Number of Species from Regularly Monitored Taxa in the Chicago Wilderness Region

Work in Progress - I will try to get this finalized in the coming days.... still waiting for feedback from several folks.... I should be able to break out the insects and add more arthropod groups.

	Total	Native	Non Native
Plants	2968	1829	1139
Mammals	50	47	3
Birds	423	_	_
Fishes	164	146	18
Reptiles and Amphibia	60	_	_
Insects	20000+	_	_
Molluscs	41	38	3
Earthworms	12	0	12

Notes:

Plants: Swink, F and Wilhelm, G (1994) Plants of the Chicago Region.  Indiana Academy of Science; personal communication G Wilhelm (Conservation Design Forum) (2013).  Mammals: Greenberg, J A (2002) Natural History of the Chicago Region and http://www.mammalsociety.org/mammals-illinois.  The three non-native mammals in the region are Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), Black rat (Rattus rattus), and the house mouse (Mus musculus).  Birds: Personal correspondence: Judy Pollock (Audubon Chicago Region) Geoffrey A. Williamson, Doug Stotz (The Field Museum) and Sheryl DeVore (2013). Fishes:  Personal communication: Philip Willink (The Field Museum) (2013); Reptiles and Amphibia: Greenberg, J (2002) A Natural History of the Chicago Region.  Karen Glennemeier (Audubon Chicago Region) counts 12 species of frogs and toads in this number. Insects: The number of species here is an approximation made by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.  Since Chicago has a high concentration of natural area remnants relative the state of Illinois, there is a probability that it will have many of the states species.  However, the number is possibly a low approximation of that total species tally, as many of insect groups are poorly known. See: http://www.dnr.state.il.us/publications/pdf/00000679.pdf Molluscs:  Barghusen, L; Bland, J.; Klocek,R,(2010), A Field Guide to the Freshwater Mussels of the Chicago Wilderness, Field Museum of Natural History, http://fm2.fieldmuseum.org/plantguides/guide_pdfs/386.pdf.  Earthworms: Personal correspondence, Kristen Ross (University of Illinois, Chicago), Lauren Umek (Northwestern University), and Basil Iannone (University of Illinois, Chicago).  

*In many cases the data is for Chicago area is defined as the 22 counties that surround Chicago, including 11 in Illinois, 7 in Indiana, 3 in Wisconsin, 1 in Michigan.

Living Large: One Large Species Doing Many Dangerous Things

Collectively we are a stunningly large species. A way of illustrating the global nature of our species comes from calculations of our own ecological footprint; Invariably we exceed the amount of productive land available to us. For example, the population of the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area contains around 9 million people. The amount of land required to sustain each person (the physical footprint of our buildings, land for agricultural productivity and so forth) is about 20 acres. Collectively this is 180,000,000 acres (281,250 square miles). Illinois's land area is 55,593 square miles, making the ecological footprint of Chicagoans five times larger than the state of Illinois. In fact Chicagoans do not live in Illinois - they live wherever their environmental shadow is cast. In turn, the US population is larger than the country which contains us, and the global population footprint is now larger than the globe. We can overshoot on the global scale only by drawing down on global environmental capital. And the planet may prove to be a rather taciturn banker when accounts come due.

The resource gluttony that got us to this point has had extravagant consequences on a global scale: despoliation of the biosphere, vast eutrophication of the hydrosphere, depletion of soils, and atmospheric changes resulting in climate disruption.

We are in the seemingly paradoxical position of not knowing the number of species on Earth to the nearest order of magnitude (are there 5 or 50 million?) but knowing that we have accelerated species loss to rates comparable to that of a mass extinction event. That extinction is the fate of all species is beside the point, since ultimately the loss is measured in repercussions to us. Not the least part of this is the implication for our ethical self-conception. Is it good to be asteroid-like, comparable to the one that took out the dinosaurs?

African Melancholia: Reading Peter Matthiessen’s African Silence 20 years on

I recently finished reading Peter Matthiessen’s African Silences (1992).  Though it is less celebrated than some of his other books, for instance, The Tree Where Man was Born (1973), The Snow Leopard (1978) or his National Book Award winning novel Shadow Country (2008), nevertheless, it covers essential territory and twenty years after its publication it still deserves to be read.  

African Silences examines a crucial conservation topic, demonstrates the pernicious impacts of humans on dwindling habitat, reveals a slightly fetishized awe of vast empty places, describes the vertiginous horrors of several potential wilderness deaths, applauds the merits of the old ways and traditional peoples, curses bureaucracies, casts its few crumbs of optimism along the way like edible markers on a dark path, and concludes prettily but gloomily.  Of course, it is tremendously depressing.  Which taken altogether is all to say that African Silences is an environmental classic. 

African Silences covers three separate African trips.  The first was to Senegal, Gambia and Ivory Coast in 1978 on a wildlife survey of West Africa with Dr Gilbert Boese, then of Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.  They conclude that animals are fewer in both abundance and diversity than in East Africa.  Though this has long been known, of course, but Matthiessen points out that West Africa is not only more populous than East Africa but that this has been true for a long time.  Therefore he speculates that long-term human impacts may be a factor explaining the depauperate state of Western Africa’s fauna.  The second trip was to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1978 with British ornithologist Alec Forbes –Watson in search of the Congo Peacock (Afropavo congensis).  Though they see the Eastern Lowland Gorilla in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, and later meet someone who has eaten a Congo peacock, Matthiessen nevertheless leaves without seeing this bird.  The final trip reported on in the book is to the Congo Basin to evaluate elephant populations, the size of which was a contentious matter back then, with Dr David Western.  They concluded that vast areas of forest in south Gabon, south Congo and western Zaire thought to harbor populations of forest elephants have disappeared.  That is, the whole forest has disappeared – destroyed or degraded.  Another observation is that there exists a wide and deep hybridization zone between forest and bush elephants.  Finally, they speculate that rumors of “pygmy elephants” in the forest are more likely to refer to independent juveniles rather than to a separate undescribed tiny elephant species. 

Dude, your evolutionary theory just ate my philosophy – Leopold and the evolutionary possibility of a Land Ethic

Part of a series on Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic”

Somebody somewhere at this moment is writing a reverential essay about Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic.  I feel a little ungenerous, I admit, to write in less than enthusiastic tones.  It seems to me though that if the land ethic, Leopold’s extension of the ethical sequence to encompass the land community (including other creatures) and thereby forming the basis for new conservation values, was going to work out we’d have stronger hints of this already.  After all, this classic essay in conservation ethics was published in 1949 and has been the subject of lively interest in the intervening year.  I am familiar with a lot of the literature surrounding the essay; certainly I know where to find those pieces I have overlooked in the past.  Its influence on the history of conservation biology cannot be overstated.  To illustrate, in A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (I choose this because it’s here beside me on the desk), the index records entries for “Land Ethic: biotic community” extending over 7 lines, with 18 separate entries (some of which bracket several pages of the text).   I am interested, however, in reading the essay afresh; a reading unencumbered by the scholarly paraphernalia available for this work.  I know therefore that the mild critique I offer here and in future posts have probably been fended off; ably deflected by the academic phalanx the surrounds Leopold’s work, nevertheless, in the spirit of inquiring if the land ethic can be rejuvenated I pose some challenges again.  It may be that we must risk deposing this king of ecology.  In other words, I ask if the land ethic must be rescued from Leopold’s treatment of it? It’s time to read Leopold as if he’s being read for the first time.

Understanding the patterns of rarity of vulnerable species: some background

Why is this important? The identification and protection of rare species remains central to the task of conservation.  However, conservationists now know that there are several quite distinctive ways in which species can be rare.  In addition not all forms of rarity are equally significant for regional conservation planning.  Translating the different meanings of rarity into appropriate policy directives at a local scale requires research into both the patterns of rarity and the mechanisms that distinguish rare species from common ones.

Rarity is an important correlate of extinction vulnerability (one of a number of such correlates, it should be noted) (Davies et al. 2000); that is, rare species are more likely to go extinct than common ones.  Rare species are therefore afforded special attention in conservation circles (Lawler et al. 2003).  The familiar policy terms endangered, threatened, vulnerable species, rely heavily on rarity for designating extinction risk.  It is, however, an ecological truism that rarity is common.  This important concept alludes to the fact that a relatively few species may be abundant in an assemblage, but the  majority of species are rare, often being represented by as few as a single specimen in ecological surveys (Preston 1948, Magurran and Henderson 2003).  For example oak and hickory species typically dominate in an Oak Woodland, whereas most other species in the will occur in relatively low numbers.  Since most species are not commonly encountered, it is clearly useful to distinguish species that are inherently rare (those species whose relative rarity is related to, for example, its life history strategy and may therefore have a stable, non threatened population) from those that are both rare and vulnerable to immanent extinction (Maina and Howe 2000).  For instance, a species that is has a small population but which has a low variability in their populations numbers, rarely fluctuating from year to year, may have a reduced risk of extinction (Pimm et al. 1988). 

The determination that a rare species has a conservation priority status should be based on objective criteria (Ledant 1991, Mace and Lande 1991).  Delineating the type of rarity being addressed in a given conservation strategy can be a crucial criterion.  Both research and action that promotes rare species conservation must carefully also consider the issue of the geographical scale on which rarity is assessed (Fagan et al. 2005).  A species with scarce populations in one area may be geographically widespread and may therefore not be regarded as having as high a priority as a species with small population in a very restricted geographical range.  With this is mind, it is important that conservation reserve selection and design procedures that employ rarity as a decision criterion are implemented with a sensitivity not only to local needs but also takes the regional context into consideration (with a view to maximizing regional diversity) (Rodrigues and Gaston 2002).  Such sensitivity to the multiple scales contributing to rarity is embedded in recent attempts to classifying different types of rarity.