The top photo is from an excellent photo essay published yesterday in El Pais. It is a collection of photos taken from various locations across Ukraine and Belorussia from the radiation exclusion zone, which has been abandoned for (most of) human habitation after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986, thirty years ago. (All photo rights are theirs. These are seriously good photos and I dont want to step on the photographer’s toes.) Nature, freed from human interference, has developed impressively there. Its full of life. Thirty years is one half life for the main emitters.
The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Animals, weather, meteorites, climate, soil, plants, waters are all worthy additions to the Bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, your location. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. |
April 11-13, IJmuiden, The Netherlands. This is a Daily Bucket News edition, this time brought to you from the Daily Bucket Overseas Correspondent Network!
Related news — Poland, Bialystok Forest.
Its over a month ago, but there was a protest by Conservationists and scientists about plans by the new Polish government to open up parts of the Bialystok Forest, in Poland’s eastern border region, to logging.
The forest is unique, being the only surviving significant forest area in all of west-middle Europe that is “original”, and has never been cleared. There are individual, highly localized copses and groves scattered about the western continent suspect to go back thousands of years, but nothing comparable in scale. According to the article, Polish government maintains logging would be to keep the forest healthy in the face of a beetle infestation; scientists do not agree. A decision is not taken yet — Polish forestry professionals are pitted against politicians in this development.
A few of these “Wisent” buffalos shown in the photo are now roaming through my dunes at home, but behind a fence, they are not safe.
Butterfly News
Oh yeah! We had a Butterfly Conservationist Congress just now, in the Netherlands: The 4th Forum on the Future for Butterflies in Europe. It contained dozens of talks, with good and bad messages.
I liked this one best:
Bonelli et many others: Farfalle in Tour.
… The project is a metaphor: like the butterflies that need flying from one green area to another and meet each other, taking care of them together is the necessary enrichment to come out from a relational isolation, which nurtures the pleasure of doing things together.
So mental health care patients and the staff of educators became available to the needs of science and developed a project that gets them involved in the activities.
Mental health centers of Turin are surrounded by green spaces, so far uncultivated or managed as urban gardens. Through the 'Farfalle in Tour' project, green areas are transformed into oases attractive to butterflies with nectar sources (i.e., native Thymus, Oreganum, Lavandula) and foodplants (i.e., Plantago, Ferula, Crataegus).
Butterflies that reach the oases are annotated and photographed by patients. All the data are validated by scientists and published on the website. ...
But there was plenty of other butterfly news at the conference. One part was the now well-known litany of reasons for the strong decline of Butterflies (and moths, and bees, and many other kinds of insects, but not ticks) in west-central Europe:
- Intensification of agriculture, scale expansion (removal of small-scale landscape mosaic mosaics), “Green desert” impoverishment of industrialized agro-fields.
- Grassland loss everywhere — plus loss of marginal agriculture and marginal grassland economy by economic pressure throughout southern to eastern Europe.
- Growing realization that excessive nitrogen loads, long decried by botanists, also acts as a threat to insects and butterflies through the ecosystem knock-on effects.
But there were also some positive items.
- Monitoring is spreading across Europe based on the proven scientist-citizen volunteer cooperation models developed in the central countries.
Slovakia, Serbia, Estonia, Slovenia, everywhere monitoring is just in time to observe the dramatic decline of biodiversity caused by spreading EU-Common Agricultural Policy directives.
- Some evidence that new methods of forestry (purposeful small clearings) can create “retreats” for open-land species under threat by agriculture, at least for real butterflies.
- Growing use of biodiversity planning and management by companies in public-partnership programs, e.g., electricity grid line maintainers giving their route lands to conservancies to manage (as long as the cables do okay).
- Mixed-bag item on transgenic maize (Bt maize) — studies showing that uncontrolled blanket use is a habitat threat to insects but other studies showing that use with carefully managed practices adapted to local conditions can coexist with insect biodiversity.
Non-butterfly news.
Birds are changing their ranges in accordance with expectations from changing climate, finds a study commissioned by Dutch bird researchers, which somehow got into Science also. (Nature? Science? How do they do it all? We never had a chance)
Its not particularly new — it is now study after study that finds these range changes, south to north or up the mountains. The same was also reported in the butterfly conference by Spanish observers seeing hot butterflies move up to the Meseta and into the mountains.
Closer to home, that means in the dunes behind my home dunes, there are wild animals, “Damherten”, which are something else in English, but you’ll all recognize them:
They live in the Amsterdamse Waterleidings Duinen. Those are a dune area into which the polluted waters of the river Rhine are pumped, the water then sinks through the sand, and comes out totally fresh and clean, and thereby constitutes the drinking water provision of the whole mid to North Holland region with Amsterdam. Me included. The deer live in the dunes behind a regional fence as “grazers,” to exert some pressure on the ground vegetation, keep the land open, keep the shrub-to-forest succession from getting out of control. Well, they do, but now they themselves are out of control, since they have no natural enemies ... they expand by the thousands, and it has now been decided that they are going to be culled. (10th of March)
We had the same problem already, in the Oostvardersplassen, where foresters act as superpredators to keep the range animals in check. In my home dunes, behind my house, the grazers are of a more phlegmatic sort. They dont quickly get out of control:
I wonder why no one has put out gazelles there yet. It becomes a zoo, gradually. (As this is a news roundup, in Eastern Netherlands, kangaroos escaped the farmers and formed a free ranging herd. But that was in 2010 and I think they were eventually wiped out by traffic).
But now, some serious news again.
Le Monde reports that half of all natural reserves that are recognized as World Heritage sites by UNESCO are functionally threatened by industrial development. WWF study. Of these threats, oil-gas as well as mineral mining developments make up just under half, with illegal forest exploitation another big chunk.
An important new study has been published by the French INRA institute as a contribution to a monograph series (paywall, but I have the pdf): The Hidden and External Costs of Pesticide Use.
It tries to quantify the hidden & externalised costs of pesticide use (such as damages to ecosystem services, let alone human health) and says these costs reached about 40 billion $ in the US alone per year in about 1990, and that today … “The benefit-cost ratio of pesticide use may have easily fallen below 1 if [the externalized] cost had been taken into account.”.
There are no nice images to go with such news items, but they need to be heard far and wide and digested, since the general perception of such issues, on which our collective future and that of our beloved encounters out there depends, is generally inadequate. In this connection I want to draw attention to another group of dedicated professionals that work to change this, in this case the Umweltbundesamt. Since 20-30 March had been the Pesticide Action Week, I can conclude this news roundup with a timely new study the UBA put out, a “5-point-plan for better plant protection”, which they accompany with the image above here.
They are talking to farmers and Economy Ministry officials. They want to change the world away from pesticides and still have it function, so they use an image like this that normally would be Industry standard stock.
But their five points are as follows.
- Minimize use of chemicals.
- Identify and quantify risks and communicate them to farmers.
- Manage these risks optimally (that is, on scientific basis, not by microeconomics).
- Compensate (farmers) for avoided risks (like non-applied chemicals).
- Internalize externalized costs.
And with that, they line up with the French study cited above. They say that plant protection involves all that is written in the pyramid at right (even if it is in German), and that proper pesticide use should restrict itself to rare cases of the top of the pyramid.
And that is all I could find so far. This was just a stand in for Ocean Diver. hope she’s back soon in health & high spirits and you all will greet her then nicely. As you should.
(Note .. when this comes out I will be working, I am on MESZ and can drop by only later. You have to entertain yourselves!)
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Now It's Your Turn
What have you noted happening in your area or travels? As usual post your observations as well as their general location in the comments.
Thank you.