Science & Policy

The latest Tangled Bank is up at Geomblog. Tangled Bank is a blog carnival for science writers. The current offering has lots of great articles and is worth a visit.

Festivals to celebrate the blooming of trees are held all over the world, and can be a major tourist draw. Most famous among blooming festivals are the various celebrations of cherry blossoms in Japan, Washington DC and other places. The vagaries of weather means that blossoms often fail to appear at the scheduled time for festivities. Since festivals have to be scheduled well in advance, it is easy to miss the actual bloom date. As cities become warmer, both because of climate change and the urban heat island effect, blossoms are occurring much earlier, often well before tourists arrive to celebrate the event.

Authorities in Hirosaki, in northern Japan, are funding research by tree biologists to try to control blossoming so that it occurs when the festivals are scheduled. Since hundreds of thosands of tourists may descend on a properly timed festival, the city stands to lose a lot of money if it is unable to predict the timing of blossoming. Hirosaki is in a cooler area than most Japanese cities and the blossom time of cherries often coincided with Golden Week, a national week of holidays. Up to two million visitors go to Hirosaki when the blossoms coincide with Golden Week.

Scientists at Hirosaki University are experimenting with hormone sprays and injections and piling snow around cherry trees. To date, none of the treatments have been effective. This is not surprising. Once a tree's dormancy requirement has been met, the timing of flowering in temperate trees is tightly tied to degree days (heat accumulation above a threshold temperature). It seems very unlikely that hormonal control of flower timing is significant. Packing snow may cool the roots, but flower development is more likely dependent on air temperature. I suspect that the scientists will spend a lot of money without any significant outcome. Maybe it is time to reschedule Golden Week.

The article describing this issue doesn't address some important questions: how often is Golden Week missed, and has there been a trend toward earlier blooming over time? The article says that there has but does not describe the trend in sufficient detail. Also, the urban heat island effect, which is often much larger in cities than other sources of climate change, is not addressed. While little can be done over the short term regarding climate change, the urban heat island effect can be mitigated.

New Scientist has an article (subscription required) about the largest ecological restoration/management project ever. Dust storms from Inner Mongolia and Northwestern China have always swept across northern China, but centuries of deforestation and overgrazing have made matters much worse. Chinese families are forced to stay indoors during the spring wind storms, and the dust destroys machinery and crops. The problem is worldwide: dust from China causes problems, including airport closures, in Korea and Japan. The dust darkens the sky as far away as Colorado.

The Chinese government initially tried building a wall of trees to block the dust. Now, China, along with Korea, Japan and Mongolia, are implementing the largest ecological management project to try multiple approaches to reducing the dust problem. Plans include grasslands restoration in dry areas, reforestation of uplands and a switch from wood as an energy source to wind and solar. There is no shortage of either of these energy sources in the region. One part of the forest restoration scheme involves the use of waste water to irrigate young pine plantations.

Although the project is huge, multinational and well funded, it may not work. Centuries of neglect of western China have made a natural phenomenon into a serious problem, and centuries of effort may be required to resolve it.

Thanks to Dave Roberts at Gristmill. He has a good account of the article here.

From Chris Mooney comes this pathetic story of the Bush administration's continued efforts to erode science. It seems the Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that species recovery plans under the Endangered Species Act can only use genetic science that was in place at the time a species was listed. So if a species was listed in 1975 but today's genetic techniques show that it actually consists of two subspecies, too bad. Managers can only 1975 data. This is incredibly stupid if you assume that the purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to help endangered and threatened species recover. If, as in the Bush administration, the ESA is a nuisance to be ignored when possible, then the new interpretation makes sense. Since the revolution in molecular genetics really only took off in the late 1970's, there is a vast amount of genetic techniques and information that postdates the listing of many species.

A modeling study suggests that many European plant species are threatened by climate change. More than half of all European plant species could be listed as endangered, threatened or vulnerable by 2080 under some climate change scenarios. All scenarios of the UN IPCC would lead to reductions in viability of European plant populations. A research group led by Wilfred Thuiller of the South African National Biodiversity Institute found that alpine plants are at greatest risk. Alpine plants will lose habitat space as warming allows forests to develop at higher elevations. Alpine plants could begin growing on what are now permanent glaciers or snow pack, but space is limited.  The article is to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, but is not yet online.

One problem presented to European plants is the direction of mountain ranges. In North America, mountain ranges run north-south, and plants can migrate along the mountains or the valleys to the east and west. In Europe, the major mountain ranges are east-west, forming barriers to migration. This explains the lower species diversity of northern Europe compared to northern North America: after the last glaciation, North American plants were free to migrate north from refugia in the south.

The Vascular Plant Red Data List, a compilation of the status of rare, threatened and endangered British plants shows that about 20% of British plant species are under threat, and there are many species whose populations are declining. Many of the species are upland plants in forests, but a surprising number are plants of arable lands that were previously thought to be safe in the margins of tilled farm lands. However, the increased intensity of agriculture has pushed many of these plants into ever-shrinking space.

British efforts to conserve endangered species have been quite successful. However, many other species have become dramatically less common. The Red List, a statistical analysis of the New Atlas of British Flora, enables conservation biologists to focus efforts on these declining species. New agricultural methods, which stress preservation of natural lands and the restoration of habitat, hold the promise of returning many of these plants to healthier population levels.

This approach, combining detailed spatial analysis of plant distributions with statistical analysis of abundance, is an important conservation tool. Unfortunately, many of the press accounts of the Red List's publications were quite hysterical. The BBC got it right, but the AP story had the header "British flora faces extinction." Other American accounts were equally overblown. This kind of coverage of natural resource issues is not helpful, as it gives readers the impression that everything is going to hell and there is no point in caring. The more optimistic interpretation of the news, and I think the correct one, is that the Red Data List provides guidelines for helping these species recover.

There is a new Tangled Bank, hosted by Buridan's Ass. My article on ramps is there, along with a lot of other articles about science, medicine, natural history and related subjects. If you haven't visited Tangled Bank, its a great place to see what is going on in science blogs. Tangled Bank is a blog carnival, a collection of submitted (not reviewed) articles from weblogs hosted in rotation by its participants.

Ramps, the smelly and tasty wild leek of the Appalachians (Allium tricoccum and A. burdickii), are in season. Ramp collection has long been an important spring activity for people in the Appalachians. Unfortunately, ramps have become trendy gourmet food items in big-city restaurants and markets, and overharvesting threatens many ramp populations.

Harvesting of non-timber forest products (NTFP) is a common activity of local residents throughout the world. At the low level required to meet local needs, harvesting is generally sustainable. Once a non-timber product becomes commercially valuable, it is much more difficult to sustain viable populations. Most NTFP are understory plants, though overstory nut crops like brazil nuts, can be important.

In the Appalachians, local people have been harvesting ramps, goldenseal, St. John's Wort, ginseng and mushrooms since long before Europeans arrived in North America. However, once commercial demand rose in recent years, many of these plants are threatened with overharvesting.

Ginseng is increasingly hard to find in many woodlands of eastern Kentucky. Since 1999, the US Fish & Wildlife Service has restricted the sale of wild-collected ginseng, and most states require permits for 'sangin (harvesting ginseng). Cultivated ginseng exports to Asia far outstrip export of wild-collected plants, but wild ginseng is worth more. American ginseng, Panax quinquefolium, is prized over Asian ginseng, P. ginseng. When I lived in Malaysia and Indonesia, all the kedai runcit and kedai ubat featured American ginseng, often with American flags displayed to show authenticity. I brought a box home to give to my friend Junior Marshall, who has been 'sangin in eastern Kentucky for the last 70 years, and told him I was returning his ginseng. In 2000, the US exported just over 400,000 kg of cultivated ginseng and 144,000 kg of wild ginseng. The cultivated ginseng brought a total of nearly $17 million, while the smaller wild crop brought in $24.5 million (USDA). The numbers have remained fairly static since then. Ginseng harvesting has been banned in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and is supposed to be tightly regulated by permit in the National Forests. However, enforcement staff in the Parks and Forests are spread very thin, and it is clear that considerable illicit 'sangin is continuing.

Ramp harvesting has been less controversial and less regulated. Many Appalachian communities have ramp festivals, like the Cocke County Ramp Festival in Tennessee. These celebrate not only the ramp, the first spring vegetable to be harvested, but also the local mountain culture.

However, now that ramps have been discovered by the culinary world, harvesting is getting out of hand. Great Smoky Mountains National Park has banned ramps harvesting, and permits will be required beginning next year in Nantahala National Forest. The Forest Service is eager to preserve the culturally important ramps festivals, while at the same time protecting the resource.

Conservation of ramps is made more complex by the fact that there are two species. Well, maybe there are two. Allium tricoccum is the more common ramp species. Allium burdickii is considered uncommon, rare or of uncertain status in many southern states. Most state floras and the USDA regard A. tricoccum and A. burdickii as separate species. A recent article by Gary Kaufman raises questions about the conservation status of A. burdickii and its status as a species. Analysis of proteins by electrophoresis does not show any difference between northern populations of the two species. There seems to have been no other genetic analysis of these species published.

How do we conserve these species when we don't really understand their taxonomy and conservation status? The obvious answer is to manage all ramps patches on public lands to maintain vigorous populations. Given the meagre budgets of the federal agencies managing the National Parks and Forests, ramps management will probably not have sufficiently high priority.

And what of the gourmet world? I am an avid viewer of the Food Channel, and love good cooking. How often, though, do we see high-end cooks paying any attention to the conservation status of their ingredients? Gourmet cooking seems to be almost entirely unaffected by moral decisions about the origin of ingredients. How many restaurants offer fair-traded, shade-grown coffee or sustainably-harvested fish? Ramps are just another example of how consumerism is at odds with sound conservation. And it need not be so: consumers can easily be educated to make the right choices in foods. It is the responsibility of the food industry to make those choices simple.



Reference (not on the web): Jones, A.G. 1979 A Study of Wild Leek, and the Recognition of Allium burdickii (Liliaceae). Systematic Botany, 4, 29-43.