The role of Biodiversity Monitoring Indices in conservation

In the past two weeks, we have discussed two non-academia good practices for conservation of biodiversity. In the posts of the following two weeks, we are going to talk about the practices from the academia world, including building biodiversity monitoring indices and monitoring efforts from remote sensing. In this post, I am going to briefly introduce a few indices, some of which I personally involved in.

Biodiversity degradation and species loss are identical issues with scientific evidence, however, there remains problems to translate science into policy-making. The power of scientific communication is limited to the publishments on journals in the world of scientists. The importance of biodiversity to ecosystem function provision, economic system performance, and human well-being needs to be translated into the language of policy-making. Biodiversity monitoring indicators are built to act as the bridge between science and communication and to achieve this goal itself needs to remain as unbiased as possible. According to Vascar et al 2012, there are a few biodiversity monitoring indices available decision-making and each of them has their advantages and disadvantages.

Living Planet Index
Living planet Index (LPI) is one of the leading indicator if the changing state of the world's biodiversity. The index is based on tracking the abundance of wild populations, which is measured usually in population count and density. The methodology of LPI is to measure trend of 2300 vertebrates species from published papers and secondary research to indicate the change in wild nature. The advantage is that the vertebrate database is largely available and most of them are real-time analysis, which supports a dynamic analysis of the nature change. Yet there is some criticism in terms of this methodology because the selection of species affect the result, for example, the results derived from LPI is most representative for vertebrates rather than any other species.

IUCN Red list Index (RII)

The Red List Index is one of the most authoritative system measuring changes in extinction risk. It uses categories from Least Concern (LC), Near Threatened (NT), Vulnerable (VU), Endangered (EN), Critically Endangered (CR), to Extinct in the Wild (CR). RII (IUCN, 2014) assessed 76,000 species and identified 18,000 threatened species. The status of threatened species are updated after a fixed period of time to keep the record close to real-time situation. Up to now, this index is the most successful and probably most powerful index as it is easy to understand and to communicate among scientists, policy-makers, NGOs and citizens. However, one main challenge it faces is that sometimes it reflects the change in human knowledge of the species and nature (especially with the technologies update today) rather than the true change in species. 

There are also other indices focus on different aspects of biodiversity change monitoring, Marine Tropic Index is designed to measure the interaction between fishery and marine ecosystem through a trophic level analysis approach. Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) is designed to look at the overall information of biodiversity, and it is frequently applied in environmental assessments. It is heard to compare whether one index is better than the others as 1) they use different methodologies, 2) their database have different selection of different data type of species, 3) they use different measurements of biodiversity, species richness (how many species are there in one area), total abundance (the total counts of animals/plants in this area), Simpson index (considers both the species richness and evenness of species distribution), which makes the comparative study even harder. I would also like to mention two monitoring project here to share some direct ideas of projects that I personally involved in. 

PREDICTS 

PREDICTS is short for Predicting response of Ecological Diversity in Changing Terrestrial Systems. PREDICTS project tries to enhance both the database and methods of the biodiversity study. It builds direct link between human land use and use intensity factors with biodiversity measurements (mainly species richness and Simpson index). It collects data for meta-analysis purposes from primary research all over the world and applies linear additive mixed-effects model for analysis. In such a way it already built a larger database than any existing indices and it predicts more accurate results. I worked with PREDICTS team for short-term project and I learnt the power of big data in the application of biodiversity conservation. 

FOREST 500

The project Forest 500 is named after Forbes 500 to attract attention from business sector. It is a project launched by Global Canopy Programme in UK to identify the most powerful players in reducing deforestation, including production companies, suppliers and investors. It tracks the import/outport data of each country to identify the most significant importer/outporter, and finds the influential companies and investors in the transaction process. By assessing the corporate social responsibility policies, it grades these companies and monitor their CSR performance. In such a way, this project would lead to positive change of deforestation issues. In my personal experience of working with them, I am very amazed that the power of a small NGO with 4 full-time project team members can play in environmental campaign. 

In this post, biodiversity monitoring indices are discussed as a good practice in biodiversity conservation. It provides the essential information of both policy making and scientific communication. Different indices are briefly discussed here, but each of them has its advantage in specific sector or in its implication. There is no right or wrong for adopting one index or not. At last, I shared two projects that I was involved to give more detailed information of the conceptual framework and operation of biodiversity monitoring project. Personally I believe these monitoring indices are powerful toolkits in policy-making and shall play more important role in the future. 

The role of Citizen Science in conservation

In my last post, I mentioned citizen science as a good practice for conserving biodiversity. Citizen science, from a scientist' perspective (BBC, 2013), is a way to bring amateurs into research project. By its name it means the collaboration between science and public involvement. Personally I agree more with the second definition, as citizen science is a win-win strategy, which benefits not only scientific researchers and citizens, but also affects the environmental education and hence the overall outcomes of environmental policy making. An European Union study (EU, 2013) examines the quality and impact of citizen science initiatives in Europe, the accuracy of collected data, the potential of new technology (smart phone devices) and concluded that citizen science can benefit the policy making and environmental monitoring from different perspectives, and it is playing a more important role in the future with the advance of technology.

There are three types of citizen science project, contributory, collaborative, and co-created, depending on what percentage of the project is helped by the volunteers. The project designed by scientists is contributory citizen science projects, those designed by scientists and refined by volunteers are collaborative citizen science projects, and those co-designed by scientist and volunteers are co-created projects (Wentworth 2014). Wentworth also identifies the key advantages and challenges of citizen science project. The advantages include public engagement with science and policy, cost effectiveness, and improvement of productivity, and the challenges include the accuracy of data, data gaps, and the lack of incentives to maintain volunteer engagement.

This piece of infograph is a good introduction for citizen science. Citizen Science brings fun and education to citizens, and in return, citizen science brings data, paper and discovery to scientists. In the well-known citizen science example, GalaxyZoo brings 50 million classification by 150,000 people, and 60 papers used the Cornell Lab data collected by bird watchers. In UK, there are also a few brilliant citizen science projects that brings benefits to the whole community.

Projectsplatter is a project initiated by Cardiff University that collaborates citizen-collected roadkill data for scientific research. The research idea is that once a citizen saw a roadkill of wildlife, he can report the location and time to the lab by smartphone. The project team then made these data into a GIS map, and analyse the reasons behind the kill when necessary. A product from the citizen science collaboration can be found here. This project involves motivated individuals and animal-lovers to be keen participators.

OPAL (OpenAir Laboratories) is a UK-wide citizen science project led by Imperial College London, it takes experts to the local communities and local communities can participate into the research by contributing data to OPAL national surveys. It helps the public understanding of their community environment, and loss of local species by building a strong network between community and voluntary scientists. The following graph is an OPAL output that shows the result of national-wide 15min bug count challenge, which aims to identify the most common insects of UK.

There is a key element in the citizen science project that is always overlooked by scientists, the communication capacity of scientists to the public. Citizen science project requires strong communication skills of scientists, as their skills are directly linked to raising public interest and maintaining public concern. The charm and ability of the scientists influence the outcome of the citizen science project. Here I want to mention a few good scientific communication cases that appeals public interest. 

Nature Live talks is Natural History Museum programme that introduces the work of scientists in NHM to the public. It includes different presentation topics by researchers every day and encourages questions from the public. Last week, I attend a citizen science talk by Erica McAlister (twitter@flygilNHM), it uses the style of stand-up comedy to analyse the sexual behaviours of different insects and it attracts great public interest. It can be noticed that the feedback of audience is very positive and they all become interested in the project instantly. Another good scientific communication example is Soapbox programme by scientists of Zoological Society of London, it adopts the style of street performance to introduce basic bio-science and successfully attracted the interest of public. 

A successful citizen science project is meaningful and beneficial to research, public and society. Citizen science help ordinary people understand how science works through firsthand experience (Bonny et al, 2009). And citizen science combines science and policy together, bring the society closer to nature (Gollan et al, 2010). However, there are also voices saying citizen science is not real science as the accuracy is not enough. Some also argues citizen science is a new PR strategy of scientists. 

This article introduces citizen science project, the types of citizen science projects, advantages and citizen science projects, and also criticism. It also gives examples of applying citizen science on biodiversity conservation topics. With the further adoption of advanced technologies like smartphone and 4G network, the role of citizen science will be increasingly important. 

The role of public education in conservation, using wildlife photography as an example

Since biodiversity today is under great pressure of human impact, there are a variety of practices to conserve biodiversity from human-triggered ecosystem degradation. Non-scientifically, public education and citizen science play important role in informing conservation knowledge to serve the purpose of promoting public engagement in conservation issues. Scientifically, international biodiversity monitoring framework that collaborates and integrates regional biodiversity data and ecosystem change data together to conduct analysis on global scale. These scientific and non-scientific methodologies are all good practices that assist the conservation progress. I will soon write something about these practices in my blogs in the near future.

Photography is now powerful tool in both scientific research and public campaign. Photographs are used in the population estimation of rare large species, such snow leopard (Jackson et al., 2010). In such method, researcher identify individual snow leopard by pelage pattern, so a mark capture-recapture model (which is a mathematic function to estimate population) to estimate the population abundance. Camera trap is also useful in the field to capture data of every vertebrate species that occurs in a certain distance of the trap. Such research use camera trap as a tool to collect primary species occurance data to build their models, mostly to estimate the species richness of the whole area (Ahumada et al., 2013). Yet mostly such research is not able to conduct individual identification, which leads to repetitive counting of a single individual and adds uncertainty to population estimation.

Grace and Ratcliff (2010) have identified the importance of education on the opinions of young generation towards conservation. Photography is an education tool for public awareness raise on conservation issues, especially to the younger generation. BBC wildlife photographer of the year, together with Wild Photo and Wild Screen events are the most popular public events concentrating on wildlife conservation, including both Fauna and Flora. Last week, Natural History Museum hosts its 50 anniversary of wildlife photographer event. All the historical  award-winners were coming to London for the event to meet royal family members and Sir David Attenborough. Some of the award-winners are also scientists and conservationists themselves, they spread their conservation philosophy and the status of their target wildlife to the vision of public. For example, the 2013 award winner Greg du Toit was a game ranger himself in Africa and by fulfilling daily conservation responsibility, he is able to integrate his conservation sense into his photography work.

In the BBC wildlife photographer of the year 2014, I happened to have chance to talk with two Chinese award winners and asked them a few short questions. Minghui Yuan is the Plant and Fungi group award winner of this year, he is a plant wildlife lover living in urban areas but he managed to devote his time into the outskirts of the megacity and stay with the wildlife there. His philosophy in wildlife photography is the harmony of people and wildlife, city and nature.

Photography work of Minghui Yuan

Zhinong Xi is the 2002 winner of Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered species, he is well known not only for his images, but also famous for his conservation efforts in conserving a few endemic species, including Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, and Tibetan antelope, together with the world famous conservationist George Schaller. In the WildPhoto event this year, I had a talk with him and asked him a few questions. I attached the interview questions in the following paragraphs, X is short for Zhinong Xi, H is short for me.  

Tibetan antelope by Zhinong Xi

Snub-nosed Monkey by Zhinong Xi 

1. H: Can you introduce your recent work these years to the British blog readers please? 

X: Yes, years ago I founded a wildlife photography studio called WildChina Film in Beijing, the aim of our institution is to take images for protection. We are preparing for a few nature documentary in these three years, and we have a Endangered species project to document the images of most endangered species in China before they go extinct. Internationally, we also collaborates with National History Museum to publish books and hold exhibitions in China. 

2. H: Can you explain the situation of wildlife conservation in China? 

X: Species are declining at an extraordinary speed today. To be a wildlife photographer in China you need to run with time, and to compete with the decline speed of the species. Another difficulty is the pollution in China today, for example, air pollution. When I was on the plane leaving from Beijing , the air is full of PM2.5. Yet when I arrived London, the air is very clean. 

3. H: Do you have any words for the young generation? 

X: The young generation today has less opportunity to be get into the wild. Most of citizens spend most of their time in city, the young generation should stay connected with nature, no matter what career they have. To be with nature should not be a privilege for wildlife photographers. 

Another encouraging news is, the Young Wildlife Photographer of the year (usually for teenager below age of 17), is a 9-year-old Spanish boy. This means the event is playing critical public education role, and attracts more and more young generation to care about nature.