Conservationists in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are witnessing the growing enthusiasm for carbon credit trading. PNG is a poor country where most of the land is still forested and owned by customary landowners. Recently, a landowner in a remote village surprised me by asking when the World Bank was coming to pay for his forest. One of several critical problems I can see with the “commodification” of ecosystem services (in “Making Conservation Profitable,” Spring 2003) is that it reinforces the notion that forests should yield cash. Given a stronger cash-from-forest expectation, many landowners will have but one place to turn—logging. Carbon deals will likely reach only a few forest owners in many tropical countries, but logging is pervasive. For conservationists advocating that forests have inherent value for their traditional uses (building materials, swidden gardening, bushmeat, medicines, etc.), the blossoming expectation of cash from carbon credits might perform a disservice.

I am not convinced carbon swaps reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being released, but as one politician here told me “who cares, so long as we can get money for our forests?” Polluting power companies that buy a piece of Bolivian forest might assuage our concerns about threatened biodiversity. But if forest clearance is simply displaced to another part of Amazonia, there is no net benefit. If power companies are not required to reduce emissions and there is no reduction in net forest conversion, then where is the reduction in greenhouse gases? Will the government feel it is unfair to require companies to invest in cleaner burning technologies or fuels after they’ve invested in a carbon deal? What happens to those carbon deals when a cleaner technology becomes available that is cheaper than forest leases?

I applaud the creative thinking and willingness to experiment described in the article. But if the experiment blossoms and then fails or does not spread beyond a few boutique projects, then many forest resource owners will be left with raised expectations of cash and few places to turn other than logging. When assessing the potential benefits of carbon deals, it is not sufficient to only look at where the deals occur. The cost-benefit analysis must also look at everywhere the deals do not occur and the policy and expectations that might be affected.

ANDREW L. MACK

Goroka, Papua New Guinea

Rules of Engagement for Conservation

I wish to congratulate John and Terese Hart for their accurate depiction of the conditions required to maintain basic conservation action in time of conflict (“Rules of Engagement for Conservation,” Winter 2003). Their analysis, however, is based on the recent events in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and does not make reference to the similar events that took place 40 years ago during the violent aftermath of the country’s independence. The very same threats to national parks’ integrity then were caused by the same factors: armed conflict, encroachments, disorganized management authority, unpaid guards, etc. At that time, none of the vital inputs that the Harts consider necessary to advance conservation during armed conflicts, i.e., highly trained personnel, up-to-date information, and secure financial backing, were available in the field. Nongovernmental organizations and foreign cooperation agencies were nonexistent. Fortunately, a few “conservation heroes”—both Congolese wardens and Belgian field scientists—managed to energize the guards and with them, to save the parks from total destruction.

How could such a thing happen without strong international backing? This kind of “miracle” is most probably due to the amazing sense of commitment and bravery of the DRC parks staff, unique among Central African countries. It dates back to colonial times and to the Mobutu era, when pride, loyalty, and team spirit were taught as values as equally as important as technical skills. These values were acknowledged in 2001 when the Society for Conservation Biology gave its Merit Award to the Congolese National Parks Institute (ICCN) in recognition of the guards’ commitment during the recent conflict.

The additional lesson that conservationists should therefore not forget is this: DRC parks have a long history in Africa, and this evolution (as opposed to a “conflict-born vision for conservation”) progressively shaped a true—albeit unwritten—local conservation philosophy that has to be sustained. Unfortunately, very few accounts of this 75 years of evolution have been published in the English literature thus far.

DR. J.P. D’HUART

WWF Belgium

Biological control

Your recent article “The Conundrum of Biocontrol: Weighing Urgency against Uncertainty” in the Spring 2003 issue was excellent. The use of biocontrol to manage invasive species is a challenging task with a full range of complexities, which the article discusses very nicely. As the threat of invasives pushes ecosystems further away from their natural balances, biocontrol will—more so than ever before—be discussed as a legitimate and sometimes critical tool. It becomes imperative to understand the far-reaching implications of biocontrol by carefully researching the impacts—both positive and negative—of introducing a species to a foreign ecosystem.

As technology and development have forged their ways across lines of conservation, publications such as Conservation In Practice have become increasingly important in today’s world. As a scientist, I commend such efforts as we work to protect biodiversity, strategically and carefully. The efforts of modern science may have increased the feasibility of biocontrol, but it remains still an uncertain process in delicate balance.

DR. DOUG PEARSALL

The Nature Conservancy

Caution Needed in Biological Control Efforts

Controlling invasive species by deliberately introducing their exotic natural enemies seems so simple and straightforward, so ecological. Yet, the outcome depends upon our ability to predict complex ecological interactions in new communities, something we’re not very good at doing (1, 2). So, we concur with the cautious, conservation-oriented perspective on biological control of Van Driesche and Van Driesche (“The Conundrum of Biocontrol: Weighing Urgency against Uncertainty,” Spring 2003). Asking the right questions, with caution and humility, identifying the real problem, developing ecological goals, using knowledge thoughtfully, and avoiding “collateral” damage (a strange euphemism) are important and often overlooked.

Our current research, however, suggests three issues that require more consideration. First, the jury is still out on longer-term evolutionary consequences. Although we found that the weevil Rhinocyllus conicus still prefers its weedy coevolved host, we also found that weevils from the native thistle accept it much more readily than do those from the naturalized weed, consistent with adaptive change. Second, small population sizes of the natives cannot predict impact or persistence of the exotic. This argument was made for R. conicus; yet, the sparse Platte thistle sustains the weevil in the absence of its preferred host. Finally, indirect effects need more attention. Theory and our recent studies show that less preferred native species can suffer from a shared predator. The greater the biocontrol population on the pest, the greater the pressure on the less preferred native.

The bottom line is that biological control is an option but should be reserved for well defined, major, intractable problems with low/no impact on native species. Alternative pest management strategies exist; “do nothing” is not the only alternative. Prediction of the outcome of new ecological interactions is tentative. The precautionary principle (3) argues: “First, do no harm.” This rings true, especially in conservation.

SVATA M. LOUDA (email hidden; JavaScript is required)

University of Nebraska

F. LELAND RUSSELL (email hidden; JavaScript is required)

University of Nebraska

TATYANA A. RAND (email hidden; JavaScript is required)

University of Nebraska

Literature Cited:

1. Louda, S.M. et al. 2003. Nontarget effects — the Achilles’ heel of biological control? Retrospective analyses to reduce risk associated with biocontrol introductions. Annual Review of Entomology 48:365-396.

2. Louda, S.M. and P. Stiling. 2003. Biological control, a double-edged sword in conservation and restoration. Conservation Biology (17). In press.

3. Simberloff, D. and P. Stiling. 1996. How risky is biological control? Ecology 77:1965-1974.

Restoration as Weed Control

Although it makes sense that restoring native plants could help control invasive weeds, no one knows if it would really work. New research makes a good case for this approach: restoring tallgrass prairie in old fields decreased the weed biomass by nearly 95 percent. Moreover, restoration may ultimately be easier and cheaper than traditional ways of controlling weeds.

“The potential weed control benefits of restoration could provide a powerful incentive for restoring native plant communities,” say Dana Blumenthal, Nicholas Jordan and Elizabeth Svenson of the University of Minnesota at St. Paul in Volume 7, Number 1 of Conservation Ecology. “It may be possible…to manage simultaneously for diversity and weed control.”

Right now, controlling weeds in places like roadsides and field edges typically means mowing, tilling, and/or using herbicides each year, which is time-consuming and expensive. For example, controlling weeds on U.S. highway rights-of-way cost an estimated US$276 million in 1994. In contrast, restored prairie is so low-maintenance that burning every few years is likely to be enough to control weeds.

Blumenthal and his colleagues tested how weeds were affected when old fields were restored to tallgrass prairie in the Cedar Creek Natural History Area in Bethel, Minnesota. The researchers compared the weeds in three types of study plots: unrestored old field (primarily nonnative grasses); seed-only restored tallgrass prairie (which entailed sowing seeds of five prairie grasses and 15 prairie forbs); and intensively restored tallgrass prairie (which entailed treating the site with herbicides, burning, and rototilling prior to sowing the seeds). Seven years after the prairie restoration, the researchers compared the weed biomass and stem numbers in the restored and unrestored plots.

Blumenthal and his colleagues found that prairie restoration could be a great way to control weeds. Intensive restoration reduced the weed biomass by 94 percent and reduced the number of weed stems by three-quarters. The results also showed that seed-only restoration reduced the number of weed stems by two-thirds, suggesting that less intensive restoration could sometimes be enough to control weeds.

To make sure that the observed weed control was due to restoration, Blumenthal and his colleagues did a companion study (submitted to Oecologia) that included separating the effects of restoration from factors such as weed seed variability. To equalize numbers of weed seeds, the researchers added large quantities of seed from 12 locally-abundant weed species (2-3 grams per square meter for each species) to both restored prairie 6 years after restoration as well as old field plots. The researchers then monitored these “added” weeds during the 2 following years.

Blumenthal and his colleagues confirmed that prairie restoration greatly decreased the density, size, and biomass of the “added” weeds. Notably, intensive restoration reduced the biomass of these weeds by 93 percent in the first year after the seeds were added.

Prairie restoration is more likely to control agricultural weeds than those that invade natural areas, say the researchers. This is because agricultural weeds typically grow fast and make lots of seeds and so do best in disturbed areas where there is little competition from other plants. In contrast, the types of weeds that invade natural eco-systems tend to live longer and be more competitive.

For more Information
Blumenthal, D.M., N.R. Jordan, and E. Svenson. 2003. Weed control as a rationale for restoration: The example of tallgrass prairie. Conservation Ecology 7(1):6. www.consecol.org/vol7/iss1/art6

“Each step of road improvement would appear to convert an increasing area of natural habitat to roadside habitat,” say Jonathan Gelbard, who did this work while at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and is now at the University of California at Davis, and Jayne Belnap of the U.S. Geological Survey in Moab, Utah, in the April 2003 issue of Conservation Biology.

Cheatgrass, knapweeds, and other nonnative plants have invaded nearly 51 million hectares of the American West. Roads are a big part of the problem: for instance, vehicles can transport nonnative seeds into uninfested areas, and clearing land during road construction gives weed seeds a place to become established. Intuitively, it makes sense that improved roads would spread weeds more than would primitive roads because the former have more traffic, more exposed soil, and more maintenance such as mowing and herbicide treatments, all of which can favor invasive species.

To see if nonnative weeds really are more likely to invade along improved roads, Gelbard and Belnap surveyed the plants along 42 roads with varying degrees of improvement (paved, improved surface such as gravel, graded, and 4-wheel-drive track) in and around southern Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. The researchers determined the cover and number of species of nonnative and native plants in two areas: roadside verges (strips along the road) and “interior sites” near but not right next to roads (about 50 meters from the verge).

Gelbard and Belnap found that road improvement greatly increased the cover of nonnative plants in roadside verges. Notably, cheatgrass cover was three times greater in verges along paved roads than along 4-wheel-drive tracks (27 versus 9 percent).

In addition, verges along improved roads were wider, ranging from about 0.9 meters on each side of 4-wheel-drive tracks to 7 meters on each side of paved roads. This means that improving roads can convert natural habitat to nonnative weed-infested roadside habitat. “For example, our results suggest that improving 10 km [about 6 miles] of 4-wheel-drive tracks to paved roads converts an average of 12.4 ha [about 30 acres] of interior habitat to roadside [habitat],” say Gelbard and Belnap.

The researchers also found that improved roads in interior sites had more nonnative plant cover. Cheatgrass cover was more than three times greater in interior sites adjacent to paved roads than in those adjacent to 4-wheel-drive tracks (26 versus 8 percent).

Overall, the cover of nonnative plants was more than 50 percent greater in interior sites adjacent to paved roads than in those adjacent to 4-wheel-drive tracks. In addition, road improvement changed the number of both exotic and native species in the interior community study plots: the number of exotic species was more than 50 percent greater and the number of native species was 30 percent lower at interior sites adjacent to paved roads than at those adjacent to 4-wheel-drive tracks.

“Our findings suggest that major opportunities remain to prevent exotic [nonnative] plant invasions in this semiarid landscape by minimizing the construction of new roads and the improvement of existing roads,” say Gelbard and Belnap.

Further Information:
Gelbard, J.L. and J. Belnap. 2003. Roads as conduits for exotic plant invasions in a semiarid landscape. Conservation Biology 17(2):420-432.

“The phrase ‘nondestructive fishing methods’ often used by those in the aquarium trade may actually be highly misleading with respect to the conservation status of reef fish,” say Niclas Kolm and Anders Berglund of Uppsala University in Sweden in the June 2003 issue of Conservation Biology.

Coral reefs have the greatest diversity of fish worldwide, and many species are unique to particular reefs. Prized for their bright colors, coral reef fish are harvested by the hundreds of thousands each year. Although nondestructive fishing methods are clearly an improvement over cyanide and dynamite, they are not necessarily benign, and little is known about their effects on fish populations.

Kolm and Berglund studied the effects of a nondestructive fishing method on the Banggai cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni), which is about 5 cm long and is silver with black stripes. Popular in North America, Japan, and Europe, the fish has been found only in the Banggai archipelago off the east coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, and is fished throughout its range. Banggai cardi-nalfish live in groups near long-spined sea urchins and seek shelter in the urchins when threatened. Fishermen take advantage of this behavior by pushing urchins into a cage with a stick, which tricks the fish into swimming right in after them. The researchers monitored the Banggai cardinalfish at eight sites in the archipelago and interviewed local fishermen to assess the fishing intensity, which ranged from low (never or rarely fished) to high (frequently fished).

Kolm and Berglund found that fishing cut the size of Banggai cardi-nalfish groups by half. Specifically, while the average number of fish per group was 11.5 at low-intensity fishing sites, it was only 5.7 at high-intensity fishing sites. This is troubling because at the time of the study, the species had been commercially fished for only 6 years and the industry is still expanding. “Our data suggest that the popular Banggai cardinalfish is under threat from the aquarium trade industry,” say the researchers.

The fishery could threaten the Banggai cardinalfish in two ways. First, fishermen move to new sites after depleting the old ones, and depleted populations are unlikely to be replenished because young Banggai cardinalfish apparently do not disperse far. Second, pushing the sea urchins with a stick often damages them, and the researchers found that the size of a given Banggai cardinalfish population depends on the size of the associated urchin population.

There is, however, an easy way to turn this into a win-win situation for both the fish and the fishermen. Banggai cardinalfish can be raised reliably and cheaply in aquariums, and the researchers are currently working to encourage local people to do so. “A fruitful industry could be developed with little or no negative impact on the Banggai cardinalfish,” say Kolm and Berglund.

Further Information:

Kolm, N. and A. Berglund. 2003. Wild populations of a reef fish suffer from the “nondestructive” aquarium trade fishery. Conservation Biology 17(3):910-914.

“In avoiding extinction, it pays to be promiscuous,” says Justin Brashares of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who presents this work in the June 2003 issue of Conservation Biology. “This study is the first to show a strong link between social behavior and risk of extinction in mammals.”

Most studies of risk factors for extinction are based on natural extinctions through the ages — but other risk factors may be at play in today’s world, where the extinction rate is unnaturally high due to overhunting, habitat fragmentation, and other disturbances caused by people. Knowing which species are particularly sensitive to these disturbances would help conservationists figure out how to save them. Since 1970, more than half of the mammal populations in Ghanaian reserves have become locally extinct. “This shocking loss of abundance and local diversity is occurring throughout Africa,” says Brashares.

To identify risk factors for modern extinctions, he analyzed the extinctions and persistences of large mammals in six reserves in the savannas of Ghana, where the mammals have been census-ed monthly for more than 30 years and 78 local extinctions have been documented. Brashares assessed the extinction risk of nine traits (including population isolation, harem size, abundance, and how much people like to eat mammals) in 41 mammal species (9 primates, 24 ungulates, and 8 carnivores).

After accounting for the effect of reserve size, Brashares found that two of the factors studied correlated with local extinctions in the Ghanaian reserves. The first is population isolation, which is not surprising because this was previously known to be a risk factor for natural extinctions.

The second is harem size: mammals that are monogamous or have small harems were more prone to extinction. For instance, several duiker species, which are monogamous, died out an average of 10 years after the reserves were established, whereas the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer), which has harems of about 15 females, is still living in all of the reserves. Similarly, several colobus monkey species, which have few mates, died out an average of 18 years after the reserves were established, whereas green monkeys and baboons, which have many mates, are still living in each of the reserves.

How could being monogamous make animals more vulnerable to extinction? No one knows for sure, but there is some evidence that hunters take more males than females from populations, which could lead to a dearth of males available for pairing in monogamous species. In contrast, species with large harems are more likely to have plenty of “spare” males. Another possibility is that when animals live in pairs or small groups, they are less likely to detect approaching hunters. “It may just be that it’s a lot easier to sneak up on one or two animals than it is 20,” says Brashares.

This work suggests that managers should target conservation efforts and monitoring on species that are monogamous or live in small groups. “This could mean using them as indicator or umbrella species, or just giving these species special attention,” says Brashares.

Further Information:
Brashares, J.S. 2003. Ecological, behavioral, and life-history correlates of mammal ex-tinctions in West Africa. Conservation Biology 17(3):733-743.

Perhaps the most basic difference between land and marine ecosystems is that the latter are “open.” Waves and currents transport everything from nutrients to the eggs and young of marine species over vast areas. Many marine animals produce tiny larvae that can disperse great distances in plankton (tens to hundreds of kilometers) and join populations far from their parents. In contrast, the young of most land animals disperse an average of less than 10 km. Whereas such “closed” populations could theoretically be self-sustaining, this is not true of the “open” marine populations, which are likely to depend on being replenished by young dispersing from another population.

This means that marine reserves should account for the patterns and variability of the currents that disperse the young. For instance, marine reserves could be designed as networks linked by these dispersal currents, helping to make sure that the various protected populations replenish each other.

Another major difference between land and marine ecosystems is that marine species respond faster to environmental changes, shifting their distributions on the order of decades rather than centuries. This fluidity results from two characteristics of marine systems: the fact that the young can disperse over long distances and that the primary producers in the sea are phytoplankton, which are tiny and short-lived (in contrast, the primary producers on land are trees, which are big and long-lived). To accommodate these relatively rapid shifts in distribution, marine reserves should include a range of depths and latitudes.

Marine reserves should also reflect the differences in human exploitation on land versus in the sea. Whereas most exploited land species are domesticated, most exploited marine species are wild. About half of the fisheries in the U.S. and Europe are classified as overexploited by the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the goals of marine reserves often include replenishing harvested populations outside the reserve. Thus, although protecting nonreserve populations is not a priority for most land reserves, it can be a critical component of marine reserves.

For all the differences between marine and land reserves, Carr and his colleagues stress that there are two important similarities: bigger is better and ongoing management, monitoring, and enforcement are critical.

Further Information:
Carr, M.H. et al. 2003. Comparing marine and terrestrial ecosystems: implications for the design of coastal marine reserves. Ecological Applications 13(1) Supplement:S90-S107.

”In a world filled with contemporary evolution, conservation efforts that ignore its implications will be less efficient and perhaps even risk prone,” say Craig Stockwell of North Dakota State University in Fargo, Andrew Hendry of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Michael Kinnison of the University of Maine in Orono in the February 2003 Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Contemporary evolution can be driven by three of the greatest threats to biodiversity: habitat degradation and fragmentation, non-native species, and overharvesting. Many populations have adapted quickly to degraded habitats; for instance plants growing in mine waste piles have become tolerant to lead and other metals within 50-70 years.

When applied to such locally adapted populations, traditional conservation methods may backfire. Notably, conventional wisdom says that fragmented populations should be connected to increase gene flow. But when fragmented populations adapt to local conditions and diverge from each other, connecting them could actually increase their risk of extinction. This is because introducing “outside” genes could make such populations less suited to local conditions.

In addition, contemporary evolution may also contribute to the success of invasive nonnative species, which can adapt and spread rapidly in their new environments. In addition, contemporary evolution can thwart attempts to control nonnative species. For instance, using herbicides on nonnative plants can actually make the problem worse because they can become resistant — agricultural weeds can become herbicide-resistant in just ten years. One way around this problem is to vary the types and timing of herbicides.

Finally, overharvesting a species can drive contemporary evolution when certain groups are targeted. Fisheries can target the biggest individuals with selective gear such as the mesh size of nets, and this can change traits that determine the size and productivity of the population as a whole. For instance, a gillnet fishery decreased the age and size at maturity of the European grayling (Thymallus thymallus) off Norway in only 48 years.

Other management implications of contemporary evolution include evaluating the relative benefits of short- versus long-term adaptation, and manipulating species’ adaptation. Because adaptation generally decreases genetic diversity, short-term adaptation could come at the expense of long-term adaptation, and managers need to know when to favor one over the other. Managers also need to know whether they should help species adapt when their environments are changing too fast for them to keep up, such as by raising a number of generations in an intermediate environment.

While Stockwell and his colleagues challenge conservation biologists to consider evolution in the short-term, they also caution that there are no hard and fast rules. “Application of contemporary evolution to conservation biology is still very much in its infancy,” say the researchers.

Further Information:

Stockwell C.A., A.P. Hendy, and M.T. Kinnison. 2003. Contemporary evolution meets conservation biology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18(2):94-101.

This could “at last enable ecologists to estimate worldwide species diversity,” say Michael Rosenzweig, Will Turner, and Jonathan Cox of the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Taylor Ricketts of Stanford University in Stanford, California, in the June 2003 issue of Conservation Biology.

Although conservationists can predict how many species there are within a single habitat, the usefulness of this approach is limited because it’s impossible to sample all the habitats in large areas. Knowing the number of species is critical to tracking and addressing declines in biodiversity. “Right now we can only guess that the correct answer for the total number of species worldwide lies between 2 and 100 million,” says Rosenzweig.

To find a way to assess biodiversity in large regions, Rosenzweig and his colleagues tested six methods for assessing biodiversity in a single habitat on a remarkably well known group of species: butterflies in the U.S. and Canada. Because butterflies are so popular, we have an unusually complete set of data for which species live where. There are 561 known butterfly species and 110 ecoregions in the U.S. and Canada, and the researchers determined which of the six methods predicted the total number of species most accurately based on data from the smallest number of ecoregions.

Rosenzweig and his colleagues found that three of the six methods to overcome sample-size limits within a habitat that they evaluated worked well even when limited to only a tenth of the ecoregions (11 out of 110). The best such estimate yielded nearly all of the known butterfly species (556 out of 561). Although the researchers found that selecting ecoregions at random worked well, spacing them evenly throughout the continent worked even better. “This is encouraging because it’s easy to do,” says Rosenzweig. It would have been much harder if they had to select ecoregions based on biologically-relevant factors. “It’s not easy to know in advance what measures are important to most species — temperature? rainfall? elevation?” he says.

Rosenzweig and his colleagues also have recently found that their approach also works for assessing the large-scale biodiversity of many other groups of species, from marine invertebrates to birds. “It points the way for getting the answer to how many species there are worldwide,” says Rosenzweig.

Further Information:

Rosenzweig, M.L. et al. 2003. Estimating diversity in unsampled habitats of a biogeographical province. Conservation Biology 17(3):864-874.

In 1993, a group of Dutch and Tanzanian biologists working on a survey of Lake Victoria’s fish fauna pulled up a small, vermilion-finned fish in a trawl conducted along a transect in the Mwanza Gulf, near the southern shore of the lake. This handsome fish was a specimen of Haplochromis tanaos, and the most remarkable thing about it was that no one had thought it would ever be seen alive again.

H. tanaos was one of about 200 species of haplochromine cichlids endemic to Lake Victoria that had been consigned to memory. All 200 were thought to have been driven extinct in large part by the Nile perch (Lates niloticus), a voracious predator introduced to the East African lake in the 1950s. The catastrophic demise of the lake’s haplochromine cichlids (a large group of small, brightly colored fish found in fresh waters throughout Africa and prone to excessive speciation) had become one of the world’s best known conservation tragedies—a cautionary tale of the dangers of releasing exotic species into fragile natural ecosystems.

But the rediscovery of H. tanaos is part of a constellation of evidence that began to emerge in the mid-1990s and has now revealed a new twist in this old story. This new twist points to the often serendipitous nature of conservation opportunities and suggests that biodiversity conservation and fisheries production need not always be in conflict. Researchers are now using a combination of computer modeling and ongoing observations of Victoria’s often surprising dynamics to pull from the vast lake the points where these two goals may intersect.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Lake Victoria, the world’s largest tropical lake and third largest overall, sits on a high plateau between East Africa’s two great rift valleys, its waters shared by the nations of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. At the beginning of the 20th century, the lake was home to upwards of 600 species of haplochromine cichlids, which were nearly all endemic to the lake and had evolved in only a few hundred thousand years—one of the world’s most impressive examples of vertebrate adaptive radiation.

In addition to this evolutionary treasure, Lake Victoria was home to a rich community of native fish species, many of which were caught by subsistence fishers in small canoes near the shores of the lake. With the introduction of modern fishing gear, such as synthetic nets and outboard motors, fishing pressure rapidly intensified, and within a few decades the native species had been severely overfished.

To replace these decimated stocks, in the 1950s and 1960s several species were introduced to the lake, including the Nile perch, which authorities hoped would convert the still-abundant but tiny haplochromines into higher-value, more easily caught fish.

Convert haplochromine biomass the Nile perch did indeed. The species is an efficient piscivore that can reach a length of 2 meters and 100 kilograms in mass. After laying low for about two decades, the perch population exploded during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and at the same time haplochromine populations plummeted. In the course of less than a decade, 40 percent of the lake’s then known haplochromine species disappeared altogether in one of the largest and most rapid episodes of vertebrate mass extinction ever witnessed.

Yet as this conservation tragedy unfolded, a valuable export fishery for Nile perch developed, bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs and huge inflows of hard currency to a region that desperately needed both.

But now, in a repeat of the lake’s history, it appears that the Nile perch is itself being overfished. Total perch catch is declining, the average size of perch caught has decreased over the last decade, and in recent experimental trawls, 70 percent of the perch catch by mass consisted of immature fish—all classic signs of overfishing.

Along with this decline in perch stock—and as a direct consequence, scientists believe—some of Lake Victoria’s cichlids have begun to come back. In addition to H. tanaos, several other species of haplochromines that had been thought extinct have been rediscovered, while others that had become very rare have rebounded.

At first, this latest development in Lake Victoria’s saga sounds like good news. But on second thought, it doesn’t sound like news at all. A decrease in the population of an introduced species led to a recovery of native species: isn’t that the principle behind any effort to eradicate an exotic species?

Where Two Waves Intersect

But no one is trying to eradicate the Nile perch from Lake Victoria—in fact, most people in the region are desperate to preserve the perch fishery, which was valued at US$220 million in 2000. Just getting rid of the major component of the largest freshwater fishery in the world is simply not an option.

Still, many scientists working in the region saw reason for hope. Having watched the populations of perch and haplochromines rise and fall, like two waves in opposite phase, they began to wonder if there might be a point of balance—enough perch for people to catch, and enough haplochromines to ensure the survival of the lake’s remaining species. They began to think that building a sustainable fishery and conserving biodiversity might not be mutually exclusive aims after all.

Finding this balance is more than just a pie-in-the-sky conservationist dream. The livelihood of thousands may depend on that balance because the Nile perch grow fastest when they are eating mostly haplochromine cichlids. “We can only sustain the kind of fishery we’re looking for on a haplochromine prey base,” says Les Kaufman, a biologist at Boston University and former head of the Lake Victoria Research Team, an international consortium of scientists working on the lake’s ecology.

Initially, Nile perch in Lake Victoria fed almost exclusively on haplochromines, producing some of the highest growth rates ever recorded for the species and fueling the rapid expansion of the fishery. As haplochromines disappeared, the perch switched to a diet of tiny prawns (Caridina nilotica), minnows (Rastrineobola argentea), and juvenile Nile perch. Like humans before it, the Nile perch was “fishing down” the lake, switching to smaller or less desirable prey as preferred species were overexploited.

On this new diet, it seemed, the perch grew more slowly. So as fishing began to deplete Nile perch stocks, haplochromines were released from predation pressure and began to resurge. Just as soon as that happened, the perch turned back to haplochromines, which they seem to prefer above all other prey.

In fact, one of the first clues that the cichlids were coming back was that they began to show up in perch stomachs again. “The predators can sample the cichlids much better than we can,” says Daniel Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Back on a diet of haplochromines, the perch should now be growing faster.

That’s the prediction of a computer model of Nile perch population dynamics constructed by Kaufman and then graduate student, Jesse Schwartz. The two researchers turned to computer modeling to find the intersection between fishing and biodiversity conservation. Their model predicted that perch yields should be greatest when fishing effort is intermediate—a familiar result perhaps, but for an unusual reason. An intermediate level of fishing also results in lots of haplochromines in the lake. “If you fish too much, there will be lots of haplochromines but no fishery because the perch population will collapse,” explains Kaufman. “But if you fish too little, you’ll have too many perch and not enough haplo-chromines, and the perch growth rate will go down.”

In other words, a sustainable perch fishery and cichlid conservation are more than just potentially compatible—they’re interdependent. Fishers and fishery managers need haplochromines to feed the Nile perch, and conservationists need fishers to remove Nile perch from the lake to reduce predation pressure on cichlids.

Selective Predation
Practical clues about how to accomplish this intermediate level of fishing come from an earlier computer model constructed by Schindler and his colleagues. Theirs is a classic predator-prey model that treats gill nets, the primary gear type used in the commercial perch fishery, as a size-selective top predator in the lake.

This model predicted that instituting a 5-inch minimum mesh size* throughout the lake would reduce Nile perch predation on haplo-chromines and other species by 44 percent, while decreasing perch yield by only about 10 percent. Although perch eat cichlids over most of their lives, the larger perch do the most damage. “It turned out that 5 inches was a good mesh size to eliminate a lot of predation but was maybe big enough to let the perch mature as well,” Schindler explains.

Schindler argues that this type of fishing regulation has the advantage of being practical. “In my view the mesh-size restriction is viable because it’s one of the few things you can do that’s enforceable,” he says. Nets are mostly imported, so enforcement involves policing a small number of net importers and sellers.

Regardless of the specific regulations that are instituted, the system will need frequent monitoring. That’s because the balance managers are aiming for is not a static maximum sustained yield but an ever-shifting interplay between humans, perch, haplochromines, and other species in the ecosystem. Striking that balance requires constant calibration, with haplochromines as well as the perch themselves used as indicator species. According to Kaufman and Schwartz’s model, Lake Victoria’s fish stocks need to be assessed about every nine months to fine-tune management decisions and avoid over- or undershooting the balance point.

“Fortunately, it’s an extremely resilient system,” Kaufman says. Nile perch are extremely fecund and grow quite fast, which makes them very responsive to changes in management, suggesting that they could recover from overfishing relatively quickly. “If you back off fishing on perch…the little ones will pop out and grow up,” he says.

Another key means of modulating the effect of the perch will be to protect the refugia where haplochromines can escape predation by perch. Researchers have identified a number of natural refugia such as swampy wetlands at the lake edge and rock islets within the lake, and they’ve noticed that local areas where perch have been fished out—such as the Mwanza, Napoleon, and Winam Gulfs—also function as such refugia. “Where there has been intense fishing—in isolated bays and such—is where the cichlid species are coming back,” explains Schindler.

Schindler and others have suggested that local fishers could be recruited and paid to continue fishing for perch in these areas. In other words, these locations would become a system of “reverse marine protected areas,” with the protected area (for cichlids) actually the area that’s fished the hardest (for perch).

A New Version of Common Sense
The story of Lake Victoria may no longer be an unalloyed conservation tragedy, but it remains bittersweet. The vast logistics of managing fisheries in a lake the size of Switzerland are complicated by international borders and scarce economic resources. The three lakeshore nations have implemented a 5-inch minimum mesh-size restriction for gill nets, but so far this measure has been only a partial success. Up to 20 percent of the gill nets used today are below the legal mesh size. Some scientists are now pinning their hopes on a new slot-size restriction under which lakeshore processing plants would only be able to accept perch between 55 and 85 cm long.

But the Nile perch is not the cichlids’ only problem. The turbidity of the water in the eutrophic lake appears to be wreaking havoc on the cichlids’ mating system. Females rely on visual cues from male coloring to select appropriate mates. Scientists are finding a number of haplochromine species that they’ve never seen before and that may be hybrids, suggesting that the lake has become a kind of singles bar where everyone looks good in the dim light.

“Fishery science is potentially quite powerful, but what we really need is clean water,” says Ole Seehausen, who was part of the team that rediscovered H. tanaos in 1993 and is now based at Hull University in the U.K. He notes that so far, the cichlid resurgence consists of just a handful of species that have come back in large numbers—not a return to the previous level of diversity. In fact, eutrophication, which occurred about the same time as the Nile perch upsurge in Lake Victoria, may have been a more important factor in the cichlids’ original decline than scientists first thought. And reversing it is likely to be key to maximizing cichlid recovery, particularly in terms of species diversity.

Yet already, some lessons of this latest act in the lake’s story are clear. “We now have a new version of common sense,” says Kaufman. Whereas common sense once dictated that fishing and biodiversity conservation are opposing goals, it now says that the two are compatible and even interdependent.

This interdependence rests on still another unexpected twist in this story of unintended consequences: the most important predator in Lake Victoria is not the Nile perch, it’s the human fisher. Of course, the idea that humans are a powerful ecological force is nothing new—that’s what overfishing is about. Nor is the idea that humans can be a force for good in ecosystems—that’s what restoration is about. But the idea that humans can help foster ecological balance while making a living through resource extraction is a novel view.

Daniel Schindler suggests that this way of thinking about humans as predators could be applied to other ecosystems, such as some of the Great Lakes of North America, where exotics are currently the most important species in both a biological and an economic sense. And Les Kaufman goes further, arguing that this philosophy is the underpinning of an ecosystem approach to fishing. Today in Lake Victoria, scientists and fishery managers aren’t merely asking “How many fish can we catch sustainably?” but “How does our catching fish affect the balance between all the other parts of the ecosystem?”

Suggested Reading:

Balirwa, J.S. et al. 2003. Biodiversity and fisheries sustainability in the Lake Victoria basin: An unexpected marriage? BioScience in press (August 2003).

Kaufman, L. 1992. Catastrophic change in species-rich freshwater ecosystems: The lessons of Lake Victoria. BioScience 42(11):846-58.

Kaufman, L. and J. Schwartz. 2002. Nile perch population dynamics in Lake Victoria: Implications for management and conservation. In Ruth, M. and J. Lindholm eds. Dynamic Modeling for Marine Conservation. Springer-Verlag, New York.

Schindler, D.E., J.F. Kitchell, and R. Ogutu-Ohwayo. 1998. Ecological consequences of alternative gill net fisheries for Nile perch in Lake Victoria. Conservation Biology 12(1):56-64.

Seehausen, O. et al. 1997. Patterns of the remnant cichlid fauna in southern Lake Victoria. Conservation Biology 11(4):890-904.

Seehausen, O., J.J.M. van Alpen, and F. Vitte. 1997. Cichlid fish diversity threatened by eutrophication that curbs sexual selection. Science 277:1808-1811.

About the Author:

Sarah DeWeerdt is a freelance science writer based in Seattle, Washington.

Further Infomation:

Boarman,W.I. 1993. When a native predator becomes a pest: A case study. In Majumdar et al. (eds.) Conservation & Resource Management. Pennsylvania Academy of Sciences, Easton, PA.

Root, T. 1988. Atlas of wintering North American birds: An analysis of Christmas bird count data. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL.

Breeding Bird Survey and Christmas Bird Count long-term data sets can be downloaded from the web: (BBS) http://www. mp2pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/retrieval/; (CBC) http://birdsource.cornell.edu/

Summer 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 3)

Some patients with heart blockages have additional ventricle beats and it has been shown that these can be suppressed by various drugs; this treatment thus became common practice (1). This follows the conventional methodology of identifying a problem and finding ways of alleviating it. However, analysis using randomized trials showed that patients given these drugs were more likely to die (2). Similarly, there are over thirty documented ways in which doctors can detect whether patients are obtaining insufficient air to survive, but when these are tested for precision and accuracy only a few both bear a relation to the actual airflow and can be confirmed by repeat measures (some were not repeatable even with the same clinician) (3). In another study of general physicians in America, the researchers interviewed the physicians after each consultation with a patient and asked if the physicians had any questions they would like the answer to. The researchers consulted the literature to answer these questions and showed that in a typical day, eight clinical decisions would have been altered (4). Finally, the advice of clinical experts regularly differs from the consensus of already published studies (5, 6).

Concerns over a discrepancy between practice and evidence led to the development of evidence-based medicine (e.g., 7) which is revolutionizing clinical practice. Clinicians often base their decisions on intuition and experience such that it is often difficult for others to learn from them except through mimicry. Evidence-based medicine involves unraveling, understanding, and making objective the logic of experts so that it is possible to replace mimicry and tradition with understanding. It builds on, rather than replaces, clinical skills, clinical judgement, and clinical experience.

Traditional medical practice is, of course, heavily based on scientific evidence but often largely derived from secondary information obtained from textbooks, from discussion with colleagues, or from information obtained during training, with little use of scientific journals or reviews (8). Thus a study of hypertension showed that the main factor determining whether doctors decided to prescribe antihyperten-sion drugs was not the severity of organ damage, as would be expected, but the number of years since the doctor graduated from medical school (9, 3). The real change in methodology of evidence-based medicine is for doctors to have the training to interpret studies and access to information so that they can review primary studies and continually update their methods.

Do we need a similar revolution to produce evidence-based conservation? At the University of East Anglia, in the U.K., we have been carrying out a series of research projects to determine the consequences of various management practices and it is striking that repeatedly the conventional dogma turns out to be mistaken. For example, it is widely accepted that burning reed beds (a traditional practice disliked by many conservationists) kills many soil invertebrates, but a series of replicated, randomized and controlled experiments showed that this was not true; but flooding (a standard practice approved of by most conservationists) did kill them (10, 11). As a second example, a U.K. government conservation scheme paid farmers to flood fields in winter to enhance populations of breeding waders, but the flooding actually kills the earthworms on which the waders feed (12). The waders are largely dependent upon shallow pools in summer but with the government scheme all areas receiving subsidies must be dry by the spring. As a final example, it was thought that the low survival of wader chicks on saline lagoons was largely due to a decline in fertility and predation was a major problem. Research showed that fertility has little effect, the major problem is chicks starving due to high salinities killing the invertebrates (13).

Conservationists are continually using methods on species and habitats similar to those that have been used elsewhere and would surely benefit from being able to review past experiences. In practice, information is obtained partly from reviews and books (but rarely from primary sources) and largely by talking to others. In practice, even wardens managing similar habitats often do not exchange information, especially if working for different organizations or in different regions or countries. Similarly, Wright (14) states that research results are rarely shared between parks in North America.

The following are the main techniques (3) of evidence-based medicine, which I have illustrated with a conservation example:

1. Convert information into answerable questions (e.g., Do motor boats affect waterweed populations?).

2. Efficiently track down the best evidence with which to answer the question. This may include comparisons within parts of the site varying in boat activity, published papers, or evidence from other sites.

3. Critically appraise evidence both for its validity and usefulness (e.g., Is the water depth or plant community so different in the other sites that comparisons are not useful?).

4. Apply results of this appraisal.

5. Evaluate performance. A critical need is to find ways in which conservationists can record the exact problem (e.g., the spread of a particular problem plant), what was done (e.g., exactly how it was treated, when it was treated, exactly which equipment was used), and whether successful (ideally by quantifying but at least by recording if the species increased, decreased, or was equally abundant). A further need is for practicing conservationists to have the training to be able to interpret studies in a critical manner. The essence of my point is that, for example, in Britain there must be dozens of wardens trying to control introduced rhododendron (Rhododendron ponticum), and dozens more trying to prevent damage to regenerating woods by introduced Muntjac deer (Muntiacus reevesi), attracting wading birds to wet grasslands, deciding when to allow grazing on fens, or trying to restore damaged raised bogs. If each had an account of everyone else’s methods, successes, and failures, and those of wardens in other countries, then surely conservation would be progressing at a more rapid pace. The Internet provides the ideal medium for this.

One problem is that conservationists have too much to do already and documenting responses to management is yet another boring administrative task. Just as I am glad that doctors are taking time to learn whether a treatment works, I believe conservationists need to find ways of assimilating their collective experiences. Rather than waste time, the opportunity to learn from others and avoid repeating mistakes should actually provide more time for conservation that works.

Literature Cited

1. Morganroth, J., J.T. Bigger Jr., and J.L. Anderson. 1990. Treatment of ventricular arrhythmia by United States cardiologists: a survey before the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial results were available. American Journal of Cardiology 65:40-8.

2. Echt, D.S., P.R. Liebson, and B. Mitchell. 1991. Mortality and morbidity in patients receiving encainide, flecainide, or placebo: the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial. New England Journal of Medicine 324:781-8.

3. Sackett, D.L. et al. 1998. Evidence-based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh.
4. Covell, D.G., G.C. Uman, and P.R. Manning. 1985. Information needs in office practice: are they being met? Annals of Internal Medicine 103:596-9.

5. Antman, E.M. et al. 1992. A comparison of results of meta-analyses of randomized control trails and recommendations of clinical experts. Journal of the American Medical Association 268:240-8.

6. Warren, K.S. and F. Mosteller (eds.) 1993. Doing more harm than good: the evaluation of health care interventions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 703:1-341.

7. Friedland, D.J. (ed.) 1998. Evidence-based Medicine: A Framework for Clinical Practice. Appleton & Lange, Stamford.
8. Kanouse, D., D. Killich, and J.P. Kahan. 1995. Dissemination of effectiveness and outcomes research. Health Policy 34:167-192.

9. Sackett, D.L. et al. 1977. Clinical determinants of the decision to treat primary hypertension. Clinical Research 24:648.

10. Cowie, N.R. et al. 1993. The effects of conservation management of reed beds: II The flora and litter disappearances. Journal of Applied Ecology 29:277-284.

11. Ditlhago, M.K.M. et al. 1993. The effects of conservation management of reed beds: I The invertebrates. Journal of Applied Ecology 29:265-276.

12. Ausden, M. 1996. Invertebrates. In Sutherland, W.J. ed. Ecological Census Techniques. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
13. Robertson, P.A. 1993. The management of artificial coastal lagoons in relation to invertebrates and avocets Recurvirostra avosetta (L). PhD thesis, University of East Anglia.
14. Wright, R.G. 1999. Wildlife management in the national parks: questions in search of answers. Ecological Applications 9:30-36.

Excerpted from The Conservation Handbook: Research, Management and Policy by William J. Sutherland. Copyright © 2000 Blackwell Science Ltd.

It’s a warm May morning in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Kilimanjaro’s frosted peaks dominate the south, and to the north, rolling plains of grass and stooped acacia gradually sink into swamps.

Slowly wading through is a tagalong troupe of 17 elephants (Loxodonta Africana) — a large matriarch with aged tusks, six more adults, and ten young. The family is on its way to swamps where it will spend most of the day feeding.

On such mornings it’s not unusual to hear the social calls of other elephant families as they too approach the swamps, and in fact, this is what happens: a reverberating burrrrr signals the presence of another family a kilometer away. Normally, the elephants would fan out their ears to listen but otherwise ignore the call and continue walking while munching tussocks of grass; after all, scores of families inhabit this area, and their calls are familiar. But this time something is amiss. The call is from an unfamiliar, possibly threatening group — and hearing it temporarily shatters the slow-mo routine of an elephant morning.

Within seconds, the family has bunched defensively around its matriarch. The elephants will remain bunched for ten minutes, no longer munching but instead listening with their ears stiffly spread, sniffing the air nervously with their trunks.

On the surface, this ritual of caution seems like simple cause and effect. But if you watched more closely, it would become apparent that something more was going on. Somewhere within the ten odd seconds during which these elephants decided to bunch for protection is an important social interaction that is relevant to conservation. Yet it could easily go unnoticed by park rangers charged with overseeing the population — or by the conservation community as a whole.

We have long managed wild populations with hunting or culling programs that remove older, larger individuals — all the while assuming these individuals play little role in the overall success of groups. But when you examine the elephants’ behavior, this rationale falls flat on its face. Just ask Karen McComb, a psychologist studying animal behavior at the University of Sussex in the U.K. For seven years, she meticulously studied the Amboseli elephants, 800 animals in all, replaying recordings of familiar and unfamiliar calls to them and watching their reactions. Her findings raised plenty of eyebrows.

It turned out that it was the family’s matriarch, its oldest female, that was running the show — deciding which calls were familiar and whether to bunch. A family’s ability to distinguish calls depended more than anything on the age of its matriarch. But what was even more thought provoking was McComb’s finding that the family’s overall reproductive success also correlated with the age of its matriarch: families with older matriarchs simply did better. This increased success probably arose from multiple factors, including improved knowledge of social calls, food sources, and parenting skills.

“What our results really have to say,” concludes McComb, “is that removing these older individuals is potentially very damaging for the social welfare and reproductive success of groups.” This is information a park administrator can use. It means that protecting tusk-heavy matriarchs from ivory poachers should be a top priority. And this principal of key individuals also applies to other species with oral culture and influential matriarchs, such as primates and cetaceans.

What’s more, this convergence of behavior and conservation is no isolated case. For decades, behavioral ecology and conservation biology have advanced along parallel paths, the former focusing on individuals and the latter looking at whole populations. But from captive breeding to species reintroductions to population modeling, the time may finally be ripe for the walls between behavior and conservation to come tumbling down.

This article describes several areas where conservation and behavioral ecology are already merging to produce powerful results — with powerful implications for policy makers, planners, and conservation workers managing populations on the front line.

Letting Down Defenses
Widespread loss of large carnivores during the past century plunged temperate North America into a massive ecological experiment. The return of carnivores to some areas 50 years later is now bringing that experiment full circle.

Joel Berger, a behavioral ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City, has had a front-row view as wolves and grizzly bears return to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to feed on its bloated populations of moose (Alces alces) and elk (Cervus Canadensis). What makes this spectacle especially interesting is that these prey lost most of their predator-avoiding behaviors during their half-century hiatus from predation.

Surprisingly, Berger’s observations suggest that the return of carnivores can prompt prey to resume some obvious anti-predator habits within less than a year. This is good news for predator reintroductions; it means that prey are unlikely to be wiped out. But it’s too early to tell whether this rapid rehabituation signals a complete return to ecological normalcy. Prey have a collection of more subtle protective responses, and it’s not yet known whether these are also resumed. The question of whether they are has significant implications for the broader ecosystem.

I caught up with Berger for a chat in the middle of his busy moose calving field season as he crouched 2,100 meters up on a mobile phone-accessible mountain ridge in the Tetons, spying on a pregnant moose.

Berger has probed the predator-preparedness of moose using playback experiments: playing wolf howls or the calls of scavengers such as ravens, which signal the presence of carnivores, or else planting predator urine at browsing sites. At first, Teton moose showed no response to wolf howls, wolf urine, or raven calls; in contrast, moose from the predator-rich Talkeetna Mountains and Denali National Park of Alaska significantly increased their vigilance in response to all three stimuli. But the Teton moose’s naivety to predators that they previously coexisted with for thousands of years is most starkly illustrated by nature itself. “We’ve had several 150-kilogram moose calves,” said Berger, “that wolves approached to within five meters and then just took them down without them responding they way they should have. They may have thought these wolves were just large coyotes.”

Yet despite the occasional National Geographic-style predator-prey massacre, the Teton moose are actually regaining their astuteness with surprising speed. It appears, based on playback experiments, that losing a single calf to predation is sufficient to evoke increased vigilance in mothers in response to wolf howls (but not to wolf urine) — where previously there was none. Vigilance in response to raven calls seems to be returning more slowly.

Despite the dire predictions by hunting groups, these results suggest that prey can weather the reintroduction of predators without population crashes. That’s relatively straightforward. But there’s more. Behavioral changes that occur when prey lose their fear of predators can be deceptively subtle, including changes in habitat use. Following the disappearance of predators, moose and elk in the Tetons fed more frequently in riverine zones where once they were easy targets for predators. The ecological effects are significant. Increased riverine browsing reduces the secondary foliage that provides habitat for some insects and birds. As a result, numbers of several neotropical migrant warblers have declined. And now that grizzlies and wolves are returning, pregnant moose are choosing to give birth closer to roads — areas that carnivores avoid.

These subtle anti-predator responses may matter greatly. In predator reintroductions, behavioral responses provide a more sensitive measure than do simple carnivore and prey population surveys for determining whether reintroduction has worked. “If people are claiming that systems are restored with predators back in,” says Berger, “then prey should be responding. And if they’re failing to, then I don’t think we can claim that we really have ecosystems restored to a level such as they once existed.”

Invisible Thresholds
Population models can be powerful tools for making policy decisions. But these tools can also dangerously oversimplify reality, as a result overestimating how much exploitation a population can sustain — or failing to predict the point where population decline crosses the invisible threshold into an accelerating downward spiral.

“The opportunity we’re really missing,” says William Sutherland, a population biologist at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., “is to create population models from an understanding of behavior. The reason that’s incredibly important is we want to predict what will happen under novel conditions” such as exploitation or habitat alteration.

The African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) provides an excellent illustration of the power of behavioral modeling. Although this carnivore once ranged widely over 34 countries, only six countries now harbor populations of more than 100 animals. If current trends continue, the dogs could vanish within three decades.

The exact reasons for the decline have long puzzled observers. After all, hyenas, which inhabit overlapping locales and suffer similar levels of persecution, fare far better. But now it appears that the African wild dog’s cooperative hunting and breeding behaviors are at the center of its spectacular crash and burn.

Group hunting allows the African wild dog to tackle larger prey and guard fresh carcasses from hyenas. At the same time, cooperative breeding allows them to leave a baby-sitter home to protect pups while hunting parties are out.

But according to Franck Courchamp, a theoretical ecologist at the University of Paris XI in France, cooperation is buckling under pressure. “Because humans have decreased the pack size,” he says, “[the dogs] have become very sensitive to predation, to competition, to all kinds of things that they are well enough adapted to fight against when they are in sufficient number.” In Zimbabwe, Courchamp’s collaborator, Gregory Rasmussen of the University of Oxford in the U.K., found that once packs became too small, they no longer had enough dogs to leave a baby-sitter behind while still mustering a viable hunting party. Cour-champ devised a behavior-based model that incorporated the trade-off between hunting and pup guarding, and this model predicted that once a pack fell below a threshold of five adult animals, the pack was then apt to melt away. This prediction was borne out by several years of field observations.

The African wild dog’s penchant for Titanic-scale implosion illustrates a widespread behavioral phenomenon. The so-called Allee effect predicts that members of a species will live in groups or in close proximity to one another and that species that do this in the extreme owe a significant amount of their overall fitness to their group living. Allee effects are rooted in behavior — cooperative hunting or breeding (African wild dogs), cooperative predator avoidance (elk, rabbits, and schooling fish), and cooperative burrow construction (hairy nosed wombats), for example.

Incorporating Allee effects is crucial for creating models that can assess a species’ vulnerability as its population changes. But these effects are completely missed by traditional population models — with potentially disastrous results.

Consider the alpine marmot (Marmota marmota). This bucktoothed fur ball inhabits above-timberline meadows throughout the Alps, spending the winter hibernating in huddled groups in burrows beneath the snow. Group warming is critical for winter survival of juveniles: they’re kept at the center of the huddled mass, and group size determines just how warm they’re kept and, therefore, their survival rate.

The alpine marmot is widely hunted. Philip Stephens, of the University of East Anglia, U.K., and his colleagues (Walter Arnold, of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, and Sutherland) compared the ability of several models to determine sustainable hunting levels. On the one hand, they tried two frequently used “bush meat trade” constant yield models, which use population size, sex ratio, annual probability of reproduction, and average litter size to determine the maximum annual production of young. They then simply assumed that 20 percent of annual production could be safely removed by hunting.

On the other hand, they also developed a behavioral model with randomly determined litter sizes based on field observations and, most importantly, winter survival rates that depended on marmot group size. This model produced population trends and group sizes that matched field observations and revealed that even low levels of hunting (annual harvests as low as 5 percent of the adult population) would cause extinction. In contrast, the bush meat trade models overestimated sustainable hunting levels — in one case suggesting that annual harvests of 9 percent of the adult population were sustainable.

The alpine marmot isn’t currently threatened; this model simply provides proof of concept. But in the management of more heavily exploited species, Allee-based behavioral modeling could prove to be a lifesaver.

Yet despite the potential benefits, the puzzling truth is that behavior-based population models have yet to gain wide use in conservation. “There’s a few of us trying to do it,” says Sutherland, “but I think lots of people haven’t really appreciated the strength of that approach.”

Matchmaking
Captive breeding and some interventions in wild populations such as fish hatcheries can thrust conservation workers into the unlikely role of matchmaker. The potential for shaping populations is unprecedented, but a word of caution is warranted. Species themselves are much better at selecting their mates than humans are at selecting mates for them — and if we ignore this fact in our conservation efforts, then we risk undermining our best laid plans. The story of the Baltic Sea salmon hatcheries provides a stark reminder.

In the spring of 1974, the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) of the Baltic Sea were struck by a mysterious blight, and in hatcheries across the region, newly hatched salmon fry foundered in the water and died. It was fish hatched from poorly pigmented, pale-colored roe that died; fish hatched from dark red roe escaped unscathed. This pale egg blight became known as early mortality syndrome. Over the following years, the syndrome waxed and waned, occasionally striking up to 95 percent of the juvenile salmon in some hatcheries.

When early mortality syndrome struck, the Baltic salmon fishery had already been supported for over 50 years by hatcheries, which accounted for up to 90 percent of the Atlantic salmon living in the fishery. These hatcheries had always randomly mated fish to avoid artificially altering their allelic frequencies.

Yet some researchers speculate that random mating, together with increasing pollution in the Baltic Sea, has contributed to early mortality syndrome. The reason, says Torbjörn von Schantz, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University in Sweden, is that the fish themselves have never chosen their mates randomly; instead, females preferentially select mates according to several criteria including, he believes, red coloration. By doing so, they’re selecting mates with the largest reserves of carotenoids (antioxidant compounds producing red coloration in both fish and roe and important for fighting the effects of pollution). In contrast, random mating prevents selection of carotenoid-rich fish, gradually decreasing the population’s pigmentation and its resistance to ever-increasing pollution. To keep early mortality syndrome at bay, hatcheries have taken to treating fry with vitamin B-1, which doesn’t solve the underlying problem but for unknown reasons seems to prevent death.

The poor mate choice/pale egg theory of early mortality syndrome has yet to be conclusively shown. But even as an unproven hypothesis, it provides a potent reminder that conservation efforts should incorporate natural mate selection whenever possible. For the salmon of the Baltic Sea, “one should collect the breeding fish and analyze their carotenoid pigmentation,” says von Schantz, “and select those fish that have the highest concentration of carotenoids in their flesh.” For now, he’s simply suggesting that this technique be tried in a few hatcheries to see if it regenerates a salmon population that is capable of breeding without vitamin B-1 treatment.

In addition to fish hatcheries and replanted forests, where humans directly influence the genetic makeup of wild populations, this lesson also has implications for captive breeding.

Substantial effort is often made to match captive animals so that genetic variation is preserved. But once the homework is done, the star-crossed animal pair — a perfect match on paper — often shows no interest in mating. This problem occurs especially in solitary species such as pandas, gorillas, and some large cats.

The problem is being solved in cheetahs by mimicking natural mate selection. At the De Wildt Cheetah and Wildlife Centre in De Wildt, South Africa, cheetahs are housed separately to simulate their natural solitary exist-ence, but males are then introduced to large numbers of females one by one. Essentially, male cheetahs wander down a corridor (nicknamed “Lovers’ Lane”) that’s lined by enclosures containing solitary females. The males’ behavior (especially their notorious hot and bothered stutter barks) makes no mystery of which females interest them, and this is used to pair animals.

Fitness-determining genes are likely to be one criterion that cheetahs use to select mates. Although it’s not known which genes are important, one possibility is that cheetahs (and plenty of other picky species) choose mates based partly on their major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genotype. These immune markers are known to be involved in human and mouse mate selection and seem to be determined by scent. Females prefer mates whose MHC genotypes don’t match their own, and offspring from mixed-MHC matings are more resistant to disease and more successful at producing young. With credentials like that, MHC has been contemplated as an easily screenable marker that could be used to evaluate captive breeding pairings. But for the moment, it remains a matter of speculation; more research is needed before MHC’s true usefulness is known.

In the meantime, moderation should be the watchword. Whereas allowing free mate choice in captive populations may maintain high frequencies of “good genes,” the flip side is that individuals lacking such genes will reproduce less — and this speeds the loss of genetic variation, just the opposite of what’s needed in small, fragile populations. “We need to find an optimum between promoting good genes and maintaining genetic variation,” counsels Claus Wedekind, an evolutionary biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Duebendorf, Switzerland. “Both are very good things to have, but you can’t get both at the same time.”

Animal Culture
But what if protecting the cultural diversity of animals were just as important as protecting their genetic diversity? The growing realization that some animals possess cultural traits that are passed from generation to generation has pushed this controversial question into the forefront.

The culture conundrum is nowhere more apparent than in cetaceans. Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, marine biologists at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have found that the sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) of the South Pacific can be subdivided into at least five separate clans, each with its own distinct culture including different vocal calls and different patterns of movement and habitat use. These clans range over broad, overlapping swaths of ocean and were only discovered through extensive data collection.

The problem is that whale harvesting has typically been managed by species or by region — a manner which totally overlooks the cultural subdivisions and therefore raises the possibility that what appears on a whole-population basis to be a reasonable harvest quota could actually decimate one entire clan while hardly touching another.

This could occur because clans’ individual behaviors (such as movement patterns, habitat use, and evasion strategies) may affect their vulnerability to whaling. The Galapagos Islands region, for example, hosts two major clans, one that stays close to shore and swims meandering routes, and another that remains further from shore and travels in straight lines.

Extinguishing entire clans is risky because their cultural behaviors are exquisitely adapted to specific environmental conditions. And so, erasing one set of behaviors from existence could harm the species’ ability to adapt or use its full range of habitats. During El Niño years, for example, one Galapagos clan has greater feeding success than the other clan does; whereas in other years, it’s the other way around. Observations like this are prompting some researchers to rethink the idea of biodiversity. “Culture is vital to how humans make a living and survive,” says Whitehead, “and we’re beginning to recognize that we’re not the only species in this regard.”

It’s a radical idea. But already there have been stories of success where novel, behaviorally sound conservation strategies also proved to be beautifully simple. In the end, drawing that much-needed connection between conservation and behavior may just be a matter of learning to look a little more closely.

Box: Learning from experience
Canada’s Grand Bank cod fishery — once the world’s lushest — collapsed in 1992, forcing thousands of fishermen from work. What was especially troubling was that catches had been consistently high from year to year — before suddenly plummeting in one season. Researchers now believe the crash stemmed from a failure to understand the fishes’ behavior, resulting in unsustainable harvesting.

Recent analyses reveal that cod numbers had been declining the whole time. But fishermen and regulators missed that salient fact because they were unaware that cod overwhelmingly preferred a few choice slices of habitat. And so even as overall populations fell, those spots were still bustling with cod. Fishermen casting their nets there continued to haul good catches, and population estimates remained over-optimistic.

But in the less-preferred zones inhabited by overflow cod populations, things were different. The density of cod was steadily declining because a steady stream of fish was emigrating to the popular spots to replace the huge numbers of fish being netted there. By 1993, there were none left to emigrate. If the peripheral decline had been heeded — and the fishes’ behavior understood — then fishermen might still be plying those waters today.

Tanagers are often hesitant to breed in captivity; you can put them together, but they may behave more like Ozzie and Harriet than Romeo and Juliet. But much of that disinterest may come down to poor lighting. It turns out that the birds are judging the sexiness of prospective mates, among other ways, by a visual cue in their plumage. And not just any cue — rather, one that’s visible only in the UV spectrum (which many tanagers, unlike humans, can see).

The problem is, many aviaries don’t provide natural, UV-containing light. But Patty McGill, an ornithologist at Brookfield Zoo, Illinois, found that simply providing some UV light increased pairs’ interest in courtship and nest building.

Nest boxes intended to help revive wood duck populations may actually have hindered the cause — all because the way they were placed failed to account for the ducks’ peculiar egg laying habits.

Nesting boxes are often placed in tight, highly visible clusters. And when this is done, the ducks lay extra eggs in each other’s nests.

Such parasitism comes naturally to wood ducks. The tree hollows where the wood ducks usually nest are limited in number, so a hen that doesn’t find one can at least squeak out a few young by laying eggs in someone else’s nest. Normally parasitism is limited, however, because tree hollows are dispersed and concealed.

But those nest boxes clustered like condos positively invite runaway parasitism. The number of eggs per nest soars, sometimes tripling. As a result, eggs are less likely to hatch due to inefficient incubation of abnormally large clutches, breaking of eggs leading to fungal infections in other eggs, and nest abandonment. A seven-year study of wood duck nest boxes at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in New York State found that with high parasitism, egg hatching success plummeted from 79 percent to 22 percent.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. Dispersing and hiding the nest boxes should increase production of young and possibly even reduce the number of nest boxes that are needed.

Suggested Reading:

Berger, J. et al. 2003. Through the eyes of prey: How the extinction and conservation of North America’s large carnivores alter prey systems and biodiversity. In Festa-Bianchet, M. and Apollonio, M. eds. Animal Behavior and Wildlife Conservation. Island Press, Washington, DC.

Courchamp, F., G.S.A. Rasmussen, and D.W. Macdonald. 2002. Small pack size imposes a trade-off between hunting and pup-guarding in the painted hunting dog Lycaon pictus. Behavioral Ecology 13(1):20-27.

Eadie, J., P. Sherman, and B. Semel. 1998. Conspecific brood parasitism, population dynamics, and the conservation of cavity-nesting birds. In Caro, T. ed. Behavioral Ecology and Conservation Biology. Oxford University Press, New York.

Grahn, M., Å. Langefors, and T. von Schantz. 1998. The importance of mate choice in improving viability of captive populations. In Caro, T. ed. Behavioral Ecology and Conservation Biology. Oxford University Press, New York.

Hutchings, J.A. 1996. Spatial and temporal variation in the density of northern cod and a review of hypotheses for the stock’s collapse. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 53:943-962.

McComb, K. et al. 2001. Matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge in African elephants. Science 292 (5516):491-494.

Rendell, L.E. and H. Whitehead. 2003. Vocal clans in sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences 270(1512):225-231.

Stephens, P.A. and W.J. Sutherland. 1999. Consequences of the Allee effect for behavior, ecology and conservation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14:401-405.

Stephens, P.A. et al. 2002. Model complexity and population predictions. The alpine marmot as a case study. Journal of Animal Ecology 71:343-361.

Wedekind, C. 2002. Sexual selection and life-history decisions: Implications for supportive breeding and the management of captive populations. Conservation Biology 16:1204-1211.

About the Author:

Douglas Fox is a freelance science writer who splits his time between Australia and California.

When The Nature Conservancy of California asked Silicon Valley venture capitalist Seth Neiman for a multimillion-dollar contribution to help protect local open space, no one involved had the slightest notion that they were about to step into one of the deepest and most difficult questions in conservation worldwide. The Conservancy’s fundraising team was just trying to raise enough money to buy conservation easements on Mount Hamilton, an island of natural habitat in an encroaching sea of suburbs south of San Jose.

Neiman asked how the Conservancy knew the investment would provide lasting protection for the oak woodlands and the creatures that live there. He wasn’t interested in preserving a piece of land for just 30 years. “That would be an act of vanity,” he says. He wanted to know whether it would be protected for hundreds of years.

“That stumped me,” says M.A. Sanjayan, who was called in to answer Neiman’s question. In fact, it touched a raw nerve for Sanjayan, the Conservancy’s chief scientist in California at the time and now a lead scientist at the headquarters in Washington DC. Sanjayan realized that Neiman was probing one of the most important unanswered questions in the science and practice of conservation biology. So he told Neiman the truth. They didn’t know. The fundraiser gripped the edge of the table. But Sanjayan pressed on. Maybe with Neiman’s help, The Nature Conservancy could find a way to begin answering the question of whether its conservation efforts are really conserving what they say they are for the long run.

That was nearly three years ago. Now, a new “measures and audit team” is putting the final touches on an ambitious program that will require Conservancy projects to measure whether they are achieving their goals and deploy auditors to verify the results for managers and donors. The idea has been field-tested at 15 Conservancy projects around the world. And it will be rolled out across the Conservancy beginning later this year.

Along the way, The Nature Conservancy has rediscovered something that businesses and other nonprofits have learned about measuring their performance: in addition to being an important tool for accountability, measuring and auditing can be powerful tools for continuous learning and improvement. As a result of the audits, some Conservancy projects have abandoned unproductive strategies. Others have realized the need to change strategies to counter new threats.

The Nature Conservancy’s effort is being watched closely by the entire conservation community. But the Conservancy is not alone in trying to figure out how to measure its results and open its conservation books to outside review, in much the same way its financial statements are publicly reported.

Four other major conservation organizations—Conservation International, the World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the African Wildlife Foundation—have joined the Conservancy in forming the Conservation Measures Partnership, coordinated by Foundations of Success, a nonprofit that helps conservation groups measure success. Together, they are working to establish a common framework for auditing their work—in much the same way that publicly traded companies use generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to report financial results on Wall Street.

But the conservation organizations promise to go beyond just sharing their financial accounting, like businesses do. They are preparing to share their management accounting, the performance measures that businesses usually keep close to the vest. And that is a brave step beyond business as usual.

There may never be a final answer to the vexing question, “Are we conserving what we say we are?” But measuring and auditing could provide a dynamic method for conservation projects to continue to hone their strategies in a changing world. And that, it turns out, is precisely what Neiman had in mind when he asked his fateful question.

Backing Up Success Stories

Sanjayan chose the Cosumnes River Preserve in California as the first project to audit because it had a documented history of conservation activities, a wealth of data from research and monitoring, and was well staffed and funded. If this project couldn’t be audited, no project could be.

The measures and audit team was made up of scientists and managers from around the Conservancy, an ecologist from the Cosumnes preserve, and a staff member from Foundations of Success. They arrived at the preserve on a summer morning in 2001 with the goal of answering the simple question: “Are we conserving what we say we are here?” But it soon became apparent that the answer would not be so simple.

For many years, The Nature Conservancy has had a simple metric for success: “bucks and acres”—how much money was raised and how much land was protected. By this measure, the Cosumnes River Preserve was a success. It protected one of the last remaining riparian oak forests along the last undammed river in the Sierra Nevada, home to sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) and chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha).

The Cosumnes also had a great tale to tell about learning and adaptive management. One day, a staff ecologist was studying aerial photographs when he noticed that an oak forest that had grown up in a former farm field was missing in a 1985 photo, taken the year the river broke through a levee during a flood, carrying sand and debris on to the field. The seeds of the forest, he realized, must have been planted by the flood. Here they were painstakingly planting trees around the preserve with mixed results, and the river had done the work much more effectively. This soon led to a plan to breach the levee in other spots and use the river to enlarge the riparian forest.

But the measures and audit team wanted to know the numbers behind the story. They dug down into the computer spreadsheet that Conservancy projects are supposed to use to document the health of the ecosystem. Much like a corporate balance sheet, which tracks assets and liabilities, the Conservancy spreadsheet tracks critical factors such as the size, condition, and landscape context of species populations and habitat, and the threats they face. The team found that many of the entries were best guesses about whether to classify the health of a species such as salmon or a habitat such as the oak forest as “good,” “fair,” or “poor.” The judgments were entered into the spreadsheet simply by clicking on one of the categories without providing an underlying scientific rationale or data. Dan Salzer, the designer of the system, called this “mouse-based monitoring.”

The Cosumnes River Preserve had a lot of data that confirmed the project was making progress on important fronts, such as improving salmon habitat. But the information wasn’t accessible in one place where auditors could verify it and managers could use it to compare the effectiveness of their approaches. They asked project staff to go back and fill in the books, this time documenting the scientific evidence and rationale behind each of their judgments.

Over the next few months, it took nearly 600 hours for preserve staff to prepare a full report that could be audited by the rigorous standards the team demanded. Preparing for the audit turned out to be at least as valuable as the audit itself. The project realized it needed to devote more attention to emerging threats, such as groundwater pumping that is drawing water from the riverbed for nearby farms, vineyards, and suburbs. The detailed report set a new bar for the Conservancy, unfortunately not one likely to be cleared by many of their projects.

There Be Dragons

The measures and audit team then decided to test audit a project at the opposite end of the spectrum: Komodo National Park in Indonesia, a classic besieged “paper park.” If the audit worked in Komodo, it might work anywhere.

The park is home to the famous Komodo dragons, giant monitor lizards that live on remote islands fringed by some of the most diverse and beautiful coral reefs in the world. While the dragons have done well in the park, the reefs have not. They have been severely damaged by local fishermen and roving bands of pirates who use cyanide to stun big groupers for the live fish markets in Singapore and Hong Kong and aquarium specimens for the worldwide market. When the more valuable fish are gone or the fishermen are in too much of a hurry, they simply toss dynamite or homemade bombs overboard and harvest the fish that float to the top, leaving a rubble field of destroyed coral under the waves.

When the team met with Peter Mous, the project ecologist, on a diving boat sailing among the islands in late 2001, he told them he knew what needed to be done. Stop the bombing and overfishing. “It’s not rocket science,” he said.

Mous had little patience for the complex ecological models that were part of the audit. There was urgent work to be done. And the Komodo project could easily demonstrate its success. The number of bombing incidents had dropped after the Conservancy donated a patrol boat to the park. After two years, there was a four-percent increase in live coral cover, and the decline of large groupers had stopped.

But the team persisted. Mous had simple ecological models for the coral reefs, mangroves, and sea grass beds that are the main elements of the marine ecosystem. But the team insisted on drawing up a conceptual model of what the project was trying to protect and the threats it faced. As Mous worked with the team to fill in the threats and trace them to their sources, they all began to see the value of adding the human element to the model.

One of the causal chains ran right to the heart of the Muslim faith of many local communities. At least once in their lives, devout Muslims are expected to make the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca. This requires cash. And the quickest way to raise cash is blast fishing. One way to break the chain, the team discussed, might be a micro-loan program to help pilgrims make the hajj without resorting to destroying the reefs.

This was one small link in a complicated project that involves encouraging local aquaculture; educating villagers about the value of intact reefs, mangroves, and sea grass beds as a steady source of fish; and an ambitious long-term goal of improving park management through a concession that will channel increased revenue from tourists back to the park rather than to the central government.

Two years later, the Komodo project is still struggling. Offering micro-loans for the hajj, it turns out, may be meddling too much. The patrols have kept blasting down. But there have been pitched battles between park rangers and heavily armed poachers, resulting in many arrests and two deaths.

Tourism in Indonesia has plummeted after September 11th, the terrorist attack in Bali, and the SARS epidemic. Income for the park has declined. Some in the Conservancy have questioned how much longer the organization can afford to subsidize the park.

That is where the audit proved useful. It didn’t solve the park’s problems, but it documented that the project was making a difference in an extremely difficult situation. And recently, the government approved the concession plan that the audit had underscored as key to a long-term solution for Komodo.

Trial by Fire

The measures and audit team came away convinced that they were onto something worthwhile. So they worked to distill the lessons and simplify the process. Having a conceptual model was essential. It forced people to articulate their intuitive understanding of their projects as an explicit set of causes and effects that could be shared and analyzed critically with others. The team knew that the spreadsheet that they provided to projects had to be more user-friendly. At the same time, however, this conservation balance sheet had to be complex enough to be scientifically rigorous.

The balance between simplicity and complexity would remain in creative tension as the team asked 13 other Conservancy projects to test the measures on their own. One of those projects was the Lake Wales Ridge, the dry sandy spine of Florida. Fire is an essential part of this highly fragmented ecosystem, which is home to 13 endemic species. The Conservancy’s goal there is to buy subdivided parcels that have not been developed yet and to return fire to the ecosystem.

To that end, the Conservancy had spent US$170,000 a year over 5 years outfitting a fire strike team to help local agencies manage prescribed burns. Fire crews throughout the area have been trained to set and control the periodic fires that are necessary to maintain the oak shrub patches favored by native species like the Florida scrub jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens).

The area burned has doubled. “Sounds like a fabulous success,” Mary Huffman, the director of the project, told a recent gathering of Conservancy scientists. But it turns out that is not enough. Even with the Conservancy’s help, the area burned each year felt short. “It’s not about capacity,” Huffman said. The people who were being trained to manage burns are still afraid to set them because they could lose their jobs if a fire got out of control.

The project had missed an important link in the causal chain. Rather than training fire fighters, project managers should have focused on higher-level decision makers, convincing them to provide incentives for their crews to set more prescribed fires.

“I’m mad as hell,” Huffman said. But, she added, if they hadn’t gone through the audit, they might not have learned they needed a course correction.

Some scientists worry that this is still no better than trial and error learning. “It’s what kids do when they touch the stove,” says Frances James, an ecologist at Florida State University, who is also on the board of governors of the Conservancy. James has advised the auditing team to encourage projects to design scientific experiments into their work. Conservation cannot be done everywhere all at once. This affords opportunities for simple, inexpensive, controlled comparisons of conservation techniques.

Open Source Code for Conservation

While The Nature Conservancy was testing these new methods, other conservation groups were also trying to figure out how to measure and audit their own work. By the time the Conservation Measures Partnership came together, they had developed their own ideas, but there was a surprising convergence of thinking. They decided their first task would be developing common “open standards for the practice of conservation” modeled on “open source code” for software developers—programming that can be used and adapted by anyone. These are the steps that any conservation project should complete and could be audited on:

• Developing an explicit causal model of the ecosystem and threats;
• Developing a plan of action and monitoring and evaluation targeted at important threats and information needs;
• Implementing actions and monitoring and evaluation;
• Analyzing the data on an ongoing basis;
• Adapting strategies based on new information;
• Communicating what is learned; and
• Iterating the cycle of planning, acting, measuring, learning, and improving.

These may seem painfully obvious. But many projects neglect one or more of these important steps. In a recent survey, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation found that less than one in ten projects it supported had an explicit causal model of how they hoped to affect the systems they were working in. Although many organizations measure what they do, few measure the effects of their work.

There are two obvious reasons for this. People intuitively respond to problems by doing what they know how to do. As the old saw goes: a surgeon will likely recommend surgery. And it is far easier to measure what you do and call it success than it is to take a hard look at whether you actually made a difference.

Activity-based Cost Accounting

The partners are also testing activity-based cost accounting on a variety of projects to see if the cost-effectiveness of different conservation approaches can be compared. Businesses have long used activity-based accounting to break out the costs of different parts of their operations. Rather than simply lumping all of the phone bills or rent or travel costs together, they are assigned to different activities.

Conservation projects have been slow to adopt this powerful accounting tool, in part because it requires more complicated bookkeeping, but also because it is hard to assign costs when one works on multiple strategies at the same time. But at the behest of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Conservation International, and the World Wildlife Fund are implementing activity-based cost accounting in their multi-partner Gabon Parks Project.

Last year, the president of Gabon announced the creation of 13 new national parks covering close to 10 percent of the country. The three conservation organizations were already working in Gabon. But the Moore Foundation wanted them to collaborate to help Gabon manage the new parks—and it wanted comparable, measurable results.

This is a key element in measures and auditing. If the partners can generate comparable activity-based accounting, it could provide the basis for estimating a return-on-investment for different conservation actions. Then the circle will be complete and the potential of measures and auditing to drive strategic conservation efforts could be realized.

Learning to Audit, Auditing to Learn

Finally, later this year, the Conservation Measures Partnership will begin conducting pilot audits on each other’s projects—three this year with at least three more to come next year. This is akin to Adobe sending auditors to Microsoft, and it could signal the beginning of a new era of transparency, accountability, and collaboration among conservation organizations that until now have largely competed on the urgency of their appeals rather than their actual results.

As the center of gravity has shifted from the pioneering efforts of organizations like The Nature Conservancy to the collaboration of different conservation organizations around the world, the truly transformative power of Seth Neiman’s provocative question is just beginning to be realized.

“I didn’t realize it was such a loaded question,” Neiman says. But now, he believes, “if this is done right, it will change the whole discussion about conservation.” Instead of seeing conservation as just a good cause, he says, people will start asking, “What are your results?”