However, it was not until maybe a month ago that I decided to vent these ideas in the form of a blog instead of a private journal. While the choice may seem like an attempt to bolster my position, it is truly not the intent (in fact, I am quite nervous about sharing my thoughts in such a public place). Instead, I found it to be unique opportunity to platform scientifically supported concepts found in nature that I believe are important for everyone to understand. Obviously, I am deeply biased on this point because of course I believe my field is important - so hopefully I can convince you that this is the case. But why now? Why create a blog on my science at this stage? Well, first of all, it is certainly timely. As of today, over half a billion animals are estimated to be dead in Australia from fires that have been raging for several weeks on a continent engulfed in flames. Ecologically, what is important to ask about these fires is Why there, why this devastating, and why now? Are fires of the scale currently burning in Australia natural occurrences or unique to the age of humans? If these systems were modulated by unrestricted wildlife, would they burn nearly as hot, as large, in the same places, or for as long? If the Australian government better conserved habitat, and perhaps more importantly, better conserved the processes that would naturally take place in those habitats, would the result have been so drastic? Could a healthy ecosystem, modulated by the vastly complex interactions of predators, herbivores, decomposers, and producers, have prevented the fires of this enormous proportion from happening in the first place? Should civilization be looking towards ecology, and in some cases specifically animals, to take on our environmental challenges? Each of these questions could possible be answered through knowledge of how animals interact with landscapes, the topic I am studying for my PhD.
My hope through this blog is to get each reader to the place where they think about questions similar to the ones above whenever an environmental topic is discussed, whenever the value of conservation is questioned, and whenever the resources society takes for granted are exploited for corporate gain. My job is to convince you that humanity is as dependent on the ecosystems of the Earth as any other living thing and that our actions have ecological consequences that will not only perturb the well being of natural systems, but human systems as well. This, I believe, will be a monumental task. I could perhaps do so easiest by sharing some recent discoveries such as how forest elephants create fire breaks on the edges of tropical rainforests that prevent parts of Central Africa from burning, how wildebeest cycle so much carbon in their massive herds that they negate Eastern Africa's fossil fuel usage, or how the loss of wolves have completely restructured North America's forests and vastly decreased carbon storage capacity across a continent (weakening an important barrier against climate change, among other problems). Maybe I will point out some of these topics from time to time, but I do not want this to feel like cherry picking. Instead, I plan to point out just how clear and common large scale animal driven ecological effects are across a single system. The point of doing so is to show how vastly complex landscapes and their ecosystems are and how that complexity, as driven by wildlife in many cases, is why landscapes are the way they are in the first place.
Perhaps the most ambitious part of my goal is that I will attempt to convey the aforementioned points through the perspective of an active scientific data collection campaign. From January 9th to February 11th, and again from February 28th to March 20th, I will be collecting data with my lab in South African landscapes with a method that has never been done before. Because of the novelty of our method we truly do not know for sure what we will be able to measure - thus readers will be learning with us. The goal is to demonstrate the often unexpected high-tech nature of ecological research and the implications of remote sensing and spatial technologies in the field. Hopefully the combination of new science, neat pictures of landscapes and wildlife we are studying, and thoughts and stories regarding the importance of wildlife in these systems will be an interesting and worth while read.
The Sites
The second reason I am choosing to make this blog at this time is because this field season is taking place in areas that may be more ideal than anywhere else to discuss how animals drive changes in landscapes. The first trip is taking place in Kruger National Park on the eastern border of South Africa. Kruger, a national park the size of Israel has been managed (under a few different forms and a couple different names) for about 100 years and is as close to pristine as one can find almost anywhere. The park, with nearby lands only being settled by Westerners in the last century and sustainably settled by indigenous people before that, has been spared of major urban development in the region. That is not to say it has not degraded, as many of the largest megafauna have only recently been re-added to the park after local extinctions were numerous due to non-sustainable game hunting methods. What is fortunate is that the park has since recovered from these poor management practices, maintaining active populations of elephants, black and white rhino, lions, and many of the other charismatic animals one associates with savannas that are now extinct throughout most of the rest of the continent. Kruger management does this by embracing the fact that landscapes should be dynamic changing systems, composed of many different habitats through natural fire, actions of animals, the differences in rain, seasonal droughts, and other natural fluctuations. By managing the processes that create variation, or heterogeneity (a post on this topic later), Kruger is a truly successfully place of conservation and a critically important scientific test bed of what a 'natural' system even is. In a few days I will post about what I will actually be doing in Kruger, as well as more specifics about the park in general. |
| Map of South Africa and Kruger National Park. From Adams & Snode, 2015. DOI: 10.1186/s40555-014-0087-2 |
The second site we will be working in is the Great Fish River Nature Reserve in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This site, while being notoriously rugged and less visited by tourists, has still not escaped the impacts of humans. While the very thick brush of this topographically intense landscape has the most dense population of black rhino left in Africa, it is also completely cleared of its elephant population. Fortunately, that will soon be changing as there is an effort to reintroduce elephant to the park later this year. We will be surveying the park before the elephants arrive so that we can measure the short term impact of elephants in the region by comparing data from the March trip to a yet to be determined field campaign after the elephants are in place. This trip is not until March, so we will return to discuss GFRNR later.
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