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The call of the wild

Not sure how long they’ve been available, but I’ve just learned that the new versions of the Last of the Wild maps are out. The first version is a few years old now.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University have joined together to systematically map and measure the human influence on the Earth’s land surface today. The Last of The Wild, Version Two depicts human influence on terrestrial ecosystems using data sets compiled on or around 2000.

These are Europe’s most untouched areas:
europe

Not much left. There are also global and continental maps of human footprint and human influence index, although I must say I haven’t fully digested the difference between the two. And you can download the data and play around with it yourself, of course. Let the mashing begin!

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CWR heaven

So you’re on holiday at a villa in Western Crete; blue skies, bluer seas, wildflowers, olive groves and fish so fresh it practically flaps its way onto your plate. But it isn’t enough. And before you arrived, your blogging compadre told you that a few kilometres down the coast was a micro-reserve dedicated to the conservation of Phoenix theophrasti, right at the western edge of its distribution.

“Hey,” you announce gaily. “Let’s go see the wild date palms a few kilometres down the coast.”

Jaws drop, sniggers are suppressed, knowing glances exchanged. Agricultural biodiversity has reared its ugly head, on holiday no less. 1

Eventually, one of the company asks the dreaded question.

“Why?”

So you go into blather mode. Crop wild relatives. Narrow genetic resources. Problems of cultivated date palms. (What was the name of that disease that’s killing Deglat Nour?) Breeding cycles. Climate change. Are date seeds recalcitrant? Vital importance for the entire future of the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. Blather, blather, blather.

And they buy it, yes! To humour you, but still. So off you wend along narrow, beautiful mountain roads, detouring for three hours to get a flat tire fixed. And there in the car park of the taverna where you stopped for coffee, locally-grown papaya and raki — at 11.30 in the morning — while the puncture was being mended, is a sign about the micro-reserve for Phoenix theophrasti, which enumerates the threats, outlines the responses and acknowledges the sponsors, but fails to answer the “why?” question.

Refreshed, on you wend, past the monastery of the golden step, through olive groves sheltering biblical flocks of sheep in their shade and down a stony incline. Confusingly, a couple of houses boast tame date palms, and you’re forced to admit that those are not why we came.

Suddenly, there you are. An honest-to-God turquoise lagoon fringed by lunar volcanic rock that has remarkably sharp edges. A sign and, you have to admit, some pretty ragged looking specimens that are clearly very like date palms.

Off you scamper to document the find and alert your colleague. Snap, snap, snap.

Carob trees. Wild thyme alive with bees. Spininess abounds. CWR heaven.

You return to the company, which has also been scampering, documenting, and paddling in the lagoon.

“This is heaven,” says one.

You breathe a quiet sigh of relief.

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Documenting the history of fisheries

  • Human fishing and impacts on near-shore and island marine life — including the catching of shellfish, finfish and other marine mammals — apparently began in many parts in the Middle Stone Age — 300,000 to 30,000 years ago — 10 times earlier than previously believed;
  • Passages of Latin and Greek verse written in 2nd century CE suggest Romans began trawling with nets;
  • In the early to mid 1800s, years of overfishing followed by extreme weather collapsed a European herring fishery. Then, the jellyfish that herring had preyed upon flourished, seriously altering the food web;
  • In the mid 1800s, periwinkle snails and rockweed migrated from England to Nova Scotia on the rocks ships carried as ballast — the tip of an “invasion iceberg” of species brought to North America;
  • In less than 40 years, Philippine seahorses plunged to just 10% of their original abundance, reckoned in part through fishers’ reports of each having caught up to 200 in a night in the early days of that fishery.

Just some of the insights that will be shared by participants in the forthcoming Oceans Past II conference, according to EurekaAlert. It sounds absolutely fascinating:

Using such diverse sources as old ship logs, literary texts, tax accounts, newly translated legal documents and even mounted trophies, Census [Census of Marine Life] researchers are piecing together images — some flickering, others in high definition — of fish of such sizes, abundance and distribution in ages past that they stagger modern imaginations.

It’s all part of the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project. One of the regions being studied is the Mediterranean, and the project website has some great historical photographs of fisheries, for example from the Venetian lagoon. The “scientific area” includes an erudite answer to the question “Did the Romans eat fish?” by HMAP leader of the Black Sea project Tonnes Bekker-Nielsen. Here’s a perhaps surprising snippet:

The fish product most likely to be found in the average Roman kitchen or cookshop was garum, a sauce made from fermented fish and similar to the sauce known as umami or nuac, which is very popular throughout East Asia today. Garum was used to give flavour to stews, soups and many other dishes; it could also be eaten as a relish on bread.

The project includes some interesting data visualization tools.

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Featured: hot cows

back40 has hot news on cool cows:

Cows are hot. Their eponymous rumens run at about 104F due to the furious activity of rumen biota. This means that heat is often a worse problem than cold since it takes energy to stay cool as well as warm, yet they need to eat and so refill the rumen to get energy. The hurrier they go the behinder they get. Shade in summer is as important as wind shelter in winter.

Not a lot of people know that.

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Cows manicure Burren

The limestone outcrop of the Burren is one of the natural wonders of Ireland — if not Europe — it’s criss-crossing grikes supporting a unique microenvironment and a similarly unique and varied flora. Not to mention generations of botanists. It is also, incidentally, “rich in historical and archaeological sites,” and a great tourist attraction for all these reasons. Now, cows are to play a part in maintaining the landscape.

Or rather, they are to continue playing such a role:

BurrenLife has provided the evidence that the role of cattle is the key factor in conserving the Burren: in controlling the spread of scrub; in ensuring increased biodiversity and in improving water quality.

I ran the article past the only Irishman to hand, and Danny said that
he thought the Burren is one of the only places in the temperate regions of the world where cattle are housed outside throughout the winter. Something to do with heat retention by limestone, or some aspect of the geology. Can anyone expand on this?

No word on whether the eco-friendly Burren cows are a local breed, though.