It's been a strange weather year in much of the U.S. I'm currently working on Hine's emerald dragonfly monitoring near Chicago, and have seen several examples already this summer of natural stochasm in action.
Through June, rainfall was well above normal. One site, on a river, flooded at least twice. Others, away from major watercourses, were wet but less extremely so. One storm in late June included high winds, severe enough to break tree branches, and probably to damage the fragile wings of dragonflies caught away from shelter.
Then the the rain just stopped for a couple of weeks, and water levels fell to what would be expected for mid-summer.
This morning another storm moved through. There were more fallen branches, more power outages, more heavy rain. Weather is expected to improve for the rest of the week, so we'll be right back out there to see what effect it's had.
Early in my dragonfly studies, I watched female Hine's emerald dragonflies oviposit in a range of locations from cool spring runs to warmer lower channels. Under normal conditions, the middle streamlet reaches are usually optimal habitat; the spring runs are too cool and slow development, and the lower resches are too warm and too prone to fish and other predation on larvae, as well as increased competition from other odonates.
Using the full length of the streamlet hedges bets, and ensures survival of some animals through drought, or flood, or "normal" conditions. In a stochastic floodplain environment, it's a logical strategy.
Too often when planning restoration projects we fail to account for stochasm. We target "normal" conditions, even though "normal" will not happen in some years. By designing restoration sites without allowing for stochasm, we could potentially doom some populations.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
social networking
I'm probably one of the last 34 people on earth who isn't on Facebook, largely as a result of privacy concerns... although in part that's a matter of principle. I do have a fairly active LinkedIn account, a necessity in my line of work, and with careful management of preferences I'm willing to tolerate the occasional annoyances that come with a site's relentless efforts to grow.
Yesterday I was invited... twice, actually... to join the two-day old limited public beta test of Google + and despite what the press is saying about access being cut off for a while, I was able to set up a page with no difficulty at all. As the various articles and tech blogs are saying, there's a reasonable level of control over privacy settings, setup is simple, and it's generally a much more adult experience as one would expect with a more mature company. The integration with other things that I use a lot... gmail, Google docs, maybe eventually this blog? is also a big plus. So I'm willing to give it a try, even as I recognize that it's a tradeoff to some extent, and with the realization that spending more time online is probably the last thing I want to do.
It's a necessity to network effectively these days, especially for people like me who work all over the U.S. So far this looks like one more potentially effective tool, and time will tell how true that turns out to be.
Yesterday I was invited... twice, actually... to join the two-day old limited public beta test of Google + and despite what the press is saying about access being cut off for a while, I was able to set up a page with no difficulty at all. As the various articles and tech blogs are saying, there's a reasonable level of control over privacy settings, setup is simple, and it's generally a much more adult experience as one would expect with a more mature company. The integration with other things that I use a lot... gmail, Google docs, maybe eventually this blog? is also a big plus. So I'm willing to give it a try, even as I recognize that it's a tradeoff to some extent, and with the realization that spending more time online is probably the last thing I want to do.
It's a necessity to network effectively these days, especially for people like me who work all over the U.S. So far this looks like one more potentially effective tool, and time will tell how true that turns out to be.
administrative moments
We're approaching an office move, into new and larger space across the street. That's very much a good thing, the existing space is showing it's age, and the new building layout will be much more conducive to teamwork and functioning in groups.
The move won't actually happen for about another three weeks, but I'm going to be out on project sites monitoring dragonflies for much of that time, so I need to be essentially ready to go by the end of today. There's a wall of boxes stacked up near my desk, mostly books, but including some paper files and lots of binders full of old endangered species recovery plans and regulatory guidance.
If I ignore the boxes and look only at my nice clean desk and nearly empty bookshelves, the lack of clutter is enticing. That's making me think about how to pare down, simplify, at the other end... a sentiment which will be encouraged by the fact that I've intentionally specified a little less shelf space in the new office.
A lot of what's in those binders is readily available online these days. Last night I began to set up a file structure and tested it by downloading a few documents. I will probably spend part of this upcoming holiday weekend doing more of that, and setting up resource folders on an external hard drive. Longer term, I'm anticipating one drive on my desk, another as a backup and kept offsite, not unlike the way I already back up my photos, which tend to be dramatically larger files than the documents I'm presently working with. Then a set can also go onto the network, and as my ecology group expands the information will be available across offices.
The idea is to exchange entire bookshelves for a couple of hard drives taking up not much more space than a paperback book each. And then, once the easy stuff is done, I can have admin start scanning paper files on slower days, and eventually get rid of most of that paper as well.
I have no illusions about keeping some sort of clean minimalist office, the nature of consulting is that day to day existence is chaotic and unpredictable, and piles of paper will happen when there's no time to sort and arrange things. But perhaps a simplified form of anarchy is a reasonable expectation?.
The move won't actually happen for about another three weeks, but I'm going to be out on project sites monitoring dragonflies for much of that time, so I need to be essentially ready to go by the end of today. There's a wall of boxes stacked up near my desk, mostly books, but including some paper files and lots of binders full of old endangered species recovery plans and regulatory guidance.
If I ignore the boxes and look only at my nice clean desk and nearly empty bookshelves, the lack of clutter is enticing. That's making me think about how to pare down, simplify, at the other end... a sentiment which will be encouraged by the fact that I've intentionally specified a little less shelf space in the new office.
A lot of what's in those binders is readily available online these days. Last night I began to set up a file structure and tested it by downloading a few documents. I will probably spend part of this upcoming holiday weekend doing more of that, and setting up resource folders on an external hard drive. Longer term, I'm anticipating one drive on my desk, another as a backup and kept offsite, not unlike the way I already back up my photos, which tend to be dramatically larger files than the documents I'm presently working with. Then a set can also go onto the network, and as my ecology group expands the information will be available across offices.
The idea is to exchange entire bookshelves for a couple of hard drives taking up not much more space than a paperback book each. And then, once the easy stuff is done, I can have admin start scanning paper files on slower days, and eventually get rid of most of that paper as well.
I have no illusions about keeping some sort of clean minimalist office, the nature of consulting is that day to day existence is chaotic and unpredictable, and piles of paper will happen when there's no time to sort and arrange things. But perhaps a simplified form of anarchy is a reasonable expectation?.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Chicago area dragonfly program
I'm leading a program on the federally endangered Hine's emerald dragonfly in mid-July, in the far southwest suburbs of Chicago. We did one of these last summer, and had quite a crowd. As an added bonus, the program will be outdoors, at a nature preserve with high quality dolomite prairie and marsh communities. Details below:
Hine's Emerald Dragonfly Walk
Saturday, July 16
9 – 11 a.m.
Lockport Prairie
FREE! All Ages.
Registration required: 708.534.8499.
For a few weeks each year, the endangered Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly emerges along the banks of the DesPlaines River. A partnership of local industries, cities, and parks are working together to help protect this rare dragonfly. The Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly Habitat Conservation Program is offering a prairie walk in Lockport Prairie. Together with expert scientists, participants will investigate the unique habitat that is home to this and other rare and interesting plant and animal species. The tour will be on uneven natural terrain. Please bring water and dress for sun, puddles, and bugs. Lightweight pants recommended.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
turtles
Today I had a reason to refresh on the Blanding's turtle literature. For the most part what I found online was disappointing, and for the most part it missed key elements of the habitat as well as the biggest threats.
It's easy enough to itemize a list of habitat types, and at first glance it seems to be fairly wide... sedge meadow, marsh, pond, river backwater. But that fails to take into account the fact that these are surprisingly mobile turtles. Saving or restoring one wetland is going to do little good.
In 1997 I had an opportunity to collaborate with the Lake County (Illinois) Forest Preserve District on a Blanding's turtle project. We gathered background information and then surveyed several preserves. Once we'd found one where turtles were relatively easy to find... which meant discarding 10 or 15 snapping turtles and painted turtles from our traps for every Blanding's turtle... we held a couple of individuals long enough for the county to put radio transmitters on them.
One of those animals quickly left the small but deep marsh where we'd captured it and then released it a day later. It walked roughly north for about 800 meters, crossing the state line into Wisconsin in the process. It stayed there, in another marsh, for a few weeks before returning to yet another marsh in Illinois.
This points out several management challenges. The "core habitat," the marshes where the turtle spent days to weeks before moving to the next core, were all of pretty good quality. But it had to cross relatively small areas of less pristine upland habitat to make those moves. Fortunately, in this case, there were no major roads in the way.
Then there were the management unit boundaries. At that time, the species was state listed in Wisconsin but not in Illinois (where it has since been added to the protected list). It crossed not only a state line, but from county land to private land and back again. The original capture location had been less than 100 meters from yet a third unit, a state-owned parcel and for all we knew perhaps it had been there a week earlier. Each unit had different management regimes, different philosophies at work.
Another management challenge, one poorly understood at best in anything I read earlier today is the key set of threats or stressors. There's the usual discussion of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation and certainly this does play a role.
But the central issue is neatly summed up in a 1993 paper by Congdon, Dunham, and Loben Sels (in Conservation Biology). They focused on demographics, on the fact that in their Michigan study area juvenile and adult survival is not sufficient to maintain the population of this very long-lived animal, which may not breed until 17 years of age and can live to be at least 60.
Some of the reasons are at least related to habitat. Certainly outright destruction of habitat results in direct and indirect mortality. Perhaps of more importance, when adult turtles need to cross busy highways on those long movements between core wetlands, a certain percentage of them become roadkill. Since adult Blanding's turtles, which can be quite large, apparently have few natural predators, this kind of removal of breeding age animals from the system is a problem.
The authors point out another less obvious problem, one that I saw no references to earlier today despite it being clearly identified 18 years ago; increases in the populations of mid-level predators such as raccoons, foxes, and skunks have led to a substantial increase in egg predation. In the Michigan study, there was no recruitment at all in some years.
There's plentiful indirect evidence of this on some of my Midwestern study sites. Walk certain open, sunlit upland areas in June, and the remains of turtle eggs are all around. Most of these are from more common species, but some of them are Blanding's turtle eggs.
It's challenging enough to put together roadless preserve complexes of sufficient size, with enough core wetlands, to support a Blanding's turtle population of any size. It's even harder to deal with raccoons, which abound for many reasons... fragmentation, edge habitat, loss of larger predators which once kept them in check, the near-demise of the fur trade, and the abundance of suburban garbage cans to help support large populations of omnivores through lean winters.
Head starting alone isn't enough, although it's been successful in some places. It's labor intensive and may require decades of sustained effort. If the preserves are still fragmented, if some of those turtles die on roads, if mid-level predators still are abundant, then it's just treating symptoms and not going after the real problems.
In this case, some of the answers are clear enough. The question is whether the political will exists to address them.
It's easy enough to itemize a list of habitat types, and at first glance it seems to be fairly wide... sedge meadow, marsh, pond, river backwater. But that fails to take into account the fact that these are surprisingly mobile turtles. Saving or restoring one wetland is going to do little good.
In 1997 I had an opportunity to collaborate with the Lake County (Illinois) Forest Preserve District on a Blanding's turtle project. We gathered background information and then surveyed several preserves. Once we'd found one where turtles were relatively easy to find... which meant discarding 10 or 15 snapping turtles and painted turtles from our traps for every Blanding's turtle... we held a couple of individuals long enough for the county to put radio transmitters on them.
One of those animals quickly left the small but deep marsh where we'd captured it and then released it a day later. It walked roughly north for about 800 meters, crossing the state line into Wisconsin in the process. It stayed there, in another marsh, for a few weeks before returning to yet another marsh in Illinois.
This points out several management challenges. The "core habitat," the marshes where the turtle spent days to weeks before moving to the next core, were all of pretty good quality. But it had to cross relatively small areas of less pristine upland habitat to make those moves. Fortunately, in this case, there were no major roads in the way.
Then there were the management unit boundaries. At that time, the species was state listed in Wisconsin but not in Illinois (where it has since been added to the protected list). It crossed not only a state line, but from county land to private land and back again. The original capture location had been less than 100 meters from yet a third unit, a state-owned parcel and for all we knew perhaps it had been there a week earlier. Each unit had different management regimes, different philosophies at work.
Another management challenge, one poorly understood at best in anything I read earlier today is the key set of threats or stressors. There's the usual discussion of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation and certainly this does play a role.
But the central issue is neatly summed up in a 1993 paper by Congdon, Dunham, and Loben Sels (in Conservation Biology). They focused on demographics, on the fact that in their Michigan study area juvenile and adult survival is not sufficient to maintain the population of this very long-lived animal, which may not breed until 17 years of age and can live to be at least 60.
Some of the reasons are at least related to habitat. Certainly outright destruction of habitat results in direct and indirect mortality. Perhaps of more importance, when adult turtles need to cross busy highways on those long movements between core wetlands, a certain percentage of them become roadkill. Since adult Blanding's turtles, which can be quite large, apparently have few natural predators, this kind of removal of breeding age animals from the system is a problem.
The authors point out another less obvious problem, one that I saw no references to earlier today despite it being clearly identified 18 years ago; increases in the populations of mid-level predators such as raccoons, foxes, and skunks have led to a substantial increase in egg predation. In the Michigan study, there was no recruitment at all in some years.
There's plentiful indirect evidence of this on some of my Midwestern study sites. Walk certain open, sunlit upland areas in June, and the remains of turtle eggs are all around. Most of these are from more common species, but some of them are Blanding's turtle eggs.
It's challenging enough to put together roadless preserve complexes of sufficient size, with enough core wetlands, to support a Blanding's turtle population of any size. It's even harder to deal with raccoons, which abound for many reasons... fragmentation, edge habitat, loss of larger predators which once kept them in check, the near-demise of the fur trade, and the abundance of suburban garbage cans to help support large populations of omnivores through lean winters.
Head starting alone isn't enough, although it's been successful in some places. It's labor intensive and may require decades of sustained effort. If the preserves are still fragmented, if some of those turtles die on roads, if mid-level predators still are abundant, then it's just treating symptoms and not going after the real problems.
In this case, some of the answers are clear enough. The question is whether the political will exists to address them.
Monday, May 30, 2011
summer
Although things are expected to be relatively calm this coming week, I'm about to hit my peak summer activity time.
First, it's almost Hine's emerald dragonfly monitoring season. Although I won't have quite as much happening as last year (when we had eight people in the field on any given day, working on two different projects), it's still going to be a busier field season than anticipated.
Toward the end of that period, I'm going to take a break of a few days to attend the National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration (NCER) in Baltimore. My paper presentation is on August 2nd, and this year I'm stepping back from the hard science side to talk about policy, politics, and collaboration. NCER always inspires some fresh thinking, and as before I'm expecting to record my thoughts here in near live time from the conference venue.
First, it's almost Hine's emerald dragonfly monitoring season. Although I won't have quite as much happening as last year (when we had eight people in the field on any given day, working on two different projects), it's still going to be a busier field season than anticipated.
Toward the end of that period, I'm going to take a break of a few days to attend the National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration (NCER) in Baltimore. My paper presentation is on August 2nd, and this year I'm stepping back from the hard science side to talk about policy, politics, and collaboration. NCER always inspires some fresh thinking, and as before I'm expecting to record my thoughts here in near live time from the conference venue.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
organizations
Over the past few years I've had opportunities to interact with a variety of institutions on restoration projects. At the moment I'm thinking of lessons learned from two of those entities.
Both are large, sprawling government agencies. Both have entrenched bureaucracies and complex, difficult to navigate organizational structures. In the case of my experience, the difference has been in the people who have been my point of contact. Those people are the reason that one of those agencies will build successful projects in spite of the organizational structure, while the other will continue to wonder why things never work out as planned.
Both of the people I've been working with understand the structure of the agencies they are a part of. One of them uses that knowledge to communicate across departments, and to give us advance knowledge of the best ways to get things accomplished within the system. It's a daunting task, and he sometimes shows the stress. But without him, it would be almost impossible to achieve the end goal.
The other person seems to have preconceived notions and a lack of understanding of the motivations of departments outside of his own. He's given us inconsistent guidance. He recognizes what's broken, but instead of cross-communication, instead of understanding why others ask for the things that they do or explaining his own perspectives, he's only added more complexity. Writing additional guidance won't help if no one reads what they already have, and no one talks to the people who have institutional knowledge. It's not complexity that's needed, it's simplification, understanding, and communication.
It's all been a good reminder that no matter how rapidly technology advances, in the end it comes down to the effectiveness of the people involved in the project.
Both are large, sprawling government agencies. Both have entrenched bureaucracies and complex, difficult to navigate organizational structures. In the case of my experience, the difference has been in the people who have been my point of contact. Those people are the reason that one of those agencies will build successful projects in spite of the organizational structure, while the other will continue to wonder why things never work out as planned.
Both of the people I've been working with understand the structure of the agencies they are a part of. One of them uses that knowledge to communicate across departments, and to give us advance knowledge of the best ways to get things accomplished within the system. It's a daunting task, and he sometimes shows the stress. But without him, it would be almost impossible to achieve the end goal.
The other person seems to have preconceived notions and a lack of understanding of the motivations of departments outside of his own. He's given us inconsistent guidance. He recognizes what's broken, but instead of cross-communication, instead of understanding why others ask for the things that they do or explaining his own perspectives, he's only added more complexity. Writing additional guidance won't help if no one reads what they already have, and no one talks to the people who have institutional knowledge. It's not complexity that's needed, it's simplification, understanding, and communication.
It's all been a good reminder that no matter how rapidly technology advances, in the end it comes down to the effectiveness of the people involved in the project.
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