habitat loss – Enviro Updates

SuzanneApril 11, 2024April 17, 2024Habitats, Water, Wildlifedrought, endangered species, fisheries, habitat loss, salmon, water diversion

California’s ocean salmon fishing season closed for second year in a row

Susan Wood, NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL

California’s commercial and recreational ocean salmon fishing season is set to be closed for the second consecutive year, another blow to the state’s beleaguered industry suffering from the combined fallout of drought, climate disruption and deteriorating ocean conditions.

Already, a new request is underway for yet another federal disaster declaration to help alleviate some of the wide economic damage from the closure, affecting not just the fleet but many associated businesses that depend on the fishery, one of the state’s most lucrative.

The Pacific Fisheries Management Council, which manages and monitors West Coast salmon stocks in the ocean, endorsed the option on Wednesday of a full closure through the end of the year, mirroring recommendations made to close the fisheries in 2023.

Many fishermen, already resigned to a severely limited season if any at all due to depleted stocks, had backed the full closure.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/north-bay/californias-salmon-fishing-season-closed-for-second-year-in-a-row/

SuzanneJanuary 19, 2021January 30, 2021Habitats, Wildlifeendangered species, Endangered Species Act, habitat loss, monarch butterflies

Western Monarch population closer to extinction as the wait continues for Monarchs’ protection under the Endangered Species Act

Emma Pelton & Stephanie McKnight, XERXES.ORG

During the 24th Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count, nearly 100 volunteers donned their masks and practiced social distancing to carefully survey groves of trees on the California and Northern Baja coast for monarch butterflies. Despite the challenges of conducting field work during a pandemic, volunteers surveyed 246 sites, three more sites than last year. Unfortunately, to the surprise and dismay of many, only 1,914 monarchs were counted at all the sites. This is a shocking 99.9% decline since the 1980s.

The Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count has been done every year since 1997. It happens during the three-week period centered on Thanksgiving and is coordinated by the Xerces Society and Mia Monroe. It is the primary way that the western monarch population is assessed and has built up a body of data than demonstrates the long-term collapse of the monarch migration in western North America.

Iconic and beloved monarch overwintering sites like Pismo Beach and Natural Bridges reported only a few hundred monarchs during the count. More startling, Pacific Grove, which goes by the name “Butterfly Town, USA” because of its overwintering sites, had no monarchs at all. Each of these sites normally host thousands—in some years, tens of thousands—of butterflies during the winter months, and are locations where visitors travel to experience the marvel of glittery orange monarch clusters.

We had indications that there might be a significant decline this year. In 2017, when monarch populations were still in the hundreds of thousands, researchers used Thanksgiving Count data to develop a population viability analysis and posited that the extinction threshold for the western monarch migratory population was 30,000 butterflies. It seems that, unfortunately, this prediction was right. The 30,000-butterfly threshold was reached during the last two years (2018 and 2019), and the population has crashed further this year. We may be witnessing the collapse of the western migration of monarch butterflies. A migration of millions of monarchs reduced to two thousand in a few decades.

The decline of the monarch isn’t just happening in the West. During the spring and summer, monarchs reach towns, cities, and rural areas across the Lower 48, making it probably the country’s most widely recognized butterfly. However, sightings are not as common as they once were. The eastern migratory population has also declined by more than 80% since monitoring began in the 1990s.

SuzanneDecember 9, 2020February 22, 2021Agriculture/Food System, Land Use, Water, Wildlifecattle, endangered species, habitat loss, national parks, Point Reyes National Seashore, ranching, tule elk, water pollution

Apocalypse cow: The future of life at Point Reyes National Park

Peter Byrne, THE BOHEMIAN

The North Bay community is divided by conflicted views on whether commercial dairy and cattle ranching should continue at Point Reyes National Seashore. This reporter has hiked the varied terrains of the 71,000-acre park for decades. Initially, I had no opinion on the ranching issue. Then, I studied historical and eco-biologic books and science journals. I read government records, including the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on Point Reyes released by the National Park Service in September. The 250-page report concludes that the ranching industry covering one third of the park should be expanded and protected for economic and cultural reasons. This, despite acknowledging that the park ranches are sources of climate-heating greenhouse gases, water pollution, species extinctions and soil degradation.

The Bohemian/Pacific Sun investigation reveals that the EIS is deeply flawed scientifically, culturally and ethically. It is politicized.

Sixty million years ago a chunk of granite located near Los Angeles began moving northwards. Propelled by the energy of earthquakes over eons, Point Reyes slid hundreds of miles along the San Andreas fault at the divide between two colliding tectonic plates.

During the last Ice Age, 30,000 years ago, much of the Earth’s waters were locked up in glaciers, and the Pacific Ocean was 400 feet lower than it is today. “The Farallon Islands were then rugged hills rising above a broad, gently sloping plain with a rocky coastline lying to the west,” according to California Prehistory—Colonization, Culture, and Complexity.

Humans migrated from Asia walking the coastal plains toward Tierra del Fuego. Then, 12,000 years ago, the climate warmed and glaciers melted. Seas rose, submerging the plains. A wave of immigrants flowed south from Asia over thawed land bridges. Their subsequent generations explored and civilized the Americas, coalescing into nations, including in West Marin and Point Reyes.

Novelist and scholar Greg Sarris is the tribal chair of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria. The tribe’s ancestors are known as Southern Poma and Coast Miwok. In The Once and Future Forest, Sarris tells the story of how the first people came to be in Marin and Sonoma counties. “Coyote created the world from the top of Sonoma Mountain with the assistance of his nephew, Chicken Hawk. At that time, all of the animals and birds and plants and trees were people. … The landscape was our sacred text and we listened to what it told us. Everywhere you looked there were stories. … Everything, even a mere pebble, was thought to have power … Cutting down a tree was a violent act. … An elder prophesied that one day white people would come to us to ‘learn our ways in order to save the earth and all living things. … You young people must not forget the things us old ones is telling you.’”

SuzanneApril 27, 2020Agriculture/Food System, Climate Change & Energy, Forests, Habitats, Land Use, Wildlifeair travel, deforestation, habitat loss, industrial agriculture, pandemic

COVID-19 stimulus measures must save lives, protect livelihoods, and safeguard nature to reduce the risk of future pandemics

Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz, Eduardo Brondizio and Dr. Peter Daszak, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic – us. As with the climate and biodiversity crises, recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity – particularly our global financial and economic systems, based on a limited paradigm that prizes economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones.

Diseases like COVID-19 are caused by microorganisms that infect our bodies – with more than 70% of all emerging diseases affecting people having originated in wildlife and domesticated animals. Pandemics, however, are caused by activities that bring increasing numbers of people into direct contact and often conflict with the animals that carry these pathogens.

Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people. This often occurs in areas where communities live that are most vulnerable to infectious diseases.

Our actions have significantly impacted more than three quarters of the Earth’s land surface, destroyed more than 85% of wetlands and dedicated more than a third of all land and almost 75% of available freshwater to crops and livestock production.

Add to this the unregulated trade in wild animals and the explosive growth of global air travel and it becomes clear how a virus that once circulated harmlessly among a species of bats in Southeast Asia has now infected almost 3 million people, brought untold human suffering and halted economies and societies around the world. This is the human hand in pandemic emergence.

Yet this may be only the beginning. Although animal-to-human diseases already cause an estimated 700,000 deaths each year, the potential for future pandemics is vast. As many as 1.7 million unidentified viruses of the type known to infect people are believed to still exist in mammals and water birds. Any one of these could be the next ‘Disease X’ – potentially even more disruptive and lethal than COVID-19.

SuzanneJanuary 22, 2020February 2, 2020Climate Change & Energy, Habitats, Land Use, Wildlifehabitat loss, herbicides, monarch butterflies, pesticides

Monarch butterfly population critically low on California coast – again

Associated Press, THE GUARDIAN

Study finds 29,000 butterflies, compared with 4.5 million during the 1980s, as experts point to habitat destruction

The western monarch butterfly population wintering along California’s coast remains critically low for the second year in a row, a count by an environmental group released Thursday showed.

The count of the orange-and-black insects by the Xerces Society, a not-for-profit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates, recorded about 29,000 butterflies in its annual survey. That’s not much different than last year’s tally, when an all-time low 27,000 monarchs were counted.

“We had hoped that the western monarch population would have rebounded at least modestly, but unfortunately it has not,” said Emma Pelton, a monarch conservation expert with the Xerces Society.

By comparison, about 4.5 million monarch butterflies wintered in forested groves along the California coast in the 1980s. Scientists say the butterflies are at critically low levels in the Western US due to the destruction of their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.

Researchers also have noted the effect of climate change. Along with farming, climate change is one of the main drivers of the monarch’s threatened extinction, disrupting an annual 3,000-mile migration synced to springtime and the blossoming of wildflowers.

SuzanneDecember 24, 2019January 12, 2020Wildlifebirds, development, habitat loss, U.S. Fish & Wildlife

A Trump policy ‘clarification’ all but ends punishment for bird deaths

Lisa Friedman, THE NEW YORK TIMES

As the state of Virginia prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay last year, engineers understood that the nesting grounds of 25,000 gulls, black skimmers, royal terns and other seabirds were about to be plowed under.

To compensate, they considered developing an artificial island as a haven. Then in June 2018, the Trump administration stepped in. While the federal government “appreciates” the state’s efforts, new rules in Washington had eliminated criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came in the course of normal business, administration officials advised. Such conservation measures were now “purely voluntary.”

The state ended its island planning.

The island is one of dozens of bird-preservation efforts that have fallen away in the wake of the policy change in 2017 that was billed merely as a technical clarification to a century-old law protecting migratory birds. Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times.

Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds.

SuzanneSeptember 22, 2019September 25, 2019Habitats, Wildlifebirds, ecosystem collapse, habitat loss

Op-Ed: Do we care that birds are vanishing?

Michael Parr, AMERICAN BIRD CONSERVANCY

You probably see birds frequently — so much so that they may seem to be everywhere. The reality, of course, is that our subjective experience only goes so far. On Thursday, researchers released a large-scale study that shows that bird populations in North America are undergoing massive and unsustainable declines — even species that experts previously thought were adapting to human-modified landscapes.

Three billion is an unimaginably large number. But that’s the number of birds that have been lost from North America since 1970. It is more than a quarter of the total bird population of the continent. While some species have increased, those that are doing better are massively outweighed by the losers. Among the worst-hit bird groups are insect-eating birds such as swifts and swallows, grassland birds like meadowlarks and Savannah sparrows and the longest-distance migrants such as cerulean warblers and wood thrushes.

Birds are a critical part of the natural food chain, and this loss of birds represents a loss of ecological integrity that, along with climate change, suggests that nature as we know it is beginning to die.

This is a genuine crisis, yet there is still time to turn it around. We know what the problems are, and we know the actions needed to affect change. Alongside strong migratory bird, clean water and endangered species legislation, and critically important work to mitigate and adapt to climate impacts, maintaining habitat is paramount.

In fact, the single greatest cause of these bird declines has been the loss and degradation of high-quality habitat. Habitat loss can seem like “death by a thousand cuts,” but some cuts go deeper than others, and some are more easily healed. The condition of American public lands is based on a collective decision — and we as a nation must decide between an emphasis on exploitative and extractive uses or nature-based and recreational uses. By better managing public lands, we can do a lot to help birds, particularly grassland and sagebrush species such as the western meadowlark and greater sage-grouse, and birds found in fire-dependent forests in the West such as black-backed and white-headed woodpeckers. Policies benefiting these and other birds will help restore nature as a whole.

SuzanneMay 6, 2019May 7, 2019Climate Change & Energy, Habitats, Wildlifeagriculture, extinct species, extinctions, habitat loss, logging, poaching

Humans are speeding extinction and altering the natural world at an ‘unprecedented’ pace

Brad Plumer, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.

SuzanneFebruary 10, 2019February 11, 2019Agriculture/Food System, Habitats, Land Use, Sustainable Living, Wildlifebeneficial insects, ecosystem services, extinctions, habitat conversion, habitat loss, insects, neonicotinoids, pesticides, pollinators

Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’

Damian Carrington, THE GUARDIAN

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”

The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
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The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

SuzanneMarch 14, 2018July 19, 2018Climate Change & Energy, Sonoma Coast, Wildlifechinook, coho, fisheries, habitat loss, ocean warming, salmonids, stream restoration

Of creeks and geeks: Fisheries experts gather to contemplate the collapse of California’s ocean economy

Tom Gogola, PACIFIC SUN

State Senator Mike McGuire convened the 45th annual Zeke Grader Fisheries Forum last week in Sacramento, bringing together a dozen-odd anglers and experts for an afternoon of testimony about the state of California’s aquatic life. Grader was a legendary commercial fisherman in the state, who died a few years ago.

As McGuire noted, the fisheries meeting this year had special significance, occurring as it did against the backdrop of a reinvigorated offshore gas- and oil-drilling push from Washington, which pretty much nobody in California is supporting.

The meetings occurred against an additional backdrop which has seen sardine populations collapsing across the state and where, in Marin County, state health officials moved to shut down the coastal shell-fishery there two weeks ago because of high levels of a potentially fatal poison found in mussels and oysters at Point Reyes National Seashore.

Warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures are the suspected culprit, an increasingly common theme in state waters that have only recently come through a devastating and demoralizing outbreak of domoic acid poisoning in Dungeness crabs. In short, the poisoning occurs via algae blooms that occur in warm water.

Environmental Center of Sonoma County

Tag: habitat loss