Novel Ecosystems and the face of the Anthropangaea

This article says it all- from the importance of genetic diversity to recognizing that sometimes landscapes with very few native species can provide real value. There is a battle brewing among the scientific community that asks,
"What will the future of forests on the human dominated Anthropangaea look like?"

Article found in Nature Magazine...
RAGAMUFFIN EARTH
A small group of ecologists is looking beyond the pristine to study the scrubby, feral
and untended. Emma Marris learns to appreciate ‘novel ecosystems’.
Joe Mascaro, a PhD student in a T-shirt and
floral print shorts, is soaking in the diversity
of the Hawaiian jungle. Above, a green canopy
blocks out most of the sky. Aerial roots
wend their way down past tropical trunks, tree
ferns and moss-covered prop roots to an understorey
of ferns and seedlings. The jungle is lush,
humid and thick with mosquitoes. It is also as
cosmopolitan as London’s Heathrow airport.
This forest on Big Island features mango
trees from India (Mangifera indica); Cecropia
obtusifolia, a tree with huge star-shaped leaves
from Mexico, Central America and Colombia;
rose apples (Syzygium jambos) from southeast
Asia; tasty strawberry guava (Psidium cattleianum)
from the threatened Atlantic coast of
Brazil; and a smattering of Queensland maples
(Flindersia brayleyana) from Australia. It also
has candlenuts (Aleurites moluccana), a species
that humans have moved around so much
that its origins have become obscure. There is
at least some native Hawaiian representation
in the form of hala, or screwpine (Pandanus
tectorius), which is pictured on the crest of
Punahou School, where US President Barack
Obama studied. There are no Hawaiian birds
here though. Mascaro sees plenty of feral pigs,
descendants of those brought by settlers from
other parts of Polynesia or from farther afield.
The soil is black and rich. Mascaro likes it here.
Most ecologists and conservationists
would describe this forest in scientific jargon
as ‘degraded’, ‘heavily invaded’ or perhaps
‘anthropogenic’. Less formally, they might
term it a ‘trash ecosystem’. After all, what is it
but a bunch of weeds, dominated by aggressive
invaders, and almost all introduced by
humans? It might as well be a city dump.
A few ecologists, however, are taking a second
look at such places, trying to see them
without the common assumption that pristine
ecosystems are ‘good’ and anything else
is ‘bad’. The non-judgemental term is ‘novel
ecosystem’. A novel ecosystem is one that has
been heavily influenced by humans but is not
under human management. A working tree
plantation doesn’t qualify; one abandoned
decades ago would. A forest dominated by
non-native species counts, like Mascaro’s
mango forest, even if humans never cut it
down, burned it or even visited it.
No one is sure how much of Earth is covered
by novel ecosystems. To help with this article,
Nature asked Erle Ellis at the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County, who produces
maps of ways that humans use Earth, to take
a stab at quantifying it. Defining novel ecosystems
as “lands without agricultural or urban
use embedded within agricultural and urban
regions”, Ellis estimates that at least 35% of the
globe is covered with them (see map, overleaf).
Their share of the planet will probably expand,
and many ecologists think that these novel ecosystems
are worthy of study and, in some cases,
protection.
For one thing, some novel ecosystems seem
to provide a habitat for native species — sometimes
crucial habitat, if all that the species originally
had is gone. They also often do a good
job of providing ‘ecosystem services’, those
things that nature does that benefit humanity,
such as filtering water in wetlands, controlling
erosion on hillsides, sequestering carbon from
the atmosphere and building soil. Provision of
ecosystem services is a popular argument for
preserving intact ecosystems, but many of its
advocates blanch a little when it comes to making
the same case for these ‘weedy’ areas.
Mascaro actually prefers novel ecosystems
to some native ones that are so vulnerable to
damage by humans that they require intense
management to maintain in their ‘pristine’
state. He sees the latter as museum-piece parks.
“Do we value the fact that nature contains a list
of things that were there 1,000 years ago, or do
we value it because it has its own processes that
are not under human control?” Mascaro asks.
For him, the value is in the processes.
Watching such processes unfold has scientific
merit to many researchers. Novel ecosystems
are often ideal natural experiments for
studying things such as community assembly
— how species find their way to a place and
which species become permanent residents
— and evolution of species in response to one
another. In essence, it takes a dynamic ecosystem
to study ecosystem dynamics, and these
novel ecosystems are the planet’s fastest movers.
Mascaro bets that all the rules of thumb and
general relationships developed over the years
by ecologists working in ‘intact’ or ‘historical’
ecosystems will probably also apply in these
new assemblages, but no one knows for sure,
because no one has studied them much.
There are some questions about the ways in
which things might be different in novel ecosystems.
Will landscape types remain the same,
with forests replacing forests and grasslands
replacing grasslands? Will novel ecosystems
evolve faster? Will they be dominated by one
species, as many who study invasive species
fear? Will species composition oscillate wildly
for decades or even longer? “We can’t know
except to observe it,” says Mascaro.
Havens of biodiversity?
One of the first researchers to see the importance
of the scrubby parts of Earth was Ariel
Lugo, a forest-service ecologist in Puerto
Rico. In 1979, Lugo was managing researchers
who were measuring the ground covered
by trees within pine plantations that were not
being actively managed. His technicians came
back to headquarters sweaty and discouraged.
“They said that they couldn’t measure the trees
without clearing all the new undergrowth,”
says Lugo. “They said it was impenetrable. I
thought they were wimps.”
The idea that ecosystems dominated by
pine, an invasive species, were so thick that his
workers couldn’t even walk through them went
against a central assumption of ecology: that
native forests will be the lushest. Millennia of
co-evolution should have created an ecosystem
in which almost every niche is filled, converting
the available energy into trees and other species
in the most efficient way. Conservationists
also generally assume that native ecosystems
contribute best to ecosystem services.
Lugo went to see for himself. Sure enough,
the pine plantations were bursting with vigour,
far more so than nearby native-only forests
of the same age. Lugo did a systematic study
of the pine plantations and some mahogany
ones, and found that the plantation understoreys
were nearly as species rich, had greater
above-ground biomass (the sheer weight of all
the living things) and used nutrients more efficiently
than the native forest understoreys. He
submitted his results to the journal Ecological
Monographs1. Reviewers were horrified. In the
end, it took almost a decade to get the paper
past peer review.
Since then, Lugo has found many novel ecosystems
in Puerto Rico and elsewhere that are
much more diverse than native forests, but that
are largely ignored by ecologists. “That diversity
doesn’t count because they are the wrong
species,” says Lugo, shaking his head. He’s
found alien trees that, by creating a shaded canopy
on parched, degraded pastureland, make
possible the establishment of native trees that
could never cope with such an environment on
their own. As a result he now finds it difficult
to despise invasive trees as he thinks his colleagues
do, and even embraces the change. “My
parents and their parents saw one Puerto Rico,”
he says, “and I am going to see another Puerto
Rico, and my children will see another.”
Lugo wasn’t the only researcher thinking
along these lines, but it was not until 2006 that
the new approach gained a manifesto — and a
name. Lugo and 17 other researchers published
a paper called “Novel ecosystems: theoretical
and management aspects of the new ecological
world order”2 suggesting that such systems were
worth scientific attention. To demonstrate the
depth of resistance to the idea, the published
paper quoted referees’ comments on the submitted
manuscript: “One reviewer commented
that the examples are ecological disasters, where
biodiversity has been decimated and ecosystem
functions are in tatters, and that ‘it is hard to
make lemonade out of these lemons’.” But Lugo
and his colleagues saw it in a different light: “We
are heading towards a situation where there are
more lemons than lemonade,” they wrote, “and
we need to recognize this and determine what
to do with the lemons.”

GLOBAL COVERAGE
The amount of land taken up by novel ecosystems, defined as unused lands
embedded within agricultural and urban landscapes.
Lemons can have their own value, says restoration
ecologist Richard Hobbs, lead author of
the paper and now at the University of Western
Australia in Crawley. Some novel ecosystems,
he says, are “alternative stable states”, relatively
entrenched ecosystems that would be very difficult
to drag back to historical conditions.
Around the time the paper came out, Mascaro
became interested in Lugo’s work and set
out to see if his results could be replicated on
the windward side of Hawaii’s Big Island. Were
the many novel ecosystems on the islands nurturing
any native species? Were they providing
ecosystem services? He studied 46 forests
growing on lava flows of varying ages at various
altitudes and dominated by a variety of species,
including albizia (Falcataria moluccana),
a fast-growing tree from southeast Asia, and
Australian ironwood (Casuarina equisetifolia).
He found that, on average, the forests had as
many species as native forests. But by and large
they weren’t incubating natives as they seemed
to in Puerto Rico3.
Part of the reason for the difference may lie in
the uniqueness of Hawaiian flora, which evolved
in isolation for up to 30 million years4. Not many
plants got to Hawaii in the first place, so competition
and predation pressures weren’t very
fierce. Without having to worry about being
eaten by anything larger than an insect, raspberries
and roses lost their thorns and mints lost
their minty defence chemicals. When people
introduced plants from other parts of the world ,
along with their attendant herbivores, Hawaiian
plants couldn’t compete.
Futuristic perspective
But Mascaro’s results didn’t put
him off the novel-ecosystem
concept. For one, he found
that in many measures of forest
productivity, such as nutrient
cycling and biomass, novel forests
matched or out-produced
the native forests. They might
not be ‘natural’ in the eyes of
purists, but they are behaving
exactly as they should . “These
ecosystems, like it or not, are
going to be driving most of
the natural processes on Earth,” he said at the
2008 Ecological Society of America meeting
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It’s a message that
Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy
in Seattle, Washington, wants to see
move from the academic world to the world
of conservation management. “You hear conservationists
talk about what they want to save,
what they want to stop,” he says. “They should
talk about what they want the world to look like
in 50 years.” Studies of novel ecosystems could
help conservationists to “face the facts and be
strategic”, Kareiva says, rather than trying to
beat back the unceasing tide of change.
Kareiva is a great fan of the ecosystem-services
argument for preserving nature. But he
admits that the problem of what to do when
novel ecosystems provide better services than
the native ones is “a question we don’t talk
about that much”. Nevertheless, he is willing to
imagine a world in which, for example, exotic
strains of the reed Phragmites are allowed to
thrive in US wetlands because they provide a
great habitat for birds, rather
than be torn out in an expensive
and potentially fruitless attempt
to return native vegetation to
dominance.
Ecosystem-service arguments
are powerful enough to
get some ecologists to abandon,
or at least put to one side, their
deep distrust of novel ecosystems.
Like many of his peers,
Shahid Naeem, an ecologist at
Columbia University in New
York, says he “would love to get rid of every
invasive species on the planet and put all the
native species back in their place”. Yet he’s willing
to see what can be made of novel ecosystems
as he feels an imperative to improve conditions
for the billions of humans on Earth.
The idea that novel ecosystems provide
welcome diversity has also gained traction.
Thinking on ‘invasive species’ has mellowed
significantly since the field was first established
in the 1950s. Newer work by the likes of Mark
Davis at Macalester College in Saint Paul,
Minnesota, and Dov Sax at Brown University
in Providence, Rhode Island, has shown that
the vast majority of species that humans move
around can slot into new ecosystems without
driving anything else extinct, and that the common
vision of invasive plants forming dense
monocultural stands that take over everything
else in their path is actually the exception. Yet
the newcomers in novel systems can still be a
genuine worry.
Peter Vitousek, an expert on Hawaiian
biodiversity at Stanford University in California,
would put albizia forests in the category
of dangerous invaders, because they wipe out
stands of the native ‘ōhi‘a tree (Metrosideros
polymorpha). He acknowledges the services
that novel ecosystems provide and that “they
may even support native biological diversity in
some important circumstances”. But, he adds,
“as with many good ideas, [tolerance of novel
ecosystems] can be taken to an extreme at which
it is no longer useful. I think most of the albizia-
dominated stands of Hawaii represent that
extreme.” His point is well illustrated where one
of Mascaro’s albizia forests abuts a native ‘ōhi‘a
forest. The albizia trees on the boundary actually
lean out towards the ‘ōhi‘a — growing sideways
to escape the shade of the next row in, encroaching
on the natives’ sunlight and looking poised
to usurp them. It is a menacing spectacle, and an
apt symbol for their tireless expansion.
Mascaro grants the point. “I can understand
where a manager wants to bulldoze an
albizia forest if they are worried that it is going
to exterminate an ecosystem type that is the
last on Earth,” he says. “If we want to debate
whether to use or conserve novel ecosystems,
we will always have to deal with the risk they
pose to other systems. But at the moment, we’re
scarcely debating it at all.”
Novel ecosystems are likely to cause at least
some extinctions. For example, species that
have evolved dependent relationships with
other species are less likely to do well in a world
in which the pot is stirred and everything is
redistributed. Hawaiian honeycreepers, beautiful
birds that often feed only on one type of
flower, are not doing well; several are already
extinct. So for those who care about slowing
or stopping the rate of such extinctions, novel
ecosystems are a net negative .
James Gibbs, an ecologist at the State
University of New York in Syracuse, subscribes
to this view. “I think celebrating [novel ecosystems]
as equivalent or improved is not appropriate.”
As an example, he points to Clear Lake
in Northern California, where the number of
fish species has risen from 12 to 25 since 1800.
Sounds like a success story. But, says Gibbs,
species that were found only in that lake were
replaced with fish that are common elsewhere
— so there was a net loss in biodiversity. A similar
caveat may hold for the genetic diversity
hidden within a species. Forests dominated by
the offspring of a handful of exotic colonizers
could be less genetically diverse than forests
that have sat there for thousands of years.
A question of values
In the end, the question of novel ecosystems,
like so many questions in ecology and conservation,
boils down to what
should be valued most in
nature. For people who value
processes, such as Mascaro,
novel ecosystems are great
hubs of active evolution. For
those who value ecosystem
services, any novel ecosystem
could be better or worse than
what came before depending on
how it operates. For those who
care about global extinctions or about preserving
historical ecosystems, they are bad news.
Gibbs says he values the exquisite complexity
of ecosystems that have evolved together over
thousands or millions of years. “Why are we
worried about the extinction of languages, the
roots of music, all these weird cuisines?” he
asks. “There is something about diversity and
our need to steward it. It is the subtlety and the
nuance and complexity that makes life interesting.”
Novel ecosystems seem, to him, to lack
this value, to be samey and artificial, “sort of
like eating at McDonalds” .
To Kareiva, though, that attitude is “one of
the reasons the conservation movement is failing.
To think there is some kind of garden of
Eden pristine ecosystem. There is none! That
view is just going to get us nowhere.”
Indeed, the Garden of Eden view, in which
ecosystems are static, is no longer widely held.
Th is means that novel ecosystems, far from
being a new phenomenon, simply represent
the latest changes on a dynamic Earth. Gradual
climatic changes and sheer randomness mean
that some species wander around continents
over vast timescales, fleeing glaciers, splitting
up and reforming . This is why Davis and some
others do not like the ‘novel’ label. “Ecosystems
are always new, from one year to the next,” says
Davis. “Ecosystems are always encountering
new species — it might be not
from another country but from
100 metres upstream. Much
more accurate would be to refer
to these as ‘rapidly changing’
ecosystems — but I guess that
is not catchy enough.”
Standing in his Hawaiian
forest, Mascaro is all too aware
of change — and it is something
he values, even if humans did
have a hand in the process. He never swore allegiance
to preserving ecosystems as they were
before humans arrived, as many conservationists
of an older generation did. “People come
up to me and say ‘it sounds like you’ve given
up,’” says Mascaro. “I want to say ‘I never took
up arms, my man’. This isn’t about conceding
defeat; it is about a new approach.” ■
Emma Marris writes for Nature from
Columbia, Missouri.
1. Lugo, A. Ecol. Monogr. 62, 2–41 (1992).
2. Hobbs, R. J. et al. Global Ecol. Biogeogr. 15, 1–7 (2006).
3. Mascaro, J., Becklund, K. K., Hughes, R. F. & Schnitzer, S. A.
Forest Ecol. Manage/ 256, 593–606 (2008).
4. Ziegler, A. Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology and Evolution
157 (University of Hawaii Press, 2002).
See Editorial, page 435.
“There is no garden
of Eden pristine
ecosystem. That
view is just going to
get us nowhere.”

450
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NEWS FEATURE NATURE|23 © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
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Vol 460|16 July 2009

Can an Event Like Burning Man Go Green?

Ok, so I've been bad lately, leaving my readers hanging and not writing. But I have a good excuse: I'm working too hard in preparation for going to Burning Man!
I hope you all have heard about it by now, since I seem to be the last BM virgin on the planet here in the Bay Area. Now why would a sensible woman like me go to a crazy pagan orgy with tons of people, drugs and art in the desert, you ask? It's not just the party that intices me, you can be sure of that!
I've written in the past about the new urban revolution going on, with folks who believe we can revitalise our cities, making them walkable communities with less impact on the environment. It seems the cities of history benefited from the lack of planning and architects, growing slowly over time and organically, making them better places to live.
It may sound crazy, but this is my reason for being interested in Burning Man and Black Rock City, the ultimate temporary city. I'm curious as to how a place can be built in a week with little planning and permitting, a place that is filled with 40k people, yet still walkable, with a central meeting place and organized events. It sounds like a blast, and what better way to test the limits of new urbanism?
So I'm headed east in 10 days, with plenty of water and costumes. I've borrowed all I can in an attempt to curb my consumption, and I'll be decorating my bike with crepe paper instead of fake fur. I'll recycle everything I can, of course, and offset the carbon from my trip through TerraPass. I've made arrangements with a photographer friend of mine, and the two of us are going to document the event. More to come on that later....
In the meantime, for all you Burners out there, check out the official BM Environmental Blog, with tips on how to make your experience more eco-friendly.
If you're going, I will be camping with a group at 6:30 and B, with a big shiny Airstream trailer in the corner of our site. My name is June Bug on the Playa, so come look me up, and we can talk ecology.

Green Walls at Home

I'm fascinated with the idea of having green walls in my house, but loath the idea of bring all that dirt in intentionally. These guys have packaged the concept and made it look tidy, too.
Check out this cute little website!
ELT Living Walls Company

Ghost Towns of 2100

I picked up this story from New Scientist's Environment Blog on the predicted ghost towns of this century. The slideshow was originally run on Forbes.com and features cities on the brink of disappearing. Cities like Detroit, Venice, and (gulp) San Francisco. The causes range from natural forces like desertification to rising water levels, and human factors such as political instability and economic collapse. It's a fascinating little slide. When you finish that one, check out another slide they produced on the world's megacities.
Check them both out at Forbes.com
for the NewScientist Blog

NASA Predicts the Climate

The IPCC notched up the urgence months ago when they released their climate change report that predicted sharp increases in temperatures across the United States. This recent report on NASA's findings blew me away.
According to CBC, NASA climate models predict we can expect average summer temperatures in the eastern United States to rise by as much as 20 degrees Farhenheit by the year 2080. Their models take into account urban heat islands of city centers such as Atlanta and Chicago, where they say average summer temperatures could rise to as high as 106 degrees. Imagine having a day that hot, and then picture tha day lasting for several weeks, with temperatures rising above even that on the hottest of days. Makes the countryside seem much more appealing, doesn't it?
The IPCC predicted summer temperature increases, but not this severe. The main difference: NASA used weather patterns and rainfall amounts to more accurately predict the future, unlike the IPCC, which used an average rainfall amount for the entire country rather than region by region.
With temperatures rising like this, changes will have to be made to create more liveable cities. The urban heat island is a well documented phenomenon, where the thermal mass of concrete, buildings and other hard surfaces collect heat by day and continue to radiate throughout the night, allowing temperatures to continue rising day by day. As this happens, more energy must be produced to power the fans and air-conditioners people need to make cities liveable. As a result of more power use, the utilities are pushed to the limits of their output capabilites, and more plants must be built. More people get in thier cars and drive to the country to escape the heat. As a result, there is more carbon released into the air which in turn adds to the global warming problem all over again. It's a nasty cycle.
But there are ways to prevent this trend. Chicago is no stranger to high temperatures. It was a series of heat waves in 1995 that killed 700 people which lead Chicago's Mayor Daly to say enough is enough. His goal is to prevent another tragedy like this from ever happening again, and he plans to make his city the greenest in the country.
As part of an effort to cool the city, strict requirements for greenroofs, energy efficient buildings and urban landscaping have forced even the most powerful businesses such as Walmart to comply. There are great financial incentives, fund matching programs, and tax breaks for those who choose to go green.
As a result: Chicago's city hall has a large green roof, but Walmart now has the largest greenroof in the entire country. Decaying neighborhoods where buildings once crumbled are now being redeveloped with incentives from the city. Green collar jobs are on the rise, creating new employment opportunities. The city is experiencing a renaissence.
If Chicago can do it, so can the rest of the country.

for the CBC article on NASA's report
check out Chicago's Department of the Environment for the latest in green

Jennifer Berry, Eco-Defender

Ok, so I talk a big talk sometimes, but that's what you all like, right? Here I go again.

A friend of mine tipped me off to some recent permitting issues in his neighborhood, where a grove of trees and building are set to be torn down so a bigger building can occupy its space. I puffed myself up for a professional letter to the City of Mill Valley, and this is what I wrote.

"I'm writing this in concern to the oak grove on Forrest Street that is threatened by development.

I am an ecological consultant who assists in sustainable building and design projects, my scope of work ranging from single residences all the way to college campuses. I am currently working on a green SPCA facility in Monterey County, two LEED buildings at a community college in Tuolomne County, and a LEED boy-scout camp in El Cerrito. A large part of my work involves using natural habitat to enhance a building and its surroundings. The design professionals I work with seek ways to increase the aesthetic quality, efficiency and health of their buildings while having little negative impact on the surrounding ecology of a site. Preserving trees are a large part of this process. I lived at two houses on Forrest over the years, giving me an intimate view of the ecology for this neighborhood.

When considering the ecology of a small site such as this one, it is necessary to look at a larger picture and determine how a building effects the surrounding lots, the block, and then the neighborhood as a whole. On Forrest Way, houses and gardens have been built with the miccroclimate provided by the trees that make up the forest that incorporates surrounding streets. The appeal of living on Forrest for me was that it was a quiet oasis just a block away from downtown Mill Valley. Over the years the large trees have been leaving, one by one, slowly bringing the sound from downtown into the neighborhood.
Also, the temperature of the neighborhood has increased in the summers. Little by little, the fan usage has increased, air-conditioners have been purchased, increasing the power use in this area and in turn putting a greater demand on utilities. Carbon emissions increase as each tree is no longer present to pull CO2 from the atmosphere and as people use more energy to cool their homes.
Flooding is always an issue in the winter months on Forrest. Large trees help reduce the saturation of soils by soaking up all that rainwater and releasing back into the atmosphere. Permeable landscape reduces the demand on waste water systems by allowing storm water to percolate into the water table rather than traveling across pavement and into the sewers.

This isn't just a case of one group of trees and one lot in consideration. This is taking a step back and looking at the picture as it should be viewed- as a whole. I assure you that cutting down this group of native trees at the fore-mentioned site will have a significantly negative impact on the surrounding neighborhood, and alternatives must be sought.

I work with a group of specialists we affectionately refer to as the Green Team, which includes architects, hydrologists, engineers, planners, and ecologists. We put on eco-charettes with design groups to help them make their projects more sustainable. As an integrated team, we solve problems and find ways to build without cutting down trees and damaging the ecology of a site. It is possible and very necessary to encourage economic growth and increase housing without having a negative impact on the environment. I urge the City of mill Valley to take a step up and find ways to do so, by starting with this project."

Pretty cool, huh? This is one of the many things I do for a living, and its great to be able to lend my professional knowledge to a friend, especially one as dear as my good friend Jimo Thomas.

Want to get involved with saving the grove at 78 Forrest? Drop me a line at:
jennie1234 at mac dot com
(I wrote it out so the spam-bots leave me alone, but you'll figure it out)

Know of the propsal and want to get involved?
let the Ciy of Mill Valley know
rwalsh at cityofmillvalley dot org
(once again written out to keep away those pesky spam-bots)