Paul's talk will soon be posted on UVM's Burack Lecture website.  And stay tuned for a video interview I did with Paul, which we'll post on the Gund Institute website and YouTube channel. 

Abstract:

Bees provide essential pollination services that are potentially affected both by local farm management and the surrounding landscape. To better understand these different factors, we modelled the relative effects of landscape composition (nesting and floral resources within foraging distances), landscape configuration (patch shape, interpatch connectivity and habitat aggregation) and farm management (organic vs. conven- tional and local-scale field diversity), and their interactions, on wild bee abundance and richness for 39 crop systems globally. Bee abundance and richness were higher in diversified and organic fields and in land- scapes comprising more high-quality habitats; bee richness on conventional fields with low diversity bene- fited most from high-quality surrounding land cover. Landscape configuration effects were weak. Bee responses varied slightly by biome. Our synthesis reveals that pollinator persistence will depend on both the maintenance of high-quality habitats around farms and on local management practices that may offset impacts of intensive monoculture agriculture.

Gund Institute, The University of Vermont

Position: The Gund Institute for Ecological Economics seeks a postdoctoral researcher to develop rigorous and practical models that predict crop pollination services across agricultural landscapes.  The position is part of a new collaborative project funded by the USDA, “Developing Sustainable Pollination Strategies for U.S. Specialty Crops.”  We aim to understand how farm management practices affect pollinators, and to develop recommendations for harnessing native bees for crop pollination.  The 3-year position will be directed by Taylor Ricketts at The University of Vermont and co-advised by Eric Lonsdorf, Research Scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Responsibilities: The postdoctoral researcher will: develop a spatially-explicit statistical model integrating the ecology and economics of crop pollination services (building on our initial modeling efforts); work closely with project field teams to apply this model to several agricultural landscapes and crops within the US; use the fitted models to predict impacts of habitat enhancements on pollinator communities and crop productivity.  The post-doctoral researcher will work closely with both Dr. Ricketts and Dr. Lonsdorf, and will interact continuously with the broader project team (www.icpbees.org).

Qualifications:  Applicants must have a doctoral degree in ecology, economics, agricultural science, or related fields.  Successful candidates will have strong quantitative and statistical modeling skills, expertise in pollination or landscape ecology, successful experience with interdisciplinary collaboration, and a commitment to connecting research to real-world land management.

Application: Applicants should send a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and contact information for three references to Taylor Ricketts, Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, at taylor.ricketts@uvm.edu.  Review of applications will begin on April 12, 2013 and we anticipate a start date of July 1, 2013. 

Setting: The University of Vermont is located in Burlington, between the Green and Adirondack Mountains and on the shores of Lake Champlain.  The Gund Institute is a transdisciplinary environmental research center involving 20 Faculty Fellows, visiting scholars, and graduate students (www.uvm.edu/giee/). Related efforts at UVM include a university-wide research initiative in Food Systems. 

The University of Vermont is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Applications from women and people from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are encouraged.

The study, led by Lucas Garibaldi at Universidad Nacional de Río Negro in Argentina, involved 50 authors and data on 41 crop systems from 20 countries.   Our surprising result is that native pollinators enhance production of crops, regardless of whether farmers use managed honeybees to augment pollination.  This suggests that honeybees do not – as popularly thought –  replace the pollination services that native pollinators provide to crops around the world.  Conserving pollinators and their habitats is therefore an important part of ensuring adequate crop pollination.

The full citation is:

Pennington, D., T.H. Ricketts, R. Naidoo (2013). Priority setting for biodiversity and ecosystem services.  In Levin S.A. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, 2nd ed. Volume 6, pp.261-272.  Academic Press.

A video of her talk will soon be posted at the Burack Lecture series link below.

Thanks Pam!

'NatCap' does about a dozen such trainings per year, mostly for conservation practitioners in developing countries.  But because we expect more than the usual number of academics and students at this one, we will include time to discuss improvements to the models, and to plan scientific collaborations around those improvements or around innovative applications. 

Link to more information and registration is here.

A Global System for Monitoring Ecosystem Service Change

Heather Tallis, Harold Money, Sandy Andelman, Patricia Balvanera, Wolfgang Cramer, Daniel Karp, Stephen PolasKy, Belinda Reyers, Taylor Ricketts, Steve Running, Kirsten Thonicke, Britta Tietjen, and Ariane Walz

Earth’s life-support systems are in flux, yet no centralized system to monitor and report these changes exists. Recognizing this, 77 nations agreed to establish the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The GEO Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) integrates existing data streams into one platform in order to provide a more complete picture of Earth’s biological and social systems. We present a conceptual framework envisioned by the GEO BON Ecosystem Services Working Group, designed to integrate national statistics, numerical models, remote sensing, and in situ mea- surements to regularly track changes in ecosystem services across the globe. This information will serve diverse applications, including stimulating new research and providing the basis for assessments. Although many ecosystem services are not currently measured, others are ripe for reporting. We propose a framework that will continue to grow and inspire more complete observation and assessments of our planet’s life-support systems. 

BioScience. November 2012 / Vol. 62 No. 11  

Marsh Professors are outstanding individuals of international distinction in the arts and humanities, sciences, social sciences, and applied fields. Their sole mandate is to invigorate the intellectual and cultural life of the University. They are non-resident faculty with six-year terms of office who come to the campus to offer public lectures; collaborate with students and faculty colleagues in scientific research, scholarly projects, and creative activities; conduct seminars and colloquia; and take part in informal conversations with students and colleagues.

Dr. Polasky brings with him a wide range of interests that compliment the Gund Institute’s transdisciplinary research. He's been instrumental in work on ecosystem services, biofuels, optimizing conservation investments, and in generally linking economics with ecology to address conservation problems. Dr. Polasky is currently leading efforts to develop methods to value ecosystem services for the Natural Capital Project and is co-leader of the BioSustainability project for DIVERSITAS. His research interests also include endangered species policy, integrating ecological and economic analysis, renewable energy, environmental regulation, and common property resources.

Dr. Polasky is a Professor in Environmental Economics at University of Minnesota; he received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1986 and a B.A. from Williams College in 1979. He previously held faculty positions at Oregon State University and at Boston College. He serves on the Science Advisory Board of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. He served as Senior Staff Economist for environment and resources for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers 1998-1999.  

UVM and the Gund are looking forward to welcoming Steve on campus next fall for the first in a series of visits that will enrich Gund’s work on ecosystem services and ecological economics. 

Gund Institute, The University of Vermont 

Position: The Gund Institute for Ecological Economics seeks a postdoctoral researcher to develop rigorous and practical models that predict crop pollination services across agricultural landscapes.  The position is part of a new collaborative project funded by the USDA, “Developing Sustainable Pollination Strategies for U.S. Specialty Crops.”  We aim to understand how farm management practices affect pollinators, and to develop recommendations for harnessing native bees for crop pollination.  The 3-year position will be directed by Taylor Ricketts at The University of Vermont and co-advised by Eric Lonsdorf, Research Scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Responsibilities: The postdoctoral researcher will: develop a spatially-explicit statistical model integrating the ecology and economics of crop pollination services (building on our initial modeling efforts); work closely with project field teams to apply this model to several agricultural landscapes and crops within the US; use the fitted models to predict impacts of habitat enhancements on pollinator communities and crop productivity.  The post-doctoral researcher will work closely with both Dr. Ricketts and Dr. Lonsdorf, and will interact continuously with the broader project team (www.icpbees.org).

Qualifications:  Applicants must have a doctoral degree in ecology, economics, agricultural science, or related fields.  Successful candidates will have strong quantitative and statistical modeling skills, expertise in pollination or landscape ecology, successful experience with interdisciplinary collaboration, and a commitment to connecting research to real-world land management.

Application: Applicants should send a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and contact information for three references to Taylor Ricketts, Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, at taylor.ricketts@uvm.edu.  Review of applications will begin on November 15, 2012 and we anticipate a start date of March 1, 2013. 

Setting: The University of Vermont is located in Burlington, between the Green and Adirondack Mountains and on the shores of Lake Champlain.  The Gund Institute is a transdisciplinary environmental research center involving 20 Faculty Fellows, visiting scholars, and graduate students (www.uvm.edu/giee/). Related efforts at UVM include a university-wide research initiative in Food Systems. 

The University of Vermont is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Applications from women and people from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are encouraged.

Taylor and colleague Eric Lonsdorf will lead a modeling effort within the overall program to predict the ecological and economic impacts of habitat restoration.  These models will help guide field trials of actual restoration projects, and will result in a user-friendly tool to help farmers locate restoration projects to maximize conservation and yield returns.

The grant will fund a post-doctoral researcher to lead this modeling team.  Watch for the ad in October!

Taylor co-founded this 6-year-old project, and it was great to bring the group up to the new digs in Vermont.  We focused on several specific projects within NatCap that aim to connect ecosystem services with non-monetary measures of human well-being (like health, security, etc.).

Several papers and proposals will flow out of the working sessions, and a bunch of UVM-NatCap relationships formed that we hope bear fruit over time.

Previously, Galford was a fellow of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is adjunct there through the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program. Galford earned her PhD in Geological Sciences and MBL Joint Graduate Program in Biological and Environmental Sciences from Brown University (2010) and a B.A., with a double major in Earth & Planetary Sciences and Environmental Science (social studies track) from Washington University in St. Louis (2004).  

Alicia will be working as part of HEAL - an international consortium working on demonstrating the links between ecosystem change and human health outcomes.  She'll work closely with Taylor, with Sam Myers at Harvard's School of Public Health, and with the Natural Capital Project.

Her post-doc is funded by support to HEAL from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Welcome Alicia!

Brendan Fisher at WWF's Conservation Science Program led the proposal.  Taylor is a co-PI, and other leaders include Robin Naidoo (WWF), Kiersten Johnson (ICF International), and Anila Jacob (USAID).

Our working group will take an informatics approach to rigorously testing whether ecosystem conservation has measurable impacts on human well-being (e.g., income, health, security), using large datasets of household surveys and spatial modeling techniques.

Anapolis, here we come...

Working with field assistant extraordinaire Anna Beuchemin, Taylor sampled pollinators to blueberry, tomato, and summer and winter squashes on 8 farms in the Champlain Valley.  The goals this year were to get to know the local agricultural landscape, build a reference collection of crop pollinators, test and refine sampling methods, and build relationships with farmers.

With this basis, we'll be spending the year taking a look at our data, writing more focused proposals, recruiting a graduate student, and preparing for "real" field work next spring and summer.

Steve's working on how scientific information on ecosystem services has affected policies and decisions.  How often has it really made a difference?  How would you detect its effect?  Under what conditions is this information most likely to matter.

Working closely with the Natural Capital Project, Steve is analyzing a set of cases where "NatCap" has produced maps of ecosystem services, estimated their values, and connected this information to ongoing decisions and policy debates.

Ecosystem service maps are cool, but do they help?  If so, when and how?  Steve will be helping us find that out.

Protecting Important Sites for Biodiversity Contributes to Meeting Global Conservation Targets

Stuart H. M. Butchart, et al.

Abstract: Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of conservation efforts and now cover nearly 13% of the world's land surface, with the world's governments committed to expand this to 17%. However, as biodiversity continues to decline, the effectiveness of PAs in reducing the extinction risk of species remains largely untested. We analyzed PA coverage and trends in species' extinction risk at globally significant sites for conserving birds (10,993 Important Bird Areas, IBAs) and highly threatened vertebrates and conifers (588 Alliance for Zero Extinction sites, AZEs) (referred to collectively hereafter as ‘important sites’). Species occurring in important sites with greater PA coverage experienced smaller increases in extinction risk over recent decades: the increase was half as large for bird species with>50% of the IBAs at which they occur completely covered by PAs, and a third lower for birds, mammals and amphibians restricted to protected AZEs (compared with unprotected or partially protected sites). Globally, half of the important sites for biodiversity conservation remain unprotected (49% of IBAs, 51% of AZEs). While PA coverage of important sites has increased over time, the proportion of PA area covering important sites, as opposed to less important land, has declined (by 0.45–1.14% annually since 1950 for IBAs and 0.79–1.49% annually for AZEs). Thus, while appropriately located PAs may slow the rate at which species are driven towards extinction, recent PA network expansion has under-represented important sites. We conclude that better targeted expansion of PA networks would help to improve biodiversity trends.

Abstract:Human population growth and the corresponding increase in human consumption rate are leading factors contributing to biodiversity degradation and loss worldwide. Conservation biology integrates diverse disciplines within the natural and social sciences, with the goal of preserving the world's biodiversity, or variety of life. This chapter defines biodiversity and different metrics of diversity, and summarises how biodiversity is distributed, emphasising important patterns both across space and taxonomic groups. Next it describes the major threats to global biodiversity. It examines how people assign values to biodiversity, with a focus on ecosystem services. Finally, it highlights future challenges of conservation biology to protect biodiversity as well as human well-being. Making conservation more relevant to policy makers, and people in general, requires integrated research to understand the provision of ecosystem services, their relationship to biodiversity and the tradeoffs of resource use decisions.

Key Concepts:

• Conservation biology is an interdisciplinary endeavour that aims to balance the natural resource uses of a growing human population while sustaining a functioning and diverse biosphere for future generations.
• Biodiversity is a hierarchical concept that includes the diversity of alleles, genes, individuals, populations, species, communities and ecosystems.
• Each level of biodiversity serves an important function, and human activities can affect biodiversity at any level of organisation.
• Biodiversity is unevenly distributed, both across spatial and temporal gradients and across taxa.
• Human population growth and the corresponding increase in human consumption rate are impacting land cover, biogeochemical cycling, water quality and availability, and other major features of the world that is contributing to biodiversity degradation and loss.
• Biodiversity has both intrinsic value and utilitarian value; the latter is derived from the ecosystem services, or the essential goods and services that ecosystems provide to humanity, including food, medicine, building materials, clean water and flood control.
• Quantifying ecosystem services can make conservation more relevant to policy makers and people in general, and research is needed to understand the provision of ecosystem services, their relationship to biodiversity, and the tradeoffs of resource use decisions.

Responsibilities: The postdoctoral researcher will: assess existing empirical and modeling efforts at the interface of ecosystem services and human health; identify promising ecosystems and health outcomes to focus on; and develop and test models linking ecosystem change with changes in human health.  The post-doctoral researcher will interact closely with Dr. Myers and other HEAL members, as well as with the Natural Capital Project, another university-NGO partnership focused on mapping and modeling ecosystem services (www.naturalcapitalproject.org).

Qualifications:  Applicants must have a doctoral degree in ecology, economics, public health, epidemiology, or related fields by June 2012.  Successful candidates will have strong quantitative skills, broad expertise in analyzing social-ecological systems, specific experience in ecological and/or public health modeling, and a commitment to connecting research to real-world issues.

Application: Applicants should send a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and contact information for three references to Taylor Ricketts, Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, at taylor.ricketts@uvm.edu.  Review of applications will begin on April 2, 2012 and we anticipate a start date of summer 2012. 

Setting: The University of Vermont is located in Burlington, between the Green and Adirondack Mountains and on the shores of Lake Champlain.  The Gund Institute is a transdisciplinary environmental research center involving 20 Faculty Fellows, visiting scholars, and graduate students (www.uvm.edu/giee/). Related efforts at UVM include a university-wide research initiative in Complex Systems and a growing campus-wide collaboration on ecosystem-health interactions. 

The University of Vermont is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.Applications from women and people from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are encouraged.