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NEWS TIPS FROM THE December 2003 ISSUE OF CONSERVATION BIOLOGY the Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEPlease mention Conservation Biology as the source of these items:
PDFs of these papers are available to the media; please register for the Society for Conservation Biology's media services at: http://conbio.org/SCB/Information/Media/ Images are provided by the researchers; please contact them directly for more information. For more information about the Society for Conservation Biology: http://conservationbiology.org
ENDANGERED SPECIES LISTINGS MAY BACKFIRESome private landowners destroy habitat
New research confirms fears that Endangered Species Act listings do not necessarily help - and may even harm - rare species on private lands. Since the Preble's jumping mouse was listed as threatened, the landowners in the study have degraded as much habitat as they have enhanced, and most oppose the biological surveys that are critical for conserving species. "Private landowners' responses suggested that the current regulatory approach to rare species conservation is insufficient to protect the Preble's mouse," say Amara Brook, Michaela Zint and Raymond De Young of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the December issue of Conservation Biology. More than 90% of federally listed species live at least partly on nonfederal land and as many as half live entirely on nonfederal land, much of which is private. Anecdotal evidence suggests that listing endangered species may not help protect them on private property because landowners may wreck their habitat to avoid land-use restrictions. This is the first study to see if this is true. Brook and her colleagues surveyed 379 landowners to find out how they responded to the 1998 threatened listing of the Preble's jumping mouse, which lives in riparian areas in parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Much of the mouse's known habitat is on private land. While some landowners worked to help the listed mouse, others worked to discourage it from living on their property. The survey showed that a quarter of the land in the study had been managed to improve the mouse's habitat, but another quarter had been managed to keep the mouse from living there. Landowners were more likely to have improved the mouse's habitat if they valued nature or had gotten information from conservation organizations. Landowners were more likely to have destroyed the mouse's habitat if they depended economically on agriculture, or thought that landowners should not be responsible for species conservation.
The survey also showed that most (56%) of the landowners would not allow a biological survey to determine the abundance and distribution of the mouse on their land, information that is essential for developing and fine-tuning conservation plans. This work suggests that listing the mouse may have done more to hurt it than to help it. Better approaches could include letting landowners know how conserving the mouse's habitat can benefit them (for instance, riparian vegetation also benefits landowners by reducing erosion); reimbursing landowners for the cost of fencing to keep cows away from riparian areas; and reducing landowners' fears of regulation by including them in the conservation decision-making process. CONTACT: Amara Brook: 734-649-1164, abrook@umich.edu) WEBSITES: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse
Conservation Psychology listserv
HELPING CARNIVORES AND PEOPLE CO-EXISTKeeping predators at bay with flashing lights and loud noises instead of bulletsWhen wolves and other large carnivores threaten people and livestock, wildlife managers often resort to killing them. But now there's hope for a non-lethal solution to controlling carnivores. New research shows that movement-activated guards with strobe lights and sound recordings can help keep wolves and bears away. "High-technology devices are much more expensive, complicated and limited in effectiveness than a single bullet from a high-powered rifle, but they also allow a predator to live - surely the goal of conservation," say John Shivik of the United States Department of Agriculture, Wildlife Services, National Wildlife Research Center and Utah State University in Logan; Adrian Treves, who did this work while at Conservation International in Madison, Wisconsin, and is now at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bronx, New York; and Peggy Callahan of the Wildlife Science Center in Forest Lake, Minnesota. This work is part of a six-paper special section co-edited by Treves on the conflict between people and carnivores in the December issue of Conservation Biology. Conflicts between people and carnivores are rising as people spread into remote habitats and as large carnivores recover from past eradication efforts. While wildlife managers often address these conflicts by killing "problem" animals, this runs counter to conservation efforts and could impede the recovery of rare carnivores. "To promote the existence and expansion of large carnivores, conservation biologists should assist with the real-world problems predators cause," say the researchers. To help find non-lethal ways of controlling carnivores, Shivik and his colleagues did two experiments to see if movement-activated devices could deter predators from feeding. First, the researchers compared the predators' consumption of road-killed deer carcasses before and after treating them with movement-activated guards. This experiment was done on wild predators including wolves and bears in northwest Wisconsin; the carcasses were replaced regularly; the pre-treatment and treatment periods ranged from roughly a week to a month; and the movement-activated guards had strobe lights and recordings of 30 sounds, including yelling, gunfire and helicopters. In the second experiment, the researchers compared wolves' consumption of sled-dog chow before and after treating it with movement-activated guards. This experiment was done on captive wolves at the Wildlife Science Center in Forest Lake, Minnesota, and the researchers determined how much of a 1-kg portion of sled-dog chow the wolves ate in an hour. Both experiments showed that the movement-activated guards deterred the predators from feeding. In the experiment with wild predators, the movement-activated guards decreased the consumption of deer carcasses by about two-thirds (from roughly 3.3 to 1 kg per day). Similarly, in the experiment with captive wolves, the movement-activated guards decreased the consumption of dog food by about three-quarters (from roughly 0.8 to 0.2 kg). The movement-activated guards have some drawbacks: they do not keep the predators away completely, and they are too costly and complicated to be feasible for many wildlife managers. Even so, movement-activated guards are still promising. "Non-lethal approaches to managing predation ...provide a means for conservation biologists to target areas with high predation levels and increase acceptance of large mammalian predators," say Shivik and his colleagues. CONTACT: John Shivik: 435-797-1348, 435-245-6091, john.shivik@aphis.usda.gov)
TRACKING THE ILLEGAL IVORY TRADEGenetic test of ivory source could help thwart elephant poachers
Despite the international ban on selling African elephant ivory, poaching is still widespread. Law enforcers may soon have a new tool for cracking down on elephant poachers: a genetic analysis of ivory can help show which part of Africa it came from. "[This method] enables determination of where stronger antipoaching efforts are needed and provides the basis for monitoring the extent of the trade," say Kenine Comstock and Elaine Ostrander of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, and Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington in Seattle in the December issue of Conservation Biology. African elephants dropped from 1.3 million to 600,000 during the 1980s, and international trade in their ivory was banned in 1989 by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). But poaching still continues and last year the Singapore government seized 6.5 tons of ivory, the largest seizure in the history of the ivory trade. "The flow of illegal ivory appears to have markedly increased in the past year," says Wasser. One of the problems is that poachers can be hard to spot, especially in the forests of Central Africa. To help track the source of illegal ivory, Comstock and her colleagues extended a genetic test they had developed that can distinguish blood and tissue samples of elephants from different parts of Africa. The test can distinguish forest elephants from savanna elephants, and can even distinguish elephants from different part of the savanna (such as north-central savanna and eastern-southern savanna). Depending on where the elephants came from, the test is 80- 95% accurate.
The researchers adapted their genetic test to ivory, using African elephant tusks that were at least 10-20 years old. Even though tusks are teeth, they still contain some DNA and the researchers found that a small amount of ivory (120 mg, or a cubic centimeter) was enough for the test. Being able to track the origin of illicit African elephant ivory could help law enforcers pinpoint where poaching is the heaviest, which in turn could both increase ivory seizure rates and deter poachers. In addition, several southern African countries want to relax the ivory ban because they have stores of ivory and lots of elephants. If CITES agrees, being able to track the source of ivory could show if relaxing the ban in southern Africa leads to an increase in elephant poaching in other parts of the continent.
CONTACT: Samuel Wasser: 206-543-1669, wassers@u.washington.edu)
FOR INFORMATION ON THE IVORY TRADE: Jim Armstrong (CITES Deputy Secretary General): jim.armstrong@unep.ch)
WEBSITE: The University of Washington's Center for Conservation Biology
(scroll past "Grizzly Bears" to "African Elephant Conservation" and
"Impacts of Poaching on African Elephants")
DOES SHADE COFFEE HELP OR HINDER CONSERVATION?Labeled "bird-friendly" but may accelerate tropical forest clearing
While shade coffee is promoted as protecting tropical forests and birds, conservationists are split on whether it actually works. The December issue of Conservation Biology has the latest on the debate: one side says shade coffee can give farmers a reason to preserve tropical biodiversity while the other side fears it can actually encourage farmers to clear more forest. Shade coffee is a traditional farming method of growing coffee bushes under a canopy of diverse trees, which helps protect the many bird species that depend on them. The case for shade coffee is argued by Stacy Philpott of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Thomas Dietsch of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington DC, who say the keys to making it work are requiring rigorous certification and offering financial incentives. "Without incentives, and faced with economic hardship, farmers may convert their lands to sun coffee, pasture or swidden agriculture, requiring that they cut more forest," they say. Philpott and Dietsch say that there are currently two rigorous shade certification programs (Bird-friendly Coffee from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and Eco-OK from the Rainforest Alliance) that require a diverse canopy over coffee farms. However, these programs are not widely used by small coffee farmers in part because they can be expensive. To encourage more farmers to continue growing shade coffee instead of switching to less conservation-friendly types of agriculture, Philpott and Dietsch advocate linking shade certification with fair-trade certification. The latter has the advantages of covering the costs of farm visits, and of helping small farmers make a living by offering price premiums and loans. "Unless shade standards are linked to price premiums for coffee producers...these programs will ultimately fail...when farmers face the choice of clearing forest or starvation," they say.
To make shade certification programs stronger, Philpott and Dietsch also recommend giving coffee farmers financial incentives to maintain biodiversity-rich shade farms and to preserve adjacent forest fragments. Finally, to help keep farmers from converting more forest to shade coffee, they recommend only certifying farms that are 10 or more years old. The case against shade coffee is argued by John Rappole of the Smithsonian Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia; David King of the U.S. Forest Service Northeast Experiment Station at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst; and Jorge Vega Rivera of the Instituto Biologia in San Patricio, Mexico. While shade certification sounds good in theory, Rappole and his colleagues say that it does not always work in practice. "Currently, promotion far outstrips certification," they say, noting that several retailers claim their coffee is shade-grown and bird-friendly but lack rigorous certification programs. The problem is that simply being grown in the shade is not enough to make coffee bird-friendly. Besides the traditional farms where shade is provided by a diverse canopy, there are also multi-crop coffee farms where shade is provided by cacao and a few other economically valuable trees. Because shade certification is not necessarily rigorous, offering economic incentives for shade coffee could encourage farmers to clear more forest, say Rappole and his colleagues. They have seen extensive areas of native forest replaced by low-diversity, multi-crop shade coffee farms during their years of fieldwork in Mexico and Central America. "I have worried for a long time that shade coffee promotion could have unintended consequences," says Rappole.
CONTACT: Stacy Philpott: 734-764-1446, sphilpot@umich.edu) WEBSITES: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center Global Exchange Fair-Trade Coffee Fair-Trade Certified
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