An Article, an Audio CD Set, and a best selling Book by Elizabeth Kolbert

Scientific Article by Giavonni Strona & Corey Bradshaw, Science Magazine, Dec. 16, 2022

ABSTRACT ~ Although theory identifies coextinctions as a main driver of biodiversity loss, their role at the planetary scale has yet to be estimated. We subjected a global model of interconnected terrestrial vertebrate food webs to future (2020–2100) climate and land-use changes. We predict a 17.6% (± 0.16% SE) average reduction of local vertebrate diversity globally by 2100, with coextinctions increasing the effect of primary extinctions by 184.2% (± 10.9% SE) on average under an intermediate emissions scenario. Communities will lose up to a half of ecological interactions, thus reducing trophic complexity, network connectance, and community resilience. The model reveals that the extreme toll of global change for vertebrate diversity might be of secondary importance compared to the damages to ecological network structure.

INTRODUCTION ~ The planet has entered the sixth mass extinction (1–5). There are multiple causes underlying the rapid increase in observed and modeled extinction rates in recent times, of which land-use change, overharvesting, pollution, climate change, and biological invasions figure as dominant processes (6). However, assessing the relative importance and the realistic impact of such drivers at the global scale remains a challenge. Another aspect rendering assessment difficult are the synergies between drivers — a species might go extinct for multiple, simultaneous reasons, and in such contexts, ecological interactions play a fundamental role in predicting its fate (7). Growing recognition of the importance of species interactions in promoting the emergence of biodiversity in complex natural communities implies that an additional, fundamental component of biodiversity loss is represented by the amplification of primary extinctions across ecological networks. Coextinction — the loss of species caused by direct or indirect effects stemming from other extinctions — is now recognized as a major contributor to global biodiversity loss, strongly amplifying the effect of primary (e.g., climate-driven) extinctions (8–11).

Networks of ecological interactions are central to global patterns of diversity loss not only because coextinctions can be triggered by other extinction drivers, but also because network structure and dynamics might modulate several processes that can either reduce or increase extinction rate. For example, it is intuitive that a species’ success in colonizing a new area depends strongly on its ability to exploit local resources while simultaneously escaping enemies (predators and parasites). The addition of the new species might also initiate substantial changes to and have important cascading effects in the local network. Ignoring the structure of ecological networks and how they reconfigure as their constituent diversity changes therefore gives a possibly misleading view of the future of global diversity.

Previous attempts to predict the future of global diversity in the face of climate change and habitat modification have only considered the direct effects of these drivers on species (typically on single taxonomic groups), without explicitly accounting for ecological interactions. For instance, Thomas et al. (12) used projections of species’ distributions and species-area relationships to predict extinction rates for 20% of Earth’s surface, and Malcolm et al. (13) applied both species-area and endemic-area relationships to predictions of biome shift under climate change in Biodiversity Hotspots. van Vuuren et al. (14) also applied species-area relationships to vascular plants to project extinctions under different land-use and climate-change scenarios within the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and Jetz et al. (15) used a similar approach for birds. Others have applied analogous techniques to many other taxa, including lizards (16), crop wild relatives (17), chelonians (18), bird, amphibians, and corals (19). Later, Warren et al. (20) applied point-process and global circulation models to predict climate change–induced shifts in species’ distributions, and Urban (21) did a meta-analysis (including many of the studies cited above) to predict extinction rates of various taxa under several climate-change scenarios. Despite this extensive research foundation, future inferences of biodiversity’s fate over the coming century are likely to underestimate extinctions arising from global change (11).

Apart from the obvious modeling and computational challenges to incorporate interactions among species, the main reason why there are few studies accounting for interactions is that obtaining sufficient data in most communities is intractable. Therefore, global-scale modeling of entire ecosystems appears to be the only viable solution, even if a challenging one (11, 22). Recent developments in network approaches have shown that potential ecological interactions can be derived by applying different techniques (e.g., machine learning) to available datasets on species distribution and ecology (23, 24). In previous work (11), we built on that idea to generate global-scale models of biodiversity by including species interactions using virtual species constructed to follow real-world archetypes. In such synthetic approaches, a virtual species is a plausible ecological entity that has a combination of ecological traits consistent with real-world species despite not corresponding exactly to them.

There are several advantages in using virtual species in this manner. The first is that once the rules have been set to generate virtual species, current gaps and biases in biodiversity sampling cease to be a limitation; we can use virtual species to populate the entire Earth and generate plausible ecological communities, even in areas where data on local diversity are scarce or missing. Second, virtual species avoid preconceptions (and biases) about current biodiversity patterns, permitting instead a focus on the processes involved in change. Here, we can populate an entire virtual planet with species, let them develop communities based on a modest set of realistic ecological rules and assumptions, and then explore the emerging patterns. With such an approach, real-world data serve as a template for generating the virtual species and for identifying the basic ecological rules controlling community dynamics and as a benchmark with which to validate the realism of modeled predictions.

We previously demonstrated how coextinctions increase the pace of annihilation of life on Earth by up to 10 times relative to primary extinctions, but only in the face of catastrophic, no-return environmental change modeled as either extreme planetary heating or cooling (11). Although an instructive proof of concept, that model contained many simplifications and was applied to (hopefully) unrealistic scenarios of global change. Building on that original approach, here we developed a more complex, and ecologically realistic dynamic model to represent all terrestrial vertebrate communities with which we project future biodiversity trends. By accounting for both primary extinctions and their resulting coextinctions, the model predicts the cumulative toll on global biodiversity of different climate and land-use change projections up to 2100 at a spatial scale of 1° × 1° and at a monthly temporal resolution. In addition to providing estimates of potential global diversity loss, the model quantifies the relative contribution of the different extinction drivers at the global scale for the first time.

This Article continues in Science Magazine.

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See also: The Sixth Extinction? | Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker Magazine, May 18, 2009

Office of Science to send $7 Billion on various energy projects

From a News Article by Adrian Cho, Science Magazine (AAAS), May 26, 2021

Sometimes a new presidential administration signals where it’s headed through whom it selects to lead a federal research agency. That appears to be the case with President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) basic research wing, the Director of the Office of Science. Last month Biden tapped Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil scientist at the University of California (UC), Merced, to lead the office, which has a $7 billion annual budget and is best known for funding physics, running national laboratories, and building atom smashers and other scientific megamachines.

The nomination of Berhe, 46, suggests the office will increasingly emphasize research related to climate change, scientists say. Berhe currently studies how factors such as erosion, fire, and temperature affect whether soil soaks up carbon dioxide or releases more of it into the air. She was born and raised in Eritrea.

Announced on 22 April, Berhe’s nomination delighted many environmental researchers. “She’s as star scientist as star scientists get,” says soil ecologist Bala Chaudhary of De- Paul University. Ecologist John Harte of UC Berkeley, who was Berhe’s doctoral adviser, hopes her nomination marks a shift in DOE science from esoteric conceptual problems to addressing the climate crisis. “There will be, I hope, more emphasis on science that relates to the sustainability of the human enterprise as opposed to the mere sustainability of a scientific endeavor,” he says.

Berhe has also long worked for greater diversity in the sciences, says geochemist Peggy O’Day of UC Merced. “She’s been a real leader, both on our campus as well as nationally and internationally, in advocating for people of color in science,” O’Day says. Last year, Berhe and Chaudhary published a paper in PLOS Computational Biology entitled, “Ten simple rules for building an anti-racist lab.”

But some physicists worry Berhe may have trouble guiding the often-fractious agency, citing her scant experience managing large organizations and her unusual scientific background for a position often held by physicists. According to her CV, Berhe has held one DOE grant for $200,000 and has served as interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.

As the nation’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, the Office of Science supports six research programs, including fusion energy sciences, high energy physics, and nuclear physics. Its basic energy sciences program funds chemistry, materials science, and condensed matter physics, and its advanced scientific computing program provides supercomputing for myriad studies. Biological and environmental research get 10.7% of its budget. The office owns 10 of DOE’s 17 national labs and builds big scientific facilities—the newest is a $730 million particle accelerator at Michigan State University.

The director’s job is to set priorities among the competing research programs and coordinate billion-dollar construction projects so that as one nears completion the next is ready to go, says Bill Madia, a nuclear physicist and former director of two national labs. “It’s one of the most important management jobs in science in the world,” he says. “You’re comparing priorities from bioenergy centers to neutrino experiments to exascale computers.”

Given that much of the office’s money goes to physics, Michael Lubell, a physicist at City College of New York and former head of public affairs for the American Physical Society, wonders how, as a biogeochemist, Berhe will approach those decisions. “There’s nothing in her background to suggest that she knows anything about fusion, or particle physics, or nuclear physics, or atomic physics,” he says.

Most past office directors have had a mixture of training in physics, experience running large organizations, and work history with DOE. But that background is not a prerequisite for success, says Raymond Orbach, a theoretical physicist and former chancellor of UC Irvine who directed the office from 2002 to 2009. Orbach won plaudits for, among other things, developing a 20-year to-do list of major projects that DOE has largely followed. But he notes that he, too, was a newcomer to DOE. “One never knows how someone with no prior formal government service (e.g. me) will turn out,” he wrote in an email. The office’s most recent director, Christopher Fall, has a doctorate in neuroscience and had prior management experience at DOE and the Office of Naval Research.

No director has to do it all on her own, notes physicist Cherry Murray of the University of Arizona, who was director from 2015 to 2017. DOE has a corps of staffers who are “incredibly competent” and can help keep the agency humming, she says. “I’m not worried at all about physics research dropping by the wayside” under Berhe, she says. “That will continue, just as under me biology research continued.” Murray says she is curious to see where Berhe will head in setting policy.

If Berhe is confirmed, her success will largely rest with budgetmakers in Congress. For example, even though former President Donald Trump repeatedly tried to slash the office’s budget, Congress increased it by 31% over 4 years. That boost spared Fall from having to make unpopular cuts. If the budget keeps growing, Berhe may enjoy a long honeymoon with DOE-sponsored researchers.

Should budgets tighten, she could face the challenge of retaining the support of the community while picking winners and losers. Berhe has the leadership skills to meet that potential challenge, Harte says. “I would call her steadfast with good humor and an extraordinary thoughtfulness,” he says. “She will gather the respect of others because of her intense intelligence.”

Distant Thunder & Rain Variations

In a Noisy World, Our Brains Still Need the Sounds of Nature

From an Article by Kerry Klein, The Allegheny Front, December 23, 2016

Kurt Fristrup is standing in the middle of a prairie and he’s the loudest thing for miles. He and I are huddled near an empty cattle pen in Pawnee National Grassland in northern Colorado. Before he pulled out his tools, the silence here was palpable. The breeze carried no sound except the rustle of a million stalks of yellow grass. A family of pronghorn, kind of like furry antelope, padded over to us to investigate.

Fristrup is disrupting this serene soundscape for a reason: He wants to better understand it—by recording it. Cows chewed through a microphone he set up a few months ago. And now he’s here to install a new one. “My respect for those cattle has just gone up,” he says. “They gnawed through some of these things, and they’re pretty tough.”

Fristrup is a senior scientist with the National Park Service in Fort Collins, Colorado. And he’s tasked with protecting a natural resource. It’s not water or minerals or endangered species. It’s sound. Natural sound. His team is studying how man-made noise is drowning out the sounds of birds and insects and rain. And as more and more research links our well-being to what we hear, Fristrup and his colleagues are pointing to natural sound as something to be managed—and even protected.

“I’d like to think that we can reach out through this effort, not just to park visitors and not just to backpackers, but help everyone realize that their lives could be better and their communities could be more vibrant places if we take some time to make them quieter.”

LISTEN: “Why We Need to Hear the Sounds of Nature”

Most of us can probably agree—our world is pretty noisy. But just how noisy is something Fristrup is trying to figure out. For a decade, he and a small team of engineers, physicists and biologists have hidden microphones in parks around the United States. Some are really remote—think grizzly bears and back-country skiing. But others are in urban areas, like Civil War memorials and the Statue of Liberty.

Each microphone recorded 24 hours a day for a month, capturing fantastic sounds—like the trumpeting of elk and goofy birds called ptarmigans. Not to mention the grunts of bears destroying the microphones, which Fristrup says was totally worth it.

But what Fristrup was after was loudness. Each device measured decibel levels 33 times per second. That mountain of data fed a model that created a sound map of the contiguous United States. It took the qualities of each site, like how close it is to roads or water, and calculated median sound levels for the entire rest of the country—even places outside parks.

“You can see that it looks very much like the images of the earth at night from satellites. The brightest noise sources are concentrated in cities. Then you see these lines along the interstates and other major transportation corridors that also light up with sound.”

Photo: Kurt Fristrup repairs a damaged recording system on a cattle pen in Colorado’s Pawnee National Grassland. 

 That big picture may not be all that surprising. But the differences in noise levels are staggering. “You and I are standing about three feet apart, and you can comfortably hear what I’m saying. In the Sierra, the background sound levels are about 1,000 times lower, which means you could stand 90 feet away from me in the Sierra. I could talk at this level, and you could hear me just as clearly.”

Every rise of three decibels doubles the sound hitting our eardrums. Now consider this: The loudest places in the U.S. are around 40 decibels noisier than the quietest. So if you do the math, Manhattan can be around 8,000 times louder than Great Sand Dunes National Park—one of the darkest spots on the map.

“There are times when I’ve been in the field in the intermountain west, where I’ve not only been able to hear my own heartbeat, but I’ve been able to hear the heartbeat of the person in the field with me.”

Our biggest noise producer is transportation—cars, trucks, motorcycles. Even the hiss of tires against pavement. But even far away from roads, there are still airplanes. Fristrup estimates man-made noise really took off in the mid-20th century, when flying became commonplace. Now, most of us are so used to planes, we don’t even notice them. After hiking with friends, Fristrup likes to ask how many they heard. “Most people will say, ‘You know, I think I heard one or two aircraft.’ And, being me, I’ve actually been counting the whole day and I’ll say, ‘Well, we actually heard 21 high-altitude jets, 10 propeller aircraft and two helicopters.’”

So if we’re not even conscious of the man-made noises around us, then what’s the big deal? Researchers at Penn State are trying to figure that out.

“In the Sierra, the background sound levels are about 1000 times lower, which means you could stand 90 feet away from me in the Sierra. I could talk at this level, and you could hear me just as clearly. There are times when I’ve been in the field in the intermountain west, where I’ve not only been able to hear my own heartbeat, but I’ve been able to hear the heartbeat of the person in the field with me.”

Heather Costigan, a lab manager at Penn State, outfitted me with a monitor that continuously recorded my heart rate for an experiment they’re conducting. It was informally called “the soundscape study.”

The first step was stress. I had to imagine I was applying for a big job and gave a five-minute speech in front of a one-way mirror. It was kind of intense. Then came the soundscape. Costigan whisked me into a dark room. I put on headphones and settled in to watch a video. On the screen was Half Dome, the majestic centerpiece of Yosemite Valley. The sun crept across the granite. Red and yellow leaves fluttered. But when I heard a garbage truck interrupt, and then a motorcycle, I cringed.

“We would like to know, when is sound helpful, when is noise harmful, under what circumstances and for what people?” says Joshua Smyth, a professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State who’s coordinating the soundscape study. His hypothesis is that natural sound will speed up stress recovery, even with people making noise in the background. But some test subjects watched that video with no man-made sound at all, and Smyth thinks they’ll recover even faster.

For each test subject, he and Costigan tracked heart rate and also measured cortisol—a hormone in saliva. Cortisol is a kind of stress indicator, and chronically stressed people produce a lot of it. Studies have connected that highly stressed state with all sorts of health issues—heart problems, breathing problems, musculoskeletal problems and a higher susceptibility to viruses and infections. “So we just generally see a decay in the capacity of the body [in] response to these sort of chronic conditions of stress,” Smyth says.

So when we hear irritating sounds, even if we try not to let them bother us, Smyth suspects that our stress levels still spike, priming our bodies for other health problems. But could noise ever be so bad that it alone breaks down our immune defenses? Probably not. “But, if I have that and stress from work and not a particularly supportive relationship and I’m worried about money, then collectively, I may be at risk.”

Photo: Joshua Smyth, a biobehavioral health professor at Penn State, is interested in how the human body responds to what it hears. 

So our cars, our airplanes—some of the very advances that make our lives easier and more productive—they might also be sabotaging us. So what’s the solution? Stop driving? Renounce technology? A social scientist across campus offers a gentler perspective.

“I think that talking about the positive effects of nature sounds is a much better story than talking about the negative impacts we have on the world,” says Peter Newman, who heads up Penn State’s department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Management. “Both might be true, but we know that we can focus on the fact that it’s important to us and it resonates with people. No pun intended.”

Newman is studying why people visit parks and what they do once they’re there. “Listening is a huge part of that experience that people have out there. They want to hear the noises of wildlife, they want to hear the sounds of wind and water. And those are really important things for how they feel.”

In the past, studies have shown we recover better from surgery when we can see nature. Newman says we also benefit from hearing it. Research shows natural sounds can improve cognition, mood and general well-being. And that’s an idea a lot of people already buy into. It’s easy to find recordings of relaxing nature sounds.

But Newman argues that we can preserve sound in the real world too. He points to a success story in Muir Woods, a national monument outside San Francisco. In an experiment in 2009, he and a few colleagues posted signs for quiet zones and showed visitors how to be less noisy.

“We actually were able to reduce the amount of noise there by about three decibels, which was the equivalent of doubling people’s listening area,” Newman says.

Conserving sound in parks may seem to be at odds with the Park Service mission of bringing people there. But back in Colorado, Kurt Fristrup sees these opposing values as a challenge. He knows the solution isn’t to keep people away. Instead, he’s helping develop new technology. Like quieter pavement and electric airplanes that could someday lead silent air tours. His team is also developing roadside noise gauges, kind of like the blinking signs that tell you how fast your car is moving, only it’s how loud you are.

“I look at this as an enormous opportunity to improve not only resource conditions in parks, but the quality of the environments in which we all live,” Fristrup says. “Because unlike many other forms of pollution, all of this goes away as soon as we throw the switch.”

Throwing that switch won’t be easy, but we all have an incentive to try. Because who wants a world in which recordings of nature are our only option? So next time you’re outside, turn off your car, stop talking and listen. What you hear might just be good for you. And it’s free. For everyone. Natural sound is a truly infinite resource. All we have to do is not drown it out.

>>> This story was originally published on 1/29/16 as part of the STEM Story Project.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net