According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Fire and Resource Assessment Program (CDF FRAP 2005) there are over 340 million bone dry tons (BDT) of nonmerchantable, technical (potentially available) forest biomass, and slightly over 62 million BDT of shrubland biomass, that could be used for energy production in California. However, these CDF estimates did not account for a variety of administrative and ecological constraints that may limit where or how much biomass can actually be removed, due for example to concerns about impacts to ecologically sensitive lands or areas of high conservation value. We therefore evaluated to what degree additional ecological and administrative constraints might reduce the CDF estimates of technical forest and shrubland biomass for energy production. This coarse evaluation is meant more to illustrate the nature and extent of the constraints these issues may present to biomass use, rather than provide a comprehensive and precise quantification of the issues.
The Sonoran Desert of southern California has long been a region of under-appreciated natural significance. For most, the term “desert” evokes images of a bleak and lifeless wasteland—a place of unforgiving heat, sun, sand, and rocks. Throughout history, the Southwest’s deserts have been avoided or they presented a challenging obstacle on the way to a greener place. In the 19th century, during the era of exploration and migration, the desert was seen as an area to be crossed as quickly as possible. Even today, the Sonoran Desert remains one of the least populated areas in California. Historically and recently, many who ventured into the desert did so for utilitarian purposes—for activities such as mining, military training, farming, off-highway vehicle (OHV) recreation and, more recently, for energy production. In general, however, there has been a lack of awareness of the special and uniquely diverse species and ecosystems found in the region, leading to an unfortunate under-appreciation for what is truly an area of incredible
natural significance.
The foothills of the iconic Sierra Nevada—the California gold fields—are linked to California’s way of life and sense of place, as well as tied to the history of our nation. To many Californians, the natural resources of the Sierran foothills are emblematic of our state—grasslands golden in the summer sun mingling with rolling oak woodlands. Nonetheless, this iconic California landscape is not well protected, but rather is severely threatened by residential sprawl that has the potential to permanently compromise its conservation values. Less than 10% of the oak woodlands and grasslands in the Sierra Nevada foothills are protected, and the value of these conservation investments relies on maintaining the lands’ integrity and ecosystem functions by buffering them from development and maintaining connections to other intact areas. The current downturn in the real estate market provides a window of opportunity to protect some of the last uncompromised areas of the northern Sierra foothills using conservation tools such as fee title acquisitions, conservation easements, and land management agreements.
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) commissioned the California Essential Habitat Connectivity Project because a functional network of connected wildlands is essential to the continued support of California’s diverse natural communities in the face of human development and climate change. This Report is also intended to make transportation and land-use planning more efficient and less costly, while helping reduce dangerous wildlife-vehicle collisions.
This Report was produced by a highly collaborative, transparent, and repeatable process that can be emulated by other states. The work was guided by input and review of a Multidisciplinary Team of agency representatives, a Technical Advisory Group, and a Steering Committee. The Multidisciplinary Team (~200 people from 62 agencies) provided broad representation across Federal, State, Tribal, regional, and local agencies that are involved in biodiversity conservation, land-use planning, or land management—and that could therefore both contribute to and benefit from efforts to improve habitat connectivity at various scales. The Technical Advisory Group (44 people from 23 agencies) was a subset of the Multidisciplinary Team. It provided technical expertise to help guide such decisions as selection of data sources, models, and mapping criteria. The Steering Committee (ten people from four partner agencies) guided key decisions about work flow, meeting agendas, and document contents. In addition to review by these agency representatives, the work plan and this final report were subject to peer review by five outside experts in conservation biology and conservation planning.
This report assess (1) the current status of fisher habitat and fishers (Martes pennanti) in the southern Sierra Nevada, California, and (2) how fisher habitat and the fisher population may respond in the future to potential forest management practices and wildfires. The ultimate goals are to hlep the three southern Sierra Forests (Sierra, Sequoia, and Stanislaus) improve landscape-level fuels management plans intended to reduce the risk of unplanned and unwanted wildland fire to human and natural communities, to restore and maintain fire-adapted ecosystems, and to conserve habitat for at-risk species.
The fisher is one at risk species whose habitat and population in the Sierra Nevada may be threatened by unnaturally large and severe wildfires; however, they may also be harmed by management efforts intended to reduce wildfire threats. This report assesses these competing threat and applies the results to recommending approaches for maximizing Fireshed Assessment goals, including to conserve and enhance habitat value for fishers to ensure their continued persistence, and perhaps expansion, in the Sierra Nevada.
Altruism presents a challenge to evolutionary theory because selection should favor selfish over caring strategies. Greenbeard altruism resolves this paradox by allowing cooperators to identify individuals carrying similar alleles producing a form of genic selection. In side-blotched lizards, genetically similar but unrelated blue male morphs settle on adjacent territories and cooperate. Here we show that payoffs of cooperation depend on asymmetric costs of orange neighbors. One blue male experiences low fitness and buffers his unrelated partner from aggressive orange males despite the potential benefits of defection. We show that recognition behavior is highly heritable in nature, and we map genetic factors underlying color and self-recognition behavior of genetic similarity in both sexes. Recognition and cooperation arise from genomewide factors based on our mapping study of the location of genes responsible for self-recognition behavior, recognition of blue color, and the color locus. Our results provide an example of greenbeard interactions in a vertebrate that are typified by cycles of greenbeard mutualism interspersed with phases of transient true altruism. Such cycles provide a mechanism encouraging the origin and stability of true altruism.
This paper synthesizes vulnerability, risk, resilience, and sustainability (VRRS) in a way that can be used for decision evaluations about sustainable systems, whether such systems are called coupled natural–human systems, social–ecological systems, coupled human–environmentsystems, and/or hazards influencing global environmental change, all considered geospatial open systems. Evaluations of V-R-R-S as separate concepts for complex decision problems are important, but more insightful when synthesized for improving integrated decision priorities based on trade-offs of V-R-R-S objectives. A synthesis concept, called VRRSability, provides an overarching perspective that elucidates Tier 2 of a previously developed four-tier framework for organizing measurement-informed ontology and epistemology for sustainability information representation (MOESIR). The new synthesis deepens the MOESIR framework to address VRRSability information representation and clarifies the Tier 2 layer of abstraction. This VRRSability synthesis, composed of 13 components (several with sub-components), offers a controlled vocabulary as the basis of a conceptual framework for organizing workflow assessment and intervention strategies as part of geoinformation decision support software. Researchers, practitioners, and machine learning algorithms can usethe vocabulary results for characterizing functional performance relationships between elements of geospatial open systems and the computing technology systems used for evaluating them within a context of complex sustainable systems.
Variation in body size, especially mass, is a function of local environmental conditions for any given species. Recent recorded decreases in body size of endotherms have been attributed to climate change in some cases. This prediction is based on the trend of smaller body size of endotherms in warmer climates (Bergmann’s rule) and it implies genetic responses rather than phenotypic flexibility. Alternatively, selection for smaller body size or lower mass could be explained by the starvation-predation hypothesis, where lighter individuals have a higher probability of escaping pursuing predators, such as raptors. Evidence that climate warming is driving patterns of size selection in birds in recent times has been mixed. We inspected data on 40 bird species contributed by bird ringers to the South African Ringing Scheme (SAFRING) for changes in body mass and condition as a function of time (year), minimum temperature of the day of capture, maximum temperature of the previous day, and rainfall data in the south-western Cape Floristic Region (fynbos) around Cape Town, South Africa, for the period 1988–2015. The region shows a warming trend over the study period (0.035 °C yr−1). Interannual body mass and condition change were poorly explained by year or temperature. High daily minimum temperature explained loss of body condition for four species, whereas evidence from recaptured birds indicated negative effects of increasing maximum daily temperature, as well as rain. For the alternative hypothesis, because raptor abundance is stable or only weakly declining, there is little evidence to suggest these as a driver influencing mass trends. Any decrease in body mass over the study period that we observed for birds appear more likely to be plastic responses to stress associated with temperature or rainfall at this time, rather than systematic selection for smaller body size, as predicted by Bergmann’s Rule.
Ripple et al (BioScience 2020) We appreciate the letters by Pouliot and colleagues (2020) and DellaSala and colleagues (2020) about our recent article “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency” (Ripple et al. 2020). Pouliot and colleagues (2020) call for more scientists, teachers, and citizens to become engaged advocates, and we agree on the importance of this in that failure of these groups to engage confirms the dangerous status quo that has led to our climate emergency. DellaSala and colleagues (2020) correctly point out that climate policymakers are focusing primarily on fossil fuels and ignoring the great importance of protecting the massive carbon stores in nature, especially the primary forests found from boreal to tropical regions. In Ripple and col- leagues (2020), we stressed the importance of scientists speaking out, telling it like it is, and becoming agents for change. We also emphasized that pre- serving and restoring nature is one of the six critical steps for mitigating the climate crisis.
At the World Economic Forum in January of 2020, world leaders committed to plant one trillion trees (1t.org). While tree planting is needed, this proposal also makes for good headlines for those who might assume they can then continue with business as usual. Planting trees will do little by itself to solve our climate emergency. A trillion trees do not make a for- est. Forests are complex ecosystems that depend on rich biodiversity of all types of species, from trees to bacteria and fungi, to be productive sinks and resilient reservoirs for carbon. Besides planting trees and regenerating natural forest habitats, we urgently need to curb the rate of global deforestation. Nature-based solutions should become a major focus of climate policy. Forests could store substantially more carbon if allowed to grow and reach their ecological potential (Erb et al. 2018). Preserving our current primary forests and allowing secondary forests to grow for carbon storage would increase car- bon sinks in the near and intermediate future (proforestation; Moomaw et al. 2019). This would benefit biodiversity and watershed protection much more than planting a trillion trees that will take many decades to effectively remove atmospheric carbon dioxide (Law et al. 2018, Buotte et al. 2019).
Nature-based solutions span numerous ecosystems including forests, wetlands, grasslands, peatlands, mangroves, and others. Their biological processes include carbon uptake and storage in vegetation and soils. Therefore, active engagement with decision makers to instigate and incentivize regenerative land uses, reform food systems, and preserve and restore ecosystems is needed to increase carbon storage, while help- ing meet multiple policy goals (e.g., biodiversity, food security, water security, economic diversification). To make a difference at the spatial and economic scales necessary to achieve effective climate change mitigation, it is vital that nature-based solutions receive global backing from diverse groups of individuals and institutions, including scientists, Indigenous people, policymakers, businesses, and land owners. Given the potential co-benefits of focusing on nature to address climate change, we are confident they can gain broad-scale support, provided they are developed and implemented in an equitable way that promotes social and environmental justice. It is essential that a combined effort to reduce emissions from the energy and industrial sector, land use changes, and agriculture be combined with protect- ing natural systems from degradation and deforestation and restoring those that have been damaged. While plant- ing trees is a laudable effort, we need to bring greenhouse gas emissions close to zero as rapidly as possible and restore and nurture functioning ecosystems, which support all life on Earth and are a prerequisite for human existence.
The increasing threat of irreversible catastrophic climate change must compel immediate and immense action across all scales of society. Irreversible climate tipping points are too risky for us to continue conducting business as usual (Lenton et al. 2019). We agree strongly with Pouliot and colleagues (2020) that scientists, teachers, and citizens must boldly address climate change by taking the actions necessary to avoid the otherwise inevitable consequences. We need transformative change in how we mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. This will entail massive personal, societal, and global political adjustments in how we function on our finite and now damaged planet in terms of energy, pollution, nature, food, economy, and human population issues (for an expanded discussion, see Ripple et al. 2020). These changes must be folded into the fabric of social and economic justice for all. We now need many more scientists to enter the science–policy– practice arena, because time is short. The transformations that we call for will at times be uncomfortable, unsettling, and strongly opposed by powerful economic and political forces. But, change can only follow when we first shift our vision to what is not only possible, but also critical for the future of Earth’s ecosystems and humanity’s survival.
Scientists can become signatories of the paper “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency” at https://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/
Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is”. On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.
Exactly 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference (in Geneva 1979) and agreed that alarming trends for climate change made it urgently necessary to act. Since then, similar alarms have been made through the 1992 Rio Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as scores of other global assemblies and scientists’ explicit warnings of insufficient progress (Ripple et al. 2017). Yet greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth’s cli- mate. An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis (IPCC 2018).