Most of population ecology focuses on births and deaths, disregarding the immmigration or emigration of individuals into or out of the population. Spatial ecology takes up the topic of movement and explores how the quality of living conditions for a species varies within its territory. The list of conditions within which a species flourishes is… (read more)
To be clear, Canada has no shortage of major projects. Natural Resources Canada lists 500 of them across the country. What is significant about the latest First Ministers’ meeting is that they discussed a list of projects that would make Canada more self-reliant. Here, I will do a scan of the environmental issues and Indigenous… (read more)
Conservation is a political movement to place value on nature itself. The value of the food, fibre and fuel that we collect from natural systems is self-evident. It is less clear why we should continue relying on nature rather than further controlling and cultivating our sources of organic matter. Conservation biology is particularly focused on… (read more)
The nature conservation treaty signed in 2022 called for a halt to biodiversity loss by 2030 and a restoration of some of the natural quality of the past by 2050. Pretty ambitious language! How will we know if we are making progress towards a world where humans share the planet with our fellow species (and… (read more)
Pollution is a matter of life or death. In 2019, 9 million premature deaths were caused by pollution, an impact similar to tobacco products. Much of this was caused by air pollution, particularly by wood smoke in low and middle income countries. More than a million deaths were caused by water pollution. Ecotoxicology has a… (read more)
Ecologists are known as alarmists. Dealing with things that are irrelevant to daily life and likely to have only long term consequences, we naturally deal in doomsday scenarios to get attention. This is tiresome, if not downright misleading. My last review of what ecology can tell us was 12 years ago. I propose to revisit… (read more)
Robert MacArthur died at the age of 42, leaving a legacy of brilliant theory and cogent observation of nature. In his book on evolutionary ecology, Laurence Mueller credits MacArthur as being one of the founders of the field, an extraordinary achievement for such a short life. The book is part of a series on conceptual… (read more)
On December 20, 2022, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was agreed to by 196 countries. The secretary-general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, called it “a peace pact with nature”. As we have discussed elsewhere on this blog, biodiversity is the variety of life around us and an important key to our happiness. I would… (read more)
Spare a thought for the members of the IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. We have talked about them before in this blog. While their more famous colleaues on the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – garner continuing headlines, the IPBES languish in obscurity despite the detailed… (read more)
Canadians are passionate about the maple leaf. This is curious since, as a plant species, the sugar maple is not representative of the country. In fact, maples, in their various forms, are common throughout the northern hemisphere. So, why Canada? Sugar maples are a common hardwood along the shores of the St. Lawrence River, where… (read more)
