Falk's Conservation Opinion Blog
30 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 months ago -Some personal comments, opinions, first-hand examples and reasonings on effective conservation worldwide! Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/falk-huettmann/support
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Neo-Colonial Flyway Conservation of Migratory Birds: An NGO example for the Afro‐Palaearctic ?
December 23, 2023 07:09 - 22 minutes - 21 MBMost migratory birds of the world's flyways are in decline, or in conservation troubles by now. The Old World flyway connecting Western Europe with Africa is no exception and hardly a surprise, while Africa features a tragic colonial legacy serving primarily the 'Global North' and a small group of wealthy or royal actors while the vast majority of people in Africa etc are ignored. Further, this Afro‐Palaearctic flyway is unique in the fact that it features deep science, done for over 100 y...
Urban Gulls: An Overlooked Management Issue for the Anthropocene ?
December 12, 2023 21:37 - 12 minutes - 11.8 MBUrban gulls are a fascinating issue in recent times. Most people in the world now live in cities, where they are confronted with urban governance and its wildlife, such as cockroaches, squirrels, rats, pigeons and gulls, let's say. In the subarctic this issue is widely unstudied but matters equally while most people in the world do live in cities: The Anthropocene. Here I present on a recent study by us on gulls using urban habitat surveys, 'Big Data', GIS, machine learning and its inferenc...
No Snow, Wow!
January 27, 2023 22:59 - 16 minutes - 14.8 MBWhen snow gets warmed up it melts; virtually every child will know that. However, on a policy and public level, those details are hardly acknowledged, certainly not the vast impacts that relate to lacking 'snow pack', e.g. seasonality, regional climate, and feeding water tables, rivers, estuaries and thus directly contributing to farming, global food security and warfare even - to name just a few. Here I share my first-hand experiences across years from observing snow and ice in winter fo...
A comment on "A decade of wrangling, but dolphins and seabirds off South Island's NZ east coast remain unprotected" (by A. Vance 2022)
January 17, 2023 06:53 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MBNew Zealand (NZ) is blessed with a unique, quite wild nature and its endemic biodiversity. Also, NZ as a relatively small nation with c. 5.1 mio inhabitants features the world's 4th largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ). But modern NZ also entails many governance problems. Indigenous concepts are becoming now more dominant in NZ, and commercial fisheries there have a governance stronghold. Many of the fisheries products are actually for export, e.g. U.S., Asia and the EU/UK. Like found in m...
Telecoupling anyone ? The global case of the Elegant Tern (Veit et al. 2021) in the Anthropocene connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic, western Europe, and the global economy
January 03, 2023 07:18 - 13 minutes - 12.8 MBSome environmental patterns appear to be local - but upon closer inspection - then have a wider and larger spill-over and are actually driven by global actors. Based on a recent study by Veit et al. (2021) here a seabird example is presented - the Elegant Tern - and how its conservation management effects spill into the wider Pacific and the Atlantic, including western Europe (Spain and France). It turned global. Most individuals of this tern species breed on just one tiny island in southern...
Living off-grid in a remote Alpine Meadow Hut: Guest Interview featuring Moriz Steiner
December 22, 2022 21:00 - 22 minutes - 22.2 MB“My dream is to live off-grid”. A sentence that seems to come up more and more frequently throughout the last few years. Who does not want to live sustainably and be self-subsistent ? Yet, how is it really to live off-grid in remote areas, away from modern society, but yet to stay in western countries ? This is what we are discussing with our special guest Moriz Steiner in this episode. Moriz lived in his early teens in remote off-grid mountain huts, looking after cattle, and also discoverin...
Distribution matters: A typical conservation story from the Great Gray Owl and many others
December 08, 2022 03:18 - 15 minutes - 14.5 MBSpecies distributions are an essential feature for a successful species conservation management. Data of presence/absence are quite simple to obtain and they are easily part of most inventory schemes, such as Bird Atlases and survey plots. After +100 years of bird banding, the current flurry of geotagging should improve knowledge on distributions. It should specifically be an easy feature for large species. The Great Grey Owl (Great Gray Owl in North America, Strix nebulosa) is one of those...
The Panama Canal as part of the Global Collateral: Sea anemones, Evolution, Birds, Butterflies, The Global Economy and ...People
October 24, 2022 03:16 - 14 minutes - 13.2 MBThis episode deals with the somewhat overlooked impact on 'deep nature' by the world economy and global trade, it uses a global bottleneck and strategic hotspot: the Panama Canal region. While focusing on a re-interpretation and shifted emphasize of the results by Bellis et al (2018; sea anemones, abundance, diversity and genetics) it also takes further evidence from Karr (1990; birds), Basset et al. (2015; butterflies) and Huettmann (2015) for the Panama Canal region and beyond (Jackson et...
Three-Dimensional Quantification of Copepods Predictive Distributions in the Ross Sea/Antarctica using Open Access and Machine Learning/AI (Grillo et al. 2022):
June 08, 2022 18:17 - 12 minutes - 11.6 MB'Plankton" consists of phytoplankton (~plants) and zooplankton (-animals). It represents the basis of the ocean food chain and it includes many species; it's a very complex 'multi-species soup' representing a true science frontier hardly tackled, understood or managed yet. Copepods are part of that taxonomic set up and they contribute usually to the majority - up to 70% - of zooplankton abundance in oceans. Using field data of the Italian National Antarctic Program from the 1980s and 1990...
Tropical Mountains and Cloud Forest: Example from Nicaragua with Guest Speaker Hazel Berrios
May 10, 2022 17:52 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MBThis episode presents on Tropical Mountain and Cloud Forest issues, namely conservation, species diversity and ecology. It uses an interview with Hazel Berrios and her wider tropical plant field experience. This session discusses a multi-year field study experience by the author, and a 2 years M.Sc. thesis field work by HB in the cloud forest of Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. A focus is made on over 200 species of epiphytes and its open access data in Dryad, a topic not much addressed before. ...
Forestation Programs and Perspectives in China: Details and Thoughts from Zhang et al. (2022)
February 11, 2022 08:46 - 18 minutes - 16.8 MBThis podcasts elaborates on some supplementary materials in the forestry publication by Zhang et al. (2022). Based on this research it briefly presents details of ten Forestation Programs in China and their contexts and objectives. Those are large-scale and long-term landscape projects with various aims and goals, increasing the forest area in China, and sometimes beyond. Grasslands and steeply sloped mountain areas play a specific role. Those programs improve poverty and rural development ...
Comment and Explanation: 'Modeling Eastern Russian High Arctic Geese (Anser fabalis, A. albifrons) during moult and brood rearing in the ‘New Digital Arctic’'
November 18, 2021 23:35 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MBThis podcast provides some deeper insights into our new publication by Solovyeva et al. (2021) dealing with Arctic Geese in the Eastern Russian Arctic. It provides a showcase for the 'New Digital Arctic' as the myriad changes in the Arctic land-, sea- and coastal-scape are unfolding so fast with devastating outcomes (Krupnik and Crowell 2020). This research shows a more nuanced range and distribution pattern for these two species - Tundra Bean Geese & Greater White-fronted Geese - during mo...
Gray-headed Chickadee: Another Canary against the Coal Mines ?
October 30, 2021 05:47 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MBThe Gray-headed Chickadee is part of the app. 50 Parus species with a dominance in the Old World, ranging from Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden Finland) all across Russia and even into the New World, namely Alaska and Yukon/Canada (Hailman and Haftron 1995). This species is often found in pine-dominated lichen stands of the subarctic region. In the last years some studies reported dramatic declines, e.g. in the southern regions of Norway and northern Finland (Krams et al. 2010, Dale and Andreass...
Segregation in Animals: Selected examples, and implications for an effective Conservation Management of the past and the future
May 22, 2021 02:22 - 8 minutes - 8.05 MBThe segregation in animals is a fundamental topic in wildlife research and conservation policy. It was studied early on within 'deer' (ungulates) and how males and females use space and habitat in different ways. Often, they are not even overlapping, and for parts of the year they may even be treated perhaps as different species ? Here I discuss some key citations and the concept, using sexual segregation, and then extend the concept to birds such as White-naped Cranes from Mongolia and ho...
Sustainable Seascape Ecology (Pittman et al. 2021): How to set Priorities for Global Sustainability without a Bias ?
April 05, 2021 07:39 - 15 minutes - 14.5 MBThis episode elaoborates on the Seascape Ecology scheme and on the concept of defining a global sustainability science agenda without bias. It is based on the new publication of over 30 co-authors by Pittmann et al. (2021) which essentially tried to follow the Sutherland et al. (2009) approach to find and highlight research priorities for the so-complex world ocean scheme reaching sustainability (something that we are currently far away from, e.g. ocean crisis and based on a traditional red...
Art and Science: This time done right ?
April 03, 2021 01:08 - 17 minutes - 16.5 MBThe Arts and the Sciences are truly connected; they feed into each other, relate directly, provide inspiration and creativity for the global audience. Following a quote by Berthodl Brecht "Art is not a mirror for reality, but a hammer with which to shape it" it can present a major force to be reckoned with. And in case done 'right' it can effectively achieve progress for the wider common good, sustainability and future generations. While art is beautiful in its own right, linking it with ...
The Big Caribou Meltdown: Reflections and Evidences from a Meta-Analysis
March 24, 2021 21:41 - 14 minutes - 13.2 MBCaribou and reindeer are an inherent and co-evolved part of the Circumpolar North. However, the Arctic Report Card 2018 stated that app. 2.6 million reindeers got lost just during the last 20 years. The status of caribou herds further south is equally worrisome, with the lower 48 states of the U.S. having virtually no wild caribou left, and reindeer herds in Mongolia also struggeling, just like many Canadian caribou do. Looking at many herds and publications, here I elaborate on those chang...
Migratory Birds from the EU-Africa flyway and their Declines: Some wintering ground models and wider views to tackle warfare, resource extraction, poverty and climate change
March 15, 2021 21:11 - 15 minutes - 14.6 MBMany songbirds are migratory, and they are in a serious conservation trouble! Here we show from a recent publication by Walther and Huettmann (2021) how those trends in the Old World and its African fllyways and wintering grounds can be modeled with Open Access GIS layers and machine learning, how they relate to recent habitat factors over time, and where the trends and hotspots in Africa are predicted to go in the near future for species that are in 'large decline', 'moderate decline' and '...
'Autocorrelation' as another Dealbreaker in Science-based Conservation Management Worldwide
March 12, 2021 23:11 - 17 minutes - 16 MBAutocorrelation -the serial correlation - as a correlated signal with a delayed copy of itself is inherent in Nature. It's not just a problem to get rid of, to be modeled away or a Red Herring in time and space, but it should be used to your advantage. In reality though, it's either ignored or disturbing the classic frequentist analysis of data and inference for a science-based analysis. There is virtually no conservation policy and legal text addressing it. Here I elaborate on the meaning a...
Central American Biodiversity: A case from a global role model ?
March 11, 2021 00:57 - 23 minutes - 21.8 MBCentral America and its Biodiversity is world famous. However, its status and conservation is very worrying, just like many features in the Anthropocene these days. Using over 12 years for field school-based field research in the region -land, marine and atmosphere - this podcast is based, in part, on Bocklett (1998) and Huettmann (2015) elaborating on issues of conservation governance relevance, and many of them otherwise widely overlooked but highly applicable worldwide. Citations Bockle...
The World is Burning ? Why we urgently need a new International Polar Year (IPY) now for progress during times of rapid man-made climate change and global industrialization
March 01, 2021 23:14 - 11 minutes - 11 MBThe International Polar Years (IPYs) are meant to provide unbiased research and progress - a great leap forward - for polar regions and wider global issues. Starting in 1882 they are organized app. every 50 years by the international community, and the last IPY just finished in 2007/8 as one of the largest internationally coordinated modern research initiatives in the world. While the world moves fully into the Anthropocene, many new and dramatic changes in the polar regions - any region in...
The snow leopard has no data sharing: Just another victim of globalization and its poor governance
February 28, 2021 06:10 - 16 minutes - 15.2 MBSnow leopards have been studied for over a century, specifically by the western world; they got heavily promoted by western media and TV as a rare sensation of the mountains (e.g. Matthiesen 2008). Realities do differ though, and here I show that the snow leopard is virtually free of Open Access data shared with the global public; many of its data are incomplete or come from zoos and captive animals in the U.S. (but not from zoos in Canada or EU etc or from the wild!). This podcast is based...
Home Ranges anyone ? Elaborations on another skeleton in the big closet of failed Wildlife Conservation Management
February 25, 2021 21:03 - 14 minutes - 13.2 MBHome ranges have occupied the Wildlife Management research and literature for decades; they are the bread-and-butter of most species accounts and textbooks. Various software exists computing Minimum Convex Polygons (MCPs), Kernel estimators etc. However, the validity, repeatability and transparency of these methods have been questioned by Signer et al. (2015) and others for years, while the U.S. Endangered Species ACT (ESA) or virtually any other legislation hardly use them anyways. Here I ...
Re-Post and Critical Context: STEMM Storytellers #12 Antarctic Ice-shelf collapse, iceberg calving and future research
February 22, 2021 22:23 - 9 minutes - 8.47 MBThis is a re-post and a wider conservation science policy context of an earlier podcast interview with STEMM Storytellers with Rachel Villiani's #90 Antarctica Series 12: https://anchor.fm/storytellersofSTEMM/episodes/90---Antarctica-Series-12-Falk-Huettmann-eom8au It is c. 1h long, tackles issues of research directions for sustainability with NSF, the international community and Antarctica, and is based on the initial internationall mass-co-authored publication by Ingels et al. 2020 belo...
Bystanding by Design ? Seabirds as Indicators of a Failed Scientific Conservation Managment and their Institutions, Employees and NGOs worldwide
February 21, 2021 07:43 - 33 minutes - 30.7 MBIt remains undisputed for over a century that 'Seabirds are Indicators', the same can be said is true for the Global Ocean Crisis in the Anthropocene. However, considering the reality of oceans and many seabirds, the applied policy concept that seabirds can show us the status of fish stocks - can actually forcast them- and indicate the ocean's health for pre-cautionary action has apparently failed. Seabird scientists in their respective institutions and employments watched and studied thei...
So-called 'Modern' Western Science and Industrial Approaches Fail the Saiga Antelope: Repeated Massive Population Crashes of Migratory Species in Herder's Land are Not Understood nor Addressed
February 17, 2021 01:45 - 17 minutes - 16.3 MBThe Saiga antelope is a fascinating - albeit tragic- example for Global Governance failure and Western Research Publication Arrogance. While widely distributed in the Asian steppe for millennia, as publicized by George Schaller for the wilderness of Central Asia and Tibetean Plateau region, the Saiga antelope is now critically endangered and went through ~90% population crashes in just the last 20 years or so. Based on the citation below here I briefly review and comment on some of the scie...
Troubles in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ): Impossible and Careless Conservation Management and Enforcement for Seabirds, Marine Life and Habitats
February 15, 2021 00:17 - 18 minutes - 17.1 MBThe Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is part of a national jurisdiction, but widely out of reach for conservation. Many nations do not even have the gear, funding or the will and knowledge to monitor and enforce it fully. Based on Humphries and Huettmann (supported by E. Woehler; 2012) here emphasize the problems, and elaborate on the wider but hardly known issues of the EEZ, using global seabirds as an example. Citations and related references (PDFs available upon request): Beal M. M. P....
The Failed Commercialized Neoliberal Publication Model for Profit: An Example from Peregrine Falcon Conservation Worldwide
February 13, 2021 23:25 - 10 minutes - 9.89 MBUsing best-available data and research, Peregrine Falcons of this world are shown to occur primarily in cities, and they link with predictors like infant mortality and proximity to coast and water. Here I discuss why this finding is so relevant and what the rejected publication means and indicates, while the pre-print achieved record-high downloads, e.g. due to Open Access Data Sharing that commercial publishers with record annual profits are not much interested in. I show that this con...
The Ecological Niche is 'kaputt': Some perspectives for mammals, nature and Mother Earth
February 10, 2021 00:11 - 10 minutes - 9.82 MBHello Everybody, This episode deals with the fact that species can only live in their respective ecological niches. That's the law of nature. Any species outside of their ecological niche will die...A good example would be when humans trying to fly to MARS, trying to exist outside of their spaceship bubble! It's a generic scheme, and here I have reviewed that concept for mammals of the world. In the Anthropocene one finds that many species now get pushed out of their co-evolved ecologica...
Squirrel taxonomy, failure of the research machine and lack of conservation
February 04, 2021 02:25 - 8 minutes - 8.24 MBThis episode covers squirrels, their taxonomy and conservation management failures in a globalized world dominated by science, policy and its institutions, but failing to address even the most basic concepts for such species, and for nature overall. We show that specifically species for wealthy nations are affected and propose that this concept is to be improved. Citation of this work and related reference: Steiner M and F. Huettmann (2021) Justification for a taxonomic conservation upda...