Ecosystem Services To Suffer Under Invasive Impact?

Been a while since I've been able to pen a post, some inconvenient examinations took up a lot of time over the past couple of months (I learnt so much about carbon sequestration after wildfires that I didn't even get to write *cries*). I was planning to re-launch the blog on WordPress, but that hasn't happened yet and it probably won't for a while....

In any case, I've had time now to put something together, taking a look at the potential impact of invasive species on ecosystem services, using a recent example from Montserrat (Peh et al., 2015)

If you're thinking 'what is an ecosystem service?' it's a fairly straightforward concept, essentially referring to the benefits that an ecosystem provides to humans. A lot of these can be very important, both locally (like food provision) and on larger scales (such as carbon sequestration *painful memories*)

The term is being increasingly used in academic literature , having been popularised by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in the early 2000s. The Google Ngram graph below shows how it's usage has really taken off.

In addition to the term's growing usage, there is growing concern that invasive species may negatively impact ecosystem function, thus the services they provide.

So, to Montserrat! Located in the sunny Caribbean, Montserrat may seem like a great place for a holiday. However, half the island is an 'exclusion zone' following a devastating volcanic eruption in 1995. The island also has a growing problem controlling invasive species, which is what the recent study is more concerned with.

In Montserrat, local stakeholders at the Central Hills forest area (Fig.1) are concerned that invasive feral goats and pigs may trigger a chain of events that causes native vegetation to by replaced by alien plum and guava trees.

Fig.1 Map of Montserrat, highlighting the study area

This, of course, will have knock on impacts for the animals of the ecosystem. For example, consumption of native lobster claw plants causes the loss of nests for the Montserrat oriole, an endemic bird which attracts nature tourism (look how cute it is, I'd like to see one)

A Montserrat oriole. Straight up 10/10 but critically endangered.

Staying on the subject of nature tourism, the opportunity to view our feathered friend and walk in the cloud-shrouded tropical forest is a great attraction to international tourists. A survey was carried out on tourists to the Central Hills asking them if they would still visit if the ecosystem was substantially altered by invasive and endemic biota were lost.

In 2009, the reserve made an estimated $419,000 from nature based tourism. The survey revealed that only 54.3% of tourists said they would still visit the reserve if the invasion substantially altered the forest, representing a loss of income of $192,000 per year.

Central Hills. Worth a visit I'd say.

Another service that could be impacted in an invasive takeover is carbon sequestration (nooo not again...). It is estimated that the total carbon stock of the forest is currently 341,000Mg and would shrink to 302,000Mg under the invasive prevalent state.

Taking a Carbon price of $83.61 per tonne, the benefit of maintaining current forest structure would be over $3,000,000, and of course, there would be a little less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The resolution of the study is low though, so there is little confidence in this statement.

Trees: sucking up CO2, and savings

Overall, control of feral livestock and suppression of invasive plants in the Central Hills would result in a net benefit of $214,000 per year. Cessation of feral livestock control would reduce benefits to locals (via harvesting wild meat) and global beneficiaries (tourism, carbon sequestration) and would likely cause the disappearance of native species in the reserve. Basically, failure to control invasive species = everybody loses.

In an attempt to manage the 'all-round loser' situation, hunting of livestock has been undertaken since 2009. However, long term funding for this endeavor has not yet been secured. From an economic viewpoint, Peh et al have shown that it needs to continue.

Montserrat has been devastated by a recent volcanic eruption and its ecosystem services in the north of the country are threatened by invasive species. Control needs to be undertaken, the only issue now is who is going to pay for it.

Finally, if invasive species are threatening services in Montserrat, it makes it more likely that services will suffer elsewhere if similar disruption to ecosystem functions occur. Another reason to be wary of invasive species then...

Over and out

Rob

My First Poster Presentation

Life is full of big firsts. First steps. First kiss. First time you got drunk and threw up in front of everyone at prom on your 18th birthday (Ok, that last one might just apply to me...)

Recently though, I experienced a new first. My first academic poster presentation. It may not be life defining, but it's definitely been an interesting process to work through, so I thought I'd give my perspective on it as a Masters student doing one for the first time.

                                                                                                                

We were informed that our poster should be on future anthropogenic environmental change, linked to an element of environmental dynamics, such as Phosphorus, land slides, soil erosion and so forth... we were required to create the poster, which we would then present to the rest of the group.

Naturally, I decided to pick something invasive related.  Invasive plants it turned out to be.

At first, I figured I should just conduct research like I would if I were to write an essay. So I found a bunch of decent looking recent papers, made my notes and had a fairly good idea what I wanted to write.


Then I decided to actually write an essay. I felt that this would help me create a structure, which I could then transfer over to my poster directly, without losing too much wordage.

I had information, but I didn't really know what to do with it in terms of presentation. So,t he next thing I did was look at some of the posters in the department. I also had a read of the British Ecological Society guidelines for creating posters, to get a different perspective. They suggested putting my Twitter handle on it, but my tweets are probably 90% football related (I should really get a separate account for academic-y stuff).

In any case, here's a version of one of the first things I put together....

At this point I thought great, I have created something full of information but it probably needs to be tidied up. I was also lacking a reference list and certain personal information which needed to be added.

But I was still not sure if this is what a poster should be like. So I asked for the opinion of some people who know more about posters than me. The general feedback I received with that my poster was too verbose (at about 600 words), to lead people into the topic but not to be overly detailed.

I was also told about a prize winning poster, with a grand total of 30 words. THIRTY. I did not dare to cut my word count by that much though!

I did, however, hack away with the aim of removing superfluous words, whilst still trying to maintain the same level of information.

I became aware though, that by doing this it would be making certain aspects of the poster more difficult to interpret for people that perhaps may not be so familiar with the topic. Additionally, I did have to remove some information.

But rather than let that fall to the cutting room floor and end up in waste disposal, I thought I should provide additional information on this very blog, which is what I did here. 

After taking away a lot of words, and rearranging the design a bit, the final poster I created looked like this.

A crucial difference between this poster and my previous offering is that I no longer have to squint to read it! I also decided to use bullet points as an effective away to more clearly highlight individual points. I also simplified the aims and introductory information and added a reference list, in the smallest font I dared to use, so as not to take up too much space.

I then began thinking about what I was going to say in my presentation. I figured we might be required to speak for 5-10 minutes, so this was what I aimed for initially.

However, we were then informed that we would only have two minutes each to talk.

My initial reaction to that was something like this:

How was I meant to put across all the things I wanted to say in that short amount of time?! I haven't actually given the talk yet but my last attempt was two minutes thirty seconds, so I'll need to try and become more concise in the coming days.

It seems a shame to me that we don't have longer to talk, but if that's the way things are going in academia, then it's good that we're doing it in that style.

So that's about it for the poster I have created, but I'll leave you with some general feelings.

One big point I'd like to make is I wish we had done a poster in my undergraduate degree. From what I hear, the format of creating a poster and giving a talk for a couple of minutes is becoming more and more popular.

When we did our undergraduate dissertations, I was fortunate enough to present my work to the year group below me in the form of a powerpoint presentation, but many people never got a chance to show off their hard work and efforts to a wider audience. Also, i'm finding there's a big difference between preparing to give a powerpoint, and presenting a poster.

We were in groups of about four or five per supervisor. It might have made a nice tutorial assignment maybe to create a poster (not an A0 beast, even just A3 would be good for the practice) and present it to the people in the rest of the small group. That's just my two cents anyway...

Thanks for reading

Rob