963, that he wrote: “It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandilion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”

And so they ARE difficult to take in, both for their beauty and their complexity.  How can you describe and assess them?  You finally stumble, awestruck, into saying that they are “beautiful” or “majestic” or just “enormous”.  But as scientists and biologists we often have to describe and quantify such entities and then communicate the results in ways that aren’t hopelessly obscure.  That is, we need to communicate a very complicated thing in a simple and, above all, useful way.

Dandilion Seed and the Moon (1961-1965)

I just returned from meeting to open a new project with the Bureau of Land Management. Sound Science is on a team, led by NatureServe, to create “Rapid Ecoregional Assessments” of the Mojave and Central Basin & Range (NV) Ecoregions.  These Ecoregions are vast and complex (the Central Basin covers most of Nevada), but we need to create an assessment — a description of the status of the place and how it is changing — that is broad in scope but shallow in depth.  BLM needs a useful snapshot that will help them know what to do as they manage their lands in the face of development, ecological transformation, and climate change.

A core thing we want to do in such an assessment is “roll up” small-scale measurements to make larger-scale observations and conclusions.  We want to take a collection of observations about species and agents of change (water extraction, exotic species, climate change, renewable energy development…not all agents of change are bad) and make conclusions about multi-dimensional and emergent attributes like “ecological integrity”.  Then BLM can know how to best manage its land for the future.

Words like improvisation and imagination can sound awkward in the context of science.  But these are the very abilities that we need to be able to see past and beyond the details — this species is here, that process is there — to create and understand how a vast and majestic thing works and how it might change.  Perspective is another important word — a sense of what you VALUE in the picture you are creating.  The Dandilion seeds are close up in Burchfield’s picture.  He values them.  The sky is there too.  You need to see the patterns and perspective and not only the details; the beating of the heart and not just the heart’s location in the chest.  How do you “take in” a complicated multidimensional thing like a mountain?  With an act of scientific imagination.

As summer changed to fall, Burchfield felt the same urge to imagination.

“All day on the gateway to September putting in the huge insect tree in the August part. For the first time in weeks I let myself go in improvisation and fantasy.” – Charles Burchfield’s Journals, Gardenville, NY, 9 Sept 1950

This piece appeared previously on Sagebrush and Spuds

Ecologists have accused “climate deniers,” who do not believe that the world’s climate is changing, of “not thinking” and have described them as “angry.” Climate deniers cause heart burn in ecologists who are documenting changes in our climate and developing strategies for dealing with the impacts of warmer and more variable weather.

Understanding the apparent intransigence of climate deniers, how they think and why they respond the way they do, can help ecologists present their message more effectively and reduce anger and heart burn. When both sides communicate clearly and calmly we can meet in the middle to solve the serious challenges facing us.

Climate denying is often linked with opposition to progressive legislation, such as the recent health care reform act, and is seen more frequently in political conservatives than in political progressives. Conservatives are conservative because they prefer the way they are, good or bad, to unknowable change. Conservatives are often slower to change than are progressives, who conservatives see as indecisive creatures without clear value systems: after all, they change their minds whenever better data are available! But even more frightening to climate deniers and conservatives is the prospect that the government might tell them what to do.

Accepting climate change and working to address its impacts is often linked with support of progressive politics. Progressives are progressives because they can envision a better world and want to move toward it. This means that they modify their approach as they learn more, which compounds the poor conservatives’ fears: they were just getting comfortable with the first approach and now everything has changed again!

Both progressives and conservatives change, they just make decisions differently. For example, compare the Republican Party’s current role as the champion of Medicare with Ronald Regan’s 1961 speech that described Medicare as the first step down the slippery slope to Socialism. Conservatives simply needed more concrete evidence than those flighty progressives, who rushed headlong into a federal program of health care for seniors before they knew it would work. Now that Medicare is wildly successful conservatives support it.

Conservatism stems from discomfort with ambiguity, apprehension about change, and fear of government intervention.  The conflict between these values and progressives’ acceptance of ambiguity, enthusiasm for change they believe is for the better, and vision of a compassionate government caring for its citizens are the basis of conflict over climate, health care, and other issues.

Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, described the moral roots of progressives and conservatives in a talk at the 2008 TED Conference. He started by describing the tremendous difference in openness to new experiences between progressives and liberals; what I call comfort with ambiguity.  Progressive embrace new experiences and conservatives avoid them.

Haidt and a coworker then identified five areas where moral decisions are made:

• Caring for others

• Fairness

• Respect for authority

• Group loyalty

• Personal purity

They polled 23,000 people in the US to describe the moral foundations of progressives and conservatives (You can explore your own morals at http://www.YourMorals.org).

I’ve reproduced Jonathan Haidt’s graph of the differences (below). Progressives scored high in Caring for others and Fairness, but low in the other three areas.  Conservatives scored high in all five areas.  Haidt described the patterns as “Two channel” and “Five channel” approaches to morality.

Everyone agrees that Caring for others and Fairness are important bases for moral decisions, but only Conservatives also value Respect for authority, Group loyalty, and Personal purity.  Haidt states that both approaches to making moral decisions are important and that they balance each other.

Progressives want to try new approaches to solving society’s problems and “want change, even at the cost of chaos.”  Conservatives “want order, even at cost to those at the bottom.” Progressive speak for those at the bottom of society and conservatives speak for institutions and traditions.  Both progressives and conservatives contribute to improving our society through their different, but complimentary, views on change and stability.

When someone is uncomfortable with ambiguity they look for solid, unambiguous answers that are part of a cohesive framework that will answer a range of questions.  They would rather hear, “There’s no such thing as climate change, don’t believe any of it” than a mealy-mouthed mish mash of, “Well, some things we’re very sure of, other things we’re sort of sure about, and then there’s a bunch of stuff we’re still scratching our heads over.”  Unambiguous, far ranging answers provide comfort and reduce the amount of thought required to understand complex issues.  Thinking is hard work: when is writing the Discussion section of a manuscript easy?

Ecologists can help ease fears over climate change by clearly stating what we know, painting vivid scenarios of expected future conditions, and listing concrete actions that we can take now to deal with climate change and its consequences. Climate change will still be frightening because there WILL be tremendous change and the government may need to place limits on both industry and citizens. But neither anger at the idea of climate change nor frustration at refusals to recognize the process will alter the course of climate change.

I participate in lots of discussions about data, and information, and how to design databases. Sometimes a database is just a repository of data – a place to store it for some future use. More often, though, a database is meant to be an active information delivery system. Let’s call such a thing an IDS.

And what’s the most important function of an IDS? It is the delivery of (1) information that users want and (2) in a form that users can use for their purposes.  Maybe I should say that this really is the ONLY useful function of an IDS.

So I am troubled when I see databases developed “from the bottom up”, because what this really means is they are developed more with the data in mind than the user. What does the user want to know from the data? In what form do they want to know it? These are the critical first questions in any database development project. They must be asked before any other work is done. Develop from the top down.

Database developers often speak about “Use Cases”. Use Cases are depictions of how database tools will look and function. What are talked about much less often are “Scenario Cases”. Scenario cases don’t describe the how of the data searches. They describe the why. Good Scenario Cases are created from discussions with potential users – focus groups or interviews – that discover what they want to know, what kinds of searches they want to make (search terms, key words, etc), and how they want to see the information summarized and displayed.

Without investing in early focus groups and the creation of Scenario Cases, lots of cool programming based on Use Cases will be wasted and misguided. And much useful information will lie fallow and unused, buried within a database that could have been more useful.  That is, it adds up to less that it should, and doesn’t honor all the work and money that was originally invested to amass the data. 1+1+1=2.

“How we doing?” asked the Ecological Manager? “Pretty well”, replied the Ecologist. “How much is pretty well?”, asks the Manager, since that’s what s/he needs to know. And not even just how much, but rather how much relative to what they wanted to accomplish in the first place.

Whether they are called “Measures of Success”, “Theories of Change”, or “Impact Monitoring”, or just “monitoring”, organizations should know whether their actions are effective, and whether they are making progress toward their organizational goals. They need to evaluate both the effectiveness of individual projects and the overall impact of their work; that is, they need to seek to understand how effectively their mission is being achieved. Such assessments involve specifically devised measures of success that are matched to institutional goals and rely on objective, transparent, and repeatable measurement methods.

I’ve been curious about and attracted to the way foundations tend to describe what the ecologists call “monitoring and assessment”: “theories of change” and “impact monitoring”. Ecologists often use conceptual ecological models (Sound Science LLC teaches them in our courses) as a way of understanding ecological systems under management.  Bob Unnasch and I, along with Karen Poinani, wrote a book chapter on the topic ten years ago. Such models, once they are accepted as good and informative descriptions of the system under study, should then be used to identify monitoring targets and design assessments.

But they typically aren’t used in such a way. Why is that? If the model is as strong as a causal chain – that is, is a good description of “what’s going on” – then detecting effort and change at the driver side of the model OUGHT to suggest/predict change at the outcome side. I often think that there are four problems that commonly exist:

(1) In the first place, the casual-logic chains aren’t rigorous enough in the models, so there is no really good description of what’s important;

(2) People get too satisfied measuring the implementation of programs that are down in the weeds and too remote from the outcomes;

(3) We often really just don’t want to know the bad news, so we settle for just measuring effort.

And the fourth? Sometimes the goals of the project are too poorly or vaguely defined to create any meaningful measurement of success or theory of change. Entire organizations can suffer from a poorly crafted mission statement and goal statements that prohibit any meaningful measure of impact.

This Blog will be about a variety of topics — conservation, adaptive management, data, politics, non-profit management, polling — but the unifying theme will be how to create scientific information that is useful. A core part of this is understanding the differences between data and information. A big pile of data is not information. It needs to be intimately related to the mission and goals of the organization. It needs to be organized within a system of understanding — a theory of change. It needs to be translated into interpretation that is useful.  It needs to be news that a Manager can use to make good decisions.