(Snowless) Mountains Beyond (Snowless) Mountains: A Two-Minute Interview with Mark Williams

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: March 12, 2012

Inspired by the 70-degree temperatures that have settled in recently, last week I invited a couple of writer friends over for lunch al fresco. While we sat in my yard under a cloudless sky, eating cauliflower-and-leek omelets and gabbing about work, the butter pooled in its glass dish and a bar of chocolate melted in its wrapper. All of which was a bit disconcerting, given that it was early March. In Boulder, Colorado.

My season ski pass, meanwhile, sits forlornly in my desk drawer. Some nearby ski resorts are sill less than 100% open, and at Vail the current base is a measly 43 inches. The mountain snow reports are the same, day after day. New snow: Last 24 hours, 0″. Last 48 hours, 0″. Last 7 days, 0″.

Colorado gets its water from the mountains. It falls as snow and eventually melts into streams and rivers, which deliver it to reservoirs and city taps. Without snow, there is no water except what we’ve stored in those reservoirs in previous years of plenty. And reservoir water, while great for humans, does nothing to help nature cope with drought.

So while I confess I kind of liked reading The New Yorker in my yard in flip-flops and a t-shirt this weekend, admiring my about-to-bloom tulips, it also scared the crap out of me. What will this place look like come summer? Will whole neighborhoods go up in flames at the first lightning strike? What will the wildlife do? Will there be any water in the ditches where my dogs like to swim? Will I be allowed to water my yard?

I contacted Mark Williams, a professor of geography and a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research here at the University of Colorado. Williams is an expert in snow hydrology, and in how water moves through mountain watersheds. (He also studies biogeochemical cycling and acid mine remediation.) I figured if anyone could explain how worried we should (or shouldn’t) be, it’d be him. The good news is, I probably won’t have to stop showering this summer. But the bad news is pretty bad: wildlife, and the forests it lives in, could be in trouble.

American Pika

Q: Absent some massive spring storms, what will the lack of snow mean for Boulder and the rest of the region this summer? Are we in for severe drought? Wildfires? Possible rationing of water supplies?

A: Snow in the west is white gold. Snowmelt runoff provides somewhere on the order of 70% to 80% of usable water in the western U.S. Agriculture, energy, and domestic and municipal uses of water are all dependent on snowmelt runoff. Moreover, many of our ecosystem services are dependent on snowmelt, including the health of our forests — which are under stress from the mountain pine beetle epidemic — and sufficient water in streams during the hot summer months to maintain our blue ribbon trout fisheries. Much of the western U.S. is experiencing a below-normal snow year. Here in Colorado we were 72% of average in February, and only 62% of the snowfall at the same time last year. And it hasn’t snowed much since.

How much water becomes available from snowmelt runoff is obviously dependent on the amount of snowfall that we have. Less snowfall means less available snowmelt. However, the amount of usable water from snowmelt also depends on when the snow melts. For the same amount of snowfall, the earlier that snowmelt begins, the less available water compared to the same amount of snow but later snowmelt. The reason is that earlier snowmelt is caused by warmer air temperatures, and warmer air temperatures mean the vegetation wakes up earlier and more water is lost back to the atmosphere through evapo-transpiration. Here in the Front Range, snow has been melting for the last week at 10,000 feet at our Niwot Ridge LTER research site, a month ahead of schedule and two months ahead of last year.

The good news is that we expect little affect on water availability. Last year was an above-normal snow year with a late start to snowmelt. Thus, we had abundant flow in our streams and rivers, with excess water that was stored in reservoirs. This stored water from last year will in general be adequate to offset this year’s low flows. However, our reservoir storage is only adequate for about 2 years. Several consecutive years of low snow results in a tipping point where reservoirs storage can no longer compensate for the low snow, and water availability declines rapidly, as happened in the drought in Colorado from 2000 to 2002.

The low snow year will likely have its largest affect on vegetation that depends on snowmelt as an important source of soil moisture — our forests. A reduction in available soil moisture results in water stress for our forests, making them more vulnerable to attack from the mountain pine beetle and other insects. If the current climate conditions continue, we may see a renewed mortality of our forests from insect outbreaks. And obviously, the danger of grassland and forest fires increases dramatically because low soil moisture results in low fuel moisture, the most important ingredient for wildland fires.

Pikas are particularly at risk from the low snow year, for two reasons. Pikas are the cuddly rabbit-like critters that live in rock piles at high elevation, generally above timberline. Their presence is known to many high-elevation hikers by the characteristic whistle sound they make. Pikas are awake all winter; they don’t hibernate like marmots. Pikas need a thick snowpack to insulate their rock homes and keep them warm, a lot like a snow cave. A thin snowpack means that pikas will be much colder and can freeze to death during the winter. Secondly, pikas need to harvest enough food during the summer to last through the long winter. A low snow year means little soil moisture and a bad growing season for alpine tundra. So, there may not be enough forage for pikas to harvest to get them through the following winter.

The low snow year here in the Colorado Front Range will stress our water resources, but in general will be compensated by increased releases of water from reservoirs. The largest affect likely will be on the flora and fauna. There is a good chance that there will be increased mortality of our forest resource by insect outbreaks. The chances of more and larger wildfires are greatly increased. And our fauna, from pikas to elk, will be stressed by the poor forage year.

Pika photo credit: Chris Kennedy / USFWS (via Flickr)

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Their So-Called Journalism, or What I Saw at the Women’s Mags

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: February 9, 2012

Funny how women's magazines have women on the front cover yet...

I’ve been needing to get this out in the open since the excellent Science Online 2012 session that Maryn McKenna and Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn organized, on writing about science for women’s magazines.

A few years back, I went to Borneo to report on efforts to save the rainforest there, which people are hacking and burning into oblivion in the mad quest to grow oil palm trees. In the process, they’re obliterating wildlife—including the orangutan, which is sliding toward extinction. Palm oil is ubiquitous in American life. It’s in all sorts of processed foods—Oreos, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Ritz crackers, margarine—as well as soaps, make-up, and many other beauty products.

One destination on my Borneo trip was an orangutan sanctuary run by an incredible Danish woman, who was passionate and unflappable and very photogenic. Maybe, I thought, I could interest a women’s magazine in a short profile of this woman, as a way to inform readers about the palm oil problem—which, despite sporadic publicity over the years, very few people seem to know about or understand. So I contacted a friend of a friend, a smart and lovely editor at a high-profile women’s magazine that from time to time runs articles about strong women doing worthwhile work. Her reply was quick, honest, and upsetting: The magazine couldn’t tackle the palm oil issue head on, because half its advertisers were beauty companies guilty of destroying the very same forests my Danish woman was trying to save.

Collectively, women’s magazines—by which I mean the whole field, from fashion titles like Vogue and Elle to health publications like Self and Women’s Health to the more general sex-and-diet-tips mags like Glamour or Cosmopolitan (does that even still exist?)—reach millions upon millions of readers each month. So the lack of willingness to cover globally important topics is dismaying. It’s a colossal missed opportunity. That’s why I was heartened to hear some success tales of writing about science for women’s magazines, at the Science online session. Maryn and Elizabeth write frequently for women’s mags and had largely positive experiences to share. I know enough about Maryn to know that she’s a serious, sharp, ethical reporter. (I’m not familiar with Elizabeth’s work, but I assume the same is true.) So clearly there’s some solid journalism getting out there via women’s mags.

But there are also some serious institutional problems, and these can lead to 1) lack of coverage of important topics, 2) less-than-completely-truthful coverage of important topics, and 3) complete and utter bullshit coverage of important topics. My experiences working for women’s mags have been incredibly frustrating and disheartening—and I’ve long wanted to share them publicly but haven’t, for fear of alienating potential clients. The absurdity of this is a testament to the tough economics of freelancing. Few experiences are so bad that we won’t accept a lucrative repeat assignment when it’s dangled in front of us. But as I started thinking back on some of my horror tales, spurred by the Science Online session, I realized I no longer give a shit. I feel like this stuff needs to air out.

A couple of years ago, with the economy tanking and magazine budgets going the way of orangutans, an editor at a women’s magazine called me with an assignment. I’d already sworn off these mags forever after my last debacle but, as I was in no position to turn down $5,000 or whatever it was, I agreed. Anyway, this editor insisted that this was to be a serious science story (albeit written in the publication’s from-one-girlfriend-to-another voice), for which I should conduct many interviews and extensively scan the literature. So I did.

It soon became clear that the editor had had a specific thesis in mind from the start, one that wasn’t borne out by the research. Then one day I got an email saying the story was going to press that day, and could I please give it one last read to make sure it was okay. I was confused, as I hadn’t been contacted by any fact-checkers. But upon reading it, I noticed a few instances in which scientists’ quotes had been altered. The points they made were roughly the same, but the words simply weren’t theirs.

That’s not okay in serious journalism. When I asked the editor, she said the quotes had been tweaked for clarity, and that I shouldn’t worry—that a fact-checker would read the quotes back to the scientists, and if the scientists weren’t happy with the way they sounded, they could change their wording. Setting aside the ethics of this, I felt concerned for my own reputation. If I interviewed you, and then someone read you back your supposed quote, you would likely recognize immediately that the words weren’t yours. And your immediate thought would be that I misquoted you, and am therefore a shoddy journalist. And you would rightfully decide not to speak to me again, and possibly tell your colleagues to do the same. As a freelance journalist, my reputation for professional integrity is paramount; take it away, and I’m just some girl with a laptop who likes to ask questions.

The editor and I had an email argument, I left her a voicemail, she never replied, and that was that; in the end, I think we just stopped communicating. I never saw the final version of the story and I tried to move on with other work and forget about it. A few months later, after the check came, I saw the magazine on the newsstand. I picked it up, saw my article in the table of contents, and put it back without reading it. I have no idea of the editor worked in her own spurious thesis, or what the researchers “said” in their quotes.

This was only the last of a string of bad scenes, though. I was told multiple times by editors at another women’s mag to feed a source a quote—as in, “Can you call this source back and see if they’ll make this specific point in these exact words?” These were stories about health, in a magazine women turn to for actual, truthful, information. (I refused.)

Years ago, another women’s mag so badly mangled a story I’d done for them on young breast cancer survivors that one of the interviewees called me in tears. I hadn’t yet seen the printed article, which had been cut down—without my knowledge—from a feature of several thousand words to a quarter page of little more than a “charticle,” featuring four of the eight women I’d profiled, with nothing other than a thumbnail photo, a single quote, and their name, age, and how they’d learned of their illness.

And yet, the magazine had even bungled that. The tearful woman calling me was devastated because the magazine had completely altered the facts about how she’d discovered a lump in her breast.

I dialed my editor in despair, and she blamed it on the fact-checker.

This same story had begun with instructions to find a dozen breast cancer survivors under 35 who might be good candidates to profile, from which the editors would select the ones they wanted. Presumably, I thought, they’d select the women with the most interesting or relatable stories. After I sent the list to my editor, she told me to go back and ask each woman to send a photo. Like, a headshot. Because, I don’t know, stories about unattractive cancer survivors don’t sell?

I could go on, but remembering all this has made me need some bourbon. I’ll just mention one more very quick thing, which is that for the first women’s magazine story I ever wrote, the editor told me outright that if I couldn’t find anyone who’d ‘fess up to the behavior that was supposed to be a trend (the whole point of the story), I was free to invent characters. For the record, I did not. And the story never ran because the real people I talked to just weren’t outrageous enough. (This wasn’t a science or health story, but nonetheless.)

I know that there are amazing and talented editors at these magazines who would love to publish an expose on palm oil, or a profile of a 27-year-old breast cancer survivor who doesn’t look like a supermodel. But often their hands are tied—whether by advertisers or the institutional structure or the status quo. I think women who shell out hard-earned money to buy these magazines deserve better. They at least need to know that much of what they’re reading isn’t entirely true.

Or maybe I’m being naïve? Maybe the readers all know this already, and I’m the rube who’s clinging to some goody-two-shoes rules. One thing seems clear, in any case: I probably won’t be offered any more assignments by women’s magazines.

Photo credit: jaimelondonboy via Flickr

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The Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and a Two-Minute Interview with Craig Stockwell

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: January 16, 2012

I’m pleased to report that I’m a 2012 Alicia Patterson Fellow. The Alicia Patterson Foundation–established in honor of the longtime editor and publisher of Newsday, in 1965–funds reporters for a year to work on a series of articles on a theme. I was surprised and thrilled that my project won, because it’s both fairly science-heavy and focused on conservation. And I’m used to conservation stories being a tough sell.

My project is called “The Evolution Fix: Saving Species in the DNA Era.” I’ll be publishing stories on this general topic throughout the year, hopefully in some high-profile venues. (Editors: hint, hint…) I’ll be exploring how evolution is intersecting with ecology, and how the advent of fast, cheap DNA analysis is affecting our conservation decisions—and ultimately influencing our view of nature itself. Tied into this are ethical and legal issues, as well as questions about what defines a species.

Earlier this month, I went to Fargo, North Dakota to speak at a media-training workshop for biology grad students. (I’ve now been to all 50 states!) There, I spent some time with Craig Stockwell, director of North Dakota State University’s Environmental & Conservation Sciences Graduate Program and a biologist who studies the evolutionary ecology of fish populations. We talked a bit about rapid evolutionary change, the idea that evolution can happen extremely quickly—over decades, rather than eons. But I confess it wasn’t until I got home that I thought to do a one-question interview. So here it is, somewhat stupidly conducted via email.

Q: Why is rapid evolutionary change so important for us to recognize and understand? What role can it play in conservation decision making?

A: Contrary to long-held dogma, it seems that evolution can occur within a few decades. Biologists have observed evidence for such contemporary evolution for populations of fish, birds, and mammals, as well as various plant species. Contemporary evolution often occurs in response to human-associated phenomena, such as climate change, invasive species and habitat degradation. In fact, the same factors that are driving the current extinction crisis also drive contemporary evolution. For instance, many populations have been shown to evolve in response to invasive predators. Further, invasive species have also been shown to evolve as they invade new habitats.

In the early 1990s, such responses were rarely documented, but over the last few decades, a large number of studies have documented contemporary evolution. In fact, some biologists wonder if instead of being a rare phenomenon, perhaps contemporary evolution has become the norm. This has led to a paradigm shift in evolutionary biology, and now researchers are examining how such evolution may affect population persistence and various ecological relationships.

Although scientists have embraced the study of contemporary evolution, the applications to conservation have not yet been applied widely by the management community. It is very likely that as we learn more it will become more apparent that managers who have historically assumed their systems to be evolutionarily static will need to incorporate an evolutionarily enlightened approach to management. For instance, assisted colonization has been discussed as one management option protecting species in the face of climate change. However, it may be in some cases that such species have the potential to evolve in situ [meaning right where they are], whereas other species have limited genetic variation for such change, making it critical to identify which species will need such assistance.

–
The first of my “Evolution Fix” stories will appear in High Country News later this month.

Also, my New Year’s resolution is to be a better blogger. Stay tuned.

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A Quick Check-In from Falling Walls

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: November 10, 2011

Science and schmoozing at the Falling Walls reception, Berlin's Museum of Communications

Berlin’s third annual Falling Walls conference just finished up, and it was a curious and mostly fascinating mix of 15-minute presentations on everything from economics to evolution, computing to catalysis, magnifying time and fixing social messes and turning iron into platinum. Even Angela Merkel stopped by, using the opportunity to talk about–what else?–debt and the need for Europe to shift course. The Twitter stream is pretty interesting; check it out at #fw11.

You can get a rundown and a feel for the conference blog. Here’s a quick take from that site on one session I attended.

I’ve watched a lot of climate models run, but never before had I seen one set to live musical accompaniment. Until now, that is–thanks to Alejandro Litovsky of Earth Security Initiative, a UK-based group that’s calling attention to the link between environmental crises and security risks. Litovsky brought along his friend Anders Scherp, who played guitar and sang a slightly haunting ballad as an NCAR model displayed rainfall patterns.

Litovsky’s point was that we need a radical shift in how we understand risk, and how that understanding translates into financial policy. Changing patterns of rainfall in the Amazon, for instance, will have a big impact on Brazil’s energy security since the country relies heavily on hydropower. But, said Litovsky, traditional investment risk models don’t understand “systemic risk”–so they don’t take into account how deforestation changes rainfall patterns in the Amazon as a whole, and how that in turn will influence Brazil’s electricity production.

So how to better communicate this type of interconnectedness? Litovsky proposed “a little experiment,” a way to “try to understand how does it all fit together and what does it mean in terms of the earth’s security.” The remaining minutes of his talk were taken up by Scherp’s musical accompaniment to the climate model. I couldn’t agree more with Litovsky’s point that disruption of the Earth’s systems represents a real security threat, and one which we desperately need to communicate and address. The music, said Litovsky, is meant to move us emotionally rather than rationally. I’m not sure it quite worked for me, but he might be onto an interesting idea.

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Two-Minute Interview: Steve Running

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: November 3, 2011

Only one professor at the University of Montana has a Nobel Peace Prize hanging in his office: Steven W. Running, director of the intimidatingly named Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, part of the university’s Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences. Running, a climate scientist who studies forest carbon, received the award for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Running’s group monitors global photosynthesis and evapotranspiration, specialties that involve merging satellite data with on-the-ground ecological monitoring. He’s currently collaborating with wildlife biologists–a first–in an effort to use large-scale climate predictions to inform questions about the future of animal populations. I popped in to see him yesterday in Missoula.

Q: That’s a nice plaque on the wall. What are you up to now?

A: I want to know when we’re going to reach the capacity of the biosphere to carry society. After the IPCC work, I revisited the ideas of Limits to Growth [the 1972 book about finite resources]. I found out really quick that hardly anyone remembered the book. It just wasn’t registering in public talks. Then this paper came out in Nature where another group defined these “planetary boundaries.” It’s a new conceptual framing even though it’s the same bottom-line theme.

I’m asking, Are we capable of measuring a planetary boundary for something like plant production? And if we are, can we evaluate how close to the limit we are? If we can successfully evaluate it, and we are close to the limit, the policy significance is huge.

Do people understand this deeply enough, that if we really hit capacity it’s game over? The answer in the general public is no. Hardly anyone gets paid to think 50 years ahead, except for some of us eggheads at universities. It’s not a strategic horizon that people work on.

I’m seeing if I can help quantify planetary boundaries of biospheric production. I wrote a paper in Bioscience a few years ago that’s kind of an overview of the whole thing. You start with satellite measurements, and from that we compute the current biospheric production every year. And then you evaluate, what’s the capacity to increase it? This is what the Green Revolution did for decades, increase biospheric production. What we’re seeing more and more is that we’ve probably reached the end of that rope.

All the agriculturally functional land is already under production. People think that not only is there no more water for new irrigation, but we can’t even sustain what we have in parts of the world. And in the fertilizer domain, we’re already at a point of nutrient saturation in our systems that’s causing things like the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. The idea that we can just grow food by dumping lots of fertilizer in is not in the cards.

I’m weaving together this argument: Here’s the current production, here’s the evidence that we can’t expand much more and may not be able to sustain what we have in certain areas where irrigation may run out of steam. And I’m trying to package that into the final bottom line: Do we think there’s any capacity for additional biospheric production? My indications right now, midway through this, is kind of no.

That brings me to my crossover, where I start reading economics, which is mostly what I do these days. Economists all say we need growth. It’s absolutely saturated in our economic thinking that we have to grow forever, and here I am saying we’re tapped out in our ecological production. Which is just one area of growth, but it’s the one that feeds us and clothes us.

How are we ever going to solve this clash of theories, of economics that insists we have to grow forever and ecology that insists we’re on a finite planet? If I had an answer, I’d be on the Rachel Maddow show tonight.

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Two-Minute Interview: Tom Yulsman

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: October 17, 2011

Tom Yulsman runs the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, which last year caused a stir by discontinuing its School of Journalism and Mass Communication and turning it, at least temporarily, into an entity within the Graduate School.

The university has since convened eight “discussion groups” to make initial recommendations about the program’s future, which could eventually include becoming part of a new school or institute.

Meanwhile, little has changed in the day-to-day: The same staff still teaches the same courses to the same students. Yulsman is optimistic about future iterations of the j-school, and particularly about the CEJ. I wondered about his broader vision.

[Disclosure: Yulsman was my graduate advisor when I did my MS in environmental studies at CU.]

Q: What should the future of journalism education look like?

A: I’ll start by saying what it should not look like: what many journalism schools have looked like, and that is a walled fortress, cut off from the rest of the university. My journalism program at Columbia was pretty much like that. It’s only now that I’m hearing all the wonderful things that are available at Columbia, because my son goes there, that I’m realizing how much I missed by just being within the walls of the j-school.

That, to a greater or lesser extent, has been a problem. Engineering schools are the same way. There are all these self-contained schools.

I think going forward journalism schools need to connect more with the campuses on which they sit. In the changing media environment, to be successful as a journalist it really helps to know something about a specific area, so that you can play multiple roles. With a more entrepreneurial journalistic mindset, with more people being freelancers, we are called on to play more and different roles. Maybe that includes blogging, maybe that includes a certain element of being a public intellectual. In order to do that, to give yourself that in-depth knowledge, I think you need to have knowledge about something specific—like environment, science, business.

I also think because journalism schools have been walled off, it meant that people in the university who might have benefitted from what we have to offer have had a hard time of it. We have only so many seats in our classes. But I think we have a lot to offer. Especially here at the Center for Environmental Journalism. There’s a huge demand among science PhD students to know how to communicate better. They’re not going to be journalists, but they don’t want to take traditional academic research communication classes. They want to make videos and blog and write about their research and communicate it to general audiences. So to the extent that we can facilitate cross-fertilization, that’s going to benefit communication on issues like environment in a lot of ways.

That’s the big picture. Overall, the campus needs to be more open to this sort of thing.

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Two-Minute Interview: My Dad

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: October 9, 2011

A shelf in my office. Like father, like daughter....

Welcome to the first installment of “Two-Minute Interview,” which I hope will be a weekly feature here.

Don’t you sometimes just want to ask someone a single question? I do. I decided to start close to home, with my father, Bernie Rosner. All my life, my dad devoured books. But not just any books; they were on the most wide-ranging and often obscure topics you could think of. Centuries and Styles of the American Chair, 1640-1970. England’s Thousand Best Churches. The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization. It became something of a family joke at holidays to see who could come up with the most outrageously esoteric book for him. Lately, though, the bulk of the books piled on various tables around his apartment are about science. I wondered about the allure.

Q: Why do you read so many books about science?

A: I guess it’s an extension of my interests as a teenager. When I was growing up, science fiction was just starting to emerge in a serious way. The science fiction greats like Ray Bradbury and A. E. van Voght were writing amazing, mind-stretching things. Even L. Ron Hubbard was interesting.

I started out in science as a college student, then wandered off into the arts, then the dark arts of advertising. I guess I’m trying to re-connect to my science roots.

If you’re interested in science, it’s necessary to keep up with the latest books, because science is a field that keeps obsoleting itself.

The history of France, for instance, while interesting, is not likely to change from year to year. But astrophysics is. History is fixed, more or less. Science is in flux. Even something as rock-solid as evolutionary theory keeps evolving.

Also, since there’s generally not a plot involved [editor's note: GASP!], or a host of characters to follow [editor's note: DOUBLE GASP!], you can dabble in science books by reading a few at a time. Right now I’m reading Adventures Among Ants by Mark Moffett, The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins, The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios and The Beekeepers Lament by Hannah Nordhaus, which you gave me.

I’ve just finished two interesting books on early humans, one about Cro Magnons (us) and the other about Neanderthals (not us).

One of my big interests is cave art. It’s mind-boggling to think that our immediate ancestors, some 30,000 years ago, worked their way into the remotest corners of caves, with flimsy torches, to leave their mark upon the walls. This ability to think symbolically led to computers and putting a man on the moon. The first five million years of human evolution didn’t produce very much except crude stone tools, but the last 30,000 years or so were off the charts.

I’m also fascinated by fossilization. I used to think that fossils were just old bones. Then I learned that fossils were bones that had been converted to stone, through minerals in the sediment replacing the organic matter in the bones. A stone replica. How can you not be amazed at that?

Every time you pick up the newspaper (or view it online), there’s another new scientific discovery to read about. I don’t mean to keep picking on France–but when was the last time you read about a new discovery in French history?

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Streams, Bugs, and the Future of Species: An Interview with Chris Funk

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: October 3, 2011

On an unseasonably hot day last week in Fort Collins, Colorado, I sat down with Chris Funk, assistant professor of biology at Colorado State University, to learn about a new research project aimed at predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Called Evotrac, the project, led by eight investigators from three universities, is focused on insects—and to a lesser extent fish and frogs—that live in headwater streams in the Colorado Rockies and the Ecuadorian Andes.

(WARNING: For ecology wonks only!)

HR: What’s Evotrac all about?

Chris Funk: A lot of the limitations on predicting the effects of climate change have to do with our limited basic ecological and evolutionary understanding. So you have to step back and ask some bigger, basic questions in the field. Our premise is that the historical selection pressures that these species have experienced wherever they live are going to influence how vulnerable they are to climate change.

Our idea is that the type of variability in temperature and stream flow that an organism experiences is going have an important effect on its traits, and those traits will determine how vulnerable it is to changes in temperature and changes in disturbance. So, for example, if a species experiences lots of variability in temperature throughout the year, you’d predict it has a high tolerance to changes in temperature. In Colorado, a species that lives here all year round has to be pre-adapted to a lot of variation in temperature. So if temperature rises, or becomes more variable with climate change, then those organisms would be less vulnerable.

We’re also looking in Ecuador. An organism at a given altitude in cloud forest in the Andes throughout the year experiences a relatively small range of temperatures. At the same elevation in Ecuador as in Colorado, it’s a relatively constant temperature all year round. And because those organisms in the tropics don’t experience much variability in temperature, we predict that they have relatively narrow thermal tolerances.

HR: What would that mean for tropical species?

CF: It suggests some tropical species might be more vulnerable to climate change. Even if the absolute temperature changes very little in the tropics compared to the temperate zone, because those species are very sensitive to changes of temperature, just a small amount can throw them over the edge.

This idea is known as the climactic variability hypothesis. It’s been attributed to Dan Janzen, from a paper titled, “Why mountain passes are higher in the tropics.” The idea is, say you’re in the middle of a mountain range in the tropics. There’s a greater cost to going over it than there is in the temperate zone, because you have to go into a climate that you’re not adapted to.

HR: Has this hypothesis been tested?

CF: There’s been some testing of it, but not so much in freshwater systems. And there are all sorts of predictions based on this hypothesis. One is narrower thermal tolerance in the tropics. Another is that you’re going to have narrow elevational ranges in the tropics—so that if you looked at the species’ distributions, you’d predict that they’d have narrow bands corresponding to elevation, kind of like those Jell-o cakes where you’ve got different flavors at different levels, to use a friend’s analogy. Whereas in the temperate zone, it’s all one flavor of Jell-o.

You can also make predictions about dispersal. Because it’s costly to move in the tropics, species will have lower dispersal abilities. This is something else that will determine vulnerability to climate change, because it’s important to be able to move and track suitable habitat when that habitat is changing in space. You want to be able to move from your currently suitable habitat to one that becomes suitable in the future.

HR: What else are you hoping to accomplish, besides testing that hypothesis?

CF: Another thing we’re trying to do is link the changes that occur because of climate change to predicted effects on ecosystem processes. Evolutionary history affects the traits of species that you find in a given spot. Now we’ve got this new rapid climate change, and the traits an organism has are going to affect whether they persist in the system. And then you have a new set of species that persist, and those will affect the ecosystem processes—say, nutrient cycling. And those changes will in turn feed back on the kind of organisms that can live there.

HR: You’re planning to compare related species from each area. So you would take, say, a mayfly in both these places and look at how it’s physiologically different? How do you measure the differences?

CF: In general, we’re finding one mayfly species in a given family in Colorado and a similar one in the same family in Ecuador, and then we’ll look at their thermal tolerances. The most basic standard way of doing it is stick them in a little container and heat up the water and see at what point they have a hard time functioning. That’s the physiological measurement. For dispersal, we’re using population genetic techniques to look at gene flow between populations. If there’s more gene flow—if the populations are more homogenous—there’s more dispersal. And if they have greater dispersal ability, you’d predict that species would be more resistant, less vulnerable to climate change.

HR: What’s the ultimate goal? Just because we can make predictions doesn’t mean we’re going to do something about it. Does this change the way we might think about conservation?

CF: In the broadest sense, our job is to help predict where there will be certain areas that are hotspots of vulnerability, so we can focus our management and policy in those areas, because obviously there are limited resources. Up until recently, people have been more worried about the temperate zone and the Arctic/Antarctic than the tropics. But the problem is that you don’t know anything about the sensitivity of organisms to a given unit change in temperature, or a given change to the flow regime of a stream.

Potentially we might be able to imagine some sort of vulnerability map of the western hemisphere, and red means you’re very vulnerable to climate change and blue means you’re not. And maybe, if these hypotheses are right, then the tropics would show up very red.

There also might be differences between groups of organisms. Some family of stonefly might have a really low dispersal ability. There are some stoneflies that have no wings. So we might say not just that these regions are vulnerable, but these organisms in these regions. And, say a particular organism has a very important functional role in ecosystem processes—say it’s very important in nitrogen cycling, which is an important process in these headwater streams. We could say, then, that it’s gonna really change how these streams work at a bigger level if the organism disappears.

So you could argue whether you care about one individual species of stonefly or not. But if you say that this whole functional group is really vulnerable, and that its absence changes the ecosystem processes, and all these headwater streams connect to rivers, and these rivers are used extensively by people… There’s an easy argument about the importance of headwater streams, and freshwater in general, for human welfare.

Photo credit: Jeanne Robertson

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The Evolution Solution

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: August 15, 2011

WILLOW WARBLER

Now that I’ve recovered from Austin’s 107-degree days—and the shock of shuttling in and out of an overly air-conditioned convention center—I’m trying to process the takeaways from the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting. There were some great sessions, including one on the nascent Urban Long-Term Research Area (ULTRA) network, which I wrote about at the NYT’s Green blog. It’s yielding some fascinating insights into how cities function as ecosystems, and the unintended consequences of seemingly innocuous policies.

Environmental trade-offs are going to become increasingly common. How can we encourage smarter water use without stripping away vital backyard habitat for native birds? How can we plant trees—for shade, biodiversity, carbon storage, soil stability, etc—without sucking up scarce water supplies? How can we power cities with renewable electricity without destroying fragile landscapes in the process? These are the sorts of questions we need to answer, and the more we can measure and understand urban systems, the better we’ll be at making informed decisions.

Of course, this is true for all ecosystems, not just urban ones. Which is why I was surprised there wasn’t more talk of evolution at ESA. There were a few sessions and a smattering of presentations that sought to bring evolution into ecological thinking, but for the most part they were marginalized or lost in the overwhelming crush of traditional ecology. Not that I’ve got anything against traditional ecology. But I think it’s time to recognize that establishing priorities and setting sound environmental policies in the face of global change means understanding how species adapt. As Andrew Gonzalez, a biologist at McGill University, told me over enchiladas and mole, “We don’t know how to fix an ecosystem, so we have to encourage it to fix itself.” The only way to do this is to bring evolution to bear on ecology. (Which is just one reason I’m excited about Kevin Zelnio’s new blog, EvoEcoLab, over at Scientific American.)

One of the best talks I saw at ESA was by Kristen Ruegg of UC Santa Cruz, who’s combining DNA sequencing and stable isotope measurements to try to solve the mystery of songbird decline. Half of all migratory songbird populations in North America are shrinking, but it’s not clear whether the problem is happening at their breeding grounds, their wintering grounds, or both. Understanding songbird migration—linking a population’s temperate mating area with its tropical getaway—is essential to honing in on what’s killing them. So Ruegg is using feathers—more than 150,000 of them, collected since 1992 and stored at UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research. She’s using isotopic signatures from hydrogen to identify the birds’ wintering locations, and then using single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs (sorry for the crappy, human-focused link) to create a fine-scale genetic map of which birds summer where.

Employing new genetic techniques in the service of understanding nature is an important step forward. I’ll be delving into this topic, here and elsewhere, over the coming months. Evolution happens before our eyes, not just at the glacial pace at which new species arise–and we can no longer afford to ignore it when it’s relevant to environmental decisions. The planet is changing, and species will change with it. We need to understand how. Stay tuned.

Photo via Flickr/Duncan Brown

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From the Archives, 1998

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: July 28, 2011

Okay, so this has nothing to do with teeth or claws. Or, for that matter, with nature. Though it does have to do with evolution—specifically, the evolution of the internet, and our relationship to it. I was reminiscing about this story recently with my old friend Austin Bunn, and I’m hereby dusting it off for a little summertime nostalgia trip.

Back in the late ’90s, when I edited the Village Voice’s coverage of the emerging culture of the internet, I commissioned an experiment. Austin, my lead writer, would hide out in his Brooklyn apartment and see how long he could survive using only the internet as his portal to the world—for sustenance, companionship, entertainment, information. Today, when trying to avoid the internet is a far bigger challenge, it’s hard to fathom that this piece ran just 13 years ago.

One Wednesday, I holed up in my apartment– no radio, no television, no phone, no contact. Just me, my ThinkPad, and a 28.8 connection.

You kind of have to read the whole piece. It’s in diary format, a time machine to an era full of promise but not yet delivering much beyond email and porn.

12:55. I’m at fitNOW, an exercise site. I have to get another plug-in first to watch a clip of “Abs of Steel.” I spend 15 minutes getting the player. Then, in a tiny, jittery box, Tamilee Webb (M.A., Exercise Science) tells me about her career. I can’t hear a word.

Bizarrely, you can’t access the piece on the Village Voice website (perfect)—though you can read my absurd introduction, in which I mention “the scores of homegrown start-up companies that have dictated the development of the Web— and are now household names: Amazon, N2K, Salon. . .” (Anyone have a clue what N2K was?)

Here’s another gem from the intro:

Aimless surfing has been all but obliterated; the bulk of Internet usage is for pragmatic concerns. (A survey released last month by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that 44 percent of Americans use the Net most often “for research or getting information,” 27 percent for e-mail, 6 percent for online banking, and 5 percent for reading magazines and newspapers; 11 percent use it mainly for “entertainment.”)

Reading Austin’s article is kind of like picking up that awesome old dial controller for the original Atari version of Pong. Or like hearing your grandmother talk about the days of party lines.

3:45. The Starr report is posted online. CNN.com is down. MSNBC.com is also full. NYTimes.com bounces me, but I keep pounding until I get through.

Was 1998 really that long ago? Apparently, it was.

9:05. I’m going to have to order food. I cruise the delivery sites: Netgrocer, NYCdelivery, NYC Grocer. Nobody will deliver to Brooklyn.

Read the full story here (perhaps accompanied by Massive Attack’s Mezzanine.)

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