Off trail: only for the 1 percent

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Back in the day, when I was a cub reporter in Wyoming I spent quite a bit of time writing about and often visiting Yellowstone National Park. One thing I learned is that the way to get away from crowds is to get out of your car, find a trail, and walk 100 yards. The joke was that Yellowstone had LA-style traffic jams, but the truth is that most of the visitors arrive in July and August and 99 percent of them don’t stray from their cars (quite literally: around 1 percent of the visitors to Yellowstone apply for a backcountry permit).

I found myself thinking of those statistics this weekend in Central Park. Spring finally arrived in full force this weekend, and I have no idea how many people entered the park. Tens of thousands, I’m sure. You can see many of them here and here. But if you wander off the road and away from the grassy areas, you can find a little seclusion. I took the photo above in the northern woods. Central Park provides a little bit of breathing room for the Westerners like myself.

Reporter’s notebook

Deep dive: forest fragments, long-term data and the extinction debt

In 1975 a scientist named Jared Diamond published a paper suggesting that, given the choice, governments should protect one large block of habitat rather than several small pieces, even if the total area is the same. It was an extension of the theory of island biogeography, a then-decade-old idea that biodiversity is a function of habitat size and connectivity. A year later Daniel Simberloff and Lawrence Abele countered with a paper showing that protecting several smaller conservation areas might be more effective if those areas feature a broader range of species. In academic circles it came to be known as the SLOSS debate: single large or several small. With SLOSS on his mind, in 1976, a young ecologist with the World Wildlife Fund named Thomas Lovejoy initiated the most ambitious experiment in the history of tropical ecology.

The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments experiment is still running in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, and I was lucky enough to visit the site with Lovejoy and a small crew as part of an annual expedition over New Year’s Eve (detail: we observed jungle time, so when 2013 officially arrived I was asleep in my hammock, though surrounded by thousands of lively frogs who no doubt called in the New Year with style). The fruits of that trip as well as further reporting can be found in a recent feature (Splinters of the Amazon). But this week I found myself pondering the way that story unfolded, and the questions that raised about investments in long-term data collection. So I decided to go flip through my reporter’s notebook one more time.

When all of this got started, landowners in the Brazilian Amazon were legally required to maintain forest on 50 percent of their land (compared to 80 percent today). Lovejoy imagined working with ranchers to create an experimental landscape where plots of primary forest could be isolated and studied; by varying the size of plots and comparing to intact rainforest, scientists would be able to test fundamental ecological theories in the field. He convinced the National Science Foundation to buy him a plane ticket to Manaus in 1976, and in a matter of hours he sold the idea to the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research. He has been selling the idea ever since, although it has gotten harder, not easier, with time.

The experiment served as a training ground for a generation of tropical ecologists, and it also produced a wealth of papers as the initial wave of changes – local extinctions, biomass shifts, the development of new microclimates and ecosystems along the edges of the plots – swept through the forest. But as so often happens, the experiment has struggled to make the transition from an exciting new experiment to a stable site for long-term monitoring. People often find the latter, in Lovejoy’s words, “kind of boring.”

I’m as guilty as anyone. The National Science Foundation has invested some funds to re-isolate the plots from encroaching forests (the local ranchers gave up their battle against the persistent rainforest long ago). But during my visit I found myself asking Lovejoy why he doesn’t incorporate these secondary forests into the experimental design. From a practical standpoint, it the answer seemed fairly obvious: put your resources into the questions of the day. Scientific interest in secondary forests is only growing as governments seek to manage our increasingly imperfect paradise. But I was also attracted to the pure science, which might yet yield practical knowledge of a different kind, the kind that is steeped in time.

The SLOSS debate wore itself out in relatively short order. The fact is that both sides were right; depending on the situation, one or the other strategy might be better, but more of both is always better. The best policy is might thus be named as many as possible, as large as possible. For convenience and consistency, I will henceforth refer to this idea as AMAPALAP. And in the end, AMAPALAP won out. Conservationists and like-minded politicians realized this long ago, and they have proceeded accordingly. So what’s the purpose of the forest fragments project today?

The answer is in the name. Continue reading