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.

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.

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.

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.

invasives

There's an op-ed in today's New York Times by Hugh Raffles titled "Mother Nature's Melting Pot" which in essence says that invasive species aren't such a bad thing.

Many, perhaps most with ecology backgrounds will bash the opinions of Mr. Raffles. He's an anthropologist, and some of his ideas don't translate very well across disciplines. I'm going to critique him too, but I'll say up front that what he said needed to be said, and if he's guilty of gross oversimplification, then perhaps so are we ecologists.

First, the critique.

Mr. Raffles provides the words himself, in a metaphor which references human immigrants: "It is... the ever shifting diversity that immigrants like us bring to this country that keeps it dynamic and strong."

What he says may be true when speaking about humans, but it points out his lack of understanding of how plant and animal immigrants affect the ecosystem on at least a short-term timescale. Invasives usually decrease natural diversity, sometimes dramatically so. This is true at a variety of scales from local to continental. In extreme examples they displace most of the native community. Stands of Phragmites (common reed) are a good example. Not a lot grows under the monoculture. Not a lot lives there either. Even the lowly crayfish disappears.

What happens, typically, is that when an invasive plant takes over there is a loss of habitat structure. The complex interaction of hundreds of native species provides food and cover for a multitude of animals. Take that away, replace it with one kind of plant, all the same size and shape, and there's no place to hide, and not much to eat.

It's only a little better when the invasive is an animal. Carp do considerable damage to aquatic ecosystems. Bullfrogs (native to at least the southeastern U.S. but now found in most of the U.S.) are voracious predators on smaller native frogs.

So what we end up with is a simplified ecosystem. To revert to the anthropological example of Mr. Raffles,  it's as if when human immigrants arrived, they killed everything in their path instead of, at worst, displacing earlier residents from one neighborhood to another. Human immigration increases diversity at anything larger than a local scale. Plant and animal immigration, on a human time scale, more typically eliminates what was there before. There is no new neighborhood to move to, especially when humans have created barriers to migration in the form of cities and farmland.

The other problem is related to the pace of invasion. Mr. Raffles is correct that immigration is a natural process in the plant and animal world, and it has probably functioned as long as there have been plants and animals on earth. What's changed is the speed of immigration. Now, humans help the process along, either intentionally (carp, starlings) or unintentionally (gobies in ships ballast water, zebra mussels on the bottom of a pleasure boat).

Once, ecosystems had time to adapt to new arrivals, to assimilate a few at a time. Now the invasion is overwhelming. New things with no local predators arrive, and for a while they have a competitive edge. If a native community survives one, it may fall to the next one, or the one after that. There's no time to recover.

But now, here's my qualification. Not all invasives are created equal. While Phragmites or purple loosestrife can be devastating once they're well established, native biodiversity can persist fairly well in stands of some other species. It's a case by case thing.

More importantly, we ecologists are making the all too human mistake of looking at things only at the time scale of our own short lifetimes... or even less. We assume that what we see now will always be, or at least will be for a long time.

But even within the 25 years or so that I've been working in this field, I've seen changes. There's a place near where I grew up that was, when I was in high school, a thicket of buckthorn. When I went back there last summer, cottonwoods had overtopped the buckthorn and shaded it out. Most of the shrub cover had died back. What had been a successional field had become a forest. In another 100 years, those cottonwoods, a fast growing pioneer species with a relatively brief lifespan as trees go, will probably be giving way to something else.

Invasives undergo successional processes, just like anything else. Other species eventually outcompete them, or the presence of a near-monoculture eventually draws the attention of a browser or a parasite or a disease.

In most of the U.S., what was here at the time of white settlement was not natural. it was a fire-maintained ecosystem, kept artificially open by frequent native fire. Because native tribes had already been decimated by diseases which for the most part preceded scientists and other observers, the dynamic equilibrium which had existed for a few thousand years had probably already been altered to some extent. Fire suppression, logging, agriculture, and development thoroughly shuffled the deck, and invasive species stepped in to fill newly available gaps.

If humans disappeared today, it would take a while for the system to find a new dynamic equilibrium. It might take 150 or 200 years or more, but eventually new assemblages of species would find their niches.

Even if humans continue as we've been doing, which I expect to be the case at least until well beyond my lifetime and until whenever limits and cold hard reality finally catch up with clearly unsustainable economic systems, things will change. In another 20 years, some of the invasives we're very concerned about today will fade back, overtaken by other things. New species will arrive. It's all in flux, and we need to recognize that.

Fighting invasive species creates jobs, and it provides a mission for teams of enthusiastic volunteers, thus creating new networks, places for new connections to be made and creative new ideas forged and tested. Thus I'm going to advocate that we continue to fight invasives. However, it's best if we understand that we occupy a moment in time, and that very little is static. Change is the only constant.

It does not serve us well to take a simplistic viewpoint, no matter which side of this or any other debate we're on. Command and control mentalities are gradually being replaced with adaptive management for a good reason, although too many people seem to have not yet gotten the memo. We also need to think beyond this year, beyond this decade, beyond this century, even beyond several centuries.

metaphor

One of the frustrations of restoration work in California is navigating the state bureaucracy. A number of policies adopted by state agencies provide strong disincentives to restoring habitat by creating absurdly lengthy review processes, inconsistent guidance, and expensive requirements which typically add little or nothing to the on the ground benefit of the proposed project.

Last night it occurred to me that the career of our current Governor may provide a thought framework to evaluate ways to move forward.

Jerry Brown was Governor during the 1970s era when so many of our current environmental policies were formulated. At the time, as a first wave of regulation reining in heavy industry pollution and the like, the approach was command-and-control. For what needed to happen at that time, and as a starting point, that was probably a necessary phase.

The problem is that, at a regulatory level, little has changed since then in California.

Jerry Brown's thinking has evolved with the times, as evidenced by his apparent willingness to pursue serious budget negotiations... a refreshing change from the shell games of previous administrations. Finally, we're (I hope) confronting the problem in a meaningful way, with give and take asked of all sides.

The thinking of our state regulatory agencies has not evolved. Our world has changed, and with rare exceptions they have not. Bureaucratic inertia rules.

So my question is... how can we take the sort of adaptive management that seems to be manifesting in the Governor's office, and make it happen at the State and Regional Water Boards, at Fish and Game, at the Coastal Commission, and at other state agencies?

snakes

Spring is approaching, and with it groundbreaking on a variety of projects. I'm beginning to get requests to visit sites to complete required pre-construction surveys.

One of these sites is in the Sacramento Valley, and it's potential giant garter snake (Thamnophis gigas) habitat. We're not certain if the species actually occurs in the project area, which is currently in rice production, and the nearest documented locality is about six miles away. But it might be there, and as so often happens, it's more efficient to assume presence and mitigate.

There's some controversy about the habitat needs of the species. The agencies generally consider rice fields to be habitat, and it's true that snakes do sometimes enter them. Rice fields are wet in summer, and thus they mimic the presettlement wetlands of parts of the Central Valley which were once fed by now diverted Sierra snowmelt well into the summer. Rice fields also harbor tadpoles... Pacific tree frogs or introduced bullfrogs... and as the fields are drained in late summer, snakes may forage in the shrinking pools of water if there is more permanent vegetated wetland habitat nearby to provide cover and food in other seasons.

Rice fields are also subject to frequent disturbance, and they can concentrate pesticides and herbicides. They are structurally simple. In my opinion, they're marginal habitat for giant garter snakes, at best. They're used only because so little else exists.

Giant garter snakes persist on some of the National Wildlife Refuges in the area, but these tend to be command-and-control facilities driven by pumps, and managed for waterfowl. They are largely dry in the summer months, and thus they differ considerably from the historic condition. Where more permanent water is present, snakes can do well because vegetation is more structurally diverse and food sources more predictable.

It seems at first glance to be easy to restore the requisite habitat. In practice it may not be so easy, because the water control system is so vast. Yet there are certainly at least some areas where restoration is feasible, and indeed it's been done at a few mitigation banks. Overall though, the lack of imagination is striking, when considering this species.

While I'm out on those sites, I'm going to be looking around, getting a better understanding of the landscape, and of the possibilities.