ecosystem services – Field Talk

Making room for prairie STRIPs: Lisa Schulte Moore (Land Sharing/Sparing #1)

liza — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 07:00:29 +0000

“I got kind of sick of working on environmental problems, and I wanted to work on environmental solutions. From that standpoint, agriculture — it’s like the world is your oyster. There’s so much that could be done.”

Lisa Schulte Moore, an professor of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State University, seems to have the energy of three people. She has a hand in agricultural landscape management, bioenergy development, oak restoration, and hemlock and pine forest management, among other projects, and still makes time to drive all over Iowa, talking to farmers. In this episode of Field Talk, she explains how integrating STRIPs of prairie into conventional row crops improves water quality — and helps farms, waterways, and wildlife.

This is the first in a series of conversations springing from ideas and arguments about “land-sparing” and “land-sharing” strategies to conserve a rich tapestry of species in our human dominated world. Should we intensively farm some lands in order to preserve wildness in reserves? Accept a more flexible, less “pure,” idea of wildness, embracing conservation easements threaded into more diversified agricultural landscapes? Is this dichotomy a useful concept at all?

Soil erosion….or not. Even small amounts of perennials can have a dramatic impact on the environmental benefits provided by row-cropped agricultural lands. This image depicts the ability of native prairie to keep soil in farm fields, where it can produce crops, as opposed to allowing it to move into streams, where it becomes a serious pollutant. The STRIPS Project has shown that farm fields with just 10% of their area converted to native prairie produce diverse environmental benefits in amounts greatly disproportionate to their extent compared to fields entirely in row-crop production. This image was taken after a 4 inch rain. Caption, Lisa Schulte Moore. Photo, Dave Williams.

Show notes:

[0:00] song of the dickcissel (Spiza Americana), recorded by Jonathon Jongsma at Dordt College Prairie, in Sioux, Iowa in July, 2013. Background birds: red-winged blackbird, common yellowthroat, American crow, American robin.
[3:20] Lisa Schulte Moore’s Lab
[5:30] “If you’re working in agriculture, it’s going to be all about privately owned landscapes. If you want anything to stick, it’s gotta work for the people that own and manage that private land. It means working with farmers, and the people who talk to farmers.”
[10:10] farm policy, risk management and unintended consequences: the Energy Independence and Security Act (2007)
[12:28] the four big water pollutants in Iowa, nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment, and bacterial contamination, cause problems near and far.
[13:22] Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairies (STRIPs) at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge
[14:30] four experimental treatments in the STRIPs pilot project
[23:30] birds: we can pack in more territories for dickcissels and common yellowthroats when strips are interlaced into the rowcrops than if the same amount of prairie is placed at the base of a field.
[27:17] stage II: putting STRIPs into working farms (pdf) – an abundance of volunteers
[31:26] Should agricultural policies encourage land sparing or wildlife-friendly farming? (2008) Joern Fischer, Berry Brosi, Gretchen C Daily, Paul R Ehrlich, Rebecca Goldman, Joshua Goldstein, David B Lindenmayer, Adrian D Manning, Harold A Mooney, Liba Pejchar, Jai Ranganathan, and Heather Tallis. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:7, 380-385.
[34:45] “Right now, probably the top concern in the agricultural realm itself is that soil fertility piece. How do we maintain soil quality into the future?” Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS) campaign on soil quality.
[39:50] “What’s going to work in this place, for this farmer?”

Where the ecologists are: geographical bias in field research

liza — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:13:46 +0000

“It matters because we’re facing global change – these are global phenomena, so we need global information,” said Erle Ellis, a professor of geography & environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, talking about the low resolution of ecological data from many parts of the world. A review of five years of ecological field studies, published earlier this year, showed a bias toward the protected, temperate, broadleafed forests of wealthy countries, where most ecologists make their homes. Ellis talks about some of the surprising discoveries of the review, and the challenges of defining native species ranges in a time of global change. He shares concerns about framing conservation in terms of ecosystems services, and his own journey from plant physiology through agricultural field studies in rural China, to his current work in land use and global change.

Mapping where ecologists work: biases in the global distribution of terrestrial ecological observations. Laura J Martin, Bernd Blossey, and Erle Ellis. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2012 10:4, 195-201.

Image taken from Figure 1 of Martin et al.: The percentage of global ice-free terrestrial area in each anthrome category (left) as compared with the percentage of ecological sites (n = 2573) situated in each anthrome category (right). In the key, “other” refers to sites that were not densely settled or agriculture/rangeland but that did not contain adequate information to assign a protected status. Estimate of protected sites is therefore conservative.

Learn more about this project on ESA’s blog, EcoTone.

Dead Zones as Safe Havens

liza — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:39:18 +0000

Andrew Altieri, a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, joins us in this month’s episode of Field Talk to discuss his work examining hypoxic marine systems, known as dead zones. Altieri studies a community of clams and mussels – collectively known as bivalves – in Narragansett Bay, off the coast of Providence, Rhode Island. His paper in the October issue of Ecology shows that one species of bivalve, the quahog, can benefit from reduced oxygen content in the water. The resulting boom in quahog populations has important implications for ecosystem services.