Conservation Concepts – Video Series
Our former BES President and leading scientist, Bill Sutherland has created a series of clear 2-minute explanations of concepts in ecology and conservation.
These short, concise videos can be used in the classroom/lectures or as extra material for students.
Please subscribe to Bill’s YouTube channel
Video Content List
Why ecology underpins conservation
PATTERNS OF DIVERSITY
Distribution of Biomes. The broad climate patterns can be explained by the angle of that latitude to the sun combined with the rainfall patterns resulting from the three global air circulation cells. These climate patterns broadly explain distribution of biomes, such as deserts or forests.
Habitat specialism is driven by competition. For example, salt tolerant species can occur in areas where competitors cannot. They can occur in areas without salt if the competitors are excluded.
Effects of area and isolation. Large areas have more viable populations as more likely to be colonised and less likely to go extinct. Less isolated areas are more likely to be preoccupied. Landscape-scale conservation combines these.
Microclimates. The climate of patches may vary enormously depending on a range of factors including slope, direction, soil and vegetation cover. This is important for maintaining species with particular demands, maintaining a diversity of species and providing resilience to change including climate change. This shows the insights from using a infrared thermometer.
STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL
Plant protection against grazing. The structure of plants reveals the herbivores in their original habitat.
Plant protection against grazing
Hemiparasites and diversity. Whether diversity increases or decreases with adding hemiparasites, such as yellow rattle, depends on whether the parasite selects or avoids the dominant species.
Plant strategies: annual or perennial? Dormancy or not?
Ancient woodland and grassland indicators. Poor dispersers, for example species who largely expand through rhizomes or bulbs, can be indicators that the area is ancient.
Ancient woodland and grassland indicators
Bulbs are an adaptation for short growing seasons. For example in woodland they can grow quickly in the spring but reclaim resources in the bulb once tree cover makes it too dark to photosynthesise effectively.
Bulbs are an adaptation for short growing seasons
Meristems, monocotyledons and dicotyledons. The meristems (growth points that produce stems, leaves and flowers) of monocotyledons (grasses etc) are basal or intercalary (at leaf nodes) while dicotyledons (herbaceous plants) have apical meristems (at tip). Cutting or grazing is thus more damaging for dicotyledons: this explains why lawns are grassy.
Meristems, monocotyledons and dicotyledons
Meta-populations. For species in ephemeral habitats need to think of the birth (colonisation) and death (extinction) of populations just like we usually think of the birth and death of individuals in a population.
How arctic-alpine plants persist in refuges. These remnants from the ice age occur on line-rich soils that exclude the competitors in combination with habitats that have stayed relatively tree free since the ice age.
How arctic-alpine plants persist in refuges
Grimes CSR triangle. Useful to distinguish between strategies of Competitors (dominate and exclude others), Stress tolerators (persist where conditions are difficult) and Ruderals (short-lived annuals or biennials who grow in short-lived habitats)
Archaeophytes and neophytes Archaeophytes arrived between Neolithic times, and 1500 AD while neophytes arrived after 1500.
CONSERVATION CHALLENGES
Shifting baselines: each generation accepts poorer environment, such as fishers accepting smaller catches comprising fewer and smaller fish, unaware of what was once possible.
Umbrella and flagship species. Umbrella species: protect the high profile species, such as the bittern, and numerous other species gain from sharing the umbrella.
Flagship species: one selected to spearhead the protection of a particular habitat or project.
Diseases mimic competition. Grey squirrels replace red, but this is due to the spread of squirrel pox, which affects red but has minimal effect on grey, who spread it.
Problems with Invasives. Some invasive species can have devastating consequences.
Extinction debt. Extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past, such as habitat loss.
Immigration credit – the future gain in species likely to eventually appear after habitat restoration.
Species-area relationships can be used to predict magnitude of extinction crisis
Causes of extinction
1 Small populations are more likely to be inbred, which can cause problems.
2 Small populations are vulnerable to demographic stochasticity (randomness).
3 Environmental disasters may be catastrophic for depleted populations; a larger extensive populations may be more resilient.
4 Allee Effect: species perform badly when rare.
HABITATS
Upland streams. Rivers or streams on steep slopes are fast moving, oxygen-rich, with sediment washed away leaving rock or gravel. Lowland rivers are slow, oxygen poor and muddy. This radically affects the species that occur in each.
Fens are wet, ground-fed, base-rich habitats. The seeping water moves slowly so the soil surface has little oxygen – is anaerobic- so the vegetation rots slowly forming peat. This, in turn, means fens are low in the key nutrients of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, as these are locked up in the peat. The diversity in geology, hydrology, topology, fertility and disturbance results in a mix of open water, low habitats, dense vegetation and woodland, which provides a huge diversity of habitats and species.
Wood pasture and ancient pollards. Wood pasture is a traditional management combining grazing and pollarding. Pollards are trees whose branches are cut every few years. To prevent grazing of the regrowing shoots these are cut at 2-3 metres giving a classic stumpy shape. As these wood is obtained by repeated cutting rather than felling when mature, pollarded trees are often old, sometimes many hundreds of years old. As a result wood pasture is famous for a community of insects, fungi and lichens.
Wood pasture and ancient pollards
CONSERVATION STRATEGIES
Surrogate herbivores proxies. Many large herbivores have gone extinct locally (bison) or globally (giant elk). Their roles are now replaced by substitute proxies.
Definitions of sustainable exploitation. The six definitions given here have very different consequences
Definitions of sustainable exploitation
UNDERSTANDING POPULATIONS
Community level stability: patch level dynamism. General predictors of community structure may successfully describe the expected diversity and composition in a site while the actual species may vary and keep changing.
Community level stability: patch level dynamism
Distinction between microparasites and macroparasites. Microparasites, such as viruses and bacteria) breed within the host, have a short lived infection, can kill host, the surviving hosts often have immunity. Macroparasites, such as tapeworms, usually reproduce outside host, are long lived and sometimes are debilitating if high infection.
Distinction between microparasites and macroparasites
Geometric mean (multiply together and take the root) is better for understanding populations variation between years than the arithmetic mean as it accounts better for the occasional extreme event, such as severe winters.
METHODS
Telling the age of a conifer. Count the number of whorls of branches. Does not work for older individuals where no longer a lead growing tip.
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