Natural scientists are taking up their soapboxes on Monday, taking a place at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and encouraging the public to engage with science. For one afternoon, Speakers’ Corner will become an arena for public (and scientific) learning and debate centred around the International Year of Biodiversity 2010.

See speaker bios, and post your own questions at: www.zsl.org/speakerscorner, or heckle the speakers in person from 12 – 3pm…

Session One: 12noon – 1pm
EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH

Monica Grady – Life on Mars from Life on Earth?
Anjali Goswami – Lucky breaks in the history of life
Chris Jiggins – Where do species come from anyway?
Sandy Knapp – What we don’t know about biodiversity.
Tristram Wyatt – Pheromones – smells at the heart of life

Session Two: 1pm-2pm
EARTH CHALLENGES

Helen Roy – Alien spotting: recording non-native species in Britain and beyond
Rob Ewers – Why deforestation in the tropics should worry us
Stuart Roberts – Bees in crisis – well known fact or widely held belief?
Michelle Taylor – Trawling and corals: impossible sea-bed partners
Stephan Harrison – Global warming and a cold winter
Alun Anderson – Vanishing arctic

Session Three: 2pm-3pm
EARTH SOLUTIONS

Jonathan Baillie – Saving species on the EDGE
Guy Poppy – Food versus Fuel versus Flora and Fauna – a balancing act for managing the land.
Matt Prescott – Lessons from Ban the Bulb
Patricia Brekke – Back from the brink of extinction
EJ Milner-Gulland – Should we all be vegetarians?

This event is organised by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL)

Nominations from within each party for Select Committees chair-person roles closed on June 9th, when the unopposed candidates took their seats on the newly re-formed committees. The elections for the committees where a contest was needed went ahead this Wednesday (June 10th) by a secret ballot of MPs. The Committees of interest to BES will be chaired by a mixture of both Labour and Conservative Members, some of whom have specialist knowledge gained from extensive parliamentary and government careers in relevant policy areas.

The Science and Technology Committee will be chaired by the Conservative Andrew Miller MP, whose political interests include science and technology, as shown by his long-standing membership of Scientists for Labour and his roles on the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee since 1997. As a board member for the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in the early 1990s, and as a former member of the Science and Technology Select Committee between 1992 and 1997, his role as Chair seems a natural progression for this established parliamentarian. Commenting on his appointment, Miller said “I would like to see the Committee focussing its attention on helping to maintain the strength of the UK’s science base and also improving public understanding of some of the challenging scientific issues facing us today.”

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee receives Anne McIntosh MP as its new chair, who has sat as a member on the Committee since 2007 and previously on similar Select Committees scrutinising former environment and transport departments during the Blair Government. She has held corresponding Shadow Ministerial roles during this period, including Shadow Minister for Transport (2002-03), Environment and Transport (2003-05), and later as Shadow Minister for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (2007-10). A former MEP, the Thirsk and Malton MP has long standing political interests in transport and agriculture.

The Environmental Audit Committee will be headed up by the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North since 1987, Joan Walley. In opposition, Ms Walley served as Spokesperson on Environmental Protection and Development (1988-90) and on Transport (1990-95). She is a member of SERA, the Labour Environment Campaign, which reflects her political interests in this area. Ms Walley’s appointment follows her long service as an Environmental Audit Committee member, a position she has held since 1997. Ms Walley today spoke of her passion for the subject, saying “I have a long standing passion for environmental issues and I look forward to using my chairmanship to hold the government to account and ensure that environmental sustainability is at the heart of everything it does.”

The Energy and Climate Change Committee gains the experienced former chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, the Conservative’s Tim Yeo MP. As MP for South Suffolk for more than 25 years, Yeo has served as a junior minister in the Department for Environment under John Major’s premiership, and later as as Minister of State for the Countryside and Environment, where, according to his website, he “reformed planning law, helped to develop climate change policy and established the now thriving Energy Saving Trust”. In Opposition he has held relevant shadow ministerial roles including Environment and Local Government spokesman (1997-98), Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (1998-2001) and Shadow Secretary of State for Transport and the Environment (2004-05). His five years as Environmental Audit Committee Chairman up until the election has given him substantial Select Committee experience.

With chairs now in place, the membership of these Committees will take shape in the coming weeks.

The Badger Trust has been told that it can appeal against a Judicial Review’s decision to back the Welsh Assembly Government’s planned badger cull in Pembrokeshire.

The cull aims to cut the rate of tuberculosis in cattle, but opponents say that it is not justified by science. The trust argued that the assembly government had not demonstrated that a cull would “eliminate or substantially reduce” the rate of TB infection, as the law meant it had to.

In response, Mr Justice Elias agreed that these two points were “arguable”, and granted the trust leave to appeal.

However, a spokesman for the assembly indicated that the cull will proceed, although the a date has not been set for fear of disruption from campaigners.

Source article: “Wales’s Badger cull faces new legal challenge” by Richard Black

A recent report published by The Russell Group, which represents 20 elite research universities in the UK, warms that tuition fees must rise if UK universities are to keep their global reputations and stay competitive.

The report advocates the funding of research-intensive universities, which “train the researchers and innovators who are indispensable to the future success of UK business and industry.” It advocates their role in driving future growth and prosperity, also highlighting their high current economic output.

This, however, comes with a warning. The report states that although the UK’s universities are currently ‘world-class’, “the current system of higher education funding is failing to provide sufficient resources to sustain a cadre of world-leading research-intensive universities.” Other countries, it warns, invest far more in their universities, and many, including the US and France, have actually increased their funding during the recession.

This theme is continued, stating that although funding has increased as a result of the introduction of variable fees, this was needed to rectify under funding throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As such, the report suggests that although Russell Group universities continue to seek innovative new sources of income, a rise in tuition fees is necessary to fund teaching.

Source: “Staying on top: The challenge of sustaining world-class higher education in the UK”. Russell Group Papers – Issue 2, 2010. (Available at http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/uploads/Staying-on-Top-The-challenge-of-sustaining-world-class-higher-education-in-the-UK.pdf)

Natural England and the British Ecological Society are working together to organise a conference early next year, exploring conservation in the context of a changing climate. This event will take place over two days, 11 – 12 January, at Charles Darwin House, London; the headquarters of the BES.

Effective adaptation research requires a strong partnership between researchers, practitioners and policy makers. It is essential that adaptation measures are developed on the basis of sound science, combined with a rigorous assessment of their feasibility and acceptability to society. This conference will therefore bring scientists together with policy makers and those who are actually implementing adaptation measures.

More information will be available shortly on the Public Policy section of the BES website, under ‘Forthcoming Meetings’.

A written parliamentary question tabled by Bob Russell MP to DCLG today received an answer from the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Natural Environment and Fisheries in DEFRA, Richard Benyon MP.

Question: “To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government with reference to page 17 of The Coalition: Our Programme for Government, what plans he has to promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitat and restore biodiversity.” [348]

Answer: (Richard Benyon) “I have been asked to reply. We look forward to receiving Sir John Lawton’s report, “Making Space for Nature”, later in the summer. Sir John’s update in March reported that to achieve a coherent and resilient ecological network we will need to look beyond existing designated sites and take account of landscape designations, local wildlife sites and green spaces.

The Government are also looking forward to the completion of work currently being carried out by Natural England on the implementation of landscape-scale enhancements to benefit wildlife. This will build on and use the lessons learned from existing work such as the Great Fen, a collaboration between Natural England, Environment Agency, the local Wildlife Trust and district council, which is joining up two national nature reserves through creating 3,700 ha of wetland habitat in Cambridgeshire, which will deliver benefits not only for biodiversity but also for water quality, recreation and local communities.

In addition, this Government will deliver a White Paper, the first since 1990, that will, finally, take an integrated approach to the natural environment in all its aspects. By reflecting nature’s real value in our social and economic decisions we will be able to review and improve the ways in which we both harness and protect it. We are currently considering options and time scales for taking this commitment forward.”

This reaffirms DEFRA’s commitment to publishing a White Paper on the natural environment, as suggested by the Prime Minister before reaching government.

Four years ago the European Commission’s annual ‘Green Week’ conference examined the progress towards the target of halting the loss of biodiversity by 2010, carrying a positive “Biodiversity is Life!” strapline. Speaking for the UK’s Labour Government, the then Minister in charge of biodiversity, Barry Gardiner MP questioned the general public’s awareness of biodiversity loss, not to mention the apparent lack of understanding of what the term actually meant. Four years on, in the context of the International Year of Biodiversity, this year’s ‘Green Week’ fittingly brings biodiversity back into the spotlight. The conference provides a forum for a week of investigation into how to take the EU’s biodiversity policy forward post-2010.

Three days of discussion will address the pressing issues affecting Europe’s nature – what new policy responses are needed? How can the EU best value the remaining resource and measure the ecosystem services the continent’s nature provides? How can it properly maintain and expand its now long-established Natura 2000 network? 3,800 delegates from the public, charity, scientific, academic and business communities are joining representatives from the EU institutions to answer these questions.

Amongst the opening presentations was a speech by the European Environment Agency’s Executive Director Dr Jacqueline McGlade, who unveiled a new Biodiversity Information System for Europe (BISE), which centralises information about European biodiversity in a new web portal. Combined with the new Biodiversity Baseline, which provides a shapshot of the current state of biodiversity, the EEA and European Commission hope this partnership project will make the monitoring of progress towards renewed efforts to halt biodiversity loss a lot easier.

To catch up on the week’s activities, the Green Week 2010 website has details of the thirty sessions taking place, with video links to many of the proceedings.

Large, long-running records are essential to show how species numbers and distribution changes over time. Limited resources and funding mean that professional biologists, conservationists and museums are unlikely to be able to fulfill this task, and the gap could be filled by “citizen scientists”.

These are the conclusions reached by a recent international study led by Elizabeth Boake. The study collated a large historical database of ~170,000 records of the avian order Galliformes, dating back over two centuries in Europe in Asia. Museum records were found to be essential but time-consuming to collect, and literature from the past 30 years was found to be extremely biased towards threatened species and areas of high biodiversity.

This leaves a clear gap in knowledge. Dr Boakes remarked in an interview with the BBC, “While this is very sensible, it means that we are really lacking data from huge areas of low biodiversity.” This gap, she says, can be filled by “citizen scientists”, who should record sightings of the common species they see, and not just those which are “exciting”.

Given that internet access is now so widespread, the authors suggest that a formalised website could help “facilitate collection and distribution of all kinds of taxonomic data from a wide geographic area at minimal cost”. However, the authors assert that submissions lacking geographical references, or that were not fed into a centralised database, would have “little future scientific value”.

Study article: “Distorted Views of Biodiversity: Spatial and Temporal Bias in Species Occurrence Data”

Source article: “Citizen science ‘can safeguard birds’ future’” by Mark Kinver

If you’d be interested in sharing information about species you’ve observed, and would like help from experts in identifying what you’ve seen, upload pictures to the iSpot website, maintained by the Open University.