Category: Biodiversity

David Millican, IGC Fellow, studies impact of climate change & deforestation in Namibia

Post author By jcoker
Post date March 20, 2017

A Virginia Tech graduate student is living in one of the hottest and driest countries in the world this semester so that he can study how climate change, land management, and other human-caused phenomena impact a community of animals known as the cavity guild.

Composed of birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and invertebrates, the cavity guild, biologically speaking, is a group of animals that depend on holes and crevices in trees for their nesting sites.

However, Namibia receives only 2-24 inches of rainfall annually, leaving the landscape devoid of large trees. To exacerbate the problem, trees that are able to survive and grow in such a water-scarce environment are subject to removal for charcoal production, a common energy source in Namibia.

David Millican in Namibia. Photos by Jelena Djakovic.

“Species in this community are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change due to their habitat needs,” said David Millican, of Greensboro, North Carolina, a doctoral student in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science. “Weather in Namibia is highly variable, with yearly droughts occurring in unpredictable intervals. This variation in weather may likewise cause extreme variations in community dynamics, with some species opting not to breed in years of extreme drought and others altering the timing of their breeding in response to the altered rain schedule.”

The goal of Millican’s research is to provide critical information on how the cavity guild community is structured.

Topics of interest include what tree species are most utilized by cavity nesters, the most important processes of cavity formation, and the intensities of the competitive interactions between species. Answers to these questions will help ensure the preservation of the community and its members.

While in Namibia, Millican partners with the Cheetah Conservation Fund, an international nonprofit organization based just outside of Otjiwarongo. As a visiting researcher there, he has access to research facilities and the center’s farm properties for fieldwork. Currently, he is searching for and monitoring tree cavities in 20 sites, each approximately 40 acres in size.

“David’s work continues our lab’s tradition of conducting basic research with conservation applications and of studies of cavity guilds around the world,” said Jeff Walters, the Harold Bailey Professor of Biological Sciences in the College of Science and co-director of the Interfaces of Global Change graduate program. “He is seeking to determine how connections between cavity resources and the species who use them, and interactions between those species, determine the abundance and diversity of cavity-dwellers. That knowledge can inform forest-management practices in order to integrate conservation with the needs of the people that depend on these habitats.”

As an Interfaces of Global Change Fellow, Millican received a grant from Virginia Tech’s Global Change Center to add a social science component to his fieldwork this semester. Each year, the center, which is housed in the Fralin Life Science Institute, accepts proposals from graduate students to support interdisciplinary research and research-related travel that address both basic and applied aspects of global change science.

“David’s proposal stood out because he seeks to engage Namibian indigenous communities so that they can be part of the solution to this incredibly complex environmental problem. Most conservation issues require engagement of local stakeholders to be successful, and David is determined to make this a team effort,” said Bill Hopkins, the center’s director. “To this end, David has also surrounded himself with faculty expertise in ornithology, ecology, and social science, representing the type of interdisciplinary research that the center seeks to promote.”

To best prepare himself for engagement with stakeholders, Millican teamed up with Ashley Dayer, an assistant professor of human dimensions in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. Dayer, a social scientist, teaches a graduate course called Human Dimensions of Fisheries and Wildlife that educates students about how current domestic and international issues can be addressed through an understanding of human thought and behavior.

“Dr. Dayer and I are keen to understand the wildlife perceptions of communities throughout Namibia, including private landowners and tribal communities,” said Millican. “Namibia is a very diverse country, composed of communities with many different African tribal origins as well as European origins. To understand and incorporate the values of these unique communities into conservation outreach campaigns, we plan to hold focus group interviews with indigenous groups. Our goal is to understand how these different indigenous regions overlap and differ in their perceptions of wildlife to identify flagship species that could unite people in conservation action.”

Flagship species, as students learn in Dayer’s class, are an umbrella species for conservation of a habitat type or suite of species that are chosen for a conservation campaign based on their importance to people, rather than their ecological role. Flagship species are used to attract the attention of stakeholders to raise awareness and funds for conservation and to change people’s behaviors to promote conservation.

“Working with Dave on this research project is just one of the rewards I’ve experienced as a faculty member affiliated with the Global Change Center,” said Dayer. “He’s one of several Interfaces of Global Change Fellows that I’ve had the opportunity to teach in my class. Their passion for integrating social and ecological science inspires me; I am sure that this generation of conservation scientists is going to make a real difference in this world.”

Millican expects to hold stakeholder meetings as early as April.

Related Links:

Learn what it’s like to be out in the field with David on the Virginia Tech Research Blog
Video and slideshow available at VT news

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Story by Lindsay Key

Photo by Jelena Djakovic

Biodiversity

Indirect effects of invasive Burmese pythons on the Florida Everglades

Post author By jcoker
Post date February 20, 2017

John D. Willson recently published a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology titled, “Indirect effects of invasive Burmese pythons on ecosystems in southern Florida”.

Willson’s research paper was highlighted in the online magazine, Anthropocene, published by Future Earth:

Invading pythons and the weird, uncertain future of the Florida Everglades

By Brandon Keim | February 8, 2017

The Florida Everglades are one of Earth’s biological marvels, a vast slow-moving river in whose marshes live—even at this late date, with water diverted, pollution injected and human development steadily destroying—a wondrous and singular array of creatures. Yet the Everglades are also undergoing a dramatic ecological upheaval. They’re home to a new and invasive apex predator: Burmese pythons.

Descended from escaped or abandoned pets, the pythons established a breeding population late in the 20th century. Their predatory habits are the stuff of viral legend (Google “python bursts after eating alligator”) and conservation concern, with researchers having documented dramatic mammal declines where pythons have proliferated. In those areas, once-common creatures like raccoons, opossums, and white-tailed deer are nearly extirpated.

So what next? That’s the big question and the subject of a new Journal of Applied Ecology study by biologist John Willson of the University of Arkansas. Curious about the future of a python-regulated ecosystem, Willson dug scores of artificial turtle nests across and outside the pythons’ range, then used motion-triggered cameras to monitor nest predation. (Rather than turtle eggs, Willson’s nests contained quail eggs.)

Where pythons prevailed, the nests were less-disturbed, as would be expected in the near-absence of egg-loving raccoons and opossums. This suggests a possibly turtle-rich future for the Everglades, and is also emblematic of the indirect, cascading consequences of the pythons’ rise.

“It is probable that pythons are having a strong positive indirect effect on turtle nesting success in southern Florida,” writes Willson, “and may also be having positive indirect effects on recruitment of other small egg-laying species in the Everglades such as ground-nesting songbirds, lizards, sea turtles, and oviparous snakes.” It’s not all good news for egg-layers, though. Willson notes that pythons have recently been documented eating the eggs of larger species, including guineafowl and crane-like birds called Limpkin.

As some populations expand and others contract, their ecological roles will also change. Given the importance of animals as seed-dispersers, for example, certain plant populations might also expand and contract; and that principle can be applied in the myriad contexts of each species’ life history. Altogether, writes Willson, changes might be expected in “vegetation composition or structure, nutrient dynamics, food web structure, or ecosystem services.” The very fabric of the Everglades could be rewoven.

Read the full article here.

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John D. Willson, a former postdoc in the Hopkins Lab and current faculty member at the University of Arkansas.

Biodiversity

Strickland: Scientists zero in on biological diversity in ‘poor man’s rainforest’

Post author By jcoker
Post date December 21, 2016

From VT News

The soil beneath our feet is not as biologically diverse as scientists previously thought, according to a research team that includes a Virginia Tech soil microbial ecologist.

Leftover DNA from dead organisms — known as “relic DNA” — has historically thrown a wrench into estimates, causing scientists to overestimate microbial diversity by as much as 55 percent. Understanding microbial diversity in soil is crucial for understanding how environmental processes like atmospheric nitrogen fixation and climate change occur.

But a team that includes Michael Strickland, an assistant professor of biological sciences in the College of Science, used a high throughput sequencing technique to determine the exact make-up of 31 soil samples from varying climates and ecosystems.

The results were published in Nature Microbiology this week.

“When we started to realize that our numbers could be off, we knew we had to find a way to take a closer look at how many species are actually there,” said Strickland, who is also affiliated with the university’s Global Change Center and the Fralin Life Science Institute.

Information about populations of microbes in soil is important because these organisms play critical roles in the terrestrial ecosystem and they help maintain soil fertility.

But linking the activities of microbes to soil processes is difficult. Scientists need to measure living microbes — a challenging task because DNA from dead microbes can persist in soil for years, obscuring the analysis of microbial diversity.

“This research suggests that a significant proportion of the microorganisms detected in soil using DNA based techniques are no longer living,” said Ember Morrissey, an assistant professor of plant and soil sciences at West Virginia University who was not involved in the research project. “As a consequence we may need to use tools that distinguish the genetic material of living cells from the relic DNA of dead microbes in order to understand the influence of microbial ‘species’ on important ecosystem processes.”

Paul Carini, a microbial ecophysiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and first author of the paper, used PMA, a photoreactive dye that binds to relic DNA but does not adhere well to living cells, to distinguish viable cells from DNA debris in soil.

“Accounting for relic DNA in our analyses will help us understand the important ebb and flow of the soil microbiome and help us better understand how microbes help regulate soil fertility and make earth habitable in the face of a changing climate,” said Carini.

Although soil microbial communities were found to be less diverse than previously thought, they are still pretty diverse, according to Strickland. In one gram of soil, thousands of species of microbes live, causing Strickland to deem soil as “the poor man’s rainforest.”

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Story by Lindsay Key, Fralin Life Science Institute

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Biodiversity Climate Change Disease Global Change Pollution

The extinction crisis is far worse than you think

Post author By jcoker
Post date December 20, 2016

From CNN

The extinction crisis is far worse than you think. In all of Earth’s history, there have been five mass extinction events. You can see them charted here. Now, we’re on the verge of the sixth extinction. And three-quarters of all species could vanish. Imagine three out of four species that were common are gone. This is the first time humans have caused anything like this.

Experience this interactive report at CNN

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Biodiversity

General Mills, USDA & Xerces Society: $4 million effort aims to stop the death of honeybees

Post author By jcoker
Post date December 11, 2016

From The Guardian

On the 33-acre Prairie Drifter Farm in central Minnesota, farmers Joan and Nick Olson are cultivating more than just organic vegetables. Alongside their seven acres of crops – including tomatoes, cucumbers and onions – they’ve also planted flowering plants, dogwood and elderberry hedgerows to accommodate species of bees and butterflies essential for the health of the crops.

The Olsons are not beekeepers, but they are part of a movement to reconnect sustainable farming to a healthy environment. As part of a 2013 project by Xerces Society, a nonprofit that specializes in wildlife preservation, the Olsons worked with a biologist to figure out what types of flowers and shrubs to plant to attract bees, butterflies and other insects that pollinate plants. With seeds and plants they received from Xerxes, and those bought with federal grants, the couple also planted strips of grasses and flowers to attract beetles, which help to defend the vegetables against pests.

“There’s now a ton of bees – bumblebees, honeybees, sweat bees – and predatory insects,” Joan Olson said, adding that the flowering plants also add beauty to the land. “It’s good for the habitat but it’s also lovely for us.”

The Olsons’ effort is one that General Mills, in partnership with Xerces and the US Department of Agriculture, hopes to replicate in other parts of the country in a new initiative. The company is contributing $2m to an ongoing project by Xerces to restore 100,000 acres of farmland in North America over the next five years. The project, which will receive an additional $2m from the agriculture department, will bring General Mills’ investment in pollinator habitat restoration to $6m since 2011.

“Most of our products contain honey, fruits, vegetables and other ingredients that require pollination,” said Jerry Lynch, chief sustainability officer at General Mills. “So healthy and abundant bee populations are a priority for us.”

Each year, pollinators contribute more than $24bn to the US economy. Honeybees alone are responsible for $15bn of it by boosting the production of fruits, nuts and vegetables. But bee and other pollinator populations such as butterflies have been in decline in recent years, which has made food giants sit up and take notice.

Nearly 30% of American honeybees were lost last winter, according to the department of agriculture. More than aquarter of the 46 bumblebee species in North America are considered at risk. Another study found that up to 40% of pollinators, including bees and butterflies, are in decline worldwid

“One in three bites of food that we eat comes from a pollinator, as well as nearly three-quarters of the crops that we eat,” said Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society.

Scientists are still investigating what is causing the mass die-off of bees, although they have reasons to believe that pesticides, fungicides, disease and a loss of habitat are all contributing factors. General Mills has been under pressure to protect the bees from exposure to pesticides.

Studies show that habitat restoration is an effective way to increase bee and other pollinator populations. Restoration work involves planting flowers and shrubs on marginal land, typically narrow strips and edges that border crop fields. President Obama established a 2014 task force that developed a plan to boost pollinator populations, which committed to restoring 7m acres of land for pollinators over the next five years.

“Restoration boils down to having the right kind of flowers in the places pollinators live, and having a lot of them,” said Andony Melathopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health extension at Oregon State University.

Continue reading at The Guardian…

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Biodiversity Conservation Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Postcards Student Spotlight

Postcards from the field: Brandon Semel in Madagascar

Post author By jcoker
Post date June 22, 2016

POSTCARD from:

Brandon Semel, Ph.D. student in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation

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The range of the Golden Crowned Sifaka on the island of Madagascar

“I’m currently writing this at 2:30 am, Madagascar time, as I wait for the local taxi brousse (or bush taxi) to take me from the small town of Daraina to the coastal cities of Vohemar and Sambava where I can finalize my research permits. Let’s just say that things here don’t always go according to a western schedule, as my ride is already half an hour late and there’s no sign of car, driver, or even other passengers! Fortunately, music from the town’s only discothèque is loud enough to keep even the drowsiest of travelers wide awake.

For the past two months, I’ve been in and out of Daraina and its surrounding forest fragments conducting surveys to estimate population sizes of several lemur species. The focus of my study is on the critically endangered golden crowned sifaka, which is found only within about a 40 mile radius of town. But, as lemurs are earth’s most threatened group of mammals and are endemic to (or found only on) the island of Madagascar, we’re keeping records of the six other lemur species also found in the area.

Golden-crowned sifakas are definitely among the most charismatic of the lemurs, with their long legs and tail that help them to leap 20-30 feet between tree trunks, bright white bodies accented by a crown of golden hair (thus the name!), and mellow disposition expressed by bright, orange eyes. Unlike other lemurs in the region, they’re protected from hunters by local taboos. However, as people from other regions come here to try their luck at finding gold, and law enforcement is still recovering from a recent coup d’état, this protection may be short-lived. Perhaps an even greater threat is the continued loss of habitat due to slash-and-burn agriculture, logging, and ever-expanding cattle pasture that are a direct result of Madagascar’s rapidly growing human population.

Thanks to conservation efforts by the Malagasy NGO, Fanamby, I have some hope for the region’s incredible biodiversity. But long-term protection can only be guaranteed if local people embrace the importance of conserving their few remaining natural resources. As one of the poorest countries in the world, Madagascar’s rich biodiversity has significant potential to bring in much needed international tourist and research dollars. Hopefully the continued presence of researchers, such as myself, not only will improve our understanding of how species are responding to ongoing global change, but also will impress upon the locals the international significance of their natural heritage.

Well, finally! It’s 4 am and we’re about to see just how many people, mattresses, sacs of rice, and live chickens can be squeezed into what should be a 12 passenger van (right now I count at least 20, 1, 10, 9, plus luggage). It’s going to be a long, bumpy ride!”

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Photo credit (Range map): IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, species assessors and the authors of the spatial data. [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo credit (Sifaka): By Jeff Gibbs (email & Flickr) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Biodiversity Conservation News

Red-cockaded woodpecker uses fungus to create tree cavities

Post author By jcoker
Post date May 12, 2016

From VT News

Home decor has never been so useful.

An endangered woodpecker carries wood-eating fungi into its tree cavity home that ultimately help to expand the home’s size, according to a multi-institutional team led by a Virginia Tech researcher.

The finding, which comes after more than two years of experimental research in a protected area on Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Researchers determined that the red-cockaded woodpecker carries spores from the fungus Porodaedalea pini and other fungal species on its beak, wings, and feet and introduces them to cavities of trees that are not yet infected, according to senior author Jeff Walters, the Harold Bailey Professor of Biological Sciences in the College of Science.

Michelle Jusino, lead author on the paper and Walter’s former doctoral student, swabbed the beaks, wings, and feet of 11 woodpeckers and sampled 60 tree cavities, half of which were not accessible to the woodpeckers. The holes that were accessible to the birds had the fungi growing in them, while the others did not, indicating that the birds play a role in dispersal.

“Our findings provide the first experimental evidence of a symbiosis between woodpeckers and fungi, two groups of organisms who are often assumed to work together,” said Jusino, who is now a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service. “The common assumption is that the fungi help the birds, and that very well may be the case as well, but here were have shown that the birds help the fungi. The next step is to show that the fungi found in the excavations actually do help the birds complete the difficult task of excavating a cavity in the heartwood of a living pine tree.”

Walters, who has studied the red-cockaded woodpecker for almost 40 years, said these longleaf pine cavities are extremely important to the bird’s survival. As cooperative breeders, many woodpeckers live at home with their parents until they are able to acquire their own cavities. Building a new cavity is a process that could take as long as 13 years.

“In order to create their homes in the preferred longleaf pine, these birds must dig a tunnel through the outer surface of sap wood, and the tree responds by releasing sap that could trap and kill the bird if it is not careful,” said Walters, who is also affiliated with the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech and the Fralin Life Science Institute. “Once the bird gets through this layer, it reaches heartwood which is a bit less risky but still takes years to excavate.”

The wood-eating fungus appears to speed up the process.

Creating one’s own home is desirable because only home-owning birds have a chance to breed. Only two birds (one female and one male) breed per family, and this ranking is based on seniority.

The red-cockaded woodpecker is the only woodpecker that chooses to make its home in living pine trees, and the reason for this preference is still a mystery to scientists. To accommodate the birds, the trees must be at least 100 years old and relatively healthy —when a tree dies, it is abandoned.

The highly specific habitat preference does not bode well for the bird’s endangered status, but in past years Walters and his group, with help from a National Science Foundation grant and other funding from the Department of Defense, have assisted by drilling holes in the trees, creating hundreds of new cavities and attracting 83 new family groups to the Camp Lejeune area. This management project was repeated with populations in the Sandhills of North Carolina and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and their successes led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare these two populations recovered.

With a little help from their friends — both fungi and humans — these quirky birds have a better chance at survival.

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Story by Lindsay Key

Biodiversity Global Change Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Pollution

Tony Timpano’s paper in Science: Mountaintop mining & crop irrigation can increase salinity in freshwater, impacting diversity

Post author By jcoker
Post date March 2, 2016

From VT News

BLACKSBURG, Va., March 2, 2016 – Aquatic life can suffer when high concentrations of dissolved salts enter freshwater ecosystems, a process known as salinization.

An international, multi-institutional team of researchers that includes a Virginia Tech graduate student recommends ways that humans can protect freshwater from salts in a recent article in the journal Science.

The recommendations include the use of less water for agricultural practices, less salt for road de-icing, less discharge or sequestering salts during mining operations, and re-routing of urban salt discharges to retention basins rather than treatment plants or streams.

“We’ve written the paper as a call to action, or at least a call to awareness, and we’ve tried to describe what we think will be an effective path forward,” said Tony Timpano of Herndon, Virginia, a doctoral student in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment.

Increased salinization in freshwater is an issue that hasn’t gotten much attention in terms of science policy, according to Timpano.

Dissolved salts and other minerals are naturally found in streams, but increased levels can be toxic to aquatic invertebrates that are an important component of freshwater ecosystem food webs. At extremely high levels, salt can kill fish and other organisms that humans rely on for food.

Since 2008, when he began a master’s program in environmental sciences and engineering at Virginia Tech, the focus of Timpano’s research has been changes in biodiversity of the aquatic insect community as salinity increases in Appalachian freshwater streams.

Of the two dozen streams that Timpano monitors, those located near coal mining operations have shown the highest salt concentrations and insect losses.

“I’ve been focusing on trying to understand the pattern of salinization through time because it does change seasonally, and then trying to understand that related to the diversity of stream insect communities,” Timpano said. “These insect communities are currently being used as a bio-indicator of water body health for Clean Water Act compliance.”

Now in his third year as a doctoral student, and a member of the Interfaces of Global Change interdisciplinary graduate education program, Timpano is working on his dissertation but says he plans to continue working with the group of co-authors — a multi-disciplinary global advisory group to the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

“I think one of the most important things about our recommendation isn’t so much the details of the science as it is fostering the cooperation between the scientists and the other stakeholders,” Timpano said. “Getting all those stakeholders to the table and communicating that science to those stakeholders is critically important for any biodiversity protection effort to work.”

“Tony has had a unique opportunity to meet and work with leading international scientists who are advancing our knowledge of freshwater salinization,” said Stephen Schoenholtz, Timpano’s advisor, a professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, and director of the Virginia Water Resources Research Center. “Collaborating with these scientists to publish a synthesis paper on this topic has been a wonderful experience for Tony.”

Timpano is also advised by Carl Zipper, a professor of crop and soil environmental sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Timpano’s research is supported by the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, the Virginia Water Resources Research Center, the Department of Interior Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, and the College of Natural Resources and Environment.

Timpano and Schoenholtz are both affiliated with the Global Change Center, which is an arm of the Fralin Life Science Institute.

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Article by Lindsay Key, Fralin Life Science Institute

A university-level Research Institute of Virginia Tech, the Fralin Life Science Institute enables and enhances collaborative efforts in research, education, and outreach within the Virginia Tech life science community through strategic investments that are often allied with colleges, departments, and other institutes.

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Tony Timpano is investigating the impacts of coal mining on Appalachian streams

Biodiversity Conservation Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Student Spotlight

Brandon Semel will use drones to help save lemurs in Madagascar

Post author By jcoker
Post date March 1, 2016

Brandon Semel is a PhD student in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech and a fellow in the Interfaces of Global Change IGEP. This story was first published as a Student Spotlight at Fralin Life Science Institute.

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Flying high for conservation: an Interfaces of Global Change fellow will use drones to help save lemurs

Brandon Semel’s doctoral research can be traced back to a picture book.

Within the book are images of bushy tailed lemurs, hand drawn by an eight-year-old Brandon growing up in the Midwestern United States. He’d first seen the big-eyed primates on a wildlife documentary show on television and was hooked.

When Brandon presented his dad with the book, Brad Semel knew he had to encourage his son’s passion. He called the Duke Lemur Center and arranged a guided tour. They graciously obliged.

Little did Brandon know that the person who led the tour would one day be the advisor for his undergraduate research into the wild world of lemurs.

“I was told that a family with a third grader who knew a lot about primates, and lemurs in particular, had scheduled a visit,” said Dr. Ken Glander, a professor in the Evolutionary Anthropology Department at Duke University, and former director of the Lemur Center. “I was intrigued and told my staff that I was willing to be their guide on their visit. Brandon was unusual in that he was already much better informed than most young students; he was already at the level of many Duke undergraduates.”

Back home in Illinois, Brandon volunteered with the state’s department of natural resources, where he participated in wetland bird surveys, habitat restoration, and prescribed burns to maintain native prairies. While his knowledge and interest in all wildlife grew, he still had a favorite.

A budding anthropologist

Come college time, Brandon knew exactly where he wanted to go. He chose to enroll as an evolutionary anthropology major at Duke University in order to gain the knowledge he needed to help conserve his beloved lemurs.

At first glance, anthropology seems like an odd choice, as the field is often centered on the study of humans. However, the close genetic tie between humans and other primates, such as lemurs, makes it the major of choice for primate researchers.

“Studying the wide diversity of social behavior, nutrition, culture, habitat use, and evolutionary history of primates, our closest living ancestors, can teach us a lot about early human evolution,” said Brandon. “Thus, primatology is often included under physical anthropology. Most people who study primates in the United States —whether they’re studying behavior, conservation, evolution, morphology, etc.— work out of anthropology departments.”

As an undergraduate researcher in the evolutionary anthropology department at Duke, Brandon began working as a research assistant to Dr. Luke Dollar, associate professor of biology, who had strong ties to the Duke Lemur Center.

With Dollar, Semel traveled back to Madagascar to investigate the effects of human encroachment on the fossa, the most significant predator to lemurs besides humans. Fossas—which made a Disney debut in the film Madagascar—resemble miniature mountain lions, though they are more closely related to mongooses.

By conducting extensive vertebrate surveys and trappings, the team that Semel worked with found that increasing feral dog populations were reducing populations of birds, reptiles, and mammals across the landscape. They also found that feral dogs were able to out-compete fossas for food. Therefore, the fossas were driven away from forest edges and deeper into the shrinking interior.

Living amongst native people while on research projects, Brandon saw a whole new Madagascar.

“Once I started to get a handle on the language, things really changed because I was no longer hearing second hand accounts of the challenges that people were facing,” Semel said. “They suddenly became real. People had individual hopes and dreams that I could understand and relate to, but the lengths to which people had to go to achieve them was mind-boggling and the obstacles seemed insurmountable. Everyone always talks about the Malagasy (the ethnic group that makes up the population of Madagascar) being tied to their homelands and families, so I was shocked to hear what lengths people would travel to find jobs or work, not knowing when or if they would be able to return home.”

Brandon learned about the specific environmental and economic challenges faced by the Malagasy. For example, he learned that poor tropical soils make a lot of the country’s land unsuitable for agriculture.

“When people need farm land, really all they can do is cut down the trees and burn them, to release those nutrients back into the soil,” Brandon said. “If you do that on a small scale, every few years, it can be sustainable. But Madagascar has one of the fastest growing human populations in Africa, in the world really, and so it has just become unsustainable.”

He also learned that in the rainforest areas, where it’s hard to keep domesticated animals, lemurs are the only real source of meat that the Malagasy have access to, and, therefore, hunting is a major threat for many lemur species.

While an undergraduate researcher in Madagascar, Brandon connected with Dr. Sarah Karpanty, an associate professor of wildlife in the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech. Brandon chose to continue his studies at Northern Illinois University where he got a master’s degree in anthropology; however, he stayed in touch with Karpanty, and this connection would prove important down the road.

A commitment to conservation

For his master’s thesis back in his home state, Brandon chose to study why two lemur species that live in Madagascar’s eastern rainforests eat soil. He investigated several potential reasons: parasite removal from the gut, acid neutralization, diarrhea prevention, that the soil packed enough minerals to serve as a daily vitamin, and that the dirt flushed out toxins in the system.

The toxins, Brandon found, come from the lemur’s diet, which consists of leaves and seeds packed full of toxins created by the plants for defense. In the end, he found that this was the most likely reason for soil consumption.

Brandon enjoyed his master’s research, but when he decided to go for a doctorate, he knew that he wanted it to be in a field in which his research would go beyond behavioral studies of lemurs to applied conservation research.

That’s what brought him to Virginia Tech to work with Karpanty. After applying for and receiving a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship to fund his studies, Brandon came to Virginia Tech in August 2015. Now, he is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, and a fellow in the Interfaces of Global Change interdisciplinary graduate education program.

At Virginia Tech, he hopes to expand his lemur research by studying how climate change has and will continue to shape the distributions of critically endangered golden-crowned sifakas in northern Madagascar.

“Their habitats are highly fragmented,” Brandon said. “The entire species is found in an area half the size of Montgomery County. There are fewer lemurs than there are students at Virginia Tech.”

This summer, with the help of a $3,000 grant from the Cleveland Metro Parks Zoo, Brandon plans to use drone surveys to get the best data on population estimates of the golden-crowned sifaka in the forests of northern Madagascar. Drones are ideal for monitoring places that are hard-to-reach by foot, places where lemurs typically like to hang out.

The drone footage involves both still and moving photography, and geo-reference technology allows researchers to know the exact GPS coordinates where a lemur is photographed.

The use of drones for conservation research has become popular in the last few years. Ecologist Lian Pin Koh of Yale University founded ConservationDrones.org in 2012—an organization that seeks to raise public awareness about the use of drones for conservation purposes and to provide materials for researchers wanting to explore the technology, according to the group’s website.

While there are many regulations surrounding the use of drones to protect both people and wildlife, if successful, the technology has a lot of data to offer researchers.

“At the very least, drones can provide updated land cover data that’s often hard to come by and very expensive for conservation work,” said Semel. “But with the rate that drone technology is advancing, the sky really is the limit!”

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Posted March 1, 2016

Story by Lindsay Key

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Biodiversity

UN Biodiversity Panel: Decline of bees poses risks to major crops

Post author By jcoker
Post date February 26, 2016

From Apple News

Populations of bees, butterflies and other species important for agricultural pollination are declining, posing potential risks to major world crops, a UN body on biodiversity said Friday.

“Many wild bees and butterflies have been declining in abundance, occurrence and diversity at local and regional scales in Northwest Europe and North America,” said an assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

It said declines had also been detected elsewhere in the world and that possible causes include habitat loss, pesticides, pollution, invasive species, pathogens and climate change.

The report by the IPBES, which was established under UN auspices in 2012 to assess the state of ecosystems and biodiversity, stopped short of declaring a full-scale threat to food supplies.

But it stressed the importance of protecting pollinators to ensure stable fruit and vegetable output, amid concern over the challenge of feeding the world’s growing population in coming decades.

It said animal pollination is directly responsible for between 5-8% of global agricultural production by volume, amounting to between $235bn (£167bn) and $577bn worth of annual output.

In addition, more than three-quarters of the “leading types of global food crops” rely to some extent on animal pollination for yield and quality.

“Pollinator-dependent species encompass many fruit, vegetable, seed, nut and oil crops, which supply major proportions of micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals in the human diet,” the IPBES said.

Pollination is the transfer of pollen between the male and female parts of flowers to enable reproduction.

The assessment is the work of nearly 80 scientists from around the world and was released at an IPBES meeting in Kuala Lumpur.

It is the first report by the four-year-old group, which is considered the biodiversity equivalent of the UN-organised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In Europe, 9% of bee and butterfly species are threatened with extinction and populations are declining for 37% of bee species and 31% of butterfly species for which sufficient data is available, the IPBES said.

In some places in Europe more than 40% of bee species may be threatened, it added.

A “data gap” frustrates analysis of the situation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, but the same drivers are suspected to be at work in those regions, it said.

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Honeybee photo by Charlesjsharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography