Tag: ecosystems

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ESJ 66: Best in Show

This was my first time in Kobe, famous for its beef and cheesecake. Much of the city was rebuilt in the wake of a devastating earthquake that claimed the lives of more than six thousand people in 1995. The city mascot is Kobear (コーベア), a pun almost as clever as the bear is cute. The conference centre was a vertical maze of meeting rooms and halls, with signs in Japanese and an army of concierges attempting to funnel us towards our venue of choice.

I had met Dr. Maria Dornelas at the entrance hall on day one and introduced her to Yuka Suzuki. I’ve known Yuka for a couple of years at this point, but we had never worked on anything together until this conference. Yuka and I had been chosen to organise a symposium at the Ecological Society of Japan’s 2019 annual meeting (ESJ 66), an honour not often given to such early career researchers. The ESJ meetings do not have plenary speakers, meaning that the few invited speakers that headline organised symposia act as the big draw. So, the pressure was on for us to deliver a symposium that people would find interesting and inspiring.

Read the full post on Sam’s blog, The Infrequent Musings of an Early-Career Ecologist!

Or read his award-winning paper here:
Ross SRP-J, Friedman NR, Dudley KL, Yoshimura M, Yoshida T, Economo EP. (2018). Listening to ecosystems: data rich acoustic monitoring through landscape-scale sensor networks. Ecological Research 33(1), 135-147. DOI: 10.1007/s11284-017-1509-5 

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The Inspirational Role of Ecosystems in Popular Music

Bob_dylan1

Nature, natural phenomena, animals and ecosystems have always inspired human beings and references to it are omnipresent in ancient and contemporary cultures. To take just a narrow example, composers and songwriters have found inspiration in Nature an uncountable number of times. Rivers, mountains, forests, sea and desert are evoked by the lyrics of songsters far from their homeland, or just carried away by the beauty of Nature they are experiencing. In “River” Joni Mitchell wishes to have a river to skate on it on Christmas days. In a different mood, Bob Dylan sits down on a bank of sand “watching the river flows …. no matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow”; maybe a metaphor of a diverted and conformed society. In “Sea Song” Robert Wyatt comforts himself by confessing to his sea/lover “your madness fits in nicely with my own, your lunacy fits neatly with my own”.

The environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff once cited the 60’s popular rock ‘n’ roll group the Drifters, singing:

At night the stars put on a show for free,

And darling, you can share it all with me …

Up the roof …

somehow reminding us that this “inspirational” role is a service that Nature gives us for free, available for everyone who wants to enjoy it, or write a song about it.

Anyway, just for the sake of curiosity, let’s try to make a quick calculation. By searching the website AllMusic (a 30 million track repository of popular music) I found around 1.35 million songs that referred to one of the main biomes. Lakes and rivers lead the chart with 400,000 titles, followed by prairies and steppes with around 300,000, then forests and shores (and beaches) with 270,000 titles each. Coral reefs, jungles, the sea and the deserts stand in the middle of the chart, each of them scoring in between 50,000 and 80,000. At the bottom of the chart we find pastures and grasslands, and swamps or wetlands with 30,000 and 26,000 titles.

If we consider that the average price for a song on iTunes stands at $1.20 we can calculate the overall value of these “ecosystems inspired” songs, as equal to $1.6 million. Notice that this is a minimum estimate because we are considering only a single download for each song. Furthermore, if Dylan’s river or Wyatt’s sea inspired their valuable songs, what about all the other rivers and seas that are out there just waiting to be sang about and flattered? In order to do justice to more of them, I hereby invite all readers to share their favourite “ecosystems” songs in the comments below!

Author

Luca Coscieme COSCIEML[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

References

Sagoff, M. (1997). Can we put a price on nature’s services? Philosophy and Public Policy. 17 (3), p.7-12.

iTunes Store average price per song estimation is based on this article.

Links

www.allmusic.com

Joni Mitchell – River 

Bob Dylan – Watching the River Flow 

Robert Wyatt – Sea Song 

The Drifters – Up on the Roof 

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IUCN Red Listing Ecosystems Workshop

Peatlands_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6592

Many of us attended a fantastic seminar on Friday the 17th of May, given by Dr Ed Barrrows – IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: An evolving tool for risk assessment, priority setting and landscape action. Dr Ed Barrows is a former graduate of Trinity’s Zoology Department and is currently the Head of Ecosystems at the IUCN. The focus of his talk was to introduce us to the new risk assessment criteria developed by the IUCN to assess ecosystems. This will ultimately provide the world with a Red List for Ecosystems. We were all familiar with the concept of a Red List for Species but this was the first time we had been introduced to concept of a standard global assessment of risks for entire ecosystems or “higher levels of biodiversity”. First we had a great introduction into the new ecosystem assessment tool developed by the IUCN. Ed brought us through the process behind the model and the need for such a tool. Incorporated in the model was the interesting concept that of ecosystem collapse. When does an ecosystem go beyond recovery and change into something else.

A well deserved cup of coffee and great pastries helped us to digest and process this information.

Following this, a number of the lucky ones who had signed up for the workshop traipsed over to the SNIAM building where we were in for a treat. Ed was hosting a two hour workshop to give us all some practical experience of applying the model and carrying out a risk assessment on an Irish ecosystem. There really was a great mix of people attending from permanent Trinity staff, post docs, master’s students, undergraduates and members of various NGO’s.

We were divided in to four groups. The model uses four distributional and functional symptoms to assess ecosystem risk. Two of the groups were to look at the criteria A & B (distributional) and the other two C & D (functional). Ed explained to us that the process of evaluating a habitat would normally take over four months and extensive amount of backing data. He then proceeded to tell us that we had two hours and two scientific papers with which to assess maybe one of the most politically sensitive habitats in Ireland “Peat lands”! A lively debate ensued as the two groups from each section gave their results and the reasons as to why they come to those conclusions. The final discussion looked at the fifth criterion which estimates the risk of ecosystem collapse and assigns it to critical, endangered or vulnerable – I think there are still people arguing over it…

Author

Caoimhe Muldoon: muldoocs@tcd.ie

Photo credit

Wikimedia commons