Gryphon CAST Episode 4 Transcript

Michael Lim
The planet is warming and humankind continues to expand into previously untouched natural habitats, threatening plants and animals around the world. While combating climate change is a large and multifaceted problem, it may seem relatively simple to curb human expansion through establishing protected areas. But you know that not all protected areas are created or managed the same? Open your ears and mind, and let's chat about that.

Leonardo Custode
Thanks for having me.

Michael Lim
So how would you describe your research if you spoke to some random person on the street? Maybe what the Norris lab does in general as well.

Leonardo Custode
In general, the Norris lab focuses - while we're an Ecology Lab, which means really focused on how interactions in the natural world affects specific species as well as the environment on a broader scale. For example, Canada Jays is one of our big study species, as well as we do research on cats in urban environments and how they affect other wildlife. For me specifically, I focus on much broader scales than that so things like how our protected areas in Canada (government protected areas as well as protected areas managed by other organizations or individuals) can help protect species diversity. 

Michael Lim
So, considering the relatively narrow scope of other people in the Norris lab, is there reason why you decided to focus on the bigger picture?

Leo Custode
Yeah, so for me personally, Ryan brought this project to me, but it also intrigued me from a research perspective. So just kind of a bit of background on me as a kid, one of my all my favorite memories are going camping with my family, going to different provincial parks, canoeing, swimming in the lakes, all that kind of stuff. So I really like that aspect of it is doing research on those protected areas that I spent so much time in. So, I studied zoology in my undergrad at Guelph but I also minored in statistics. So I have a bit of a background in data analysis and coding from that. And I felt this project gave me a chance to apply those skills to a large data set that's important nationally. 

Michael Lim
You recently published a study titled "Canadian private protected areas are located in regions of higher vertebrate species richness than government protected areas". So in other words, areas managed privately by the Nature Conservancy of Canada or the NCC for short have higher biodiversity compared to those managed by the government or just some random sample plot of land. Can you please describe what biodiversity is and how its measured for our audience? 

Leonardo Custode
Yeah, so in a general sense, biodiversity is just the diversity of living things found in a specific area but also across the globe. So for us, we're focused on Canadian biodiversity. But we also had to limit our search for where data was available. So we focused specifically on terrestrial vertebrate diversity. And that's because even though it's important to study things like invertebrates, as well as marine animals, looking at Marine Protected Areas is almost a different study system and also there's just not a lot of large-scale data on invertebrates across all their taxa. And to measure biodiversity we use something called range maps, which are created or organized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. And so these are maps that are created by experts on individual species. And what they broadly say is, within this range is generally where the species habitat is found. So, when it comes to measuring, quote unquote "number of species on a protected area", what we actually measured is this protected area is found in a location where this species possibly could occur. 

Michael Lim
So, for our listeners, Leo's study was comparing not only who was managing the protected land, (so in this case of the study is the NCC or the Canadian government) but also had the land came under management in the first place? So this included Conservation Agreements. This is the case where someone already owns the land but then certain land use activities are prohibited. Say, you know, developing the land to build certain buildings or via direct acquisition. So the land is either purchased or donated to either the government or the NCC. Do you have anything that you'd like to expand upon that description Leo? 

Leonardo Custode
Conservation Agreements are important to bring up because I don't think they're a mechanism of conservation that is widely known as your standard protected areas. So NCC is one. They're probably the largest organization across Canada that creates and manages Conservation Agreements. But there's also many non-profits across every province that also does the same idea. So the general concept is instead of purchasing land outright from an owner, they manage a portion of property owned by an owner for the purpose of conservation and they limit the use of LM permanently. And this is really great when it comes to things like farmland, ranch lands for example in Alberta, where someone may own a set of land where they want to have cattle grazing but they also would like to protect part of the land but selling that piece of land could cause future problems for the ranch owners. So instead, they partner with someone like NCC and manage that portion of land for the purpose of conservation. 

Michael Lim
Okay, so speaking of different types of areas, your study also highlights there's a large discrepancy in average areas' size between both the NCC and the government. For our listeners who haven't yet had a chance to actually look at the paper. On average, the NCC is overseeing land about 1/3 the size of the University of Guelph while government areas on average are close to about half the city of Guelph. So why do you think there is such a large discrepancy between these two different groups? And what implications do you think there are for the management of these different sized areas? 

Leonardo Custode
Yeah, so the discrepancy in size, first of all, just the amount of resources available from the government. So for example, NCC has less resources than the government in general just for being a non-profit. And while NCC does have more resources available than other smaller conservation organizations, they still are limited in the amount of properties they can acquire or the size of properties they can acquire. Generally, they're looking at first of all, they have to look at properties that are available for purchase, you know, just what's for sale, or what potentially you could reach out to a potential buyer and look if it's for sale for the creation of protected areas. And generally, those giant pieces of land aren't available, as opposed to the government where they have many more resources available and they also can look at things like Crown land, which currently isn't protected. But potentially could be repurposed or re-designated as a protected area. 

Michael Lim
So, speaking of how different animals are classified in terms of how endangered and at risk they are, there are many different categories of use or classification systems to classify species at risk or SAR. Can you explain to our listeners what some of these categories are? For example, what's used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature IUCN, and what they mean? 

Leonardo Custode
Yeah, so the way we classified species at risk wasn't just simply we took IUCN categories for, there's also something called the SARA or the Species at Risk Act, which is what we use in Canada to designate species at risk. And so we've kind of used a combination of both of these to assess species at risk. So yeah, just to give you an idea of the IUCN has seven main categories for species at risk. So there's least concern this is something that under the current assessment, looking at things like current population size of these animals, how their current habitat is affected. So, for example, a species with a very fragmented habitat would be of higher concern than a species where all their habitat is still intact. Then after that you have near threatened, which is a species that could qualify for more extreme categories in the future. Followed by vulnerable which, again, somewhat at least threatened a vulnerable species is something that could potentially in the future be at risk of going extinct based on current trends and population decline, or what's happening to their habitat. Then you have endangered then critically endangered, which is the species that is in imminent danger of going extinct in the wild, followed by extinct in the wild. And then finally, there's extinct. Extinct in the wild, that species is still existing in captivity, and potentially could be reintroduced in the future. Whereas extinct, that species no longer exists. The thing with the IUCN species at risk categories is they are done with their global assessments. But that doesn't always work when you're talking about a specific country like Canada. So an example of why this is important, would be something like the Fowler's toad. This is a species I give as an example of something that globally it's under the least concern category. So, there's not really a threat of this species going extinct globally. But in Canada, the populations live mostly on the edge of Lake Erie and in southern Ontario, and are very much at risk of going extinct. 

Michael Lim
Your study shows that land privately managed by the NCC has the greatest biodiversity at least compared to government and randomly sampled areas. But unlike you had predicted land under conservation agreements have more species richness than that was directly acquired, so either purchased or donated. So why do you think that was? What made this conservation agreement better? 

Leonardo Custode
Yeah, so that was kind of a bit of a surprise for us. But I think when we really started thinking over it, it kind of started making a bit more sense and that's because with a private protected area, so one that the NCC has to purchase. The big restriction there is you have to be able to acquire that land. So you have to have someone who's willing to sell or you have to negotiate a deal for purchase. Whereas with a conservation agreement, there's a bit more flexibility there. So they're able to do things like reach out to landowners, where the owner may not want to give up or sell that portion of land but they may be open to negotiating a way of conserving part of that land. With a conservation agreement you're more focused on a partnership between the land owner and the non-profit. I think the big thing there is it is more of a partnership and like someone may not want to lose access to being able to cross-over a piece of land. For example, if they need to get to the other side of a woodlot to work on their farm or something like that. So it kind of is more of a partnership. Working towards conservation as opposed to unilaterally NCC owns this property and they're going to manage it. 

Michael Lim
So, speaking with how NCCs manage areas where you're setting up the background in your study, you mentioned that there are different focuses between the government and the NCC, when it comes to what they're trying to accomplish. So for example, the government has a way typically other concerns other than just animals like protecting national landmarks. While the NCC has focused primarily on ecological concerns since it was first created in the 1960s. Do you expect the differences between the two in terms of how well they are protected to change as time goes on? 

Leonardo Custode
Yeah, I think we've seen this just when you start looking at more recent protected areas. So instead of just being focused on landmarks, there's also things historically, like how government protected areas would protect ... overprotect certain habitats. And that's not to say overprotection is bad thing. But for example, somewhere like the Rocky Mountains has these vast national parks, which are great, you know, as far as protecting species and those areas but other areas may be underrepresented. So other areas, for example, around the GTA, or southwestern Ontario, are in need of more protection based on how threatened they are by human developments. Or other areas, for example, prairie lands potentially may need more protection because it doesn't have tourists. People want to go visit Banff, it's a spectacularly beautiful place. But that's not to say that protecting species in the Rocky Mountains is more important than protecting species in somewhere that has less of a reputation for drawing in tourists. If you look at the most recent Environment Canada reports, for example, about half of them say that one of their big focuses is targeting large unfragmented pieces of land and that is really important. It's important to get these large and fragmented lands to prevent them from being fragmented. But at the same time, if those lands are currently unfragmented and available, that means they're not under the most imminent threat. And it's important to also consider maybe protecting smaller pieces of land. 

Michael Lim
I'm not sure we actually defined this earlier on? But to help our listeners out, can you explain what fragmentation is and why is it so detrimental when that happens? 

Leonardo Custode
Yeah, I've been mentioning that a lot because my current research actually focuses on protection, habitat connectivity and fragmentation. So the idea of habitat fragmentation is that if you have two pieces of habitat that are of the same size, that doesn't mean that they are equal. So if you have one piece of habitat that is just one chunk of land and there's nothing breaking it up. That is much better for species on that habitat than something that's fragmented. That could be for example, it's split across by highways, there's woodlots between pieces of farms or farmland. It can be split up by any human development, it could be split up by something as simple as a mountain, for example, creates isolated breeding populations. So, if I have a population of 50, that isn't fragmented, well the population is 50. But if I have a population of 50, by two pieces of land that are split by a highway, potentially you could see those two populations be considered a population of 25 and another population of 25 because they're restricted in their ability to breed. It's important to make sure that when we're developing protected areas, while it's important to have species diversity, it's also important to make sure we're protecting in a way that animals can reach other protected areas through corridors or pathways. Allowing them to move between like dispersed between populations. 

Michael Lim
So a limitation like you acknowledged your study and we talked about briefly earlier on, is that it focused primarily on vertebrate species when tackling species richness. So of course, all these species are involved like say, marine ones, you didn't have a chance to look at, or even others saying vertebrate species which of course, there are tons of matter where you are in the world. So one partial explanation that you did not look at that is because there's just a general lack of available range maps. So how do you think this could be improved? And how would that occur? 

Leonardo Custode
I think by kind of by their definition, range maps aren't going to be the most accurate at depicting where a specific species is on a one by one kilometers, scale grid. For example, right? You know, I can't say, "oh, this species is going to exist exactly where I am right now". But the kind of idea of them is they broadly categorize where species potentially could exist. And so I think as far as that goes, they serve that purpose. But for looking at species presence/absence in protected areas, as well as in locations across Canada. I think it is important to start considering potential other data sources or potential other mechanisms for identifying species presence or absence. So ideally, you'd have people go into each protected area in Canada and count all the species they see and do that, I don't know 50 times a year and you know, really get a sense of how many/what species are there. But of course, the resources aren't available for that. So, other potential options are things like using citizen science data. So, either it's an initiative that's through the University of Cornell's ornithology lab that basically tracks so it gets people to report sightings of birds across the world. Instead of only having researchers counting birds. You're having people, just people who are enthusiastic about birds, or just general public reports, sightings of certain species. Now obviously to kind of jump into invertebrates, that's difficult. With invertebrates if I probably walk down the street, there's probably you know, 1000 invertebrates somewhere around there, but I might see a bee fly by right? And so invertebrates is, I'm not quite sure that is the solution to tackling that problem. I think it really starts with starting to allocate more resources and looking into invertebrate species - just even species declines. For example, if we're looking at something like myriapods (so centipedes and millipedes), and this is a paper I was just reading a few days ago. I think there's only 210 of them that have been categorized under IUCN assessments. And I believe that taxa has about 17,000 members that have been identified. So that's about 1% of the 1% of the taxa that has been assessed. And so there's or is that less than 1%. I'm not going to do that math right now. But a very small percentage of that taxa has been assessed. So, I think the first step is really doing more assessments on more invertebrates and trying to increase our understanding of how invertebrates are being affected by biodiversity declines, as well as climate change and things like that. And then from there, potentially leap into having more accurate data sources on invertebrates. There are others. So, there's the GBIF ("Global Biodiversity Information Facility"). I can't remember exactly that stands for but it's another source of large scale biological data sets, and they do have more things on invertebrates including presence/absence data for certain species. So that is a potential data source that I could look at, but just in a general sense, there's a lot more work that needs to be done just learning about it. And where they can be, as well as how they're impacted by protected areas. 

Michael Lim
So I know you touched upon earlier how, just in general, it's a lot harder classifying vertebrates, like even experts would sometimes take a long time to tell one taxa apart from another because they are incredibly similar. But do you think there's also...part of it may just stem from I guess...a poor perception? I guess you could say of invertebrates. Of course, you have like, oh, your, you know, birdwatchers out there or any people who we're really interested in seeing wildlife versus "oh, we could see like, three types of beetles in this forest.” and then people are like “yeah, not that interested". So do you think that's something that should also try to be improved across time? 

Leonardo Custode
Yeah, I think one thing, so I remember like, you know, I've loved animals my whole life. But I remember one thing I that kind of jumped out to me, when I started my undergrad at the University of Guelph was just kind of how interesting invertebrates actually are. I remember you know, you jump in, you're like, Well, I love I love all these. You know, I love cats. I love whatever it is, I love birds I love and those are kind of things you see in a lot more like nature, documentaries and things of that sense. But when you really get into it, invertebrates I almost find are much more interesting because of the variety of them that exists. You know, with comparing a bird and a mammal, for example, you know, they all have hearts, they've got their lungs they've got and they do have unique physiological features between them. But when you're talking about a new invertebrate, you know, you can have two taxa that are just complete like, you know, comparing a sponge to a beetle for example, or those are completely different systems of how they work. So I do think there could be a better job of kind of promoting how interesting invertebrates are, as well as you know, potentially working on citizen science project or getting people involved in maybe if you aren't identifying specific taxa, identifying like, at the species level, identifying broader scale taxa. So, you know, we know this insect is existing in this area or things like that, just kind of broadly improving our database or data sets for invertebrates. 

Michael Lim
Okay, so moving on. I find that I think that most people would think that government should be responsible for overseeing any large areas of land, especially you're trying to protect these animals in a non-fragmented space. But in your study, you suggest that private management through the NCC in this case, has increased biodiversity. So should it be more of a switch towards private management where these more of these collaborations with landowners, should it be primarily just the NCC going forward, should be kept to a similar ratio and is right now between government and non-government bodies? 

Leonardo Custode
I don't think it's a competition of we should have more government protected areas or we should have more private protected areas relative to the number of government protected areas. I would say that there's just a need for conservation in general. So generally, the kind of most recent goal for protected area coverage in Canada was set. I believe it was set in 1982. And that goal was to have 17% of terrestrial lands and 10% of marine lands covered by protected areas. Well, that goes great. A lot of more recent studies have suggested that the goal should be somewhere more to like somewhere more similar to having 30% of terrestrial areas protected by a protected area. The goal should be just to have more conservation. Government protected areas are the ones I think a lot of people would associate with conservation as protected areas. There are also private protected areas that I discussed in this paper, but there's been a push for other different conservation measures so there's something called IPCAs which is Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. And that's been gaining a lot of traction and there's been a lot more of those starting to be created as well as worked on through government funding, as well as through indigenous communities independently organizing those. So that's a very promising potential way to protect land. 

Michael Lim
So what was your favorite part of doing this research project? I know you already have mentioned before your tie in terms of your interest in animals and your ability to apply your statistics background to that kind of work. But was it something that really stood out to you while you're completing the study? 

Leonardo Custode
Yes, so I felt this was rewarding to work on the study because when I started kind of like, "okay, I'm going to do this assessment and you know, kind of we'll see what we discover". And it was rewarding to feel the results of my paper actually kind of showed an impact and also that as far as government protected areas and NCC protected areas go they are doing better than ..... It's kind of comparing if I just threw a bunch of darts on a board and made protected areas there. We can see the government and NCC are both doing a better job of planning and protected areas than just throwing darts at a board. So that was really encouraging to see the positive impacts that both government and NCC protected areas had across. 

Michael Lim
If you go back in time and change one thing by how you carried out your study, what would it be and why? 

Leo Custode
So, I think it's a good question. And I think the big thing would be to see if I could try to apply more information about invertebrates to kind of see how those are impacted. Similarly, it would be interesting to see that, you know, there's just so many taxa, like even just looking at other kingdoms, so looking at plants, looking at fungi, things like that. So it would it be good to include more biodiversity in kind of the large-scale assessment. I still don't know if that was like doable to the same extent with the with the data that's available. But I think if I could change one thing would be to try to include more species than just vertebrates. Because as you mentioned before, I think it is important to start promoting those as important species that we need to conserve. There's also the avenue of looking at other alternatives to government protected areas. So this paper was actually based on a paper by Richard Schuster. He focused on species diversity on indigenous managed lands and showing that those across three countries had similar or higher species diversity than government protected areas. That's just one example of kind of how my paper was an application of that idea. And so potentially, there's other alternatives to government protected areas that we could be looking at. I only looked at NCC but there are a lot of different non-profits across Canada that also create protected areas for the purpose of conservation. So something I am doing in my master's is I reached out to many of them and I'm trying to include their protected areas in my next analysis because while NCC is large and was easy to work with because they cover things across Canada it is important to include even small organizations that manage through protected areas, for example, because those exist, and those should be recognized. 

Michael Lim
I think that is enough questions from me. We have a few from social media. I've picked a few that I thought were pretty interesting. Our first question is, is there a conservation effort story that has really impacted you? And what was special about that animal and or protection strategy? 

Leonardo Custode
Whew. That's a good question. So, one I think of is Ospreys and I mean that the conservation effort strategy for that one was simply not it wasn't just this but identifying a pesticide that was causing harm for Ospreys’ eggshells, as well as like other birds of prey. And so the infamous DDT. And what really stands out to me with that one though, is in my lifetime, I'd never saw an osprey until you know now, I'll go up to a park and I'm going canoeing and I'll see I might see two Ospreys just seeing the that bird come back and feeling like, well, something we can do, even just over the course of my lifetime can make an impact. 

Michael Lim
This question may offend you, but I thought it was too good to not ask. It's often said that humans should not interfere with wild animals as what happens to them as part of a natural way of the world. For example, you might see wildlife documentary filmmakers not stopping a predator hunting a prey animal. In that sense, should we not interfere with endangered species and consider their extinction a natural part of life and or evolution? 

Leonardo Custode
Yes, it's a very interesting question and what I would say so there's kind of two ways I've thought about this question in the past. The first one is, I think this is an argument we've already done. We've already interfered with those animals. So, a lot of conservation initiatives, what we're doing is we're stopping stuff that is caused by by human impacts, whether that's climate change, or it's through over hunting. Whatever it is, it's important for us to consider the fact that we're not stopping natural processes from occurring. We're stopping processes that humans have kind of perpetuated over our existence that have caused these species to decline. On the other side, I think there's a there's a selfish argument for this for humans, and that's that species all over the world are important. Not just for... ecological systems are important for those animals, but also for us. And so if we were to sit back and do nothing that's going to cause long term impacts on humans through the deterioration of natural areas. And so just from a selfish perspective, we should be stepping in right now and trying to prevent biodiversity declines, because it will be helpful for humans. 

Michael Lim
So I think a big problem with a lot of these management strategies is that they're set decades and decades in the future. And although I think humans would like themselves as particularly high functioning, I think we don't do very well with long timescales, anything more than like five years is almost impossible to comprehend for the general person. So what do you say to them to try to get them more motivated to try and engage or support these management practices? 

Leonardo Custode
Well, I think there's no better time than now to step in. So when you look at, for example, the Convention on Biodiversity I believe that was that was signed in 1992. With that goal of 70% coverage? Well, it's basically an exponential curve of how many protected areas were created along the course of that function. So, in the last 10 years, there's been a lot more protected areas created than in the first, you know, 10 years of that convention. But I think of how many potential conservation opportunities were missed during that time period, because we weren't consistently working on increasing protected area coverage. And so what I would say is, there's no better time than now to protect species across Canada. And you don't want to put yourself in a situation where you're sitting there and you're going well you know, if only we'd done this two years ago, this species would still have a lot of habitat. Because it's impossible to reverse certain decisions that are made, if you're creating a new development, it's a lot harder to tear a development down and completely rehabilitate that land than it is to protect that land now. 

Michael Lim
So before we end, do you have any final comment you'd like to make about your work? And if our listeners only take away one thing from my chat today, what do you hope it is? 

Leonardo Custode
I think if there's one thing listeners can take away from my work, it's that it's just how important effective conservation measures are, and also how important it is to think outside the box when it comes to conservation. Government protected areas are great and we should be increasing those but there are other alternatives to helping conserve nature. Some of them that you can more directly impact itself. You know, you can you can petition the government but some of these conservation organizations, you know, they have contact information out there or some of them may focus on local areas in so all across Canada, not just NCC but many smaller ones. So those are potential organizations you could look at reaching out to seeing if they need volunteers, seeing if they need donations and things like that to protect your local area. And I really hope we can keep the good progress we're making to protecting the species in Canada but also improve it further. So, you know, in 10 years, we're not talking about "Oh, if only we protected the species". 

Michael Lim
And so that brings us to the end of today's podcast. A big thanks again to our guests, Leo Custode for joining us today. GryphonCAST is brought to you by your host me, Michael, with editing assistance from Ian Smith. If you're hungry to learn more about different science topics please check out scribe research highlights that's SCRIBE, S-C-R-I-B-E research highlights on the University of Guelph website at uoguelph.ca or you can follow us on social media @UofGCBS.