Bluebird

March 23, 2012, 11:03 AM

Ancient Hawaiians Caught More By Fishing Less

By DOUGLAS M. MAIN

Getty ImagesA school of manini fish pass over a coral reef in Hanauma Bay in Honolulu.

Centuries ago, Hawaiians caught three times more fish annually than scientists generally consider to be sustainable in modern times — and maintained this level of harvest for more than 400 years, researchers report in a new study in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

The findings could be instructive for agencies that enforce fishing limits in overfished waters around the globe.

Native Hawaiians caught about 50 percent more fish than modern fleets catch today in both Hawaii and the Florida Keys, the two largest reef ecosystems in the United States, said a co-author of the study, Loren McClenachan, a fisheries researcher at Colby College in Waterville, Me.

Hawaiians harvested about 15 metric tons of fish per square kilometer of reef annually from 1400 to 1800, the study found. That’s five times the median harvest in island nations worldwide today.

Dr. McClenachan and her co-author, John Kittinger, a researcher at theCenter for Ocean Solutions in Monterey, Calif., drew on a variety of historical records and a method called catch reconstruction to estimate historical harvests in the Hawaiian Islands and the Florida Keys.

The Hawaiians used many techniques similar to those employed today, like temporary or permanent bans from fishing in certain areas, restrictions on certain species and gear, and catch limits. But they enforced the rules strictly; breaking them could mean corporal punishment or even death.

While the authors obviously don’t advocate such extremes, penalties in some areas could be stricter, the authors suggested, and enforcement could improve. In Hawaii today, “you get penalized much more harshly if you shoplift sunglasses from a store than if you take a bunch of fish that are the wrong size or kind,” Dr. Kittinger said in an interview.

Dirk Zeller, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study, said that the conclusion makes sense: Hawaiians were able to maintain such high levels because their fishing activities were so well managed and focused on a wide variety of different species, he said. They also left well enough alone, regularly outlawing fishing in spawning grounds and other areas to allow populations to regenerate, Dr. Zeller said.

The two places studied tell very different stories. As historians have documented, native Hawaiians employed a carefully controlled community-based system of regulations on fishing. Rules were passed down by oral tradition and recorded when missionaries introduced printing presses to the islands in the early 1800’s, Dr. Kittinger said.

In the Florida Keys, however, where intensive fishing didn’t take off until the mid-19th century, there have been fewer regulations and a repeating pattern of overfishing of one species for sale on global markets followed by a crash in that fish population and a switch to a new species. This cycle has severely depleted green turtles, sponges, sawfish and other creatures.

Now reefs in both places are overfished — “and there are less fish coming off the reef then back in the day,” Dr. Kittinger said.

Given that enforcement agencies are often underfinanced, he said, they might do better to devise a bottom-up approach. That is already happening in some areas, where officials have adopted co-management schemes with community groups that help draft rules and regulations.

Most productive reefs in long-ago Hawaii had community managers who knew a reef well and made rules unique to their own neck of the ocean, Dr. Kittinger noted.

The researchers reconstructed historical harvest levels by calculating the amount of fish consumption per capita necessary to maintain estimated population levels in Hawaii over the last 700 years. Dr. Kittinger said the results are conservative because he and his colleague used the low end of anthropologists’ population estimates in their calculations.

While some may question the use of such historical data, Daniel Pauly a researcher at the University of British Columbia, said that such information is probably just as accurate as current harvest estimates. One can estimate the catch of an isolated society like Hawaii by using population rates, which can be inferred quite reliably by anthropologists, said Dr. Pauly, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Zeller suggested that the study shows “that we must learn from the past to save the future.”

If more marine reserves were established and limits were firmly imposed on fishing, he said, the fishing industry could actually catch more fish while making less of an effort.

But the blame should not be assigned solely to regulatory agencies, Dr. Pauly said. “We moderns cannot stomach restrictions on fishing that are necessary to maintain the stocks,” he said.

 

March 13, 2012, 9:59 PM

In Africa’s Vanishing Forests, the Benefits of Bamboo

By TINA ROSENBERG

 

In the district of Asosa, the land is thick with bamboo.   People plant it and manage the forests. They rely on its soil-grabbing roots to stabilize steep slopes and riverbanks, cutting erosion. They harvest it to burn for fuel, to make into charcoal sticks to sell to city dwellers and to build furniture.

Asosa is not in China, not even in Asia.    It is a district in the west of Ethiopia, on the Sudanese border.   To many people, bamboo means China.   But it’s not just panda food — mountain gorillas in Rwanda also live on bamboo.   About 4 percent of Africa’s forest cover is bamboo.

Soon it may be much more.  Bamboo may provide a solution to a very serious problem:  deforestation.  In sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of the people cook their meals over wood fires.  The very poorest cut down trees for cooking fuel; those slightly less poor buy charcoal  made from wood in those same forests.  Every year Africa loses forest cover equal to the size of Switzerland.  Terence Sunderland, a senior scientist at the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, said that in southern Africa, even trees that can be used for fine carving, such as ebony and rosewood, are being cut down and made into charcoal.

Deforestation starts a vicious circle of drought and environmental decline.   Burning wood releases the carbon stored inside.   And deforestation accounts for at least a fifth of all carbon emissions globally.  As tree cover vanishes, the land dries out and the soil erodes and becomes barren — a major reason for Ethiopia’s periodic famines.

Reliance on hardwood fuel poses more present dangers as well.   It’s a woman’s job to collect firewood, and when trees are scarce, women must walk farther and farther to find it, an often dangerous journey.

Much cooking, moreover, is done indoors.  The resulting air pollution kills some two million people a year. Almost half the deaths are from pneumonia in children under 5.  Bamboo and charcoal made from bamboo burn more efficiently and cleanly than wood and wood charcoal

Sunderland is talking to several southern African governments about bamboo.  Farther north, the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan, a membership organization of 38 countries based in Beijing, is providing technical support for growing and using bamboo in Ghana and Ethiopia.

InbarHundimo Dedere owns and manages a plantation of African highland bamboo in Southern Ethiopia that was used as a model for modern bamboo cultivation and management training.

How does bamboo improve on hardwood?  Cut down a hardwood tree and it’s gone.  It will take several decades for another to grow in its place; it can take a century for a forest to grow back after cutting. But bamboo is a grass, not a tree.  Under the right conditions, it can grow a full meter a day — you can literally watch it grow.   It is also fast maturing.   A new bamboo plant is mature enough to harvest after three to six years, depending on the species.   Most important, bamboo is renewable.   Unlike hardwood trees, bamboo regrows after harvesting, just as grass regrows after cutting.  After it is mature, bamboo can be harvested every single year for the life of the plant.

Bamboo has other advantages.  Its roots grab onto soil and hold it fast.   Plant bamboo on a steep slope or riverbank and it prevents mudslides and erosion.  And bamboo is parsimonious with Africa’s most precious resource:  water.

“In Africa you want everything,” said Dr. Chin Ong, a retired professor of environmental science at the University of Nottingham in England, who was formerly a senior scientist at the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi.  “You want firewood, you want to reduce erosion, to maintain the water supply, generate cash and employment.   Bamboo comes the closest — it gives you the most things.”

The need for firewood is now critical in Ethiopia; trees covered 35 percent of the country a century ago; by 2000 they covered just 3 percent.   Ethiopia is trying to reverse deforestation by planting trees, and it lags behind only China and India in sheer numbers — in 2007 alone the country planted 700 million trees.   But even a huge, continuing campaign may not be enough to reverse deforestation.  It has been a problem wherever people settled in Ethiopia.   The country’s capital had to be moved five times since the first century B.C., because any concentration of people quickly ran out of firewood. In the 1890s the problem was solved by importing eucalyptus from Australia — a tree that, like bamboo, is renewable.    The first plantations were around Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s new capital, which at times has gone by the name Eucalyptopolis.

But while eucalyptus trees provide a renewable source of wood, they starve other trees and plants of water, and rob water from rivers and reservoirs.  They gobble so much water that they are sometimes planted for the purpose of draining swamps.  By 1913, the government issued a proclamation ordering the destruction of all eucalyptus trees.   It was ignored.

InbarIn Ghana, Chinese experts taught a local man how to use bamboo charcoal and energy efficient stoves.

In the last five years or so, Ong said, Ethiopia has realized that bamboo is a more profitable and greener solution. INBAR’s programis a four-year project financed by the European Commission and the Common Fund for Commodities, a United Nations organization.  The technology comes from China. The project provides bamboo seedlings and trains people to manage bamboo plantations.    It teaches villagers to build kilns to make charcoal, which they can sell to city dwellers (rural people in Ethiopia and Ghana can’t afford charcoal.  They burn wood. )   The program also promotes bamboo as fuel, and has helped village women to set up businesses making and selling a stove with a closed chamber that uses half the fuel of an open fire. In Ethiopia, the stove, locally made of iron and clay, costs only $3.

Coosje Hoogendoorn, INBAR’s director-general, said that while people in Ghana are slower to embrace bamboo because they can still find firewood,  Ethiopians need no convincing — there are hardly any trees left to cut down.

Bamboo is not the perfect plant.   Although the kinds of bamboo that grow in Africa are not invasive — some varieties that grow in cooler climates are — it can be very difficult to get rid of the networks of roots when the plant is no longer wanted.    While bamboo can tolerate dry conditions, like any plant it will grow more slowly with less water, and it cannot grow in desert climates — exactly where it is needed most.   And most bamboo is hollow, which means it burns more quickly than hardwood.  Fortunately, bamboo that grows in Africa’s lowlands is one of the few solid bamboo species.

Because bamboo requires few nutrients, it can grow in soil inhospitable to other plants — not only does it thrive there, it can reclaim the land so other plants can thrive, too.  Its roots leach heavy metals from the soil, hold the soil together and draw water closer to the surface.   One example is a project in Allahabad, India, to reclaim land whose topsoil had been depleted by the brick industry.  In 1996, an INBAR project planted the land with bamboo.  Five years later, villagers could farm the land again.   Dust storms — a local scourge — were greatly reduced.   The bamboo also helped raise the water table by seven meters.   In 2007, the project won the global Alcan Prize for Sustainability.

Charcoal, of course, is not the only thing that can be made of bamboo.  Its tensile strength makes it a good construction material, and it is also used for furniture, flooring and textiles, among other things.   Paradoxically, harvesting bamboo to make durable goods is greener than not harvesting bamboo.  Here’s why: bamboo culms — the poles — do not live as long as hardwood trees, usually up to a decade. When an old culm decays, it releases carbon into the atmosphere. (The root system, which hold 30 to 40 percent of its carbon, last much longer.) This means that an untouched bamboo forest is a poor carbon sink.    Fortunately, the best way to turn bamboo into an excellent carbon sink is to make money with it — harvest the bamboo to make durable products before it starts its decay. Treated bamboo flooring or furniture will last as long as wood, storing its carbon the whole time.

In some ways, the challenge in Africa is not to introduce bamboo, but to persuade people and governments that it has commercial uses.  “We’ve taken policymakers from Africa to China and India where bamboo used in everyday life — and there’s still very poor adoption,” said Ong.   In some countries, for example, Kenya, making charcoal is illegal — a well-intentioned ban that seeks to prevent deforestation, but one that is impractical as long as people need to find their own cooking fuel.   “It is not effective to ban charcoal production,” said Jolanda Jonkhart, the director of trade and development programs at INBAR.  “It is more effective to promote charcoal production with renewable biomass sources such as bamboo.”

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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”

 

Snow Fleas in the UP

March 12, 2012, 7:38 PM

When Snow Fleas Surface, Winter Study Comes to a Close

By JOHN VUCETICH

John VucetichWolves in the Chippewa Harbor Pack.

John Vucetich, a wildlife ecologist from Michigan Technological University, leads the wolf-moose Winter Study at Isle Royale National Park.

Saturday, March 3

Snow fleas by the hundreds have congregated on the surface of the snow. They belong to a group of creatures collectively known as collembola. They look like insects, but recent research suggests they may be as closely related to insects as mammals are to reptiles. They live in the soil, sustaining themselves on decomposing vegetation. Of the earth’s animals large enough to see with the unaided eye — and collembola barely qualify — these are reputed to be the most abundant. Usually they escape our attention almost entirely.

Then on certain warm days in late winter, some adventurous snow fleas crawl to the surface of the snow, where you can’t help but notice them. I wonder what the life of a snow flea is like. Is it itchy to molt your exoskeleton? Do their “springtails” feel stiffer on cold days, when their bodies are soaked in glycine-rich proteins that work like antifreeze? Why do they come to the surface of the snow?

What we do know is that when the snow fleas congregate, the end of winter is not far off. Soon the snow will begin receding and exposing stumps, and south-facing exposures will see the sun again as the snow recedes. The chickadees will switch to their spring song. And the ice will begin to break up.

Our plan, should the weather cooperate, is to fly home three days from now. If today’s snow and wind continue as forecast, then the last research flight of Winter Study 2012 was yesterday. It’s as sad as the last day of summer.

 

John VucetichThe skull of a wolf-killed moose.  The inset shows a tooth impacted with rotting vegetation.

JOHN VUCETICH

Posts From Isle Royale

• Preparing to Live With Wolves
• In Winter Weather, Flying to Find Wolves
• Wolves, Snow and the Red Dragon
• A Wolf-Moose Standoff at Isle Royale
• One Moose, Two Moose
• Following the Wolf Pack
• Much to Learn From What Remains
• A Luscious Meal for Moose
• An Eruption of Ravens
• A Pack of Hungry Wolves
• As Wolf Diminish, Moose Flourish
• Keeping an Eye on Two Intimate Wolves
• For Moose, an Easy Winter Turns Hard
• A Band of Boy Wolves

Sunday, March 5

In preparation for our departure, I decommission the bone boiling pot. The bones are cleaned, tagged, inventoried. Later we’ll move them to a permanent storage facility, where they’ll join the ranks of skeletal remains of some 4,500 other moose, souvenirs of 54 years of effort and the subject of many scientific papers on topics ranging from the causes of arthritis to long-term trends in atmospheric deposition of mercury and lead.

For now, the bones we collected this winter will wait here in the bone shed. Two of the specimens catch my attention. One is what remained of a skull that belonged to an old cow moose. Wolves consumed most of the skull, leaving only the palate — the roof of a mammal’s mouth — and two rows of teeth. It is rare for wolves to consume so much of an adult moose’s skull. It’s an indication of how tough a time they had capturing food this winter.

The skull of another old cow moose shows severe periodontal disease. Rotting, fermenting twigs and needles are packed in a space between the roots of her teeth. I don’t imagine that a human could endure such a severe infection. Of all the moose we’ve ever collected, more than half have significant debilitation, like severe periodontal disease or arthritis.

The next two days will be a blur, and tonight is the last time until next year for the three of us to relax together. We stay up late to watch the “Mollie B Polka Party.”

Monday, March 5

Tomorrow’s forecast is dicey. If we can fly off the island, there will only be a small window of opportunity in the morning. We’ll break down base camp today – all manner of gear and equipment; boxes of canned goods to the root cellar; dry goods, dishes, pots and pans to the shed; seven weeks’ worth of long underwear and winter socks in boxes; decommission the sauna, the water hole and the red dragon.

The Winter Study generates quite a few statistics about the wolves and moose. One of the most important is the kill rate — how frequently wolves kill moose. Right now the Chippewa Harbor Pack’s kill rate stands at five moose killed, divided by the six wolves in that pack, divided by the 42 days that we’ve been able observing them. If we fly today, we might find another kill, but at least we can add a couple more days to the denominator.

No kill in the past few days. As soon as we land, with the sun setting, we strip the Flagship of her telemetry gear and survival equipment and decommission the pump used to refuel her.

George DesortFrom left, Don Glaser, pilot of the Flagship; Rolf Peterson; and John Vucetich, leaders of the wolf-moose project, on Isle Royale National Park’s Washington Harbor.

Tuesday, March 6

At 10:30 a.m., we take off from the ice on Isle Royale’s Washington Harbor for the last time this winter. A warm, moist south wind blurs the boundary between Lake Superior and the sky. Before long, the island has faded into the haze.

This winter we observed the wolves of Isle Royale National Park experience one of their toughest years ever — high mortality rates and low recruiting left relatively few wolves. The Middle Pack is gone. The Chippewa Harbor Pack may not have any females. The future of this population may well rest with the West-End Duo. They mated last week. If all goes well, within a day or two of April 26, the female will be nursing half a dozen pups, each a little larger than your fist.

Despite recent snowstorms, the moose haven’t experienced times this good in more than a decade. That is partly a result of declining wolf predation. Climate warming is adversely affecting many populations of moose living at the southern limit of their range. Isle Royale moose are one of the few moose populations that have been doing well in recent years. It’s important to observe the moose respond positively to reduced wolf predation. With climate warming, that response cannot be taken for granted.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll prepare an annual report summarizing and contextualizing what we learned this past year. Throughout the year, Rolf and I will write papers and visit universities, high schools, local communities and government agencies to share what the wolves and moose have taught us and what our observations mean.

John VucetichThe Chippewa Harbor Pack heads into the forest.

The first lesson draws our attention away from “What does it all mean?” The more important question is, “From where does the meaning come?” The meaning comes from caring, and caring can be ignited by the simple act of paying attention. Pay attention to another creature from one day to the next, but understanding those observations may well require the context of observing from one year to the next, one generation to the next. Scientists can do this in a special way — enlivened with theories and equations.

But the essential lesson of Isle Royale wolves and moose is for all of us. Meaning comes from paying attention to the life that surrounds us, life in all its varied forms.

We land in Duluth at noon, and drive for the rest of the afternoon around the western end of Lake Superior to Houghton, Mich. There we reunite with our sweeties. Every year it ends just the same. We leave in a hurry, and our lives change tremendously. Indoor plumbing and complete disregard for the weather are two of the biggest changes. But we’ll return to Isle Royale in just a couple of months to begin the summer field season, and then again next January for the 55th annual Winter Study. Don, our pilot, captures the spirit entirely with an old English proverb: “It’s a long road that has no turning.”

“Fortunate Wilderness” is a documentary illustrating wolf and moose behavior in Isle Royale National Park over a four-year span. It was filmed by George Desort and had its premiere in the summer of 2008.

 

February 7, 2012, 8:07 AM

Crossed Fingers for a Threatened Butterfly

By JIM WITKIN

Stuart WeissThe Bay checkerspot butterfly, which conservationists are trying to reintroduce in Edgewood Park in Northern California. The insect is viewed as a poster child for the harmful effects of nitrogen on biodiversity, which could be even more profound than the impacts of global warming.

If you stand with your back to the sun and inspect the place on the ground where your shadow is cast, you might spot the tiny larvae of the threatened Bay checkerspot butterfly.

“It takes some practice,” said Stuart Weiss, a conservation biologist from the Creekside Center for Earth Observation. “But when you see a little black object that stays black, that’s usually a checkerspot.”

Dr. Weiss explained the technique as we hiked through the grasslands ofEdgewood Park, a 500-acre nature preserve on the San Francisco peninsula where I have been volunteering.

To reintroduce the checkerspot to the park, Dr. Weiss and his team placed 4,000 larvae, or caterpillars, here last winter. Over the next several weeks, he and several volunteers whom he refers to as “checker spotters” will be searching their shadows for signs of success: a new batch of larvae, descendants from last year’s transplants, that will be transformed into thousands of bright orange and black spotted butterflies in late March.

While the work may seem tedious, especially for an insect whose adult life as a winged butterfly spans a mere 10 days, the study of this tiny creature has far broader implications. The checkerspot, Dr. Weiss explains, “has become the poster child for the effect of nitrogen on the environment.” The impact on California’s biodiversity could be even more profound than that of global warming, many scientists say.

Vehicle exhaust from nearby Interstate 280 deposits up to 15 pounds of nitrogen per acre each year in the park. The interstate runs along the park’s western border, carrying more than 100,000 cars between San Francisco and San Jose on a busy day.

Nitrogen from car exhaust fertilizes the soil just as common lawn fertilizer does and favors faster-growing nonnative plants. “It’s a matter of competitive ability — the nitrogen-rich soil produces a very strong growth response in annual grasses, like Italian ryegrass,” Dr. Weiss said. “They thatch over and smother native plants.”

As native plants disappear, so do the native species like the Bay checkerspot that depend on them. “When you continue to dump nitrogen into the atmosphere, it has all sorts of negative impacts on the ecosystem, on human health, on the air you breathe and the water you drink,” Dr. Weiss said.

The Bay checkerspot once thrived at Edgewood but has not been seen here since 2002. Since then, an aggressive program of mowing and weeding has helped keep invasive plants in check and restore the native grasslands.

Using grant money from the San Mateo Parks Foundation to finance the work, Dr. Weiss and his team collected 4,000 Bay checkerspot larvae last winter from Coyote Ridge park in San Jose, the only remaining habitat for the species. They carried the larvae to Edgewood and placed them over 20 acres on the west side of the park, where its favorite meal, the native California plantain, is plentiful.

During this year’s hunt, which runs throughout February and March, the team hopes to find 4,000 new larvae. A lot depends on the weather conditions, Dr. Weiss said. A wet winter and a cool spring are ideal, as sufficient moisture in the soil helps extend the lifespan of the plants that support the larvae and adults.

Ultimately, the project will be counted a success if 2,000 adults are observed flitting among the wildflowers in late March. Once the adults appear, over the course of about 10 days, they will feed on nectar from the wildflowers, mate, lay their eggs on the native plantain and then die. The annual cycle begins again.

Based on early counts of larvae, Dr. Weiss is optimistic about this year’s outcome, although he expects it will take additional cycles to re-establish the butterfly at Edgewood.

The checkerspot is not the only threatened species that occupies his time. In a remote corner of the park, he points to a few square meters of ground that hold the only known remaining patch of the San Mateo thornmint, an endangered annual wildflower. The plant has also fallen victim to invasive Italian ryegrass, its population dwindling to a few hundred plants by 2008.

Thinning the nonnative grasses and carefully replanting thornmint seeds has brought the population back to nearly 3,500 plants. He is hopeful that the plant has reached critical mass and may now come back on its own without his continuing intervention.

Although the tiny thornmint has not attained the celebrity status of the Bay checkerspot, Dr. Weiss says that nurturing the species is important work. “It’s an utterly unique form of life and we shouldn’t let it go extinct on our watch,” he said.

Jim WitkinStuart Weiss, a conservation biologist,  demonstrating the technique of “shadow hunting” to find Bay checkerspot caterpillars in the grass. Interstate 280 is in the background.  

 

Life writ large in the vastness

January 24, 2012, 6:11 PM

In Winter Weather, Flying to Find Wolves

By JOHN VUCETICH

John VucetichApproaching Isle Royale in winter snow and fog.

John Vucetich, a wildlife ecologist from Michigan Technological University, leads the wolf-moose Winter Study at Isle Royale National Park.

Friday, Jan. 20

“Dispatch, Beaver 1, departing Shagawa Lake, eastbound for Washington Harbor, Isle Royale, two aboard, four hours fuel,” said Pat Lowe, a United States Forest Service pilot. We were supposed to fly to Isle Royale on Jan. 17, but for three days, low clouds, snow and then high winds kept us waiting impatiently on the shore in Ely, Minn. It was clear, calm and cold (minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit) this morning as Pat and I lifted off from Shagawa. Rolf Peterson, a co-researcher, and Don Glazer, our Winter Study pilot, were 30 minutes ahead in the Flagship, our tiny research plane. In an hour we landed on Lake Superior ice.

The island was loosely veiled by low gray clouds — a collaboration of the west wind and moist lake air. Waves lapped on ice-covered rocks that separate Lake Superior from the forest. That forest has insights to share, if we pay attention.

 

JOHN VUCETICH

Posts From Isle Royale

• Preparing to Live With Wolves

The Forest Service plane dropped our gear on the ice and took off. It’s been six months since I was last here, and it is good to be back. It is comfortable and familiar — the feeling of being alive that only minus 5 degrees Fahrenheit can bring, the feeling of openness that comes from standing on several square miles of frozen ice, and the feeling of content from being among so many spruce and cedar trees. Wilderness is not just part of the world in which we live — it is a part of us.

There is a great deal to do. Knock holes in the ice for water. Secure the Flagship to the ice. Bring a snowmobile and several generators to life. Fire up the communications systems. Make sure the refueling system is working. Start a fire in the cabin. Haul gear from the harbor up to the cabin. The chores will keep us busy all night and into the morning. We can’t begin to make observations until we’ve prepared at least some of the essential gear.

John VucetichUnloading supplies on the ice of Washington Harbor at Isle Royale.

Saturday, Jan. 21

We worked diligently because the weather was deteriorating, and we wanted to get a flight in before the snow clouds we could see building began to unload their contents. By noon we were ready to fly.

Where do you begin when you don’t know what you may find, when you know you won’t have much time and when you need to keep an eye on the weather? We began with the south shore, where wolves spend a great deal of time looking for moose. In the flat light filtering through thick clouds, we strained to spot wolf tracks. Finally we saw the tracks of a lone wolf at Long Point. Several miles to the northeast, they hooked up with tracks of what seemed to be three wolves that had spent the night on a rocky crag near Atwood beach. They didn’t look particularly fresh, so we left seeking better prospects. At Senter point we found more tracks, most likely from the same group of wolves.

We flew northeast, listening through headsets for telemetry signals from the radio-collared wolves and staring out the cockpit window for wolf tracks that might cut across any creek, drainage or inland lake. An hour passed without another clue. Plenty of time to wonder: Are three wolves all that remain here in what had been Middle Pack (MP) territory? If they are MP wolves, none of them is collared. It could take days to find them.

Then comes a beep, and another and another. Within a few minutes we were circling over the alpha male of Chippewa Harbor Pack (CHP). He is traveling southwest through a swamp near Lane Cove with four other wolves.

John VucetichWolves of Chippewa Harbor Pack following their alpha male.

Last year CHP had nine wolves. One of them, Romeo, was not among them today. He’d tried to disperse from his natal pack during the winter of 2010, but returned home without success and spend the winter of 2011 with CHP. Had he now taken control of territory that once belonged to Middle Pack? Or was he just temporarily away from CHP? Even though Romeo wears a radio collar, we were unable to find him before having to land as falling snow began to blanket the forests.

Sunday, Jan. 23

Big, wet, heavy snowflakes let us sleep in. We won’t be able to fly again until the snow clears.

 

Do a little dance...roll a pile along...get dung tonight!

OBSERVATORY

The Hasty Retreat of the Dung Beetle

Emily Baird

The dung beetle's dance puts it on a straight escape route.

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Published: January 23, 2012

After dung beetles collect the substance that gives them their name, they do a little dance, swinging around in one direction, and then sometimes the other.

Multimedia

Dancing Dung Beetle

That dance is not one of joy, however. A new study in the journal PLoS One reports that dancing helps the beetles move away from a dung pile as quickly as possible.

To avoid other beetles that might want to steal their haul, the insects need to move on a direct course. “And that is in a straight line,” said Emily Baird, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden and the study’s first author.

She and her colleagues studied dung beetle behavior in South Africa.

In their rotations, the scientists say, the beetles are somehow taking a compass reading from the sky. (How they do this is still not clear.)

“It seems that they’re looking at cues from the sky, and the image of the sun,” Dr. Baird said.

The beetles also have four eyes, so as they roll away from the dung pile, their top eyes may be constantly watching the sky to help them keep their bearing.

Dr. Baird and her colleagues plan to continue their study to try to understand what cues they are relying on to take their compass reading.

“It could be that at different times of day it’s different things,” Dr. Baird said. “It could be the polarized light pattern in the sky in the morning, and at noon perhaps the position of the sun.”

 

Mulch it, baby...

A Second Chance for Christmas Trees

By RACHEL NUWER

Fort Macon State ParkBoy Scouts dragging trees into the dunes as part of an annual dune-stabilizing effort at Fort Macon State Park in North Carolina.

The gifts have long since been opened, the turkey leftovers are gone, and the eggnog has been drunk. For those who purchased real Christmas firs or pines, the tree may be looking a bit droopy or thin. How to dispose of it?

Luckily, creative and eco-friendly recycling options abound around the country. With alternatives like turning Christmas kindle into kilowatts and creating fish farms from firs, locally tailored recycling can ensure that the tree keeps on giving after its retirement.

In Burlington, Vt., the tree gets turned into actual fuel for heating homes. For the last 20 years, the Joseph C. McNeil Wood and Yard Waste Depot has been organizing an annual Merry Mulch project.

“It’s kind of amazing when you see a huge pile of Christmas trees chipped into just a tiny pile of fuel,” said John Irving, Burlington Electric’s manager of generation. “Christmas trees are all air,” he added.

The depot collects about 2,500 trees a year from residents and tree sellers with unsold product. Vermonters bring their trees to the wood yard for chipping and have the option of either taking the mulch home for gardens or donating it to the plant.

Most people opt to donate their chippings to the plant, where the matchbook-size wood chips are fed into a boiler that makes heat, turning water into steam that is directed into a turbine to turn a generator. The system produces a net output of 50 megawatts — enough for about 50,000 homes, or the average load of Burlington. The power produced by each tree is worth about 36 cents, Mr. Irving said.

The energy produced by trees may seem puny: one 25-pound tree feeds a 70-ton capacity boiler for about half of a hundredth of a second. In other words, if the plant was run on full capacity using only Christmas trees, the boiler would have to be fed about 100 trees a second.

Some people favor dumping their trees in the woods surrounding Burlington, but Mr. Irving points out that decomposing trees still produce carbon dioxide. “If people are worried about their carbon footprint, it’s the same to throw a tree into the woods or into the boiler,” he said.

While trees heat homes in Burlington, a winery on the opposite side of the country uses them to build houses for fish. In Healdsburg, Ca., Jordan Vineyard and Winery recently started a holiday tradition known as “Christmas Tree Point,” a collection of submerged trees in the company’s tournament catch-and-release bass lake.

“Instead of getting things like plastic spheres and all kinds of other weird stuff, we decided to put Christmas trees into the lake as fish habitat,” said Tim Spence, the company’s director of operations.

“One requirement for growing trophy largemouth bass is prime habitat,” said the winery’s chief executive, John Jordan. Christmas trees shelter smaller fish further down the food chain, which improves the chances for the survival of baitfish and thus provides more nourishment for predatory bass.

Both Mr. Jordan and Mr. Spence are self-described fishing fanatics, and were the first to submerge their family trees about six years ago. Now, it’s a company-wide tradition. (Christmas Tree Point takes its name from the shape of the submerged pile.) “Right now, it’s almost in the shape of a Christmas tree,” Mr. Spence said. Underwater cameras allow him to check on the trees, which are tied to rocks anchoring them to the bottom of the 14-foot-deep lake.

They plan to start a new pile soon, given that more and more company employees are getting involved. “One employee said, ‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this,’” Mr. Spence said. “I told her, fish need Christmas, too, and she recycled her tree.”

Fish aren’t the only ones who can benefit from Christmas tree habitat. At Fort Macon State Park in North Carolina, recycled trees have preserved the barrier island’s dunes for the last 30 years.

“Dunes are very important for the whole ecosystem,” said Randy Newman, the park’s superintendent.

The trees are placed on the beach, where they quickly collect sand. Birds arrive and leave droppings that help vegetate the future dunes. New dunes replace those washed away in hurricanes and storms and protect inland vegetation from the harsh sea breeze.

The regenerated dunes also ensure that the 422-acre park remains fully accessible for its 1.3 million annual visitors. “We have such a large visitation, there’s a lot of damage done unintentionally by foot traffic,” Mr. Newman said. “We’re able to use Christmas trees to repair the damage and keep the park open instead of limiting our visitor capacity.”

Not to exclude the urbanites: New York undertakes perhaps the nation’s largest tree recycling program.

“After many years of literally throwing Christmas trees out with the garbage, they’re now returned to the natural system of recycling, saving money and energy,” said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation.

In 1988, the now-annual Mulch Fest began in Prospect Park, with a group ofBoy Scouts wielding a single donated wood chipper. By 1990, the project had become too big for just one chipper, so the city stepped in. Further encouraged by the Bloomberg administration’s green initiative, recycling stations have popped up at some 70 drop-off sites around the city, many of which are equipped with their own chippers.

Mulch Fest takes place the first weekend of January, and New Yorkers can take home their own bags of mulch for nourishing gardens, street trees or nearby parks. About 17,000 trees were dropped off last year. Taking into account the city’s Department of Sanitation curbside tree pickup, about 160,000 trees in the city end up being recycled instead of entering the waste stream.

“People who like Christmas trees feel sad just sticking it on the corner to go into the dump,” Mr. Benepe said. “They like that it’s transformed into nutrients to be recycled into the earth.”

Daniel Avila, NYC ParksMayor Michael R. Bloomberg, right, and New York’s parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, took part in mulching at Travers Park in Queens last year.

 

In order to thrive, tree murder

December 12, 2011, 3:00 pm Learning How to Kill Trees

By JUSTIN GILLIS

William R.L. AndereggA dead grove of trembling aspen in Colorado’s Grand Mesa National Forest.  

Scientists trying to understand the future of forests on a warming planet have a strange problem: They do not know how to kill trees.

I don’t mean the trees in their backyards. I would bet that the average climate scientist, especially one who studies forests, is better with a chain saw than I would be.

What I mean is that researchers don’t have a particularly good idea of how trees die in the wild, and as a consequence, they have a hard time constructing computer analyses that can accurately predict the future of forests. These programs are fine at running equations that describe the growth of trees and other plants as a function of climate in a particular area. But when it comes to understanding what causes large scale die-backs, the analyses are rudimentary at best.

I encountered this problem in my long article a few months ago on the future of the world’s forests, in which I talked about forests’ displaying disturbing signs of stress, probably as a result of global warming. This is not a problem climate scientists saw coming, which illustrates the importance of getting a better handle on the life and death of trees. So it comes as good news to learn that one of the researchers I quoted in that article, William R.L. Anderegg of Stanford University, has offered substantial new insight into how trees die.

His paper was written with five co-authors and released Monday by a journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, Mr. Anderegg and his colleagues focused on the phenomenon known as “sudden aspen decline” that has killed broad swaths of aspen forest in Colorado and other states in recent years. At least 15 percent of Colorado’s aspen forests have died, and Mr. Anderegg, a native of that state, was as shocked as other Coloradans.

“I played as a kid in some of those aspen groves,” he said in an interview. As his research project for a doctorate at Stanford, he resolved to learn what he could about the situation.

Scientists already knew that sudden aspen decline was a delayed response to a severe drought and heat wave in Colorado in the first half of the decade, but they did not know at a systemic level how the trees were dying. In fact, the question has almost never been studied in any forest during a massive die-back.

Mr. Anderegg and his group spent long hours cutting limbs from dying trees to investigate their physiology, imposing a drought on nursery saplings and wild trees, and taking other steps to pin down exactly what was happening. As they did so, they were weighing the two main hypotheses about how trees die.

One of these posits that in a drought or other stress situation, trees close the pores that allow carbon dioxide to enter their leaves and water to evaporate. That would conserve water, but it would also slam the brakes on photosynthesis, and the tree might essentially starve to death for lack of the carbohydrates it usually creates in its leaves to build and maintain its tissues.

The second idea is that in a drought, trees undergo a kind of hydraulic failure, with the fine tubes that take water from a tree’s roots to its leaves filling up with tiny air bubbles. The idea is that this damages the tubes and can lead to problems for the tree even after rainfall resumes.

It turns out that Mr. Anderegg’s findings strongly support the second idea: that trees die of thirst, not hunger. He found plenty of carbohydrates in the roots of dying aspens, but also clear evidence that their water distribution systems had been damaged and could not recover even after the drought ended in 2004. In my interview with him, Mr. Anderegg compared trees to people: we die of thirst a lot more easily than we starve to death.

James Worrall, a scientist with the United States Forest Service who has also studied sudden aspen decline, described Mr. Anderegg’s paper (he was not involved in the work) as significant and the data as convincing. But he pointed out that much of the field work occurred in 2010, late in the aspen die-back, and the results might or might not be characteristic of what happened earlier.

He also said that insects had probably played a role in killing some trees weakened by drought, and the insect populations may have built up enough to kill even trees that had not suffered much in the drought. “Although certainly not the last word on how aspen stands die, this work is an important contribution that will certainly spur further research,” Dr. Worrall said.

Both Dr. Worrall and Mr. Anderegg pointed out that the two ideas about tree death were not mutually exclusive, so while hydraulic failure appears to be the answer in at least some episodes of sudden aspen decline, that does not mean it will be right in every forest die-back. People can die in many different ways — why not trees? So a lot of work needs to be done on other forest die-back situations to establish whether Mr. Anderegg’s results represent a universal pattern or just one among several possibilities.

Unfortunately, scientists may get plenty of opportunities for such research, given the rate at which forests seem to be dying. Mr. Anderegg is finishing his doctoral work at Stanford, and my guess is that he will wind up in one of the laboratories struggling to do a better job of forecasting the future of the world’s forests.

PDX Electric Avenue

November 7, 2011, 4:39 pm

In Portland, Ore., Being an E.V. Pioneer Brings Unforeseen Challenges

By KEN BELSON

Don Ryan/Associated PressVisitors at the dedication of Electric Avenue on Aug. 16.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Sightings of the Nissan Leaf are a regular occurrence here on streets and freeways. Residents are retrofitting their older cars to run purely on electricity. D.C. fast chargers are being installed. And in August, a block on the campus of Portland State University became Electric Avenue.

Nearly three months on, the academics, city officials and company executives who built and are monitoring the Electric Avenue project, consisting of a one-way street with six chargers and parking exclusively for electric vehicles, have started to tally the many challenges to promoting electric transportation.

At E.V. Roadmap 4: Getting to a Million, a two-day workshop on electric vehicles held here last week, a five-person panel outlined issues large and small.

Charlie Allcock, the director of economic development at Portland General Electric, the utility that helped build Electric Avenue, said that more direct lighting was needed to ensure that users could see the plug ports on their cars when recharging. The designers, he said, did not factor in that people would be plugging in at night and in the rain and fog.

They also did not expect the chargers to be easy targets for graffiti artists or the pigeons that perched along a sky bridge that paralleled the street. After the chargers became dirty, the board realized that it had not assigned a specific person to look after them. A worker in the parking lot across the street has since been deputized with keeping them clean.

“It was so obvious, we missed it,” said George Beard, who helped spearhead the Electric Avenue project and organized last week’s conference, which was attended by government and industry officials from Georgia, Indiana and Colorado, among other states. “No one had operational responsibility for this, so we had to keep an eye on it.”

Mr. Allcock added that while there was a widely acknowledged industry standard for electric chargers, each company interpreted it differently. Each charging unit, for example, had a different interface, so drivers had to learn how to use them all. The chargers also synched with the vehicles in different ways and, when the units were in sleep mode, had different ways of rebooting.

Rani Boyle, a planner in the Planning, Sustainability and Real Estate division at the university, said that the charger manufacturers were asked not to put any advertisements on their machines or issue any member cards to consumers.

“In essence, we were asking them to make the machines dumber than the companies wanted,” she said. “It didn’t fit all the business models out there.”

Katya Dillman, a transportation policy adviser for Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, said that the city was starting to track parking violations by type to determine whether and how often drivers of gasoline-powered cars parked illegally in spots reserved for electric vehicles.

Mr. Allcock of Portland General Electric raised another issue: how to notify drivers that the chargers were there. The utility is trying to determine where to place signs on Interstate 5 and other major roads to guide drivers to Electric Avenue. The project’s chargers also do not yet register on many GPS systems.

“Once you install them, you have to figure out how to get them up,” he said.

More Trees, Please

October 6, 2011, 1:31 pm

Q and A: Forests and Climate

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Josh Haner/The New York TimesIn brown and red, trees in Montana attacked by the mountain pine beetle.

Readers responded to my recent article on forests and climate change with a flood of comments and questions. Here, I’m going to tackle a selected number with a bit of help from the scientists I interviewed for the piece. (Note that some questions have been shortened or recast slightly for clarity.)

Q.

Reading about declining forests, the problem seems overwhelming. So I’m wondering: What can I do at a personal level?

A.

Many readers asked variations of this important question. Policy experts agree that voluntary, individual action is never going to solve the problems of forests, much less the larger problem of climate change. If these problems are to be solved, it will be through some heavy lifting that harnesses government and corporate power over the course of decades, they say, and it will cost all of us money.

But that said, on the larger problem, climate change, you have considerable control over your own carbon footprint should you wish to reduce it. Dozens of organizations offer recommendations on how to cut it, but the most thorough and scientifically grounded advice I have seen came last year from the Garrison Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. A write-up of the project is here, and this Web site walks you through their recommendations.

On the question of forests, you can choose wood products certified to have been harvested in a sustainable way — for example, by the Forest Stewardship Council, which has major environmental groups sitting on the board as watchdogs. The Home Depot, among many companies, offers an extensive line of F.S.C.-certified products.

As for eating decisions, agriculture is the reason for a lot of tropical deforestation. Consumers are beginning to demand that major food companies put pressure on their supply chains to halt deforestation, and the companies are starting to react to that pressure. Some consumers write food companies to let them know where they stand.

Josh Haner/The New York TimesA mountainside in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana scarred by fire and beetles.

Finally, I’m going to risk sounding like a civics teacher with this, but it’s really true: Congress is going to pass national policies to limit carbon emissions if, and only if, the American people demand it by exercising the power of the ballot.

Q.

Do you think that enough is being done to control/reduce the population of the world? And what else could be done?

A.

It is certainly true, as several readers pointed out, that many of the world’s environmental problems, including climate change and the stress it is creating for forests, are ultimately rooted in the explosive population growth of the past century. My colleague Celia Dugger and I wrote recently about the latest United Nations population projections, which are sobering.

But, that said, the population growth rate for the world as a whole peaked in 1963 and has been falling as more and more countries go through the great shift known as the demographic transition.
(Here is an explanation, and here is the classic paper that introduced this concept.)

The only true population-growth hot spots that remain are in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Focused programs to empower women in those regions with knowledge and access to birth control could certainly bring growth rates down there, benefiting those societies as well as the world at large, policy experts say. Some people are trying to get such programs back on the international agenda in a bigger way.

Q.

Does it seem like the forests of America are destined for the same fate as the Arctic ice caps, being that the government will do nothing about it?

A.

When I was flying over Montana in a small plane with the scientist Steven W. Running, I was awed by the devastation we were seeing across one mountainside after another, and kept saying so. At one point, yelling over the engine roar, Dr. Running shut me up with a simple observation: “Look how much is left!”

His point was that the situation is not hopeless, and I came to see that he was right. I emphasize again, as I said in the article, that the forests of the world are continuing to take up a large amount of carbon. Even given all the problems we are seeing in the American West and in other affected regions, the healthy forests still outnumber the sick ones. Policies and action are needed to help them stay healthy, scientists say. So my answer to your question is: I just can’t bring myself to be that pessimistic.

Q.

Is the pine beetle a native insect? If so, why doesn’t it have a predator? Is any conifer resistant to them?

A.

As I said in the article, the mountain pine beetle is in fact native to the forests of the West. It evolved millions of years ago to exploit an ecological niche, and it has caused large outbreaks of destruction in the past — but, so far as we know, none as large as this one.

Josh Haner/The New York TimesThe mountain pine beetle can survive farther north now.

Pine beetles do have several predators (go, woodpeckers!), and some trees have defenses against them, including lodgepole pines. But when the beetles become numerous enough, as they have in recent years, they can swarm a tree in such numbers that they overwhelm those defenses. Several factors have contributed to the scale of the current outbreak. Among the most important is the warming climate, which is removing a natural control on beetles: deep winter freezes.

When I sent him your question, Werner A. Kurz, a leading Canadian scientist, wrote back that while the beetle is indeed native to the region, “it has experienced an expansion in range northward and to higher elevations as climate warming has allowed the species to occupy areas that were previously too cold.”

The beetle is now wiping out a whole ecosystem, high-elevation whitebark pine forests, that saw only limited beetle outbreaks during warm spells in the past. It has jumped into a new tree species, the jack pine, that could give it a path to spread across the continent in coming decades, into forests that have no defenses.

Q.

Your video shows areas of Arizona where trees are not growing back. Why can’t trees be planted there artificially?

A.

That does happen, actually, across large parts of the West after forest fires or other disturbances. But artificially reseeding forests is expensive, which limits how much of if the Forest Service can do. Moreover, the agency has sometimes run into criticism from scientists over what they describe as “political reseeding” projects that do not always make ecological sense.

In an area that was already at the edge of a particular tree’s natural climatic range, the warming and drying of recent years may have created conditions that can no longer support a forest. That means transplanted seedlings are not going to survive, and planting them would therefore be a waste of money.

What we are seeing in the Southwest is a fairly extensive conversion of forests into grasslands and shrubs, which are inherently more resistant to dry, warm conditions. This is a natural response to an unnatural situation, a change in the climate caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. It is worrisome not only because the landscape can store less carbon in shrubs and grasses, but as a confirmation that the climate is indeed changing in harmful ways.

Q.

What if all of us filled our yards with trees?

A.

We got several variations on the question of whether it helps to plant trees. Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Planting appropriate types of trees, at the correct density, in spots that can support them is a good idea for many reasons, with carbon storage being only one. But let’s face it, planting one tree, or even a thousand, is not going to make much difference to the world’s overall carbon problem.

Budging the global numbers even a little by this method would require planting trees, or allowing them to regrow naturally, across millions of acres that currently do not support them. This is called afforestation, and as I mentioned in the piece, it has already happened on a large scale in the eastern United States, the former Soviet Union, China and some other areas. It is also happening, surprisingly, in areas where tropical forests were chopped down in prior years — left alone, those jungles recover robustly and become carbon sponges.

But most of the scientists I spoke to tended to think we have gotten most of the bang we’re going to get out of this approach. The areas that would be most suitable for new forests are being used today as farmland, and with rising global food and biofuel demand, the prospect of converting large amounts of it back to forest appear to be remote.

Daniel C. Nepstad, an American scientist working in Brazil to understand the Amazon, often describes the situation as an incipient global land crisis. We have more potential uses for land, forests being one, than land available.

Q.

Please let us know, can a tree converted to wood pulp and then converted to newsprint store the same amount of carbon as a living tree?

A.

I’m going to take this as a sarcastic question. But I accept your point: newsprint has historically been one of the biggest sources of demand for pulp, and that demand led to the destruction of many native pine forests in the region where I grew up, the South. Across millions of acres, once-rich ecosystems have been replaced by pine plantations that are turned over so fast they resemble corn farming.

While I haven’t seen a formal carbon accounting for the newsprint industry, it is hard to imagine that the numbers would be favorable. But that said, I will note that newspapers have achieved the highest recycling rate of any type of paper product, close to 75 percent. Moreover, if newsprint troubles your conscience, it is now possible to go entirely digital in reading this one.

Stephen Chernin for The New York TimesCommuters recycling newsprint at Grand Central Terminal during the morning rush.