Audacious Acts of Monitoring
Audacious Acts of Monitoring
When keeping watch is an act of faith.
Michael Soulé, the founder of conservation biology, used to say that one of the most important pieces of advice he got as a young scientist was “when in doubt, count.” Monitoring — counting or otherwise measuring organisms in the same place over time — is the foundation of conservation biology, and in many ways it’s the foundation of conservation, too. Unless someone counts how many lizards, salmon, ferns, or species of butterflies live in a certain place, and repeats the count at regular intervals, that group of organisms can decline or even die out unnoticed. Before an organism can be conserved, it has to be counted.
But what’s the point of counting organisms that seem doomed to extinction? That’s the question tropical biologist Peter Edmunds addresses in a recent BioScience essay titled “Why keep monitoring coral reefs?”
For nearly four decades, Edmunds has been monitoring coral reefs at two locations in the U.S. Virgin Islands, using annual photographs to measure changes in the relative extent of coral and algae. He started the project in 1987, less than a year before the first known Caribbean-wide coral bleaching event; since then, coral extent at one of his sites has shrunk by 92 percent and at the other by 52 percent. Both reefs used to be dominated by boulder star coral, a large, stony species that provides structure to Caribbean reefs and protects the region’s coastlines from erosion. Now, they are dominated by fast-growing “weedy” corals and algae. Given that climate change continues to drive up water temperatures and increase the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, writes Edmunds, “the prospects for community recovery are bleak.”
Yet he argues that monitoring matters, and will continue to matter. The series of photographs Edmunds and his colleagues have accumulated, for instance, suggests that acute disturbances such as hurricanes and major bleaching events cause less damage over time than the everyday stress of rising water temperatures. Moreover, as he writes drily, “the past is an imperfect predictor of the future, ensuring that old data can never fully take the place of new information.” Even a grievously altered system such as the Virgin Islands reefs will continue to change in different ways for different reasons, and understanding those changes will be essential to protecting the life that persists — both at sea and on land.
I was reminded of Edmunds’ argument earlier this month, when I attended the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Biennial Scientific Conference, held this year in Big Sky, Montana. One of the speakers was Tom Olliff, an ecologist who, like Edmunds, has dedicated himself to one ecosystem: he spent 32 years living and working in Yellowstone National Park, eventually directing its Science and Resource Management Division.
Olliff noted the remarkable changes in and around Yellowstone during the course of his career, including the reintroduction of wolves, the recovery of grizzly bears, the boom in visitor numbers, and the excruciating and still-growing development pressure on private lands. He called on his listeners, who included many colleagues and friends, to undertake “audacious acts of conservation,” projects that take a long time to realize and may face determined opposition.
Olliff named some headline-grabbing audacious acts, like wolf reintroduction and dam removal. But he ended his talk with a quieter example. In his current position as a regional research manager for the National Park Service, he has been working with wildlife biologist Don Swann on the long-term monitoring of saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico. Though adult saguaros are still common, young saguaros are struggling to survive as temperatures rise. How long should scientists plan to monitor the population? Four decades from now, a report on the saguaro population might be as grim as Edmunds’ assessment of the Virgin Islands reefs.
Or it might not. Olliff told the crowd in Yellowstone that during his and Swann’s conversations about saguaro monitoring, Swann mentioned the issue to his son, who is in his twenties. For his son, there was no question: climate change was going to be solved — it had to be solved — so the feared decline might not come to pass, and even if it did, future scientists would need to know how the saguaro population was changing and why.
Olliff and Swann decided that the monitoring program should be set up to continue indefinitely. We can’t be certain that climate change will be solved, of course, but we also don’t know that the decline of any species is inevitable, or irreversible. Taking that uncertainty to heart, and keeping watch in the face of it, may be the most audacious act of all.
Conservation at Work
In a careful analysis published in Nature, a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers reports that there is “no basis” for the common (and always suspiciously glib) claim that 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is located in Indigenous territories. “The global conservation community must abandon the 80 percent claim and instead comprehensively acknowledge the crucial roles of Indigenous Peoples in stewarding their lands and seas — and must do so on the basis of already available evidence,” the authors write. They cite one well-supported statistic: in 2018, Indigenous peoples stewarded or held tenure rights to more than one-quarter of the Earth’s surface, representing at least 37 percent of undeveloped lands worldwide. The Nature paper is worth reading as a sterling example of bullshit prevention; the Guardian has more on its implications.
Since 2020, the state of California has established conservation protections for nearly 1.5 million acres of land, putting it on track to reach the “30 x 30” goal, adopted of protecting 30 percent of its lands and waters by 2030. One hundred and ninety countries adopted the 30 x 30 goal in 2022 as signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity. (Fun fact: the United States is one of the only countries not to have ratified the convention, though the Biden administration is pursuing a national 30 x 30 goal through its America the Beautiful initiative.) The Los Angeles Times reports on California’s progress.
A study in the African Journal of Wildlife Research reports that while the black rhino remains critically endangered, it has significantly benefited from past conservation efforts — including community-based conservation — and is likely to keep benefiting if efforts continue. The study informs the official “Green Status” of the black rhino, which will be published next month; the Green Status of Species, a project of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, tracks the recovery of species’ populations and their potential to respond to further conservation efforts. The Green Status is a companion to the famous Red List, which has inventoried the world’s threatened species for sixty years.
Finally, hearty congratulations to photographer Jaime Rojo, with whom I collaborated on a January 2024 National Geographic story about the monarch butterfly migration, for his well-deserved recognition in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards. Jaime’s are the only images I know of that capture the wonder of the monarch migration; take a look.