̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Wildlife

Conservation efforts are bringing species back from the brink

sc604 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 18:30:46 +0000

A major review of over 67,000 animal species has found that while the natural world continues to face a biodiversity crisis, targeted conservation efforts are helping bring many species back from the brink of extinction.

Saving England's chalk streams

ta385 — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

A conference organised by Pembroke College, Cambridge Conservation Initiative and WildFish Conservation has mobilised activists working to save chalk streams - one of the world's rarest habitats - from pollution and over-abstraction.

At least 80% of the world’s most important sites for biodiversity on land currently contain human developments

cg605 — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 07:34:07 +0000

A study has found that infrastructure worldwide is widespread in sites that have been identified as internationally important for biodiversity, and its prevalence is likely to increase.

This is the first ever assessment of the presence of infrastructure in Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs): a global network of thousands of sites recognised internationally as being the world’s most critical areas for wildlife.

Infrastructure is one of the greatest drivers of threats to biodiversity according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It can cause natural habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, increased disturbance or hunting by humans, the spread of invasive species, direct mortality, and can have wider impacts beyond the development site.

Now, researchers from BirdLife International, WWF and the RSPB, in association with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, have conducted an assessment of infrastructure in KBAs, finding that it is widespread and likely to increase. ̽��ֱ��results are published today in Biological Conservation.

“It’s concerning that human developments exist in the vast majority of sites that have been identified as being critical for nature,” said Ash Simkins, a Zoology PhD student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge who led the study.

KBAs are sites that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity. For example, they may contain species that are under a high risk of extinction or are home to species or ecosystems that are found in only a small area worldwide.

Researchers assessed 15,150 KBAs on land and found that 80% contained infrastructure. Multiple combinations of infrastructure types occurred in KBAs with the most common being roads (75%), power lines (37%) and urban areas (37%).

They found that potential future planned infrastructure developments could lead to an additional 2,201 KBAs containing mines (from 754 to 2,955; 292% increase), an additional 1,508 KBAs containing oil and gas infrastructure (from 2,081 to 3,589; 72% increase) and an additional 1,372 KBAs containing power plants (from 233 to 1,605; 589% increase).

Maps of KBAs were intersected with spatial datasets of different types of infrastructure that researchers categorised as transport, dams and reservoirs, extractives (relating to natural resources), energy (power lines and power plants) and urban areas.

Energy and extractives were the only categories for which some global data on potential future planned developments was available.

“We recognise that infrastructure is essential to human development but it’s about building smartly. This means ideally avoiding or otherwise minimising infrastructure in the most important locations for biodiversity. If the infrastructure must be there, then it should be designed to cause as little damage as possible, and the impacts more than compensated for elsewhere,” said Simkins.

Researchers found that countries in South America, (for example 82% of KBAs in Brazil), Sub-Saharan, Central and Southern Africa, and parts of South-east Asia are amongst the areas with the highest proportion of extractive claims, concessions or planned development in their KBA networks. All of the KBAs identified to date in Bangladesh, Kuwait, the Republic of the Congo and Serbia have potential extractive claims, concessions or planned development.

“It’s also concerning to see that in the future, extensive mining and oil and gas related infrastructure is planned to be built in many of the world’s most important sites for biodiversity,” said Simkins.

Some of the technology to tackle the climate crisis, like solar panels and wind turbines, is also dependent on mining for precious metals. “We need smart solutions to the climate crisis whilst avoiding or minimising negative impacts on biodiversity,” said Simkins.

“At the UN biodiversity COP15 meetings in Montreal last year, governments committed to halting human-induced extinctions,” said co-author Dr Stuart Butchart, Chief Scientist at BirdLife International and Honorary Research Fellow at Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “Widespread destruction or degradation of the natural habitats within KBAs could lead to wholesale extinctions, so existing infrastructure in KBAs must be managed to minimise impacts, and further development in these sites has to be avoided as far as possible.”

“Infrastructure underpins our societies, delivering the water we drink, the roads we travel on, and the electricity that powers livelihoods,” said Wendy Elliott, Deputy Leader for Wildlife at WWF. “This study illustrates the crucial importance of ensuring smart infrastructure development that provides social and economic value for all, whilst ensuring positive outcomes for nature. Making this happen will be the challenge of our time, but with the right planning, design and commitment it is well within the realms of possibility.”

Researchers say that infrastructure within a KBA varies in the degree to which it may drive a loss of biodiversity. More research is required to find out the extent to which infrastructure in a particular KBA affects wildlife within the site and what measures are needed to mitigate this.

Reference: A T Simkins et al, A global assessment of the prevalence of current and potential future infrastructure in Key Biodiversity Areas, Biological Conservation, DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.109953

At least 80% of sites identified as being internationally important for biodiversity on land currently contain infrastructure − of which more than 75% contain roads. In the future, more sites that are important for biodiversity could contain powerplants, mines and oil and gas infrastructure

It’s concerning that human developments exist in the vast majority of sites that have been identified as being critical for nature.

Ash Simkins

EduLeite / E+ via Getty Images

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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UK plants flowering a month earlier due to climate change

sc604 — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:08:32 +0000

Using a citizen science database with records going back to the mid-18th century, a research team led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has found that the effects of climate change are causing plants in the UK to flower one month earlier under recent global warming.

̽��ֱ��researchers based their analysis on more than 400,000 observations of 406 plant species from Nature’s Calendar, maintained by the Woodland Trust, and collated the first flowering dates with instrumental temperature measurements.

They found that the average first flowering date from 1987 to 2019 is a full month earlier than the average first flowering date from 1753 to 1986. ̽��ֱ��same period coincides with accelerating global warming caused by human activities. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

While the first spring flowers are always a welcome sight, this earlier flowering can have consequences for the UK’s ecosystems and agriculture. Other species that synchronise their migration or hibernation can be left without the flowers and plants they rely on – a phenomenon known as ecological mismatch – which can lead to biodiversity loss if populations cannot adapt quickly enough.

̽��ֱ��change can also have consequences for farmers and gardeners. If fruit trees, for example, flower early following a mild winter, entire crops can be killed off if the blossoms are then hit by a late frost.

While we can see the effects of climate change through extreme weather events and increasing climate variability, the long-term effects of climate change on ecosystems are more subtle and are therefore difficult to recognise and quantify.

“We can use a wide range of environmental datasets to see how climate change is affecting different species, but most records we have only consider one or a handful of species in a relatively small area,” said Professor Ulf Büntgen from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, the study’s lead author. “To really understand what climate change is doing to our world, we need much larger datasets that look at whole ecosystems over a long period of time.”

̽��ֱ��UK has such a dataset: since the 18th century, observations of seasonal change have been recorded by scientists, naturalists, amateur and professional gardeners, as well as organisations such as the Royal Meteorological Society. In 2000, the Woodland Trust joined forced with the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and collated these records into Nature’s Calendar, which currently has around 3.5 million records going back to 1736.

“Anyone in the UK can submit a record to Nature’s Calendar, by logging their observations of plants and wildlife,” said Büntgen. “It’s an incredibly rich and varied data source, and alongside temperature records, we can use it to quantify how climate change is affecting the functioning of various ecosystem components across the UK.”

For the current study, the researchers used over 400,000 records from Nature’s Calendar to study changes in 406 flowering plant species in the UK, between 1753 and 2019. They used observations of the first flowering date of trees, shrubs, herbs and climbers, in locations from the Channel Islands to Shetland, and from Northern Ireland to Suffolk.

̽��ֱ��researchers classified the observations in various ways: by location, elevation, and whether they were from urban or rural areas. ̽��ֱ��first flowering dates were then compared with monthly climate records.

To better balance the number of observations, the researchers divided the full dataset into records until 1986, and from 1987 onwards. ̽��ֱ��average first flowering advanced by a full month, and is strongly correlated with rising global temperatures.

“ ̽��ֱ��results are truly alarming, because of the ecological risks associated with earlier flowering times,” said Büntgen. “When plants flower too early, a late frost can kill them – a phenomenon that most gardeners will have experienced at some point. But the even bigger risk is ecological mismatch. Plants, insects, birds and other wildlife have co-evolved to a point that they’re synchronised in their development stages. A certain plant flowers, it attracts a particular type of insect, which attracts a particular type of bird, and so on. But if one component responds faster than the others, there’s a risk that they’ll be out of synch, which can lead species to collapse if they can’t adapt quickly enough.”

Büntgen says that if global temperatures continue to increase at their current rate, spring in the UK could eventually start in February. However, many of the species that our forests, gardens and farms rely on could experience serious problems given the rapid pace of change.

“Continued monitoring is necessary to ensure that we better understand the consequences of a changing climate,” said co-author Professor Tim Sparks from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “Contributing records to Nature’s Calendar is an activity that everyone can engage in.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the European Research Council, the Fritz and Elisabeth Schweingruber Foundation, and the Woodland Trust.

Reference:
Ulf Büntgen et al. ‘Plants in the UK flower a month earlier under recent warming.’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2456

Climate change is causing plants in the UK to flower a month earlier on average, which could have profound consequences for wildlife, agriculture and gardeners.

To really understand what climate change is doing to our world, we need much larger datasets that look at whole ecosystems over a long period of time

Ulf Büntgen

Crab apple tree in bloom

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Pangolin trafficking: Iceberg tip of Nigeria's illegal trade revealed

fpjl2 — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 12:59:15 +0000

New findings on Nigerian-linked pangolin seizures suggest that current global estimates for trafficking of the animal are far too small, say researchers.

Why does the kingfisher have blue feathers?

amb206 — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 08:43:53 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

Kingfishers are notoriously shy. But one of the best places to spot them in Cambridge is the Botanic Garden where they perch in the swamp cypresses to fish in the lake.

̽��ֱ��brilliantly bright plumage of the kingfisher looks almost exotic in comparison to the more modest hues of many birds native to Britain. In motion, the kingfisher’s contrasting colours – orange, cyan and blue – produce a startling flash of colour.

Colour in nature is a fascinating topic. Understanding why and how plants and animals produce and employ colour requires researchers to collaborate and share their expertise across different disciplines. Dr Silvia Vignolini (Department of Chemistry) has been working with Professors Jeremy Baumberg (Department of Physics) and Beverley Glover (Department of Plant Sciences) to look at the extraordinarily clever ways in which nature makes spectacular colour effects.

Blue is a favourite colour of people around the world. But the production of intense blue presents challenges to nature. Most vertebrates are unable to produce blue pigment. ̽��ֱ��orange of kingfisher plumage is the product of tiny pigment granules but its cyan and blue feathers contain no pigments. These colours are ‘structural’. They are created by the intricate structural arrangement of a transparent material which, depending on its precise make-up and thickness compared to the tiny wavelength of light, produces a range of colours by ‘incident light’ – in other words light shining on the sample.

Structural colours feature in plants too – particularly in fruit and flowers. In research published in 2012, Vignolini and others revealed that an African plant called the Pollia condensata produces a blue fruit, which produces a strikingly shiny blue fruit. ̽��ֱ��researchers discovered that the Pollia fruit reflects back 30% of the light cast on it. Furthermore, its reflective properties stand the test of time in a remarkable way: a Pollia fruit, locked in a seed drawer at Kew Gardens for 100 years, had lost none of its blueness.

̽��ֱ��way in which plants like the Pollia achieve extraordinarily bright and long-lasting colours offers huge scope for material science. Vignolini says: “Cellulose, which is the main material used by this plant to produce colour, can also be manipulated in vitro to obtain a similar optical effect. By controlling the self-assembly process of cellulose, it is therefore possible to produce bio-mimetic colouration without using any toxic pigment.”

Because structural colours can be so intense, their origin in only transparent materials is hard to imagine. Vignolini uses the example of a soap bubble. “If you start from a perfectly transparent water-soap suspension and you blow a soap bubble, you can observe all the colours of the rainbow. These colours cannot be the results of pigmentation, because the liquid is transparent. Instead, the colours result from creating a very thin layer, just a few hundreds of nanometres thick, of the suspension that interacts with light.” she says.

“A plant or animal cell does something similar. Using simple sugars, it creates a multi-layered nano-structure that optimises the reflection of the blue colour. Understanding these incredibly precise processes is the key to be able to copy and mimic these materials.”

In a paper published in 2011, Dr Bodo Wilts (formerly Cambridge, now ̽��ֱ�� of Fribourg) and colleagues focused on the striking plumage of the kingfisher. They found that the cyan and blue barbs of its feathers contain spongy nanostructures with varying dimensions, causing the light to reflect differently and thus produce the observed set of colours. ̽��ֱ��subtle differences within colours are produced by tiny variations in the structure of the barbs.

Kingfisher feathers reflect light in a way that scientists describe as semi-iridescent. ̽��ֱ��feathers of peacocks and birds of paradise are truly iridescent. Iridescence is produced by the ways in which layers of material are perfectly aligned and repeated periodically to achieve a shimmer effect. Semi-iridescence is produced when the layers are not quite perfectly aligned but slightly disrupted, thus causing a smaller span of iridescent colour.

There’s much more to be discovered about colour in nature. “Researchers are beginning to learn more about birds’ vision. This work will help us to grasp how they see colour and how they respond to it. To unlock the secret of how cellulose or keratin make fabulously bright colour will involve continuing collaborations between biologists, physicists and materials scientists, ” says Vignolini.

̽��ֱ��kingfisher is just one of 100 bird species to be seen in the Botanic Garden which provides an important habitat for birds and other wildlife in the heart of Cambridge. Among them is the increasingly rare song thrush. Mistle thrushes, too, can often be seen in winter atop trees full of mistletoe. ̽��ֱ��Garden also has thriving populations of great and blue tits while flocks of long-tailed tits are often heard as they fly from tree to tree to search for food. Summer visitors regularly include a pair of sparrowhawks and flocks of swifts.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: L is for a creature that has helped archaeologists learn more about the life of people inhabiting the remote and windswept Isle of Oronsay 6,000 years ago.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Kingfisher (Gilberto Pereira); ̽��ֱ��common kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, and its three main feather types: orange feathers at the breast, cyan feathers at the back and blue feathers at the tail (Doekele Stavenga, Jan Tinbergen, Hein Leertouwer, Bodo Wilts); Scanning electron micrographs (SEMs) of sectioned barbs of breast and tail feathers (Doekele Stavenga, Jan Tinbergen, Hein Leertouwer, Bodo Wilts); Close up of a cut vacuole and the surrounding spongy structures (Doekele Stavenga, Jan Tinbergen, Hein Leertouwer, Bodo Wilts).

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, K is for Kingfisher. Look out for them among the swamp cypresses at the Botanic Garden, where the secrets behind their cyan and blue feathers are being studied by an extraordinary collaboration of scientists.

Understanding these incredibly precise processes is the key to be able to copy and mimic these materials

Silvia Vignolini

Fitzwilliam Museum

Detail of Kingfisher, woodblock printed in colour, Kitagawa Utamaro

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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World’s protected natural areas receive eight billion visits a year

fpjl2 — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 19:02:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��world’s national parks and nature reserves receive around eight billion visits every year, according to the first study into the global scale of nature-based tourism in protected areas. ̽��ֱ��paper, by researchers in Cambridge, UK, Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, is the first global-scale attempt to answer the question of how many visits protected areas receive, and what they might be worth in terms of tourist dollars.

̽��ֱ��authors of the study say that this number of visits could generate as much as US$600 billion of tourism expenditure annually - a huge economic benefit which vastly exceeds the less than US$10 billion spent safeguarding these sites each year.

Scientists and conservation experts describe current global expenditure on protected areas as “grossly insufficient”, and have called for greatly increased investment in the maintenance and expansion of protected areas – a move which this study shows would yield substantial economic return – as well as saving incalculably precious natural landscapes and species from destruction.

“It’s fantastic that people visit protected areas so often, and are getting so much from experiencing wild nature – it’s clearly important to people and we should celebrate that,” said lead author Professor Andrew Balmford, from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Zoology.

“These pieces of the world provide us with untold benefits: from stabilising the global climate and regulating water flows to protecting untold numbers of species. Now we’ve shown that through tourism nature reserves contribute in a big way to the global economy – yet many are being degraded through encroachment and illegal harvesting, and some are being lost altogether. It’s time that governments invested properly in protected areas.”

Dr Andrea Manica, a corresponding author also at Cambridge, said these are ballpark estimates based on limited data, so the researchers have been careful not to overstate the case: “These are conservative calculations. Visit rates are likely to be higher than eight billion a year, and there’s no doubt we are talking about hundreds of billions of tourism dollars a year,” he said.

̽��ֱ��attempt to calculate these figures was in part borne from frustration, said Balmford. “We study what people get out of nature, so-called ‘ecosystem services’. While some ecosystem services are difficult to measure – such as cultural or religious benefits – we thought that nature-based recreation would be quite tractable: there’s a market and tangible visits you can count.

“However, when we started to investigate we found no-one had yet pieced the data together. So we got to work trawling for figures ourselves. After a few months we had constructed a database from which we could build our models. It’s limited, but it’s the best there is at the moment,” Balmford said.

̽��ֱ��database consists of visiting figures for 550 sites worldwide, which were then used to build equations that could predict visit rates for a further 140,000 protected areas based on their size, remoteness, national income, and so on.

̽��ֱ��results surprised even seasoned conservation researchers. Nature tourism expert and team member Dr Matt Walpole of the UN’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre calls their cautious estimate of eight billion annual visits an “astonishing figure that illustrates the value people place on experiencing nature”.

Visit rates were highest in North America, where protected areas receive a combined total of over three billion visits a year, and lowest in Africa, where many countries have less than 100,000 protected area visits annually.

̽��ֱ��Golden Gate National Recreation Area near San Francisco had the highest recorded visit rate in the database with an annual average of 13.7m visits, closely followed by the UK’s Lake District and Peak District National Parks, with 10.5m and 10.1m. By contrast, Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park got an annual average during the study period of 148,000 visits.

Team member Dr Jonathan Green, based in Cambridge, points out that it is far from just exotic places and large national parks that contribute to the visitation value of protected areas. “For many people, it’s the nature reserve on their doorstep where they walk the dog every Sunday”. Fowlmere nature reserve, a few miles south of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, receives an average of almost 23,000 visits a year.

By combining regional visit rates with region-specific averages for visitor spending – on everything from entry fees to transport and accommodation – the researchers were able to derive the most complete picture yet of the global economic significance of protected area visitation.

“Our US$600 billion figure for the annual value of protected area tourism is likely to be an underestimate – yet it dwarfs the less than US$10 billion spent annually on safeguarding and managing these areas,” said Dr Robin Naidoo of World Wildlife Fund, another author of the study. “Through previous research, we know that the existing reserve network probably needs three to four times what is currently being spent on it”.

“While that may seem a lot of money, it’s a fraction of the economic benefit we get from protected areas – nature-based tourism is just one part,” said Balmford.

By way of context, he points to the recent announcement by computing giant Apple of record profits of US$18 billion in a single quarter. “Stopping the unfolding extinction crisis is not unaffordable. Three months of Apple profits could go a long way to securing the future of nature. Humanity doesn’t need electronic communication to survive. But we do need the rest of the planet.”

Researchers say that the first study to attempt to gauge global visitation figures for protected areas reveals nature-based tourism has an economic value of hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and call for much greater investment in the conservation of protected areas in line with the values they sustain – both economically and ecologically.

We’ve shown that through tourism nature reserves contribute in a big way to the global economy – yet many are being degraded through encroachment and illegal harvesting

Andrew Balmford

Robin Naidoo

Visitors in Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

Top ten most visited Protected Areas:

Protected Area	Average annual visit numbers
Golden Gate National Recreation Area, US	13.7m
Lake District National Park, UK	10.5m
Peak District National Park, UK	10.1m
Lake Mead National Recreation Area, US	7.7m
North York Moors National Park, UK	7.3m
Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, US	5m
Dartmoor National Park, UK	4.3m
New Forest National Park, UK	4.3m
Grand Canyon National Park, US	4.29m
Cape Cod National Seashore, US	4.1m

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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