SER AWARE workshop: Is resilience useful in fen restoration and should scientists explain things to idiots?

Between the 21: st and 23: rd of April the Conservation and Restoration research group at the department of Plant Ecology at Warsaw University hosted the Society for Ecological Restorations workshop on fen restoration. Many prominent experts on peatland vegetation and peatland restoration were key-note speakers at the work-shop.

There were many interesting talks, but I am here going to focus on two debates that occurred:

·         Does resilience have any value for peatland restoration?

·         Should scientists actively engage in influencing policy, or just present the facts?

Resilience thinking has had a profound influence on ecology during the last years. For restoration, restoring for resilience would mean that we perform a restoration action that creates a resilient system that does not need any further funding in terms of maintenance. For fen restoration the problem is that the restored system is in most cases not resilient, but in a state that is somewhere between the degraded state and the natural state. Left alone it will often revert back to a more degraded state.

On the contrary a heavily degraded fen is often very resilient (which is the very reason why fen restoration is so hard).

Richard Hobbs has stated that resilience brings ”conceptual muddling”. Personally I am not sure it is so unclear what is referred to, but it´s questionable how useful resilience is in terms of fen restoration. There are definitely natural peatlands that are resilient. Bogs are resilient, whereas a fen can easily switch into a bog once Sphagnum starts to drive the rich fen-poor fen-bog transformation. If a resilient system was the aim, you may very well end up arguing that a species poor bog is better than a rich fen.

The debate about whether or not scientists should use their knowledge to influence policy even if it means compromising surprised me. For me it is very clear that scientists have a moral duty to the tax payers who fund them, and to future generations, to make the scientific knowledge clear to policy makers, and yes we will have to accept that sometimes compromises are necessary. One speaker at the work-shop was however very much against this idea and stated ”Our job as scientist is to tell the truth, not to explain things to idiots”.  There are indeed plenty of stupid politicians, and it is understandable that some scientists would rather do research and teach students than engage in year-long struggles to make the scientific knowledge useful for the society at large.

Where would we be if it wasn´t for scientists who never gave up “explaining things to idiots”?

If it wasn´t for James Hansen´s long work with making the scientific findings of climate-science reach further than the readers of a journal, we would still be at the state were knowledge about global warming would be very limited among the public.

If it wasn´t for peatland scientists in Poland and other Europeans nations who fought for more than 10 years to save the Rospuda valley, many of them spending nights sleeping in the trees to prevent the destruction, the Rospuda valleys fens would not have been saved. Instead of a large fen in a natural state, there would be a highway cutting through the fen, with pillars driven through the several meter thick waterlogged peat, running the risk of severe drainage with subsequent biodiversity loss and massive release of stored carbon.

These two examples illustrate painful struggles that in the end have reached important victories, giving tax payers the best value for the research that they have funded. In the real world, the rule “no pain – no gain” is often a rule we have to accept.

Elsevier added value. The story of how a figure from a paper by other scientists ended up in our paper

What I will show you in this post is hopefully the worst example of scientific editing by a publisher that you will ever see. As scientists we spend endless times in the field. As peatland scientists this involves hard sweaty work in terrain with no shade and lot of mosquitoes. When we have the data we spend a long time analyzing it and writing a manuscript. We choose a journal that we see fit for the study. Other scientists volunteer their time as reviewers. Then the paper, if accepted, goes over to the publisher who in this case is Elsevier. Elsevier has recently been criticized by a big boycott campaign for charging high prices fore their journals, but one of the arguments made by Elsevier has been the “added value” they bring to a manuscript. Many times this “added value” is indeed real. The layout is nice, typos are identified. Sometimes however, you end up with something so messed up that you first lack words to describe it. “I am shocked” and “One of the worst mistakes I have ever seen” are so far comments I have heard from distinguished colleagues in the field with decades of experience.

Directly when our paper was made available online at Science Direct I realized that something was very wrong with figure 3d. The error bar was hanging separated from the data point in one place, and was on the wrong year in the other series of the same graph. I directly contacted Elsevier and the Journal Manager got involved. She send me 2 versions and asked me which one was correct. I pointed out the one that she took from our raw manuscript. Phew problem solved you would think. You can see the wrong figure below, followed by the correct figure below it.

Wrong figure 3 d

Correct figure 3d

Yesterday the article went in print, and the wrong graph was switched to the correct one (bravo), but……..our figure 2 of the experimental layout had been switched to a completely wrong figure of a completely different paper about wildlife-friendly vs. wildlife-unfriendly farming. The correct figure is listed below, followed by the (for the context) horrendous figure that Elsevier put in.

Correct figure 2

Wrong figure 2 (can you spot the difference?)

Perhaps I am being to harsh here. I mean, at least the figure text below is still the same (although it now has no connection to the figure).

I have no words for how this could have happened, except perhaps intentional sabotage. Other options are blatant incompetence. It sure adds something to the paper, but what it adds has no value. Who are the people working at the production team? Have they any idea about scientific editing at all. Do they know anything about separating files from different projects? Has the entire work been outsourced so far that Elsevier has really no control anymore, or is this their level of competence in editing?

How this could have happened, I simply do not know. I just know that it absolutely raises the question what the “added value” Elsevier brings really is, if they are unable to identify such an obvious mistake before sending it out for print.

I will present this study on the Intecol 9th International Wetland Conference in Orlando, U.S.A. in June, and it will also be referred to during SER 2012: 8th European Conference on Ecological Restoration in Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic in September. I can only hope that this mother-and-father of editing mistakes has been fixed by then. We will of course demand a correction. Should it not have been fixed, well perhaps we can only apologize and refer to the mistake as “Elsevier added value”.

I also here would like to apologize to the people who Elsevier took this figure from and put it into our paper and send it out for print. We had nothing to do with this as you certainly already knew. I only hope you did not receive our figure in your paper, but considering what has happened so far, it wouldn´t come as a shock anymore.

Thoughts regarding the evil of restoration ecology

Two years ago I attended a meeting, were a conservation biologist made a remark regarding restoration ecologists, saying “I hope I will never be like you.” The statement is a criticism of restoration indeed, and the person making the statement was not the first one to question restoration ecology.

Critics of restoration usually question that humans can restore ecosystems, and that whatever we end up with will be an artifact of the original nature, comparable to a painting. These viewpoints have been presented by Robert Elliot (1982) and Eric Katz (1997). Katz states that the assumption that humanity can recognize the harm we have done and restore it is false, and that it is”...an unrecognized manifestation of the insidious dream of the human domination of nature.” This view has been held by humanity for thousands of years, and is present in Genesis were man is given authority to rule over nature. Moreover Katz sees restoration as an assumption that we can restore a degraded system back to what nature intended it to be. Nature however, does not have any intentions or blueprints for a system, and although modern biologists are aware of this, they still act as if nature had a plan which they understood argues Katz. Although Katz and Elliot are from the discipline of philosophy, the issue that man-kind overestimates her ability to restore nature has been voiced by restoration biologists to.

Hilderbrand et al. (2005) outlines what they perceive as the 5 myths of restoration ecology. The myths can be summarized as:

• The carbon copy myth: The idea that we can restore a system to a previous ideal state.

• The field of dreams myth: The idea that biotic composition will follow automatically if only the physical structure is restored.

• The myth of fast forwarding: The idea that we can accelerate the development of a system by controlling dispersal and colonization by for example sowing.

• The myth of the cookbook: The assumption that a successful restoration-case in one area can be performed at another site with similar result.

• The myth of command and control: The idea that we have the know-how and foresight to control and manage ecosystems structure and function now and in the future.

Finally the authors propose a sixth myth that they see as widely held by today’s society. This is the myth of the Bionic world, which is the belief that science and technology will eventually solve the problems caused by human exploitation. (Hilerbrand et al. 2005). Although the myths presented by Hilderbrand et al. bears many similarities to Katz and Elliot’s statements of man kinds overestimation of her capacity to control nature, Hilderbrand et al. are clear in their support for restoration, and they believe that as long as we are aware of the limitations of each myth, we have a higher chance to succeed in our efforts to restore degraded systems.

One problem with both Elliot’s and Katz position is that although we are prone to overestimate our ability to restore ecosystems, the choice to not restore is a choice for status quo (Allison, S.K 2007). With hardly any ecosystem being unaffected by human actions, we are seldom in a choice were we can preserve what is natural, but more often forced to choose to restore a degraded area to a system that either existed prior to the disturbance, or a system that is better than the current one, even if it did not exist prior to the disturbance. The basic mistake that both Elliot and Katz make, is in my opinion, that they fundamentally fail to see what the starting position is, and therefore makes a comparison between the virgin ecosystem, and the restored.

Hilderbrand, R. H., Watts, A.C., Randle, A.M. 2005. The myths of restoration ecology, Ecology and Society 10(1):19

Katz E. 1997. Nature as Subject. Human Obligation and Natural Community. Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham.

Elliot, R. (1982). Faking nature Inquiry, 25 (1), 81-93 DOI: 10.1080/00201748208601955

Allison, S. (2007). You Can’t Not Choose: Embracing the Role of Choice in Ecological Restoration Restoration Ecology, 15 (4), 601-605 DOI: 10.1111/j.1526-100X.2007.00271.x

That sinking feeling: CO2 emission after fen drainage substantial

A new paper by Leifeld et al. 2011 calculates the amount of carbon lost from a temperate peatland after drainage. A convenient method of estimating the amount of carbon lost has previously been to assume that it is roughly 50% of the total amount of volume lost, but the authors show that this can vary a lot even within the narrow climate zone of their study in Switzerland. After drainage, water goes out, and the ground subsides. Part of it is due to simply the fact that the water is lost and the peat is compressed. The other part is due to oxidation of the organic matter, that previously had been preserved in the very anoxic condition (think bogmen).

The authors show that in their fen that was drained 140 years ago, the annual subsidence of the ground has been 0,8-1,6 cm per year. So what does this mean for carbon loss. Well, it turns out that the amount of lost carbon is between 2,5-5,5 metric ton annually per hectare. Now assuming that the one who drained the peatland would have to pay for these emissions we would have to multiply the amount of C with 3,7 to get the amount of CO2. We are here making the assumption that all C go out as CO2. Then we end up with an annual release of 8,25-18.15 ton CO2 per hectare. Offsetting that CO2 would today cost roughly 53-117 euro per hectare annually. Considering that the amount of drained peatlands in the world are large (think Netherlands), it ends up being quite a lot. Hopefully we can be able to turn these carbon sources back to carbon sinks by restoring them, but unfortunately it is not always successful. One of the most important lessons of this is therefore to conserve the functioning peatlands we have. It is also of importance to not allow further drainage. In Sweden forestry owners are allowed to restore the ditch to the original depth, which is false thinking. The peatland has subsided since the drainage, and therefore making the ditch as deep as it was originally will take it even further down into the peat. It ought to be self evident that FSC forestry should not include “ditch-rinsing” but unfortunately it is allowed.

Leifeld, J., Müller, M., & Fuhrer, J. (2011). Peatland subsidence and carbon loss from drained temperate fens Soil Use and Management DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-2743.2011.00327.x

Fill it up, a Finnish approach to fen restoration

An interesting and well conducted study on restoration of managed pine fens in Finland has recently been published in Applied vegetation science by A.M Laine et al. In general the drainage operations done for forestry in Finland were more systematic and more effective than they were in Sweden as one can see from the graph below.

The common method in Sweden for blocking drainage ditches is a wooden dam, which may or may not be reinforced with a plug of peat and/or mineral soil. In Finland this is also done, but another approach is also used. They simply fill up the ditch, and it can be combined with a buried wooden dam that extends into the side of the ditch and redirects water into the peatland.

The finish study is a 4 year vegetation monitoring study, with one monitoring conducted prior to the restoration in 2006, and the remaining monitorings conducted in 2007-2009. Water level change was also measured.

Their results show, as have many previous studies, that the hydrological restoration occurs quickly. The only species group that responded positive to the restoration was Carex species. Surprisingly Sphagnum species decreased after restoration, and the authors speculate that it may be so that the excavators used damaged the Sphagnum cover, and that it has not yet recovered. Alternatively it may be that the increase in water level has had a negative effect on Sphagnum fuscum and Sphagnum russowi.

It should be said that 3 years after the restoration is not a very long time, and as a German restoration ecologist I know said ”Have patience. The results after 4 year can be quite boring, but the vegetation continues to develop far longer than the time period of a PhD study. It would be interesting to see how this develops in the longer term.

Laine, A., Leppälä, M., Tarvainen, O., Päätalo, M., Seppänen, R., & Tolvanen, A. (2011). Restoration of managed pine fens: effect on hydrology and vegetation Applied Vegetation Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1654-109X.2011.01123.x