NatureVolve issue 11 by NatureVolve Magazine

Issue 11

Special theme: Conserving our lands

Scientific photography In Pictures: Land conservation challenges in Central & South America... Plus much more

Front cover image: “Luminescent Inflorescence Copper Sulphate”. © Karl Gaff. All rights reserved. Karl Gaff is our highlighted science communicator of the issue. Find out about Karl’s stunning scientific photography in theScicomm section.

Science

Conservation

Scicomm

Art

Written Word

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Thank you to the following contributors to this issue (in page number order): Paulo Pereira Emilio Pagani-Núñez Hannah K. Levenson Keith Kirby Enya O’Reilly Hamed Gholizadeh Risa Sargent Eden Gerner Irene Holm Sørensen Thomas Skou Grindsted Anthony Snead Ek del Val Manuel-Angel Dueñas Subhajit Bandopadhyay Alistair Campbell Leonardo Galetto Vallejos Maria Donald Brown Lucia Tamburino Misagh Parhizkar Karl Gaff S. Paola López Ramírez Alex Mayer Byron Lamont Phillip Vannini April Vannini Karen Romano Young Aiswarya PS Amy Louise Lee Antonio Polidano Vella Star Holden Mark Noble Ying Kit Chan Ronan Quinn Edward B. Barbier Tina Claffey

Welcome to NatureVolve issue 11 At NatureVolve, we are an international community uniting to share our ideas in science and art with the world, through the common appreciation of nature. While sharing diverse topics within science, conservation and art, in this issue we emphasize the value of looking after the lands on which we live. In the section Science we cover land-based ecology research, and then move onto wildlife protection and best practices in Conservation, where we deep-dive into conservation issues in South America, with some illustrative snaps. The front cover of this issue is a small taster of what is to come in the Scicomm section, where we highlight science photography that captures stunning crystallization patterns. There is more science inspired creativity to see through to the Art section, where diverse creatives’ influences from nature are shown. Our digital magazine continually shares the ideas of both scientists and creatives with worldwide communities as we all unite to celebrate nature. Being open and inclusive, contributions in many forms are welcome. If interested to join us and contribute to an upcoming issue, please go to naturevolve.com/submission-form If you enjoy this issue please shout on social media, and so your friends can also enjoy free copies, share the free subscription link: naturevolve.com/subscribe

Thanks to NatureVolve’s writers of this issue: Heidi Schmelzer, Duc L, Glenn Molina.

Thank you for your support and enjoy the issue!

Clarissa Wright Editor-in-Chief

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Cork and Cultural Landscapes in the Montado Seeing the sustainable value of wetlands Microevolution can guide conservation efforts Conservation threats in South & Central America Socorro island vegetation Species at risk of extinction by invasive species. Deforestation by logging Bees at risk in the Amazon Native bee pollinators Subsistence living at Dry Chaco Terrestrial salamanders amid climate change Sustainability trade-off Recovering deforested hillslopes

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scicomm

Creating colorful imagery from crystallized chemicals Solving water scarcity with art and science Illustrating drought-tolerant plant’s unique features A scenic pose in Iceland I Was A Kid SciArt for bee research

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Minimalist elegance Antonio Polidano Vella Star Holden Mark Noble Ying Kit Chan

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River Liffey Economics For a Fragile Planet Portal: Otherworldly Wonders of Ireland’s Bogs, Wetlands & Eskers

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Written Word

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Struggles in sustaining land resources Long-tailed Shrike Bees buzzing in soybean fields Bluebells hiding history Making bird counts count Sericea - an invasive “alien” plant Flower-bee connections

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Struggles in sustaining land resources Written by Heidi Schmelzer

umans make a lasting impact on the environment, often through land-use change: modifying the natural landscape, which can be temporary or permanent, occuring through human activity like agriculture, urbanization, and deforestation. While these all negatively impact the environment, there are positive impacts of land use change like reforestation. Negative land-use actions do not only affect the local environment, they have widerreaching effects, like contributing to raising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or impacting natural flood control (a type of ‘ecosystem service’). One obstacle with managing land-use change is that much of it occurs on privately owned land. Many governments don’t have systems in place to regulate activities in non-public areas, and this presents a challenge in preserving important ecosystem services. It can be difficult to persuade private landowners to adopt sustainable practices if it does not financially help them. Often, implementing sustainable use strategies can cause them to lose money. It is imperative to tackle this problem, as the actions on private land have far reaching consequences for widespread habitats and the global environment. We speak with Paulo Pereira, professor at Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania. Together with his team (Marius Kalinauskas; Miguel Inacio; Katarzyna Bogdziewicz, and Luis Pinto), he investigates humans impact on the environment and how to address sustainability during the climate crisis.

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Q & A: Paulo Pereira Please introduce your background and why you entered into environmental management. I am a Geographer with a PhD from the University of Barcelona, working in different environmental fields such as soil science, fire impacts on ecosystems, land degradation, ecosystem services, nature-based solutions and spatial analysis. I always liked nature, but this love and search for understanding the interaction between humans and the environment appeared when I was finishing my bachelor’s degree. The curiosity and passion that I developed for science laid the foundation for pursuing a career as a scientist and contributing to the environmental management field.

How can land-use change impact ecosystems, and eventually negatively affect human society? Land-use changes affect ecosystems dramatically. Nowadays, coupled with climate change, land-use change like agriculture intensification and urban expansion are among the most important drivers of ecosystem change. The increasing demand for food and resources exponentially converts forested areas into farmlands (e.g., Amazon or Borneo forests).

What are some common conflicts between ecosystem services (ES) and property rights? There are indeed many conflicts between ecosystem services and property rights. From a management point of view, public property is always easier to manage than private. The supply of ecosystem services depends on the land use type and the practices conducted. On public land, this can be regulated. Establishing specific land uses representing a benefit (e.g., flood retention) for the community is easier than on private land. Some local plans regulate land use at the municipal level that impose some restrictions on land use. It is more challenging to do so on private land. Encouraging farmers to diversify their crops, apply fewer agrochemicals, and deep tillage practices because of the negative impacts on the environment (e.g., soil degradation, water pollution, biodiversity loss) is very challenging since their income depends on how much they can take from the land in a short period. These conventional agricultural practices are highly damaging to ecosystems and the benefits they

This represents a loss of habitats and biodiversity and different goods that can be supplied by these environments, such as carbon sequestration, water purification, nutrients regulation, pollination, air quality regulation, oxygen production, microclimate regulation, wild-food, medicinal plants or cultural heritage sites. Some forests are sacred to indigenous cultures. Also, urban expansion on fertile soils drastically increases soil degradation (e.g., sealing, erosion, pollution) and reduces the areas available for food production. Deforestation and urban growth negatively impact human society since they represent a loss of goods. Also, they can trigger the effects of extreme climate events such as floods and heatwaves that usually have tragic impacts on human health and life. Before cutting a tree or sealing soil, we need to understand the loss that this represents. Right: Evidence of soil erosion. © Paulo Pereira. All rights reserved. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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provide to society. Of course, the owner has the right to use their land as they want according to the law. However, although the land-use practices respect the law, this does not mean that they are exempt from being harmful to the environment and the services that ecosystems provide to humanity.

Based on your team’s study published in Geography and Sustainability, how can we raise awareness about the benefits of a healthy ecosystem to land owners? This was great work. Personally, I liked the outcomes very much. Raising awareness about the benefits of living in a healthy ecosystem is essential, but this depends very much on how the landowners implement the necessary changes. If this implies an economic loss, it is challenging to convince them. To overcome this, it is essential to show the long-term benefits of establishing a particular practice or land use. We can list and communicate to landowners many benefits, such as agriculture management with reduced impacts on the environment (e.g., no-till, cover crops, organic farming). Nevertheless, they may imply an immediate economic loss compared to conventional practices, and some are not willing to take these losses. To raise awareness, it is vital to invest in education, transfer knowledge and show the advantages of having sustainable farming practices. Nevertheless, this is not possible in many cases, and some compensation (e.g., payment for ecosystem services) is needed for the owners to engage in sustainable practices.

Also, what should land-planning decision makers be considering, so we can meet our global sustainable development goals? Definitely, it is needed to reduce our footprint on the environment. Decision-makers can do this by having better territorial planning. It is important to reduce deforestation and the expansion of intensive farming practices that are among the most important causes of land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. It is also important to limit urban sprawl and the consumption of fertile soils. Making cities greener will also be an excellent measure to reduce the impacts of climate change and urban heat islands. From an environmental perspective, by doing this, decision-makers would contribute significantly to several sustainable development goals: • • • • • •

Good Health and Well-Being (Goal 3), Clean Water and Sanitation (Goal 6), Affordable and Clean Energy (Goal 7), Sustainable Cities and Communities (Goal 11), Climate Action (Goal 13), Life Bellow Water (Goal 14), Life on Land (Goal 15).

From a socioeconomic standpoint, decision-makers need to make urban areas more inclusive and invest in renewable energies. Doing this would contribute as well to other Sustainable Development Goals: • No Poverty (Goal 1), • Gender Equality (Goal 5), • Responsible Consumption (Goal 12).

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environment Below: Portrait image of Prof. Paulo Pereira.

“...Deforestation and urban growth negativvely impact human society since they represent a loss of goods... they also trigger the effects of extreme climate events that can have tragic impacts...”

Final thoughts

Passionate about the environment, Paulo explains how negative land-use changes can harm the environment and have a negative impact on humans. There are many valuable benefits nature gives us, described as ‘ecosystem services’, that are being disrupted by unsustainable practices like rapid urbanization and deforestation. This includes a loss of natural water purification and air quality control. Persuading private landowners to adopt more sustainable practices is challenging because it takes money from their livelihoods in the short term. Education can be an important tool for convincing them to adopt strategies for better conservation, but oftentimes, it is not enough. Another strategy governments can use is to pay landowners the difference in money earned through using sustainable practices compared to higher pay-out conventional practices that deplete the land’s resources. Paulo’s interview highlights the fact that intervening in unsustainable practices requires multiple approaches to better conserve the land, protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change.

Bio

Full professor at Mykolas Romeris University (Lithuania) and invited full professor at Beijing Normal University (China). He published more than 500 publications in books, peer-reviewed articles and conferences. Paulo received several international prizes (e.g., “European Geosciences Union Soil System Sciences Division Outstanding Young Scientist Award”). In 2020 was identified as one of the world’s most-cited researchers (Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher).

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Long-tailed Shrike Long-tailed Shrike (Lanius schach), a generalist Long-tailed Shrikes perfectly exemplify this predator, hunting around Dushu Lake Wetland process – they are strong and aggressive Park (Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, P.R. China). birds and even larger species do not dare to (below) © Emilio Pagani-Núñez. All rights reserved.

Across the natural-to-urban gradient some species persist, winners, and others are lost, losers. The Long-tailed Shrike clearly is one of the winners of this story, as they thrive in agricultural and urban landscapes all around Asia. I am particularly interested in understanding why some species persist to intense habitat transformation and what mechanisms they employ to cope with these changes. Recently, we have found that, whilst in natural areas birds depend on highly specialized morphologies such as long beaks to find food, other features such as size and aggressiveness determine resource use in transformed habitats.

challenge their supremacy.

About

Emilio Pagani-Núñez is a field ornithologist with broad interests in ecology, evolution, and behaviour. Currently an Assistant Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Emilio is particularly interested in studying the impact that human activities have on nature and investigating ways in which these impacts can be minimized.

Contact

Publication: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.baae.2022.01.002

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Bees buzzing in soybean fields Bombus impatiens (common eastern bumble bee) queen visiting a soybean flower, documented while the authors were conducting visual surveys of pollinators in soybean fields (below) © Hannah K. Levenson. All rights reserved.

Bees provide critical pollination services to agricultural systems; however, these areas can be harsh to pollinators. As such, augmented pollinator habitat is commonly added as a conservation tool. Even though soybean is considered a pollinator-independent crop by many, previous research contradicts this thinking. A paper authored by Hannah K. Levenson, April E. Sharp, and David R. Tarpy is the first to show the addition of pollinator habitat results in increased soybean yield, as measured by seed weight. This paper also documents that bees in soybean fields, as shown in the image, actively collect resources from the crop. These findings suggest that the management of pollinatorindependent crops should be reevaluated as these crops can be attractive to and benefit from pollinators. This image shows a Bombus impatiens (common eastern bumble bee) queen visiting a soybean flower and was taken while the authors were conducting visual surveys of pollinators in soybean fields. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

About

Hannah K. Levenson is a community ecologist who is broadly interested in investigating the impacts that humans have the environment and how best to mitigate them. The main tool she uses to address these concerns is bees in agricultural systems. She is currently a postdoctoral research scholar at North Carolina State University.

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snapshot

Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) are one of the delights of our woods in spring. They are often thought to only occur where the woodland has existed for hundreds of years. However we know this area was rough farmland, used for grazing in the Second World War and was only planted with the beech trees in 1948. Hidden amongst the bluebells are the remains of ditches that hark back to an earlier conflict – they are the remains of practice trenches dug by soldiers in World War I before they went off to fight in the trenches for real in France.

About

Keith Kirby (D.Phil.) worked for 33 years as a forest ecologist for the British government conservation agency (now called Natural England). Since retiring he has returned to Wytham Woods where his research career began. His particular interest is in long-term woodland vegetation change and what drives this: from the human management and impacts of large herbivores to the effects of increased nitrogen pollution and climage change. He is also still involved with the debates about how best to preserve native woodland communities in Britain in a changing environment.

Contact Website: https://www.plants.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-keith-kirby

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Making bird counts count Firecrest (Regulus ignicapillus) (below) Image taken by Jo Garbutt on Flickr. CC by 2.0.

Defining species’ association with and degree of specialization for a habitat is often reliant on static, categorical classifications. These fail to account for spatial and temporal variation in the extent of species’ association with a habitat. The Relative Habitat Use (RHU) metric quantifies species’ association with and degree of specialization for a habitat using species’ count data. It can be calculated at any scale so can account for any variation over time and space and allows for between-species comparisons. The image below is of a Firecrest (Regulus ignicapillus) which we identified as being specialized to forest habitat using the RHU metric. In our research we compared RHU scores of habitats for 246 European breeding bird species to literaturebased classifications for each species’ association with and degree of specialization for the same habitats. We found the two methods were highly correlated showing that RHU is an accurate yet more robust approach.

About

Enya O’Reilly is a PhD student with RSPB and the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Her research explores quantitative methods for species selection in the development of multispecies indicators. Her main research interests are populations dynamics, functional ecology and the application of science into land management and policy decisions.

Contact

Twitter: enya_oreilly

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Sericea - an invasive “alien” plant Patches of sericea (below) [shown inside dashed white rectangles] Image credit: Hamed Gholizadeh. Image originally published by Elsevier in the Remote Sensing of Environment journal under CC BY-NC-ND end user license.

Lespedeza cuneata (or “sericea”) is an invasive alien plant brought to the U.S. from East Asia in the 1890s for use as forage. It has now become a “nightmare plant” in grasslands of several states in the U.S. southern Great Plains, including Oklahoma, Kanasa, and Missouri. At maturity, this plant has high levels of tannin that can cause discomfort in some grazing animals, like bison and cattle. Sericea has some other competitive advantages over native species, especially in nitrogen-poor soils, being a nitrogenfixing legume. Sericea is also taller than the majority of native plants which reduces the amount of light captured by native species. Interestingly, some of these characteristics or traits, such as plant nitrogen content or height can be estimated with relatively high level of accuracy using optical remote sensing technology.

About

Hamed Gholizadeh is an assistant professor and the co-director of Center for Applications of Remote Sensing in the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University. For the past several years, his research has focused on using spaceborne, airborne, and unoccupied aerial system (UAS)-based remote sensing for monitoring terrestrial ecosystems. Hamed’s most recent research focuses on developing remote sensing approaches for assessing the impact of management practices on terrestrial ecosystems. In doing so, he bring together concepts from remote sensing, image processing, plant ecophysiology, chemical ecology, and landscape ecology.

Contact

Twitter: @GholizadehRS

Through support from NASA and Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology, we used remote sensing technology to estimate key traits that distinguish sericea from native species and then mapped sericea presence from the sky at the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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This image was taken during site surveys where a team of researchers recorded and identified flowers that were in bloom. Protecting wild bee populations in urban areas is critical as they pollinate wildflowers, gardens, and urban food systems. To conduct their ecological study, Gerner & Sargent surveyed residential yards in Ottawa, Ontario to look at how bee diversity (i.e., a metric that looks at number and species of wild bees present) at yards along a gradient of urbanization (i.e., differing degrees of hard surface cover in the land surrounding the site), and tree cover. They found that having a higher number of flowering plants in a yard was a better predictor of wild bee diversity than urbanization or tree cover. These results suggest that that homeowners and municipalities can increase their local bee populations by simply adding more flowering plants to the lands they manage! Their study didn’t specify which types of plants were best, however, recommend focusing on planting

About

Eden Gerner is a former master’s student and research technician in the Sargent lab. Risa Sargent is a professor in the Applied Biology program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research focuses on how ecological context impacts plant-pollinator dynamics. To address questions in this field, her lab studies the impacts of disruptions, including species introductions and land use changes (especially agriculture and urban use) on this key ecosystem service.

Contact

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Cork and Cultural Landscapes in the Montado Written by Duc L

The montado (as it is known in Portuguese) is a unique agro-forestry ecosystem found

only in the Mediterranean region, known in Spanish as dehesa. This landscape is made up of savanna-like woodlands and is dominated by the cork oak, Quercus suber. Cork is an impermeable buoyant material and is harvested for commercial use, commonly for producing bottle stoppers, timber for building and making charcoal. Cork oak woodlands have also offered grasslands for keeping livestock, while also providing habitats for animals and plants. Not only is there sustenance and income generated from cork and cattle, it provides space for recreation, social communities and culture. However, this precious ecological system is facing numerous pressures: rural abandonment, tree mortality, depreciation of cork market value, overgrazing and climate change. Irene Holm Sørensen (Universities of Kassel in Germany and Copenhagen in Denmark) has studied the cultural landscape of southern Portugal and focuses on how agricultural landscapes change in time. She speaks to us about the montado and some of the socio-cultural traditions that developed around the cultivation of cork, as well as what happening to Portugal’s cork oak forests.

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Q & A: Irene Holm Sørensen Tell us a little about your backgrounds and what you’re now focusing on within your research department at the University of Kassel. My educational pathways have always revolved around the importance of securing habitats to provide opportunities for all life to thrive in balance. This might sound utopic and like a classic answer from any idealist working with nature conservation, but it is true. I have a background in practical garden and landscape design, being hands-on and project oriented. I always thought something was missing in the big picture, so I shifted my focus to nature management and planning. Again, there was something missing. This led me to study ethnobotany, which is the study of the cultural use of plants. One particular aspect that I took with me was the focus of unique values, knowledge, and motivations that people have for engaging with nature. In our research group, Socio-ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems, we have a wide range of focus areas, but as the name suggests, we all work at the intersection between people and nature. Currently, we

are several colleagues doing research on cultural landscapes, which are the result of centurieslong cultivation of the landscape. This could be agriculture, forestry, wild collection of plants, hunting, and also, patterns created by agri-silvopastoral, which combines pastoralism — extensive livestock and agriculture in a partially wooded environment, and a transhumance lifestyle, which is based on nomadic herding of livestock. The practices performed on the landscape provides the backbone of the uniqueness a specific culture brings to an area. For just under three years, I have been engaged with the cultural landscape of southern Portugal. Here, the landscape is made up of savanna-like woodlands, known in Portuguese as montado, and in Spanish as dehesa. The special thing about this landscape is that it is dominated by the cork oak, Quercus suber L. This tree species has its natural distribution range limited to the western part of the Mediterranean Basin, which makes this a very unique landscape, rarely observed from a global perspective. Below: Cork ready for the industrial processing. Photo credit: Tobias Plieninger. Rights are reserved.

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We don’t normally think about where our cork materials come from. Give us some examples of how cork from Portugal is being used in products we may easily see in our everyday lives.

material for isolation purposes. In the newest trends, cork is being used in components for aeronautics, clothes, handbags, pencil cases, and music instruments. The imagination is the only limit to its uses!

First of all, cork is both the name of the tree but also of the material. It is the outer bark layer harvested without killing the tree, something we also know from harvesting birch bark (Betula spp.). The first written sources that mention cork go back to Theophrastus (372-285 BC) first describing the cork oak, to Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) who mentions the uses in his Naturalis Historia XVI. Natural scientists have since described the unique qualities of cork as a natural sealant, such as Robert Hooke in Micrographia (1665). The first uses recorded were the utilization of cork for building beehives, wine casks, and floats, and in 1680 the cork stopper was made popular by the Benedictine monk Pierre Perignon (1638-1715), who until today still lends his name to one of the most popular champagne brands worldwide.

Please share with us some of the social cultural traditions that developed around the cultivation of cork.

In our daily life, we may come across cork without realising it. If we are wine drinkers, we will know the thrill of unscrewing the cork and hearing the characteristic “plop”, smelling the cork, and tasting the wine. Others may know cork from the soles of their sandals or flooring, but cork is also used as an ecological building

Cork and Portugal go hand in hand. In Portugal, trade and industrial processing developed and specialized since the 18th century. In Catalunya in Spain, there are also certain industrial hubs specialized in producing bottle stoppers for champagne, and in France and Italy, particularly on Sardinia, where there are remnants of cork oak forests, there will be some degree of harvest and processing. Portugal, being the country with the richest concentrations of cork oak, has naturally developed into the main place for the global cork market, receiving raw cork from all over the western Mediterranean. The socio-cultural traditions linked to cork are inextricably linked to the uses of the material, but also to the landscape itself. The montado as a cultural landscape is very multi-faceted and has

Left: Cork appears in multiple forms. Photo credit: Irene Holm Sørensen. Rights are reserved.

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been the scenery for agri-silvo-pastoral traditions for centuries. This means that there has been a use of all the resources the cork oak woodlands have offered, such as timber for building and making charcoal, grasslands for keeping livestock, and habitats for wild game and in some cases, endangered animals and plants. Many people might know the Iberian black footed pig breed residing in the Iberian Peninsula. During winter, the pig feeds off of the acorns from the oak trees, yielding a particularly flavourful meat. Olive groves and wine fields are other characteristic features in the southern Portuguese landscape, which attracts s tourists interested in the local and regional foods and the cultural history.

What is happening to Portugal’s cork oak forests and why is it important to protect them? For centuries, the use of the montado varied in intensity, and some practices have been given up whilst other have emerged. Particularly since the increase of modern agricultural methods and population trends in the 1950s, the woodlands experienced a polarisation between land abandonment and intensification of commodities, which have been profitable, supported by liberal market forces. Through to today, intensive cattle rearing often clashes

with attempts to regenerate populations of cork oak, which are under stress from heavy trampling and soil compactisation. Meanwhile, changes in climate are adding stress to the montado because of the increases in drought, hampering the rejuvenation of oak trees and increasing the risk of wildfires. What researchers and the industry are now working on is finding a way to make the montado profitable for more than only a few commodities. On some estates there are experiments going on to integrate elements from permaculture and regenerative agriculture in order to improve soil properties, especially focusing on water storing capacity. The montado is a unique ecosystem where humans and nature have co-existed for many years, and it is necessary to apply the correct balance of care, let-be, and extraction to sustain the landscape for the future.

Below: Cork oak woodlands or montado in southern Portugal. Photo credit: José Muñoz-Rojas. This was published in the following open-access article via Frontiers under the CC BY license: Sørensen IH, Torralba M, Quintas-Soriano C, Muñoz-Rojas J and Plieninger T (2021) Linking Cork to Cork Oak Landscapes: Mapping the Value Chain of Cork Production in Portugal. Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Final thoughts Around the world, unique landscapes provide very specific and highly valorized food products. Landscape products are embedded in strong social-ecological relationships between local communities, global consumers and production environments. The montado is a potential system of high nature and social value, providing vital ecosystem services and conserving the biodiversity of the area. It is a system that results from a high diversity in vegetation, fauna and land cover, as well as a particular balance between forestry and grazing. The characteristics of the resulting landscapes all co-exist within the limited environmental conditions of the Mediterranean region. These days, it is essential to sustainably manage these cultural landscapes while maintaining a social-ecological balance. Irene Holm Sørensen now continues to study how to promote the improved management of the montado as a multifunctional ecosystem, reconciling resources use with conservation interests. Much more is needed to fully support management solution that require her type of research to continue.

Bio Irene Holm Sørensen is a PhD candidate at the Universities of Kassel (Germany) and Copenhagen (Denmark). She has a background in landscape planning and nature management, as well as in ethnobotany. Her current research focuses on how products from cultural landscapes can provide incitement for sustainable management practices that help preserving the biocultural diversity of these landscapes. Within our research group, we do not only produce scientific work, but we have also engaged with outreach. We have created a blog and an Instagram account where we make our research available and easily readable in a non-academic language.

Links Medium: https://medium.com/people-nature-landscapes Instagram: @people.nature.landscapes Project: https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/landscape-chains/project/

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Seeing the sustainable value of wetlands Written by Glenn Molina

Wetlands are natural settings where water completely covers the ground,

throughout the year or seasonally. Wetlands can help us adapt to climate change by capturing and storing carbon, which minimizes greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, as well as offering resilience to threats like flooding, storm surge, and coastal inundation. Changes in temperature, as well as the timing and amount of precipitation, are projected to have an impact on wetlands as a result of climate change. Thomas Skou Grindsted investigates how dynamics like climate change relate to public, political, and scientific discourse. According to him, nature is social, and there is no vantage point from which we can study natural processes without considering social influences. Over the years, he has been studying local responses to socionatural transitions in a Nature Park in Denmark’s Amosen basin and water system, described in our interview.

Below: Wetlands. Source - Sofie Cold-Ravnkilde. Rights are reserved.

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Q & A: Thomas Skou Grindsted Tell us about your political ecology background and how social and environmental factors are combined in this field. I am a geographer that comes from critical interventions in urban political ecology, particularly drawing from a social nature approach - which means that nature is social and there is no position from which we can examine natural processes separately from social factors. Anthropogenic climate change is a process that socializes nature and involves a more serious examination of “humanity” as a driving force. I study the multiple ways in which concepts like natural and climate change “dynamics” are deployed in public, political and scientific discourse.

“Denmark is a highly intensified country with different forms of manipulated landscapes... the landcover’s climate impact has changed dramatically during the past century.”

Currently, I am exploring both their historical, cultural, and scientific origins, as well as adaption and mitigation efforts in geography education, urban planning and beyond. I draw inspiration from geography, environmental history and political ecology. My research into the human dimensions of global climate change can be seen as a critical intervention in the social responses and policies involved in landscape transformation. Currently, I research local responses to socio-natural transformations in a Nature Park, located in the Åmosen basin and water system in Denmark.

In recent years, why have you been studying the Danish Nature Park Åmosen? Denmark is a highly intensified country with different forms of manipulated landscapes, and the landcover’s climate impact has changed dramatically during the past century. Until the middle of the 1800 century bogs, peat, and wetlands, occupied 20-25% of the land. Today it covers less than 1%. The restoration of peatlands and wetlands worldwide is important to mitigate climate change. The scientific understanding of climate change, biodiversity Right: Water boat recreational activities at a wetland. Source - Friluftsrådet. Rights are reserved. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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degradation, the function of wetland as carbon sinks and so forth, become distilled into international policy frameworks, such as the EU Common Agricultural Policy and EU biodiversity Strategy but local responses in such areas may not resonate with climate or biodiversity agendas produced at national or international scales. While the EU and national policies recognize the need for the restoration of bogs, peat, and wetlands to mitigate the effects from global environmental change, local communities may embrace them, oppose them, or even create conflicts between local stakeholders. In Denmark, one of the core debates in re-naturalizing nature has revolved around the political construction of nature parks during the past 20 years. The critique of them has been that nature parks are essentially a rough drawing on a map with little or no impact on conservation or the restoration of nature.

Spanning 8000 hectares, the Danish Nature Park Åmosen is one of Denmark’s biggest wetland systems, hosting carbon dense soils. This is the largest bog and peatland on the Isle of Zealand, the island in which Copenhagen is located. At the same time, the area hosts some of the best archaeological remains from around 8000BC in northern Europe, preserved by wetlands.

What is environmental blindness and how does it apply to wetlands? Environmental blindness is a concept that relates to inattentional blindness which is sometimes describes when individuals fail to pay attention towards what is in front of them. Also, plant blindness arises when individuals do not at all see, know, or pay attention to plants in their own environment.

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In this context, I describe localized environmental blindness as the inability to notice the climate impact of land transformation in one’s own environment as far as locals are concerned. Meanwhile, impartial environmental blindness describes when tourists see nothing but the beauty in the former wetland. In Åmosen’s Nature Park, the area of the wetland sank 1-2.5 meters in some areas, several landowners report, mainly because of the agricultural process of peat-cutting for Carlsberg beer production and drainage. In any case, the peat was burned, causing carbon emissions to be released into the atmosphere. Farmers are aware of the value of their carbon dense soils. Their strategic responses to carbon dense soils could raise the value of their land further, and local strategies around possible compensation models evolve, if restored. Yet, after doing interviews with 70 tourists and local citizens in the Nature Park, tourists reported only seeing beauty while looking over the landscape of the former wetland. Thus, we have found a kind of collective blindness towards the climate mitigation potential of the area.

“..tourists reported only seeing beauty while looking over the landscape of the former wetland. Thus, we have found a kind of collective blindness towards the climate mitigation potential of the area.” Below: Horseriding - a type of outdoor recreational activity, popular with tourists. Source - Friluftsrådet. Rights are reserved.

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What can be done in nature tourism and outreach to gain more visibility for the environment? Although we continue to need research the physical and biological aspects of climate change in various contexts and scales, social considerations are needed to understand and challenge different national and local responses to wetlands policies. Local interests are diverse among landowners, tourism, agriculture, forestry, and hunting, but blindness about these carbon sinks will not help the democratic debate over what needs to be preserved or restored. The change should involve different parties, politicians, landowners, and many others to motivate

action. I would strongly advocate that we learn about the landscapes we inhabit. I could also imagine nature parks around the world took upon their shoulders to develop climate trails and experiences in their developments. Art, movies, poetry, and the like could play a much bigger role in embracing environmental knowledge where there are blind spots. Formal or informal education could also be a starting point to gain more visibility on the environment. Bottom up processes and a new economy to landowners are also needed to accompany desired landscape changes.

Final thoughts Globalization and industrial development will always be taking place in these times, but we still need to understand the richness and the value of the environment we live in. Showing the antiquity of the land and its transformations could cure environmental blindness through tourism destinations, exhibitions, or recreational activities in nautre. That is why protecting and restoring wetlands could be a climate and biodiversity hack. While it is a key challenge to unify local and national responses, we live on the same planet and saving it with one wetland and peatland at a time should be achievable. Appropriate education, whether formal or informal, can offer different lenses to different people that show the value of carbon sinks and how they can slow down climate change. With this, collective effort is needed to be able to shape more sustainable landscapes in the future.

Bio Thomas Skou Grindsted is an Associate Professor of geography and planning at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research focuses on urban political ecology, and he studies the multiple ways in which conceptions of climate change is deployed in public, political and scientific discourse. Particularly he focuses on the knowledge base, upon which different parties, planners and geographers shape cities and landscapes of tomorrow. Furthermore, his research aims to foster dialogue on sustainable urban planning models. This research is funded by the Nordea Foundation.

Links Academic profile: forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/tskoug

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Microevolution can guide conservation efforts Written by Heidi Schmelzer

The mangrove rivulus fish is native to mangrove forests in Florida, the

Caribbean, and Central America. Most individuals in this species are self-fertilizing hermaphrodites, allowing them to reproduce on their own. Because of this quality, and their tolerance to a wide range of environmental conditions, rivulus is an important species in researching genetics, ecology, and evolution. One question that studying rivulus helps answer is how species adjust in harshly changing environmental conditions. Mangrove forests in which this fish lives are located in saltwater or brackish water in coastal intertidal zones. The forests experience changing tide levels as well as have general susceptibility to changing environmental conditions such as salinity, temperature, and precipitation. Mangrove forests are heavily impacted by climate change and are a major focus for conservation efforts. As the rivulus is mostly composed of hermaphrodites and after many generation of self-fertilization, offspring are nearly genetically identical to their parents. This fish makes the perfect system to study how changing environmental conditions in mangrove forests affect individual traits within species that live in this habitat. Anthony Snead, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alabama studies the mangrove rivulus fish in the Early Lab in the Biological Sciences Department. He uses rivulus to study both basic research in microevolution and apply it to broader conservation strategies in the face of climate change.

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Q & A: Anthony Snead Please tell us about your PhD studies at the Earley Lab at the University of Alabama and how you came to enter into this program.

Why does your lab particularly focus on the Rivulus fish inhabiting the mangroves of Central America, the Caribbean, and Florida?

Life in science and academia is a combination of luck, timing, and hard work. Unknowingly, my undergraduate research at Saint Leo University (SLU) and the University of South Florida (USF) made me uniquely qualified for the Earley Lab. In 2012, I began volunteering with an Australian-based organization called Mangrove Watch to map the health of mangrove forests across Tampa Bay, FL. I immediately fell in love with research and mangrove forests. Shortly after, I worked with Dr. William Ellis to identify the environmental drivers of tumor-like growths known as galls on red mangroves. Galls serve as weak points that increase mangrove death during extreme weather events. At USF, I worked with Dr. Thomas Crisman, a well-respected and accomplished wetland ecologist, to quantify the impacts of urban landscapes on invertebrate and fish communities in local ponds.

The mangrove rivulus is a unique system that enables my lab to diversify our research. Hermaphrodites and few males dominate populations. The hermaphrodites generally self-fertilize and form lineages of nearly genetically identical individuals. We use these lineages to isolate the genetic and environmental contributions to an individual’s traits.

Through my projects with Mangrove Watch, Dr. Ellis, and Dr. Crisman, I gained experience within mangrove forests and fish, making me exceptionally suited to collaborate with Dr. Ryan Earley on the mangrove rivulus fish. I have been with the Earley lab for almost four years, and I am now in the final stages of my doctoral degree. While working on my doctorate, I have expanded the previous research program with a new direction dedicated to combining basic and applied research. My basic research focuses on quantifying environmental drivers of microevolution and fish community structure. In contrast, my applied research aims to predict the future of rivulus under climate change to guide effective conservation strategies. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

Rivulus are also extremophiles capable of tolerating a wide range of salinities, oxygen concentrations, and hydrogen sulfide. The fish can even live outside of water for up to 66 days and move across the land! This unique constellation of traits enables my lab to investigate diverse questions from behavioral evolution to the potential for personalized medicine and everything in between.

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I work with rivulus because the habitat they occupy is complex. Mangroves are impacted by climatic factors (e.g., temperature, rainfall) and marine variables (e.g., salinity). To add further complexity, the tides and landscape properties like elevation mediate the impact of these environmental conditions. The habitat changes rapidly across short distances and time, making it the perfect system to explore the effect of temporally variable environmental factors. I focus on rivulus because the small killifish is tolerant of these environmental shifts. I want to know how rivulus survive in this harsh environment and the genes that confer this resilience. If the habitat gets too stressful, the fish irreversible change sex, even though males do not often get the chance to reproduce. Hence, we wonder, why do males even exist in this species? These factors make rivulus ideal to study microevolution and climate change.

As mentioned in your recent publication in Ecological Informatics, what is the effect of climate change on mangrove dependent species? Mangroves are considered foundation species. Foundation species are groups of or individual species essential for their habitat. Foundation species are often primary producers like trees, but they do more than provide food. They are ecosystem engineers, provide structure, and are critical to maintaining habitat integrity. Therefore, conservation managers often design plans to protect the foundation species in hopes of saving the entire community. However, each species, including foundation species, have unique combinations of environmental conditions in which they thrive.

Mangrove forests are projected to expand their range northward under climate change. In my recent publication in Ecological Informatics, I first developed a model to quantify the impact of both climatic and marine variables on rivulus habitat suitability to evaluate if rivulus would respond similarly to mangrove forests. I found that rivulus will not follow mangroves. In fact, rivulus may lose suitable habitat and become more restricted, even though the species is highly tolerant of environmental conditions. I demonstrate that umbrella protection for mangrove trees will not necessarily protect their community members. Therefore, managers should consider all the target species when designing conservation plans. Additionally, I project future habitat suitability under different climate change scenarios to 2050. I show that the rate of climate change is essential even over short timescales, meaning that time is of the essence for climate change action.

“...time is of the essence for climate change action.”

Climate change has and will continue to change these conditions impacting where species can live. Hence, climate change will disintegrate biological communities because species-specific responses drive distributional changes. Above: Mangrove forest field site in 2021 within Florida Keys. © Anthony Snead. All rights reserved. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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Why is it important to do further research on mangrove habitats and biodiversity as the world faces ongoing climate change? Biodiversity is often considered important for its intrinsic value; species have an inherent right to exist. However, biodiversity also supports all life on earth, including humans. Agriculture depends on pollinators like birds, bees, butterflies, and other insects, but agriculture also depends on microbes and invertebrates in the soil to recycle nutrients. While plants provide oxygen, many plants also prevent flooding. Many of our medicines are produced or originate from bacteria, fungi, or plants. As human-induced climate change progresses, we need to continue studying biodiversity to know how to protect it. Mangrove habitats are especially important for both humans and wildlife communities. Mangroves protect coastal communities from storms surge, while the

complex root system limits erosion. Mangroves also store carbon and other nutrients from human activities like agriculture, limiting their release into our oceans. Mangroves serve as nursery habitats for estuarine and marine fishes. In Florida, mangroves provide critical habitat for about 90% of the commercially important fish. Even though mangroves are essential, urbanization is decreasing mangrove area globally, with an estimated 33% already lost due to human activity. Even the mangroves that remain are threatened by coastal squeeze. Coastal squeeze occurs when the sea level rises and forces coastal habitat to migrate upland, but barriers like urbanization limit migration, resulting in habitat loss. By studying these habitats, we can better understand their utility and role within the ecosystem to further protect them and design conservation strategies for mitigating their loss.

Final thoughts We have learned about the importance of mangrove forests both for the ecosystem and human soceity. By studying the mangrove rivulus fish, we can learn how species adjust to changing environments and use this information to guide conservation efforts. While current efforts are aimed at preserving the general habitat, Anthony has discovered that this strategy does not always protect individual species within the habitat. To preserve biodiversity both for its intrinsic value and for the value it brings humans, such as protection from flooding and medicinal properties, we need to study the species at risk due to climate change and apply conservation efforts both individually and to the whole habitat.

Bio Anthony Snead is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alabama in the Biological Sciences Department, applying integrative, interdisciplinary methods to understand the impact of environmental and biotic variables on a mangrove obligate, the mangrove rivulus fish. His work includes both applied projects focused on conservation and basic research in evolutionary biology. He is particularly interested in quantifying microevolution to better predict the future of species under climate change.

Links

Link: anthony-snead.com

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world in pictures

Conservation threats in South & Central America We take a journey through some of the key environmental challenges and

conservation threats faced in South and Central America, while shining a keen lens on the communities in sync with nature who are directly affected.

Socorro island vegetation Pteridum caudatum invading Socorro Island in Mexico. Photo credit:. Ek del Val took the picture. Rights are reserved. Socorro island in Mexico was subject to herbivory from feral sheep for 100 years that devastated the native vegetation. Once sheep were removed, the island was colonized by the aggressive Pteridium caudatum that currently is hampering natural regeneration. Our investigation aims to provide tools to restore ecosystem functioning on the island using native plant species.

Bio Ek del Val studied Biology at UNAM and a Phd in Ecology at Imperial College, UK. Since 2005 she has been a Professor at IIES-UNAM, in Morelia Mexico. She is interested in understanding how anthropogenic activities affect biotic interactions, in particular invasive species and insect pests. She is passionate about science outreach. Horacio Paz studied Biology and a Phd in Ecology at UNAM. Since 2004 he has been a Researcher at IIES-UNAM, in Morelia, Mexico. His research interests are to understand morphophysiological aspects that allow tropical plants to cope with drought and to use this knowledge for ecological restoration. See more at the following page: http://www.iies.unam.mx/laboratorios/interacciones-bioticas-habitats-alterados/ © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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world in pictures

Species at risk of extinction by invasive species. Galápagos petrels in flight © Lip Kee CC-by-sa/2.0.

The photo below shows a pair of Galápagos petrels, a seabird endemic to the Galápagos Islands, affected mainly by invasive mammal predators. The first global review of the research literature undertaken on the impact of invasive species on critically endangered species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List shows that a small proportion of species globally are impacted, but not evenly distributed among the different taxonomic groups. The majority of species impacted are terrestrial vertebrates, mostly on islands by invasive mammal predators (mainly rodents and feral cat), although it is birds that face the highest risk of extinction, with almost half of critically endangered birds on islands affected. Amphibians is the next group at risk of extinction by invasive species, threatened by the chytrid fungal pathogen, mainly in Central America.

Bio

Manuel-Angel Dueñas is currently a visiting scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), based in Oxfordshire, UK. His research focuses on biological invasions as one of the drivers of global biodiversity loss – using a scientific evidence-based approach. Find out more at the webpage: Dr. Manuel Angel Dueñas | UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (ceh.ac.uk) © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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world in pictures

Deforestation by logging in Peru Deforestation caused by timer logging, wildfires captured during field visits in the parts of Peruvian Amazon, Peru. © Mr. Alexander Cotrina Sánchez and Dr. Subhajit Bandopadhyay.

To combat massive deforestation and landscape change, the government of Peru created Protected Areas to conserve the Peruvian Amazon and maintain floral diversity, and sustainable environmental services. Despite several measures taken to promote the conservation of the Peruvian Amazon, our 20 years of observation shows that the Protected Areas experienced losses at lower rates than unprotected forests. However, the trends of forest loss in the Protected Areas are quite similar to the global deforestation trends. The spatio-temporal transformations are not only limited to the Protected Areas but also in their buffer zones at a much higher scale. Although the Protected Areas are under surveillance, timber logging remains the most important cause of the accelerated deforestation followed by cropland extension.

Our projection model illustrates an increasing trend of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon in the near future in the form of habitat fragmentation that requires very urgent attention.

Bio

Dr. Subhajit Bandopadhyay is a remote sensing scientist dedicated to research in the domain of carbon cycle, forest loss, agriculture and climate change. Dr. Bandopadhyay is currently working at the University of Southampton, UK. In 2019, he was awarded with Iwanowska fellow and STSM grants to conduct his research at the University of Zurich and German Aerospace Center, Berlin. Find out more via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/subhajitbandopadhyay-41197264/

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world in pictures

Bees at risk in the Amazon Small bee pollinators at risk from Amazon deforestation © Erin J 2018 – 2022 Cristiano Menezes.

The below image shows a stingless bee (Plebeia minima) collecting nectar from the flowers of the açaí palm (Euterpe oleracea). Three quarters of the world’s crops rely on animal pollinators for yield, including many of the fruits and vegetables needed for healthy human diets. This includes the açaí palm, the Amazon region’s most important native crop, providing vital income and food security to thousands of rural families in the Brazilian state of Pará. Açaí palm is pollinated by an immense diversity of insects, including bees, flies, wasps, beetles and even ants. For example, this photograph taken under laboratory conditions shows a small sized (4mm in length) stingless bee (Plebeia minima) collecting nectar from the palm’s flowers. However, our recent study published in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment found that visitation by such small-sized bees is highly sensitive to deforestation in the surrounding landscape, due to the limited dispersal abilities of small bees which predominantly nest in surrounding forests. Ongoing deforestation not only risks the conservation of native bee fauna, but also the long-term sustainability of açaí palm production in the Brazilian Amazon.

About

Dr Alistair Campbell is a researcher based at Embrapa Amazônia Oriental in Belém, Brazil, as part of the “Projeto Polinizaçaí” team. He seeks to better integrate pollinator conservation and management in crops to enhance productivity and sustainability. Find out more through the published study: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2021.107777 © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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world in pictures

Native bee pollinators provide the essential ecosystem service of pollination (which involves carrying pollen from a plant’s anthers to its stigma). Pollination can occur when the bees visit flowers, enabling fruit and seed production of many kinds of crops (such as the sunflower; shown on the right) and native plants (and Cactaceae, shown below). We need to enhance conservation strategies to guarantee food sovereignty and well-being for communities.

Bio

Leonardo Galetto is a Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and Researcher at CONICET, Argentina. His team studies socio agroecosystem ecology from a landscape perspective, trying to better integrate the practices of the different social actors with the functionality of the biodiversity and improve conservation and food production.

Find out more on Researchgate: www.researchgate.net/profile/ Leonardo_Galetto

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world in pictures

Subsistence living at Dry Chaco

The above photo was taken on a trip taken by the University of Buenos Aires. The aim was to provide indigenous communities with tools for the legal defense of their territories. Copyright: Vallejos Maria. Agricultural expansion in the South American Dry Chaco takes place on lands historically inhabited by indigenous communities, who practice a subsistence economy, including hunt and gathering. In the last decades, new capitalized actors were expanded in a context characterized by legal insecurity and weakness of the enforcement authorities. The advancement of land-intensive systems, poorly adapted to local socio-ecological conditions and heterogeneity is not only intensifying environmental degradation but also causing the communities expulsion, feeding back the poverty traps in which these people is involved. Despite existing laws that promote the conservation of native forests, illegal deforestation and logging were detected. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

The future of the Dry Chaco forests, the permanence indigenous people in their territories, and their coexistence with the model based on agribusiness are still in debate. It is essential to design systems that consider not only the conservation of biodiversity, but also sociodiversity as an important aspect.

Bio

Vallejos Maria’s work is based on the sustainable management of ecosystems using remote sensing tools. She focuses on the problems associated with agricultural expansion and land use changes. Find out more at the following site: sites.google.com/agro.uba.ar/maria-vallejos p35

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The Appalachian Mountain region of the eastern United States is a global biodiversity hotspot for amphibians and contains many high elevationendemic woodland salamanders (genus Plethodon). In mountainous regions, many wildlife species are responding to increasing temperatures by shifting their distributions to higher elevations. Unfortunately, these high elevation salamanders are already at the mountaintops and have nowhere to go. Our research suggests the majority of potential habitat for two of these species, the Cow Knob Salamander (Plethodon punctatus) and Cheat Mountain Salamander (Plethodon nettingi), will disappear by the end of the century due to climate change.

About

Donald Brown is a research assistant professor with West Virginia University and the U.S. Forest Service Northern Research Station. He and his graduate students conduct research to assist with conservation of wildlife populations and communities under changing environmental and management conditions.

Contact

Website: https://brown.davis.wvu.edu/

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Sustainability trade-off Sustainability trade-off graph (below) Background image: In the Public Domain by NASA. Data and overlying graphics: created by Lucia Tamburino. It is often argued that over-consumption and inequality, not population, are the true causes of the current overshoot of planetary boundaries: through a consumption reduction in rich countries and through a fair resource distribution, humanity could become environmentally sustainable. Nevertheless, a quantitative analysis to prove this idea was never done. To prove it, we estimated the potential eco-balance, namely the eco-balance of a hypothetical world where resources are equally distributed and individual impacts are reduced to τ, an empirically determined threshold corresponding to an acceptable level of human development. Results show that even under this scenario, the global eco- balance, albeit improved, would stay negative.

About

Lucia Tamburino has a background in Mathematics and Natural Sciences. She holds a PhD in Forest Ecology, has a post-doctoral research experience at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and is currently a researcher at IGDORE. Population-resource dynamics are her main research interest.

Contact

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Deforestation and inappropriate forest management practices are key causes of soil erosion. In the northern part of Iran, the reduction of forestland cover, due to the expansion of arable land and intensive cultivation, population growth, and technological development, has led to soil degradation in large areas. To present a new method, Misagh Parhizkar made some striking discoveries about how Hydromulch affects rill erosion, and its potential as a technique for rill erosion control. Hydromulching involves spraying a particular mix of liquid to prevent soil erosion. The below image shows “deforested hillslopes” in a forestland of Guilan province (Northern Iran), where there is a very high susceptibility to rill erosion and great potential for Hydromulch to help.

About

Misagh Parhizkar is a Dr of Soil physics and conservation graduated from the Guilan University of Iran. One of his honors is the brilliant talent of Guilan University in undergraduate and graduate courses and also his selection as top doctoral researcher of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, in 2020. In addition, he was selected as one of Iran’s elites in 2020. His research focuses on soil conservation techniques, especially the control of rill erosion and the reduction of soil detachment capacity in forestlands.

Contact

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photography

Creating colorful imagery from crystallized chemicals written by Pamela Policarpio

We can view nature around us as a form of art, whether it be majestic

mountain ranges, the colorful diversity of flowers, and the blue shades of ocean water. When we see the picturesque varieties of nature around us, we cannot help but grab our camera to capture that moment. Karl Gaff must have felt the same when he saw the visually stunning formations that are only visible from the microscope. Karl is a scientific photographic artist and has a degree in Physical and Life Sciences. His passion for science and photography led him to discover the colorful spectacles that can be formed from crystallized chemicals. Inside Karl’s laboratory, through the lens of his microscope and camera, a fusion of art and science is beautifully interwoven to make art like no one has seen before.

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Q & A: Karl Gaff Please tell us about your university degrees and how you became a scientific photographic artist. The first degree that I undertook was called the BSc Physics & Life Sciences. This degree cultivated a knowledge of the biological, chemical and physical sciences with emphasis on biological systems. Having grown up with a deep-rooted fascination of science, it greatly enhanced my appreciation of the mystery and awe of the tapestry of nature. I then took the degree called BSc Physics & Physics Technology which explored the fundamental operations of scientific instrumentation from the point of view of the electronics and the physics at work. To give an example, one module of the course explored the design of ground and space-based imaging platforms fitted with spectroscopic instruments, their basic electronic instrumentation, digital image sensors, advanced optics and electromagnetic theory of light.

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In combination with other modules such as thermodynamics, astronomy, etc you would see how all of the information is woven together to give a big picture of our world. This degree as you can imagine, further helped to flourish my curiosity for science and technology. Finally, I took an MSc Imaging & Microscopy through which I gained specialist experience in the operation of a wide range of microscopes. At the same time, I began funding my own imaging laboratory at home, building microscopes and macro imaging setups and this is where I do all of my photographic explorations that you see on my website and social media.

How has growing up in Dublin influenced you and your works? Living on the suburbs of Dublin, with one foot in the city and the other in the countryside, there are numerous botanical gardens and wild life ponds a short distance away where I enjoy collecting

samples in. Even the smallest of ponds contains a fascinating biodiversity of flora and fauna with which you can observe and document through the microscope. The Wicklow mountains is just a short drive away which hosts a nature reserve and is a botanical haven of wild flowers, fungi, and bryophytes. The bark of the trees are cloaked with mosses and lichens waiting to be photographed, not to mention the ferns, fungi and host of creatures that inhabit the forest floor and the river that meanders beneath the canopy. During the winter-time when I am limited for samples, I can work on researching new chemical recipes and creating beautiful artworks.

“I began funding my own imaging laboratory at home, building microscopes and macro imaging set ups...”

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Tell us about how you do your chemical work, gently heated from beneath. Once the water has completely evaporated and a thin film has grown, and what this reveals about the process of the sample is mounted on the microscope stage. crystallization.

The microscope is configured for cross polarised All substances are made up of molecules. A molecule light. The addition of a wave plate in the optical path converts phase differences within the light is a constellation of atoms and they come In many different sizes and shapes. Atoms may have a positive field into different colours which depend on the thickness as well as the orientation of the crystal or charge, a negative charge or they may be neutral. When linked together into molecules, different regions its molecules at each point. In other words, nature chooses the colour palette depending on the of the molecules may possess differing amounts of charge. So, depending on the size, shape and charge physics and chemistry of the sample and setup. distribution, molecules can link together to create an There is no artificial colouring applied to any of infinite array of crystalline patterns. my imagery or digital manipulation. Most of the imagery I make are of mixtures of chemicals. By To make pictures of chemicals, the chemicals are altering the ratios of each compound, it is possible dissolved in a solvent, such as water or alcohol. for nature to come up with wildly different patterns. The solution is smeared onto a glass slide and

Final thoughts

Each month, I have printed and framed to a very high quality, my most favourite works which I sometimes use to carry out science-art exhibitions.

Karl’s interest in crystallography and photography led him to discover a whole new world under his microscope. We have seen how Karl’s idea of altering the ratios of each compound allowed him to create colorful photographs. Another fascinating discovery is how nature chooses a specific color palette through a particular crystallization process. It is exciting to think of the endless possibilities there are to discover even more natural patterns and forms that waiting to be seen and captured through Karl’s microscope and camera. Keep up with Karl’s scientific photography on his website and Instagram account to see how nature will continue to surprise and astound us.

Bio Karl Gaff is a technical officer in the School of Physics, Clinical & Optometric Sciences at TU Dublin. In his free time, he is a scientific photographic artist who works from his home laboratory creating visually stunning photography of flowers, microscopic lifeforms and photographic artworks of chemicals that he cooks up in his laboratory, chemicals that take on the appearance of botanical-like patterns.

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environmental awareness

Solving water scarcity with art and science By Heidi Schmelzer Before the 1930’s, the area surrounding the Rio Grande river on the border of the United States and Mexico was filled with wetlands and riverside forests. Canals were built along the river to allow for the division of water between the United States and Mexico. While this system allowed for sharing of important water resources, it destroyed the surrounding habitat. In the face of climate change and further drought in the area, communities are looking into how to better utilize our resources and ensure water availability in the desert environment. The Center for Environmental Resource Management (CERM) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) aims to address environmental health and water resources. One project includes restoring a small section near the river back to the native wetlands environment it once had. Somos Agua/ We Are Water is another group that aims to address water scarcity in the Paso del Norte Region. It uses an interdisciplinary approach combining arts and sciences to understand connections to the environment, facilitate community engagement, and ensure all living beings, humans, animals, and plants, have equal access to water in the area. We speak with two collaborators on these projects about the interdisciplinary approach and the importance of their work. Sandra Paola López Ramírez is an artist, cultural organizer, and Dr. Alex Mayer, Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of CERM. Both are located at The University of Texas at El Paso and collaborate in Somos Agua/ We Are Water.

Above: Somos Agua/We Are Water collaborators S. Paola López Ramírez and Melissa Melpignano performing at the Río Bosque Wetlands Park in April 2022. Photo credit - Federico Villalba (Paola and Melissa dancing) . © Somos Agua/We Are Water © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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Q & A: Paola and Alex As a community organizer at The University of Texas at El Paso, how do you incorporate your arts and dance experience? [Paola] As a performance activist, I have worked to radically integrate my interdisciplinary dancemaking with my community organizing for over a decade. I am passionate about democratizing the creative process and reigniting the creativity inherent in all human beings. In my work, the activity of making a dance or performance is the organizing activity. I create culture to organize community and organize community in the process of culture production— an activity that a mentor of mine describes as cultural organizing. In our consumer capitalist society, cultural expression— our songs, dances, poems, stories— have become commodified to such an extent that most of us have become passive consumers of culture. I want people to remember that culture is not something static we are born into, but rather a complex, dynamic, living thing that we are actively and continuously co-creating. Using performance both as an organizing tool and as the result of the organizing itself, enables me to create spaces where people can rehearse their creativity while creating new ways to relate to themselves, each other, and the environment. In my current position at The University of Texas at El Paso, I create these cultural organizing activities out of my home at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, a vibrant © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

and radical space committed to making contemporary interdisciplinary art practices accessible and relevant in our border community. The robust support I get from the Rubin allows me to make the work more visible and magnify the impact of each project I develop. Tell us about why the project Somos Agua/We Are Water was founded and how you merge art and science collaboratively. [Paola] Founded in 2020, Somos Agua/We Are Water brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists and activists at The University of Texas at El Paso who are interested in finding innovative ways to solve water scarcity issues in our region. We all came together from a variety of fields and understandings about water with a desire to have a designated research space that was artist-led. Nurtured by a growing collaboration between the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts and the Center for

Above: Participants are brought through the park during a community workshop in February 2022. Photo credit: Jess Tolbert (participants walking through the park. © Somos Agua/We Are Water p46

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environmental awareness

Environmental Resource Management (CERM), Somos Agua offers an opportunity for us to learn from each other while generating shared understandings, having difficult conversations and creating new ways of moving forward. For our work to be truly collaborative, the how we do this is being constantly recreated according to the needs and desires of our members. For example, a handful of us are working on a multi-year intervention at the Río Bosque Wetlands Park that aims to reconnect people to land and water while we learn about the Río Grande valley environment. We are doing this through the activity of creating a performance together in relationship to our students and the broader El Paso community. Through events at the park, we share our research with the public and each other creating ways to integrate sensory experience with scientific research. After each encounter, we document participants’ experiences with gestures, poems, written reflections, or drawings, which are then curated to create the content for the performance that will culminate the first phase of the project.

planting and protecting native vegetation, and providing water to the channel and wetlands. The goal is to approximate the rich mosaic of habitats typical of the Río and its floodplain in pre-colonial days (since around 1600 CE). Today, much of the native vegetation has returned, and the Park is an oasis for wildlife and people next to the channelized Río, which also happens to coincide with the US-Mexico border. The success of the habitat restoration in bringing back birds to the Park is especially remarkablethe Park now hosts more than 200 different bird species over the year, including close to a hundred waterfowl species. What can be done to better manage our precious water resources and wetlands elsewhere in the world? [Alex] I think we need continued advances in science and engineering to understand how to manage our water better. But, I think the big lesson from successful efforts to restore or protect our water is that it takes hard, sustained, collaborative

At CERM, why have you been focusing on the management of Río Bosque Wetlands Park? What impact have you had compared to its condition 100 years ago? [Alex] Before the channelization of the Río GrandeRío Bravo in the mid-1930s, a bend in the river wound through today’s 372-acre Río Bosque Wetland Park. Instead of being confined to a straight, concrete channel, as we see today, the Río used to meander with many complicated loops and would periodically avulse and migrate within in its floodplain. Inside the Park is one of the loops that was cut off when the Río was channelized. The dream to restore this 2-mile, remnant section of the Río began in the mid1970s, but it took another 20 years to begin the restoration. CERM, along with our partners, agreed to manage the restoration activities, including removal of invasive vegetation, Right: Metals students sketch textures of the Bosque after a blind sensory walk through the Park in November 2021. Photo credit: Jess Tolbert (Metal’s students sketching) © Somos Agua/We Are Water.

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political work to convince people and institutions that it is worth it. We are approaching 50 years of work for the Río Bosque and can begin to say that the dream of restoring the habitat is almost there. There is yet work to be done into the future to continue to restore and protect habitats in the Park, especially as the land around the Park continues to be developed. These efforts include carefully maintaining and growing the network of partners that contribute to sustaining the Park. Our arts and sciences collaboration, Somos Agua/We Are Water, is an example of how we want to expand engagement with the community.

Final thoughts

Like elsewhere, our region is not homogeneous. Our arts-sciences collaboration is finding ways to connect to groups in the community who may not have interacted with the Park in the past, and to strengthen our ties with our partners. I think that the arts can play a very important role in solving water problems in that the arts allow us to imagine what others may think are impossible and to approach problem solving in new, creative ways. Finally, as an individual scientist-engineer, I would add that the collaboration is allowing me to see the human connections with the Río ecosystem in new ways, which is critical for advancing my own scientific research.

We have learned that culture and community are important factors in understanding and assessing environment resources and their utilization. Combining art and community organization with the science of ecology and climate change is a fascinating approach to solve water scarcity in drought-prone and desert areas. It facilitates innovation and sharing ideas to find creative solutions to complex modern problems. Involving the community is an important aspect of this program because this hard work of addressing water scarcity requires much political effort and sustained engagement.

About the team

Find out more

Dr. Alex Mayer is Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Center for Environmental Resource Management at University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Mayer’s teaching and research focus on solving water resources problems. Current research topics include impacts of sea level rise on groundwater aquifers, water access in desert cities and underserved populations, and climate change impacts on water availability.

Center for Environmental Resource Management (CERM): https://www.utep.edu/cerm/ Río Bosque Wetland Park: www.utep.edu/cerm/Río-bosque/Ríobosque-home.html Sandra Paola López Ramírez artist: https://www.sandrapaolalopez.com/ Improvisa: http://www.improvisa.org The Rubin Center for the Visual Arts: https://www.utep.edu/rubin/ Somos Agua: https://www.utep.edu/ rubin/community-engaged-practicesin-the-arts1/we-are-water.html

Sandra Paola López Ramírez, MFA, is an interdisciplinary dancemaker, cultural organizer, and mother. Her work radically integrates her creative process and her community organizing efforts creating small and large scale works that activate public spaces, non-traditional and formal performance venues, and natural landscapes. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at El Paso. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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Illustrating drought-tolerant plant’s unique features Written by Heidi Schmelzer

Left: Actual cross-section through Hakea meisneriana leaf. Stained with safranin (picks up lignin in red), and fast green (picks up cellulose in blue-green). Note the orange/red tannin in certain cells that increases drought resistance. Pink ring surrounds two sunken guard cells that control water loss from the leaf. Section here is 500 µm wide. © B. Lamont. All rights reserved.

Hakea is a plant genus that includes about 150 species native to Australia. They grow as shrubs or small trees that can reach up to 6 meters tall. Hakeas have leaves that are flat or circular in cross-section as well as woody fruits where seeds are held that stay intact until there is a fire or the plant dies. These features help support the plants’ tolerance of drought conditions. We speak with Professor Byron Lamont, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Plant Ecology at Curtin University in Western Australia. He researches how plants such as Hakea and other Mediterranean flora are adapted to drought and fire conditions and uses his artistic abilities to illustrate intricate details that allow these plants to thrive in harsh conditions. © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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Q & A: Byron Lamont Why do you focus on the Hakea group of plants? In 1968, I was looking for a botanical topic on which to undertake a possible PhD so I toured the Botanic Garden in Perth, Australia, for inspiration. I marvelled at its collection of Hakeas with their hard, sculptured leaves, beautiful clusters of flowers and shiny, rounded, woody fruits that they retain on the plant until they release their winged seeds in response to fire. This group of plants, with 102 species in southwestern Australia (I have since named a few too), was obviously well adapted to the world’s poorest soils. Here there are the severe summer droughts of a mediterranean/semiarid climate, moderately frequent intense fires, and birds that either pollinate the plants (honeyeaters) or consume their nutritious seeds (cockatoos).

This group was clearly going to satisfy my increasing interest in how the Australian flora has adapted to these severe constraints on survival over many millions of years. I began my research on this archetype genus of the Australian bush the next year. I have now done research on all species of Hakea in southwestern Australia with the help of Dr Philip Groom in the early 1990s who did his PhD with me, and published 95 papers that mention Hakea, the latest, this year (see Links section). Together with my work on equivalent species (all in the Protea family) in South Africa we contributed 10% of the data to a review in Nature (2004) that has now been cited over 7000 times.

“the beautiful symmetry of their structure and kaleidoscope of colors that are nothing short of an aesthetic, uplifting experience.” Left: Paintings of cross-sections of needle leaves of Hakea species. Each painting is about 1 m wide for actual leaf widths of about 2 mm. Clockwise: Hakea meisneriana, H. lehmanniana, H. invaginata. H. sulcata, © B. Lamont. All rigths reserved.

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What became clear from this survey was that Hakea has the toughest and most nutrient-impoverished leaves in the world: they are so hard and unpalatable that they do not wilt and retain their shape even when bone-dry. The clue to these features is in their tissue structure.

How do you combine your scientific knowledge with your artistic abilities to communicate the beauty of these plants? To understand how Hakea leaves manage to be so hard and rigid (the technical word is scleromorphy) it is necessary to wax-embed them, take thin sections with a microtome, stain with special dyes that pick out the different components such as cellulose and lignin, mount them in resin and examine under the light microscope. What one sees takes your breath away because of the beauty and elegance of the arrangement of the tissues that are revealed. I wanted to share what I see under the microscope with my students, others interested in natural history (naturalist clubs, adult-learning courses) and possibly even fellow biologists. I have a strong artistic streak (after finishing my Bachelors in Agricultural Science, I worked for two years in my father’s landscaping business and took music and art lessons again after letting them lapse – I gained a distinction in matriculation art and completed a diploma in recreation that included fine art options).

What are the mathematical principles behind the natural aesthetics of these leaf structures? The hardness of leaves is usually given as dry leaf mass divided by projected leaf area. Informed by my structural studies on Hakea leaves, I gradually realized that leaf thickness has a special part to play in supporting the leaf and increasing its drought and heat tolerance (there is more resistance to water loss and greater ability to spread absorbed heat the thicker the leaf). Also, I could play around with the formula – if I multiplied mass/area by thickness/ thickness. It does not change the value of leaf-mass-area but I have now created two new variables: [mass/(area x thickness)] x thickness = mass/ volume x thickness = dry density x thickness (Witkowski and Lamont 1991).

“Hakea has the toughest and most nutrientimpoverished leaves in the world”

Thus, the secret to why Hakea leaves are the most scleromorphic in the world is that they are both thick and dense. My paintings make this clear – usually only succulent leaves exceed 1 mm thickness– most are wafer thin. In addition, the inner cells have unusually thick cellulose walls while the photosynthetic tissues are supported by girders and wedges of lignified fibres that stop the leaf collapsing if turgor is lost.

So, I thought I could reproduce what I saw as largeformat paintings. This involved taking photos of what I saw under the microscope for reference, reducing 3-ply wood to about 1.2 m square, and covering with white water-based house paint. The tissues are then outlined, the walls of cells are created by dispensing polyfilla via a nozzle and bag used for cake decorating and the new surface covered with white paint. The shape is cut out with a jigsaw. Acrylic paints are now used to highlight the cell walls of the various tissues using a square, 10 mm-wide brush.

Our work showed that some Hakeas spend the entire summer below the wilting point and only recover once the wet season begins again. Hakea invaginata is even more remarkable: because it has grooves (crypts) running down its full length, as the leaf starts to shrink when water is scarce, the crypts seal at their open side and prevent further water loss (Hakea is not unique in that respect such as some cylindrical cacti).

The paintings are finished with several coats of household varnish then mounted on another 3-ply board, separated by wood blocks to give it stability. The backboard is then cut to the outline of the painted section with a jigsaw. Each has taken about 30 hours to complete. A mosaic of four of the eight paintings I have produced accompany this article. Perhaps this is a new type of art: micro-naturalism?

Some Hakea leaves have the same density as hardwood eucalypts! Thus I can use my paintings in lectures to show the remarkable adaptations of these species to their harsh environment and highlight form and function, at the tissue level, as well as show, at the whole leaf level, the beautiful symmetry of their structure and kaleidoscope of colors that are nothing short of an aesthetic, uplifting experience.

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Right: Painting of leaf section of Hakea invaginata, which occurs in semi-arid Australia, as used in teaching to show how the tissues are arranged to minimize water loss yet allow photosynthesis to occur. The leaf is 2 mm wide. © B. Lamont. All rights reserved.

Final thoughts Distinguished Professor Byron Lamont shares the endless beauty of these Hakea plants, whether looking at their leaves in their whole form or through thin-section, as stained samples or as their bare tissue structure. We learned that there are several adaptations that make these plants suited to semi-arid climates: thick leaves and fire-adapted seeds to name a few. By creating largescale paintings of the tissue sections he sees under the microscope, Professor Lamont is able to easily share the intricate details that add to Hakea’s hardiness to their harsh environment and climate. His style of art, which he deems “micronaturalism,” is an effective tool for scientific communication.

Bio Byron Lamont is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Plant Ecology at Curtin University, Western Australia. His expertise is adaptations of Mediterranean floras to fire, poor soils, drought, herbivores, and pollinators. Byron has published 380 articles cited 27,500 times. PhD (1974), DSc (1993), Member of Order of Australia (2010). Since retirement in 2010, Byron has published 70 papers, and a book on the southwestern Australian flora, with his research focusing on the role of fire and climate in the evolution of plants. In 2019 he was placed in the top 0.3% of 7 million science researchers.

Links Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Byron-Lamont Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?hl=en&user=V1Ea0pgAAAAJ 2022 publication about Hakea: doi: 10.1007/s11258-022-01232-x © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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The photograph portrays a tourist in costume posing for an Instagram post (in the evening we ourselves found the picture the tourist took on Instagram). The image was taken in Iceland at Reynisfjara Beach, just outside the town of Vik. It’s a spot that has been made very popular over the years on Instagram. Iceland, as a whole, has been a popular sight on Instagram and the country’s tourist authorities have played a central role in using Instagram and other social media to promote their landscapes, especially after the country’s financial crisis. Yet, the country’s hottest destinations and the national infrastructure have struggled to keep up. Vik, for example, has a population of 750, and yet it receives over a million visitors a year. This is putting tremendous pressure on both human and non-human inhabitants.

About

Phillip Vannini and April Vannini are ethnographers and filmmakers. They share an interest in exploring the meaning of “wild” and “wilderness” and are the authors of Wilderness and Inhabited: Wildness and the Vitality of the Land and the directors of In the Name of Wild and Inhabited. They teach in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Road University and live on Gabriola Island in British Columbia.

Contact

Website: https://www.inthenameofwild.com/

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I Was A Kid is a brand-new multimedia project from author/illustrator/explorer Karen Romano Young. Dedicated to demonstrating pathways into STEAM fields for young people, it shares the stories of STEAM careerists. Find out more about Angelica Patterson -- and the other I Was A Kid profilees -- at iwasakid.com

About

Karen Romano Young is an author, illustrator, science communicator, comics creator, polar explorer, and deep-sea diver. I Was A Kid brings all of these strands together to form a new project in the hope of welcoming new students and their viewpoints to STEAM education and careers.

Contact

Website: www.iwasakid.com

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SciArt for bee research Bee illustration (below)

This SciArt illustration aims to illuminate the importance of bees and their research. It was created to support Dr. Hema Somanathan’s laboratory, which focuses on behavioral and evolutionary ecology at IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India.

About

Aiswarya PS is a physics master’s and biology minor student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, India. She is an avid science communicator and an aspiring illustrator. She aims to work with scientists to help communicate and share their research through the fantastic medium of illustration. She is currently serving as a gravitational wave science communicator at LIGO, India, and head of design at Project Encephalon.

Contact

Email: aiswarya18@iisertvm.ac.in

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Art

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Art

Artist interview

Minimalist elegance with Amy Louise Lee

Amy Louise Lee is an experimental

contemporary artist who is currently immersed in the metal medium. While she does many sketches, the media she uses is mixed, even using sculpting paste and fabrics, channelling a natural curiosity about science and nature. Having spent most of her life in New York City, she has lived all over the world but it is now in New Jersey in the Sourland Mountains, pursuing her artistic practise. She enjoys taken crude, unrefined materials and transforming them into minimalist elegance, embracing the design philosophy of wabi sabi: a world view in Japanese aesthetics based on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. Amy describes her creative process and her aeclectic influences with us here.

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Artist interview

Q & A: Amy Louise Lee How did you become an artist?

What about nature inspires you?

I have always been a creative and curious person, always wanting to explore and understand things, figuring stuff out for myself. I believe this is the true foundation of any artist. As a child, having lived in various countries I realized at a young age the most common language is art, whether through a painting, music or dance, it is universally understood. This allowed me to connect to people without speaking their native language.

Science and nature is my inspiration, being completely fascinated by the smaller details all around us, while one might see a tree, I see the texture and detail of bark on that tree, wanting to learn and understand why the bark is the way it is. I indulge in my outdoor surroundings everyday by keeping my curiosity alive, constantly wanting to learn.

As with most young adults growing up, art is always presented as a poor option to make a living, so I decided to step into the world of Interior Design. I felt it was still a creative field and I could make a nice living designing. What I found was that my true self was always struggling against the limitations of design. I constantly had this nagging feeling that something didn’t connect in my soul.

In addition, taking nature classes or reading books on ‘math in nature’ keeps me intrigued and engaged. I often wish math was taught in schools in a visual way, through nature. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is absolutely fascinating and made no sense when studying it abstractly in school, but

After years and years of struggling to figure out what was wrong, I realized that my authentic self wanted to just make art without the input or limitations Interior Design can present. That’s when the light came on, I needed to follow my own path of creativity. Ever since I began creating and exploring art my entire life has been transformed. I am flooded with ideas and have fully immersed myself into everything art related. This is one hundred percent my path in life and I look forward to seeing where it takes me.

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Artist interview

when I started to learn and see it in nature, it blew me away. This beautiful mathematical sequence shows up everywhere, in sunflowers, pinecones, ferns, nautilus shells. There is so much beauty and chaos in the tiny details, which I am forever trying to immerse myself into, not photographically or realistically, but in spirit, capturing the essence. Art is my way of expressing abstractly what I see, sense and learn through nature: simple with complex humility. I’m quite sure the humble simplicity of the British countryside is at the center of my being and translates itself into my work over and over again.

Tell us about your creative process with metal, texture and paint mediums I typically begin by sketching out ideas in a large sketchbook I keep in close proximity. This leads to thinking about canvas size, which materiality I want to proceed with to communicate the idea. Currently my favorite and most labor intensive material is metal. I take crude industrial metal ingots, melt them down over high heat to a molten state which takes approx 20min per bar. Then I literally throw it against various materials to achieve different tones and textures. Once the metal has cooled and hardened, I am able to start

creating delicate works of art on the canvas. If it’s a painting, then I like to build up the canvas with sculpting paste and fabric to achieve the maximum texture prior to painting the canvas.

“Overall, no matter which process I choose, my wish is to bring the same sense of calm to the observer as they would feel walking through the countryside.”

Somewhere within the painting I like to show a perfectly straight line to emphasize the contrast. Using tiny milk glass beads or burlap is another way I create texture, allowing the tactile nature of the product to be the subject. As a result, the texture placement feels familiar and hopeful. Overall, no matter which process I choose, my wish is to bring the same sense of calm to the observer as they would feel walking through the countryside.

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Have you done any interesting collaborations, or do you have any special plans coming up this year? I’m working on a few different upcoming exhibitions, however I’m most excited about learning AR, Augmented Reality, a technological medium that can make my artwork come alive. Although it’s a different discipline, I love the idea of creating art on top of my existing art, showing more of my personality. For example, having the circles in ‘empowerment’ slowly start to rotate in different directions and speeds so it feels like the inner workings of a machine or something more silly like having my head randomly hover or appear within the work.

The idea of combining both disciplines is extremely exciting and allows for endless possibilities. In addition to learning how to work with a digital medium, I am also in the process of exploring different tactile materials like concrete and wax. I have been experimenting with both independently and look forward to creating and showing interesting shapes and textures. I love the idea of industrial, functional materials and developing a process that allows them to show as delicate abstract works of art.

Final thoughts Amy has always been naturally curious and creative, seeing art as a common language between all, coming from her worldly perspective. Pursuing interior design, she felt something lacking. To release the limitations felt in her career, she followed her own path of creativity, and has been experimenting with her minimalist art ever since. Being curious about science, she has always been learning along the way, such as with the occurrence of Fibonacci sequence, which can be spotted in all kinds of natural forms like pinecones. She is also exploring Augmented Reality (AR) and its potential to be infused with her artworks. Influenced by many aspects of the world, natural forms are Amy’s artistic muse.

Bio Amy was born in England, raised in Germany, yet have spent her adult life living and working in New York City, now resides in the countryside of the Sourland mountains, New Jersey. Creativity and Art is at the center of her life and is a reflection of her enthusiasm for warm, minimalist sophistication, embracing the design philosophy of wabi sabi. When she is not creating art, she is designing interior spaces.

Links Website: https://www.amylouiselee.com Instagram: @amylouiselee_art Email: amy@amylouiselee.com

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Antonio Polidano Vella Antonio Polidano Vella is a cancer research scientist currently undergoing a PhD at the University of Malta; his motherland. In his project he seeks to find a better therapy for a type of Leukaemia called CML. When out of the lab he pursues his main interest - the visual arts, relishing painting in oils, particularly by amalgamating scientific concepts into his art.

Artwork

Hope in Labcoats

(below)

Painted in oil paint on canvas. Inspired by the pandemic, this artwork portrays how imperative the works of scientists and health care workers are, not only for the advancement, but for the mere maintenance of the human race.

Links Website: antoniopolidanovella.com

The science of medicine will be the torch that will guide us out of dark times and with the right cooperation, will help defeat all things which hinder us from living.

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Star Holden Star Holden is a self taught artist based in London with an interest in

capturing natural phenomena and exploring our connection to the cosmos. He uses a combination of digital fabrication methods and traditional techniques to create performative sculptures. Planetesimal is a tactile, dynamic depiction of changing light on the surface of Asteroid 4 Vesta. Shadows emerge and disappear as light moves bringing different textures into definition.

Artwork

Planetesimal (2021)

(below)

Planitesimal imagines witnessing the movement of light and shadow across the Rheasilvia crater as asteroid 4 Vesta silently tumbles through space. It represents a snapshot of the early formation of a planet in our solar system.

Links Website: www.starholden.com

Surface topography data gathered by NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft in 2012 is sculpted into a primitive surface, while hundreds of individual lights hidden within the artworks frame orchestrate shadows revealing millions of years of impact events.

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Mark Noble Mark Noble is an English painter. His works shine a new light on the under-valued

aspects of the world in which we live. Often specialising in landscape paintings and abstract work, Mark infuses his worlds with a melancholic and spiritual beauty. After a difficult time at school (dealing with autism and severe dyslexia) and spending nearly 20 years working in a local plastics factory, Mark Noble set out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. Inspired by the work of Turner, he expresses the mystical, dream-like and sublime, through delicate attention to the commonplace or overlooked. Mark has exhibited paintings across the UK and Europe and has received interest from as far afield as South America. He is currently running art workshops and wants to encourage those who, like him, have creative dreams yet to be fully realized. Mark recently sold work at a major event in London (the OXO Gallery) to raise awareness of Parkinson’s Disease and he is displaying paintings in several other galleries around England. In March 2021, Mark became an ambassador for a charity called ‘Outside In’ – assisting and promote disabled artists.

Artwork Sunset over Somerset (right)

This Turner-esque painting showcases Mark’s ability to capture the sky and sea in all its glory. The glorious coastal sunset depicted in this painting is one you might be able to witness in person if you’re fortunate enough to visit Somerset in the South West of England. This is one of Mark’s finest ‘recycled’ paintings from his ‘Driftwood Collection’ and makes use of wood from a disused mirror!

Links Website: www.marknoble.art

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Ying Kit Chan Ying Kit Chan, a Chinese-American artist, is

currently Professor of Art at the University of Louisville, USA. For over three decades, Chan used his art projects to celebrate the beauty of nature, but also to critique the anthropogenic impact on the environment. He has presented his artwork in over 200 exhibitions in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ecuador, Germany, Korea, Japan, England, Hong Kong, Poland, Taiwan, and Portugal.

Artwork

Not In My Backyard

(below)

The phrase “Not In My Backyard” is a common expression which carries complex meanings. It implicates environmental injustices and identifies environmental issues as social justice issues. Constructed with tree branches and discarded plastic bags, the materials embody the degradation of nature and harmful effects of plastic waste pollution. The round shape may symbolize the garbage patch or the Runit Dome in the Pacific Ocean.

Find out more at: yingkitchan.com

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Written Word

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Written Word poetry

River Liffey, By Ronan Quinn

The days of the chime in the slime are long since gone, so too the floozy in the jacuzzi, But as I stand on your wide open bridge to look down river, I feel as if the squat like Houses are closing in on me. The even more squatter friendly windows and dumpy Doorways attract your green sludge and an undercurrent in a swirl, the keen bike Lovers and the kayaks turning on the tide. Drinkers or the beggars on the Halfpenny approach the grime, I notice the paucity It’s a pity to behold, the stark difference

The boardwalks full of drug addicts and Bridge. There is a stench of traffic as we of trees lining the banks on my right hand. with the sea it flows into, is the river Liffey.

Bio Ronan is an editor, writer, poet and literary translator based in Dublin. He studied for an undergraduate degree in Russian and European History in Bangor University and a Masters in Russian Literary Translation in Trinity College Dublin. Originally a journalist for various publications in Ireland, including The Irish Times, Ronan went on to translate many books from Russian to English. He is currently working for a few Russian translation outlets and writes poetry for online publications both in the United States and Ireland. Find out more at: theoutposteire.com/2022/05/07/the-releasing-by-ronan-quinn

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Written Word book flash

Economics For a Fragile Planet Economics For a Fragile Planet (below)

Economics for a Fragile Planet outlines the policy, business and consumer actions needed now to overcome global environmental risks. The world is facing growing environmental risks from global warming, biodiversity loss, water scarcity and degradation of the marine environment. Meeting these challenges calls for a fresh perspective on our economic relationship with the environment. For too long we have undervalued nature – at our peril. Managing an increasingly “fragile” planet requires new thinking on markets, institutions and governance that decouples wealth creation from environmental degradation. This can only happen if we end the underpricing of nature, foster collective action, accept absolute limits, attain sustainability, and promote inclusivity.

Business as usual is no longer an option actions are needed now by governments, businesses, financial institutions and consumers for better stewardship of the biosphere. Rethinking economies in this way is essential to reducing human ecological impacts and global environmental risks, for the benefit of both current and future generations.

About

Edward B. Barbier is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics, Colorado State University. He is an environmental and resource economist and a highly cited scholar on global environmental and sustainability issues. His latest book is Economics for a Fragile Planet, Cambridge University Press. Find the book here.

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Written Word book flash

Portal

Otherworldly Wonders of Ireland’s Bogs, Wetlands & Eskers

Portal is an immersive visual exploration through the realms of unique flora and fauna within Ireland’s bogs, wetlands and eskers, revealing the hidden gems that have lived and evolved for millennia. Tina Claffey has been exploring these wondrous bogs through the seasons with a macro lens, which captures this enchanted wilderness in its minuteness, seeing beyond what the human eye is capable of.

About the Author

Tina Claffey is an award winning Irish nature photographer with a fascination with the Irish wilderness. She is the author of Tapestry of Light (2017) and Portal (2022) and has been honoured with awards from highly prestigious world competitions including the International Photography Awards, Fine Art Photography, BigPicture, Close-Up Photographer of the Year and IGPOTY Macro competition. She has presented her work on many worldwide online platforms including the Wildlife Habitat Council Online Conference in the US and the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) to promote the importance of the Irish bog wilderness. Link: Portal - Currach Books © NatureVolve digital magazine. All rights reserved.

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Thank you for reading this issue! Another huge thank you to our worldwide community, whether you are a contributor, member or reader. By us coming together, we are helping to unite commonly seperated fields within science and art, while making insights and ideas more accessible to the world. You can receive upcoming free issues by joining our subscription list at naturevolve.com/subscribe Feel free to share the link with others so they can access it for free as well. We want to hear what you think We would love to hear what you thought of this issue, feel free to tag us on Twitter with our handle @naturevolve or message us on naturevolve.com Whether a writer, scientist, student or artist, do you have an interesting idea to share about the natural world or our place on the planet? If so we’d love to hear from you! Let us know by submitting interest at naturevolve.com/submission-form

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NatureVolve issue 11

Articles inside

Solving water scarcity with art and science

Microevolution can guide conservation efforts

Seeing the sustainable value of wetlands

Cork and Cultural Landscapes in the Montado

Struggles in sustaining land resources