Academy scientist Brian Fisher looks at life on a different scale than most people. And his unique perspective has had a profound influence on his approach to species conservation in some of the world’s most critically endangered biodiversity hotspots.

Fisher, an entomologist who specializes in the study of ants, was recently appointed the Academy’s first Patterson Scholar in Science and Sustainability. The honor comes in recognition of his tireless work in Madagascar and other remote regions of the world, as well as the innovative methods he uses to find and study the creatures he calls “the glue that holds ecosystems together.”

“Ants are one of the most important members of ecosystems,” says Fisher. “They turn over more soil than earthworms.” But they’re also some of the most overlooked, he says. “If they were bigger, they would be the most studied type of organism, but people don’t see them.”

Fisher does see ants of course, lots of them. He and his team have identified more than 900 new species of ants in Madagascar alone. So obviously, he spends a lot of time looking closely at patches of ground where ants might live. Some of his other methods, however, are decidedly higher-tech and provide a much more detailed view of these organisms, their habitats, and what their presence or absence might indicate about ecosystem health.

Surprisingly, one of these detailed views comes from space. Fisher has teamed up with satellite companies and engineers from Google to deliver high-resolution satellite images of some of the least explored areas of Madagascar. Fisher can reference these images in the field, even when no network access is available.

The amount of information this places at his fingertips is not unlike what we’ve come to expect from our smartphones while we’re navigating city streets. But Fisher uses these technologies as he explores some of the world’s most remote regions. It’s an unprecedented view and it’s invaluable to his research. Equipped with a GPS-enabled tablet with customized software and high-res satellite images taken only weeks prior, he can not only see where to camp and find water, but he can also tell which patches of forest are most likely to contain new species of ants.

Fisher has learned from years of field experience in Madagascar to focus his search for ants on forests that are wet, situated at 800 meters (2,600 feet) of elevation or below, and isolated from other such patches. Those are the forests that tend to have the greatest species richness—of ants and many other arthropods. They’re also the types of forest that Fisher thinks should be our highest priority in terms of habitat conservation for these species.

Some habitat conservation analyses suggest that deforestation has stabilized in Madagascar, but the percentage of deforestation is not the important measure, Fisher says. “The important question is: Where are we losing the most species due to deforestation?” he says. “What patch of forest is under threat that should be our highest conservation priority right now?”

Of course, ants shouldn’t be our only focus, according to Fisher, but the perspective that research on these types of animals provides is helping to correct a bias in habitat conservation. “If you base conservation on vertebrates alone,” he says, “it leads you to conclude that only the largest forests are important. Ants and other insects provide a better map of true biodiversity.” It’s a more holistic approach.

Based on this approach, Fisher is developing new models that are helping him provide effective conservation recommendations as well as plan future research efforts. He’s currently working with conservation organizations like the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) to identify patches of forest that should be highest priority for protection. So far, he’s identified five areas that CEPF has under review, and he’s always in search of more. “Most of the forests in the lowlands are already gone, so we’re really focused on trying to find the remaining lowland patches of great conservation value,” Fisher says.

Of course, protecting biodiversity requires a solid understanding of the species that are actually out there. This is a huge job in places as species-rich as Madagascar—even if you’re focused only on ants. Fisher and his team of 20 Malagasy scientists and students, as well as five postdocs here in San Francisco, are busy trying to identify and describe the hundreds of new species of ants they’ve discovered in Madagascar. The thinking is that the more species they document, the stronger the efforts will be to save the habitats where these organisms live.

Gathering and sharing information about ants—not to mention generating an appreciation for these creatures—was the primary motivation behind AntWeb, the online database that Fisher created. The site contains records of more than 10,000 ant species collected from around the world, and the perspective it provides on these tiny creatures is unlike most scientific databases. In addition to the tremendous amount of data that AntWeb contains about each species, Fisher says the site’s high-resolution composite images are helping to put a face on these tiny creatures and getting people to appreciate ants and their significance to the health of our planet.

And yet there are so many more ants to find and document—and Fisher and his team feel like they’re in a race against time. Their methods, he says, are “too, too slow. We’re struggling to speed it up.”

Staring at a satellite image of rugged, roadless Malagasy terrain, Fisher says there’s one piece of technology he and his team need more than any other. “We could really use a helicopter,” he says, only half joking.

He’ll continue his exploration of the unexplored when he returns to Madagascar in January 2014—by helicopter or on foot… probably on foot.

Steven Bedard is editor of the Academy website. A recent Bay Area transplant, he now understands what all the fuss is about.

What’s going on with the oceans and what can we do?

As carbon dioxide (CO₂) rises in our atmosphere, the oceans absorb roughly a quarter of the amount. This lowers the pH level in the seawater, making the oceans more acidic. How this affects life in and out of the sea is continually studied.

This week, ocean acidification is the topic of several scientific papers. We thought we’d highlight a few of them here.

Nature Climate Change has two papers—one about the affect of acidification on several different species, and the other on how ocean acidification causes even more global warming.

For the first paper, German researchers surveyed previous studies that dealt with the consequences of ocean acidification for marine species from five animal taxa: corals, crustaceans, mollusks, fish, and echinoderms. By the end, they had compiled a total of 167 studies with the data from more than 150 different species.

Their findings? Different species are affected in different ways and to different extents, but all species are negatively affected by ocean acidification. “Our study showed that all animal groups we considered are affected negatively by higher carbon dioxide concentrations. Corals, echinoderms, and mollusks above all react very sensitively to a decline in the pH value,” says lead author Astrid Wittmann, of the Alfred Wegener Institute.

The second study demonstrates that the negative effects of ocean acidification aren’t just limited to marine life. The authors discovered that rising ocean acidity has the potential to amplify climate warming in general, through the decreased production of a biogenic sulfur compound.

Phytoplankton in the ocean produce dimethyl sulfid (DMS). As DMS is released into the air, it creates atmospheric sulfur—which increases the reflectivity of the atmosphere to incoming radiation, reducing surface temperatures. Warming acidic oceans means the phytoplankton produce less DMS, causing an even warmer planet.

In addition to the Nature papers, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B has an ocean acidification-themed issue this week, with nine papers studying its effects. The papers describe three distinct effects on marine life due to ocean acidification: species interactions, decreased ecosystem functions, and adaptations. Andrew Revkin has a great summary of them on his Dot Earth blog in the New York Times.

“It’s great that some of these papers are looking at entire ecosystems,” says Aaron Pope, the Academy’s sustainability manager who works tirelessly to communicate ocean acidification issues. “There’s been lots of research in the past on individual species impacts, but data on entire natural systems was missing. Now we can start to talk about what will really happen in marine ecosystems as ocean acidification gets worse.”

One paper of the group (from local researchers at San Francisco State University) looks at tiny coccolithophores. These single-celled algae are able to sequester oceanic carbon by incorporating it into their shells, providing ballast to speed the sinking of carbon to the deep sea. The little organisms are central to the global carbon cycle, a role that could be disrupted if rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and warming temperatures interfere with their ability to grow their calcified shells.

This paper might provide a bit of hope among the rest: “At least in this experiment with one coccolithophore strain, when we combined higher levels of CO₂ with higher temperatures, they actually did better in terms of calcification,” says co-author Jonathon Stillman, of SF State.

Here’s to hoping that all of these papers findings will create more awareness of ocean acidification that will lead to more solutions.

Coccolithophore image: Alison R. Taylor/PLoS Biology

Healthy ecosystems often rely on secret agents. Not spies, but organisms that might not seem to have an obvious connection to a natural community. We reported on this earlier in the week when we described the influence of toucans on the evolution of palm trees in the Brazilian rainforest. Now, two other recent studies make these hidden, yet important, connections more apparent.

With coral reef ecosystems around the world under threat from climate change, coral bleaching and ocean acidification, Australian researchers are looking for resourceful ways to save these communities. Reporting in Nature Communications this week, a team led by Joseph Maina from Macquarie University determined that a coral reef off the coast of Madagascar could benefit from a healthy forest on the mainland.

It’s not obvious, but the scientists discovered that improving land-use management strategies, such as controlling sediment pollution caused by deforestation and soil erosion, are crucial to reef survival.

“Curbing sediment pollution to coral reefs is one of the major recommendations to buy time for corals to survive ocean warming and bleaching events in the future,” says co-author Jens Zinke of the University of Western Australia. “Our results clearly show that land-use management is the most important policy action needed to prevent further damage and preserve the reef ecosystem.”

In another study, published last week in PLoS Biology, researchers examined the role of species in a variety of ecosystems—from coral reefs to tropical forests to alpine meadows—in terms of their abundance. David Mouillot of the University of Montpellier 2 and his colleagues found that it is primarily the rare species, rather than the more common ones, that have distinct traits involved in unique ecological functions. As biodiversity declines, these unique features are particularly vulnerable to extinction because rare species are likely to disappear first.

Biodiverse environments are characterized by many rare species. These rare species contribute to the taxonomic richness of the area, but their functional importance in ecosystems is largely unknown. It is often assumed that they fulfill the same ecological roles as those of common species but have less impact because of their low abundance, but the work of Mouillot and his team shows that, in fact, the opposite may be true.

Examples of such functional species include the giant moray (Gymnothorax javanicus), a predatory fish that hunts at night in the labyrinths of coral reefs; the pyramidal saxifrage (Saxifraga cotyledon), an alpine plant that is an important resource for pollinators; and Pouteria maxima, a huge tree in the rainforest of Guyana, which is particularly resilient to fire and drought. Not only are these species rare, but they have few functional equivalents among the more common species in their respective ecosystems.

“Our results suggest that the loss of these species could heavily impact upon the functioning of their ecosystems,” says Mouillot. “This calls into question many current conservation strategies.” The authors argue that the preservation of biodiversity as a whole—not just the most common species—appears to be crucial for the resilience of ecosystems.

Image: David Mouillot/PLoS Biology

In ecosystems, every organism plays a part. From the smallest microbe to the fiercest predator to the tallest tree, each species contributes to making its community healthy. But this role isn’t always obvious.

Take the colorful toucan and the palm tree Euterpe edulis in the Brazilian rainforest. Scientists have long understood that the palm’s seeds are dispersed by not only the large birds, but smaller birds, too. The birds eat the seeds, fly-off and poop—spreading the palm seeds far and wide.

But the past 100 years have seen many changes in the rainforest. Since the 1800s, the forest has become more and more fragmented, mostly due to agricultural development such as the planting of coffee and sugar cane. By creating this patchwork of forest and farmland, humans have affected the rainforest in many ways.

According to a new study in the journal Science, the numbers of toucans have declined in the forest patches, and the palm trees in those areas have responded by producing much smaller seeds.

These palms generally produce different-sized seeds. Different sized-birds with different-sized beaks distribute the seeds evenly. But with the toucan and other large birds, such as large cotingas, absent from the ecosystem, only the small-seeded palm trees are reproducing. The birds are basically changing the evolutionary trajectory of these trees.

Researchers, led by Mauro Galetti from the Universidade Estadual Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil, collected more than 9,000 seeds from 22 different palm populations and used a combination of statistics, genetics, and evolutionary models to determine that forest fragmentation displaced many toucans. They also considered the influence many environmental factors, such as climate, soil fertility, and forest cover, but none could account for the change in palm seed size over the years in the fragmented forests.

For palm tree seeds, size matters. “Small seeds are more vulnerable to desiccation and cannot withstand projected climate change,” explains Galetti. The rainforest is projected to be drier as the climate warms, and the smaller seeds are less equipped than larger seeds for survival in these conditions.

See, every organism plays an important part.

“Unfortunately, the effect we document in our work is probably not an isolated case,” says Galetti. “The pervasive, fast-paced extirpation of large vertebrates in their natural habitats is very likely causing unprecedented changes in the evolutionary trajectories of many tropical species.”

Image: Lindolfo Souto

That’s what a recent paper in PLoS Biology asks—and doesn’t really answer.

Instead, it lays out a great argument, giving the pros and cons of using the controversial technique in addressing conservation issues. It also urges the two parties—synthetic biologists and conservation biologists—to get in the same room and talk about the possibilities and problems with open minds. In fact, the authors of paper organized a meeting this week in the United Kingdom, bringing the two groups of scientists together. (Ed Yong has an article about the meeting at National Geographic.)

The paper describes several examples of how synthetic biology could work to help conservation efforts—restoring habitats, supporting endangered species, and even reviving extinct species. It also lays out several examples of how synthetic biology could wreak havoc on the natural world. (The open-access article is very readable. We encourage you to review it or at least take a look at the examples in Table 1.)

The paper and meeting come on the heels of huge media coverage on de-extinction. National Geographic’s April issue on the topic garnered a lot of press and generated public interest. In some cases, these articles say, de-extinction could be just a few years away, if not closer.

The PLoS paper and de-extinction topic seemed to be a great opportunity to speak to Terry Gosliner, the Academy’s Dean of Science and Research, about the subject.

“Do you really want to encounter a saber-toothed cat in Muir Woods?” Terry joked when we sat down.

He sees huge potential risks in using synthetic biology for conservation, but admits that the meeting and discussion are a great idea. “Open dialogue is the only way to explore the topic, see the potential and understand what the concerns and dangers are,” he says. “Bad things happen when there isn’t discussion. Informed dialogue is the best way to deal with controversial issues.”

Terry believes some aspects of synthetic biology in the natural world could work, with appropriate regulation.

But he also sees that synthetic biology may not be the right approach. When thinking about threatened species, the problem is usually “habitat loss, not necessarily genetic constraints.” He uses the re-emergence of California condors as an example of this.

And in some cases, extinction is a natural process, Terry reminds us. Synthetic biology could just be more of humans interfering with nature, and not in a good way.

The resources going toward de-extinction could be better used to protect life before it goes extinct, Terry thinks. “If we use the same resources to address climate change and how we use energy,” Terry says, “We literally could save hundreds and thousands of species.”

And those energy and climate resources could be from synthetic biology. The PLoS paper cites a 2009 report on synthetic biology: “Many believe that synthetic biology will be one of the transformative technologies necessary to combat climate change, energy shortages, food security issues and water deficits.”

What do you think? Can synthetic biology save wildlife? Where do you stand on the issue?

Protecting biodiversity is essential to our health and longevity on this planet. But can we quantify that value? Especially the economic value?

Late last year, researchers from the US and France attempted to put dollar amounts on the importance of biodiversity by correlating it to the prevalence of tropical disease in developing countries. According to their introduction in PLoS Biology:

Along with 93% of the global burden of vector-borne and parasitic diseases (VBPDs), the tropics host 41 of the 48 “least developed countries” and only two of 34 “advanced economies.”

They contend that economic growth falters when people get sick. (Seems reasonable.) And the spread of disease among humans, many scientists argue, can increase or decrease depending on factors in the natural environment, including biodiversity.

The more diverse an ecosystem, the greater the chance that a pathogen is diluted among numerous and potentially less-than-ideal host species and, therefore, the less abundant the disease. In 2002, researchers found this to be true with Lyme disease. NPR sums it up well:

If you have a rich community of tick hosts, like squirrels, mice and other small mammals, the disease is diluted among them. But if the habitat is degraded, and ticks carrying Lyme have only white-footed mice as hosts, the disease risk to humans can rise dramatically.

The Academy’s microbiologist, Shannon Bennett, weighed in on biodiversity’s impact on human diseases. In a recent email, she wrote:

I am sure biodiversity influences the transmission of infectious diseases one way or another.  Over 75% of new, emerging or re-emerging human diseases are caused by pathogens from animals, according to the World Health Organization. That means that the ecological communities we live in, and how pathogens cycle through the different players, are key to human health. Biodiversity is one way that we measure the complexity of these communities. In what way biodiversity is important, or how these communities specifically affect infectious diseases and risk, depends on the pathogen ecology and life history, and host species relationships.

Stanford researchers brought up this same point last month—“depends on the particulars,” as Bennett put it—in a study in Ecology Letters. A summary from the Stanford Report states:

The researchers found that the links between biodiversity and disease prevalence are variable and dependent on the disease system, local ecology and probably human social context.

The role of individual host species and their interactions with other hosts, vectors and pathogens are more influential in determining local disease risk, the analysis found.

That dovetails exactly with the research Bennett and Academy entomologist Durrell Kapan are conducting. They’re currently studying mosquito vector communities and the relationships between their biodiversity, the diversity of their microbes, and the presence of pathogens.

As for putting a price tag on biodiversity, Bennett encourages the PLoS study’s authors:

I find the authors’ argument intriguing and certainly a significant angle to consider in support of the health value of biodiversity, and one that is unique—no one has teased out the financial correlations between biodiversity and human societies. That it includes human health and infectious diseases is the angle I find particularly intriguing and worth following up on with empirical studies.

And on these studies of human disease and biodiversity in general? Bennett is excited about the possibilities of further research, including her own:

Increasingly we are recognizing and appreciating that humans are members of complex communities of other species, and that the make-up of these communities, whether they live inside of us or outside, can be very important to human health, as well as the health of all life. Human health and the health of life on this planet are coupled. We need to understand those coupling mechanisms better to ensure sustainability of that life, and the best way to understand those coupling mechanisms is with a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together human health researchers with ecologists and evolutionary biologists, to name a few!

Some organizations have sprung up to do just that. Bennett points to two examples: the One Health Initiative and the EcoHealth Association. Whatever dollar value we assign to biodiversity and other ecosystem services, let’s wish these organizations luck in improving human health and well-being.

Image: CDC

Here’s one: Dimensions of Biodiversity, a program for graduate students funded by the National Science Foundation. It currently boasts 112 grad students from 14 institutions in five countries, with 23 faculty members advising these students.

Their mission? According to their website, “To prepare the next generation of biodiversity researchers for higher levels of academic and scientific interaction, while simultaneously advancing, synthesizing, and baselining knowledge of biodiversity science on a global scale.”

At the AAAS meeting last month, three members of the program talked about a few of the various projects of Dimensions of Biodiversity.

Selina Heppell, a professor at Oregon State University, discussed a project to measure biodiversity in the oceans utilizing commercial fishing data. Samantha Davis, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, described three separate projects looking at the variability in biodiversity in tropical forests. And Ailene Ettinger, a student at the University of Washington, looked at data about the efficacy of citizen science and the data collected by non-scientists. (Her PowerPoint opened with a picture of citizen scientists on the Academy’s roof!)

The young researchers are using existing data in each study, looking at old observations in entirely new ways. All of the projects span many institutions and approach biodiversity beyond species numbers. They look at the diversity of individual species, of course, but they also look at the diversity of groups of species and functions of each species. For example, you can look at functional biodiversity as how many herbivores, carnivores, top predators, and bottom dwellers exist within an ecosystem. Their diagram, above right, demonstrates this and the effects and influences to an ecosystem.

Students drive each endeavor, but they don’t need to select something within their particular program of study. And like the iGem teams, each project includes a diverse group of students—biologists, statisticians, writers, you name it.

And the results? A recent paper about remote sensing in rainforests and two more publications forthcoming (see here and here). Also an online blog that was introduced earlier this year at the popular Science Online conference.

The Academy supports a similar NSF-funded program, this one for undergraduates. The Summer Systematics Institute has been running for an astounding 17 years and “addresses critical issues such as, world-wide threats to biodiversity, the origins and diversification of life, phylogenetic systematics and evolutionary biology, which have become critical components of undergraduate education.” Stay tuned for a video about the SSI program, available on Science Today later this year.

Diagram courtesy of biodiverseperspectives.com

By Zuberoa Marcos

While cities can reduce the impact an individual has on the environment by increasing the density and efficiency of human settlement, the cities themselves pave over nature. By 2030, hundreds of millions more people will live in cities around the world creating vast megalopolises and blotting out ecosystems.

According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the area covered by cities may sprawl out over an additional 1.2 million square kilometers by 2030. That means the area covered by cities may triple.

The United Nations (UN) predicts that cities will absorb all of the world’s population growth — of around 2.3 billion people — in the next four decades.

Geographer Karen Seto and her team from Yale University, authors of the study, used NASA satellite images and population and economic growth forecasts from the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to build a map that assigned a probability of urbanization to 25-square-kilometer blocks all over the world. The team found that wide-ranging urbanization will take place in eastern China and tropical Africa.

Much of the expansion will occur near cities that are already gigantic, but some biodiversity hotspots are in danger of being swallowed by the concrete. For example, the urbanization of the tropical Guinean forests of West Africa may devour 6.8% of the regions’ hotspot. The Western Ghats region of India, the highland forests of eastern Africa, and the ecosystem of Sri Lanka are other hotspots that are likely to lose ground.

Seto told Nature News the map could be used to guide conservation policies helping policy-makers shape the next generation of urban infrastructure while protecting biodiversity rich areas.

Other experts, such as Gerhard Heilig, chief of the United Nations’ Estimates in Population Division, told Nature that the map itself is important because it may be the first global-scale attempt to predict the environmental impact of urbanization.   But, it is incomplete. It does not consider how those future cities will be constructed, the spatial arrangement of housing, infrastructure and green space, all factors that affect the environmental footprint of an urban area.

Zuberoa Marcos is a former biologist and current science writer based in Barcelona. She writes articles regularly for Science Today.

Explosión de megalópolis

Por Zuberoa Marcos

Las ciudades, al ser lugares de asentamiento humano muy densos, pueden reducir el impacto que un individuo tiene sobre el medioambiente. Pero, al mismo tiempo, las urbes son una amenaza para la naturaleza. En 2030, cientos de millones de personas más vivirán en megalópolis que acabarán con algunos de los ecosistemas actuales.

Según un estudio publicado en Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, el área cubierta por las ciudades va a aumentar en 1,2 millones de kilómetros cuadrados de aquí al 2030. Esto significa que el área ocupada por las urbes puede llegar a triplicarse en las próximas décadas.

Las Naciones Unidas (ONU) predicen que las ciudades absorberán todo el crecimiento de la población mundial – alrededor de 2,3 millones de personas – previsto en las próximas cuatro décadas.

La geógrafa Karen Seto y su equipo de la Universidad de Yale, autores del estudio, emplearon imágenes de satélite de la NASA y las previsiones de crecimiento económico y de la población de las ONU y del Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre el Cambio Climático para construir un mapa que asigna una probabilidad de urbanización a parcelas de 25 kilómetros cuadrados que abarcan todo el mundo. Al analizar el mapa, el equipo encontró que el proceso de urbanización se llevará a cabo, sobre todo, en el este de China y en el África tropical.

Gran parte de la expansión se producirá cerca de grandes ciudades que ya existen pero algunas áreas ricas en biodiversidad corren peligro de ser engullidas por el hormigón. Es el caso de los bosques tropicales de Guinea, en el África occidental, que podrían ver mermada su extensión en un 6.8% por la urbanización. La región de Ghats en la India, los bosques de las tierras altas del este de África y Sri Lanka son otros lugares propensos a perder ecosistemas naturales.

Seto explicó a Nature News que el mapa podría ser utilizado para fijar políticas de conservación, para ayudar a los responsables políticos a dar forma a la próxima generación de infraestructuras urbanas protegiendo al mismo tiempo regiones ricas en biodiversidad.

Otros expertos, como Gerhard Heilig, jefe de Estimaciones de la División Población de las Naciones Unidas, afirmaron a Nature que el mapa es importante porque se trata del primer intento a escala global de predecir el impacto ambiental de la urbanización, pero que es incompleto. No tiene en cuenta cómo se construirán esas ciudades del futuro, la disposición espacial de las viviendas, de las infraestructuras y de los espacio verdes, factores que también afectan a la huella ecológica de un área urbana.

Zuberoa Marcos es bióloga molecular y actualmente trabaja como productora de TV y periodista científica. Escribe de forma regular para Science Today.

Image: Seto et al./PNAS