Protecting nature has become a global concern. However, the very idea of nature is problematic. We examined the etymological and semantic diversity of the word used to translate nature in a ...conservation context in 76 of the primary languages of the world to identify the different relationships between humankind and nature. Surprisingly, the number of morphemes (distinct etymological roots) used by 7 billion people was low. Different linguistic superfamilies shared the same etymon across large cultural areas that correlate with the distribution of major religions. However, we found large differences in etymological meanings among these words, echoing the semantic differences and historical ambiguity of the contemporary European concept of nature. The principal current Western meaning of nature in environmental public policy, conservation science, and environmental ethics–that which is not a human artifact–appears to be relatively rare and recent and to contradict the vision of nature in most other cultures, including those of pre‐Christian Europe. To avoid implicit cultural bias and hegemony–and thus to be globally intelligible and effective–it behooves nature conservationists to take into account this semantic diversity when proposing conservation policies and implementing conservation practices.
Cómo Afecta la Diversidad de los Conceptos Humanos de la Naturaleza a la Conservación de la Biodiversidad
Resumen
La protección de la naturaleza se ha vuelto una preocupación a nivel mundial; sin embargo, la misma idea de naturaleza es problemática. Examinamos la diversidad etimológica y semántica de la palabra que se utiliza para traducir la palabra nature en un contexto de conservación en los 76 lenguajes primarios del mundo y así identificar las diferentes relaciones entre la humanidad y la naturaleza. Sorprendentemente, el número de morfemas (raíces etimológicas distintas) usado por siete mil millones de personas fue bajo. Las diferentes superfamilias lingüísticas compartieron etimologías a lo largo de grandes áreas culturales que se correlacionan con la distribución de las religiones más importantes. Sin embargo, encontramos diferencias importantes en los significados etimológicos entre estas palabras, reflejando las diferencias semánticas y la ambigüedad histórica del concepto europeo contemporáneo de naturaleza. El principal significado occidental actual de nature dentro de la política ambiental pública, las ciencias de la conservación y la ética ambiental — aquello que no es un artefacto humano — parece ser relativamente raro y reciente, además de que contradice la visión de la naturaleza que tienen la mayoría de las demás culturas, incluyendo a aquellas de la Europa precristiana. Para evitar el sesgo y la hegemonía cultural que vienen implícitos — y así ser mundialmente entendibles y efectivos — le conviene a los conservacionistas de la naturaleza que consideren esta diversidad semántica cuando propongan políticas de conservación e implementen las prácticas de conservación.
摘要
自然保护已成为全球关注的话题。然而，自然这个概念本身仍存在问题。我们研究了世界上76种主要语言在环境保护的语境下对“nature”这个词的翻译的词源及语义多样性，来确定人类和自然之间的不同关系。令人惊讶的是，研究覆盖的70亿人使用的语素（独特的词根）实际上很少。不同的语言总语系在与主要宗教分布相对应的大文化区域中拥有相同的词源。然而，我们发现这些词在词源意义上却存在很大差异，与当代欧洲自然概念的语义差异和历史歧义相呼应。当前西方国家在环境公共政策、保护科学和环境伦理学中认为“自然”的主要含义是非人类创造的东西，这个理解似乎相对罕见且近期才出现，并且与大多数其他文化中对自然的看法相矛盾，包括前基督教欧洲文化。为了避免隐性的文化偏见和霸权，从而使自然的概念在全球范围内都具有可理解性和有效性，自然保护主义者在提出保护政策和实施保护实践时，有必要考虑到这种语义多样性。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article impact statement: The idea of nature exists in most cultures, so awareness of the diversity of the concepts of nature is essential for nature conservation.
The multiplicity and diversity of entities and processes involved in major transitions require narrative choices to make these transitions intelligible, requiring concepts that combine human and ...non-human agentivities. The notion of mediant, or “transhuman assemblages of vital materiality”, could be at the heart of the narratives of major transitions, helping to clarify their scientific stakes. The associated techniques and institutions, their mode of appropriation and their effects, by humans and non-humans, might be major mediants of major transitions.
Birds are tracking climate warming, but not fast enough Devictor, Vincent; Julliard, Romain; Couvet, Denis ...
Proceedings - Royal Society. Biological sciences/Proceedings - Royal Society. Biological Sciences,
12/2008, Letnik:
275, Številka:
1652
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Range shifts of many species are now documented as a response to global warming. But whether these observed changes are occurring fast enough remains uncertain and hardly quantifiable. Here, we ...developed a simple framework to measure change in community composition in response to climate warming. This framework is based on a community temperature index (CTI) that directly reflects, for a given species assemblage, the balance between low- and high-temperature dwelling species. Using data from the French breeding bird survey, we first found a strong increase in CTI over the last two decades revealing that birds are rapidly tracking climate warming. This increase corresponds to a 91 km northward shift in bird community composition, which is much higher than previous estimates based on changes in species range edges. During the same period, temperature increase corresponds to a 273 km northward shift in temperature. Change in community composition was thus insufficient to keep up with temperature increase: birds are lagging approximately 182 km behind climate warming. Our method is applicable to any taxa with large-scale survey data, using either abundance or occurrence data. This approach can be further used to test whether different delays are found across groups or in different land-use contexts.
Each species generally has a close relationship with one or more habitats and can therefore be classified as either specialist or generalist. We studied whether specialist and generalist species are ...spatially distributed independently of each other. Repeating the analysis for 100 of the most frequent terrestrial bird species recorded over the 10 000 sampled sites of the French Breeding Bird survey, we found that specialists were more abundant if the rest of the community was specialized, and that the inverse was also true. This pattern was far subtler than just a simple dichotomy: most species actually presented a maximum abundance at a value of community specialization similar to their own level of specialization. Bird communities appear very well defined along a specialist-generalist gradient. We believe this pattern becomes more apparent with habitat degradation. The consequences on both ecological services and community resilience may well be considerable.
Volunteer-based standardized monitoring of birds has been widely implemented in Europe and North America. In France, a breeding bird survey is running since 1989 and offers keen birdwatchers to count ...spring birds annually during 5 min exactly on 10 fix points within a randomly selected square. The first goal of such breeding bird surveys is to measure temporal trends in order to detect possible species declines. Combining annual indices of species sharing ecological affinities or a protected/red list status further provides biodiversity indicators for policy makers. Because the sampling effort is similar among sites, and because the initial selection of monitored sites is random, the temporal trends can be considered representative of national trends, and spatial comparisons of the obtained metrics are possible. Species abundance, community richness but also community specialization and average trophic level can be estimated for each site and each year and further related to the wide range of habitat and landscape characteristics and to agricultural or forestry practices. The large number of sites allows overcoming the opposition between adaptive and passive monitoring, making such schemes fitted to adaptive monitoring. This provides opportunities to determine which type of management or practices favour biodiversity. The comparison of population fate or community dynamics across a wide range of climates and temperatures, e.g. from southern to northern Europe, revealed how European birds are already affected by climate change. Bird communities are shifting northwards, but at a slower rate than temperatures, while bird populations have larger growth rates away from their hot thermal limit. Finally, such large-scale long-term monitoring data on a complete taxonomic group (Aves) is original and offers the opportunity to compare different measures of biological diversity, such as taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity. Such a citizen science scheme is an efficient scientific tool (numerous papers published in international peer-reviewed journals) which is furthermore highly cost-effective, with a reduced permanent staff in a state insitution coordonating the network and analysing the data, while a similar survey conducted by state staff only would cost more than one million euros annually. The future development of bio-economic dynamic models for providing scenarios of sustainable farming and logging to maintain biodiversity will further highlight the necessity of such volunteer monitoring for policy makers and decision planning. Scientific and logistic partnerships could be proposed to help developing such a monitoring scheme in China.
► A breeding bird survey monitor common breeding species in France since 1989. ► This scheme provides trends in species numbers and community structure. ► Official biodiversity indicators are developed from the count data. ► Bio-economic dynamic models provide scenarios of sustainable farming and logging. ► We highlight the necessity of such volunteer monitoring for policy makers.
In a dataset on 83 countries covering the years 1960–2009, we find a negative indirect effect of the share of renewable natural capital in wealth on economic growth transmitted through demographic ...factors, more specifically, population fertility. In contrast, in countries with lower income inequality and higher institutional quality, the share of non-renewable natural capital in wealth has a direct positive impact on growth. We also find that countries with higher income per capita, human development, and institutional quality have a higher share of renewable natural capital per capita, but a lower share of renewable natural capital in wealth. Renewable natural capital is thus valuable for the population and of primary concern for empowered countries, even though it contributes less to wealth and economic growth. Our results raise serious questions about the way wealth and growth are defined in economics when one investigates the impact of natural capital and point to the importance of preserving natural capital, particularly, in less developed countries.
We studied the community richness and dynamics of birds in landscapes recently affected by urbanization to test the prediction that biotic communities living in degraded landscapes are increasingly ...composed of generalist species. We analyzed bird communities in 657 plots monitored by the French Breeding Bird Survey from 2001 to 2005, accounting for the probability of species detection and spatial autocorrelation. We used an independent land-cover program to assess urbanization intensity in each FBBS plot, from 1992 to 2002. We found that urbanization induced community homogenization and that populations of specialist species became increasingly unstable with increasing urbanization of the landscape. Our results emphasize that urbanization has a substantial impact on the spatial component of communities and highlight the destabilizing effect of urbanization on communities over time. These results illustrate that urbanization may be a strong driving force in functional community composition and that measuring community homogenization is a powerful tool in the assessment of the effects of landscape changes and thus aides sustainable urban planning.
Biodiversity offsets are intended to achieve no net loss of biodiversity due to economic and human development. A variety of biodiversity components are addressed by offset policies. It is required ...that loss of protected species due to development be offset under the EU Habitats and Birds Directives in Europe. We call this type of offset a species‐equality offset because the offset pertains to the same species affected by the development project. Whether species equality can be achieved by offset design is unknown. We addressed this gap by reviewing derogation files (i.e., specific files that describe mitigation measures to ensure no net loss under the EU Habitats and Birds Directives) from 85 development projects in France (2009–2010). We collected information on type of effect (reversible vs. irreversible) and characteristics of affected and offset sites (i.e., types of species, total area). We analyzed how the type of effect and the affected‐site characteristics influenced the occurrence of offset measures. The proportion of species targeted by offset measures (i.e., offset species) increased with the irreversibility of the effect of development and the conservation status of the species affected by development (i.e., affected species). Not all effects on endangered species (International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List) were offset; on average, 82% of affected species would be offset. Twenty‐six percent of species of least concern were offset species. Thirty‐five percent of development projects considered all affected species in their offset measures. Species richness was much lower in offset sites than in developed sites even after offset proposals. For developed areas where species richness was relatively high before development, species richness at offset sites was 5–10 times lower. The species‐equality principle appears to have been applied only partially in offset policies, as in the EU directives. We suggest the application of this principle through offsets is highly important for the long‐term conservation of biodiversity in Europe. Compensaciones y Conservación de las Especies de las Directivas de Hábitats y Aves de la UE
Few studies have examined how life history traits and the climate envelope influence the ability of species to respond to climate change and habitat degradation. In this study, we test whether 18 ...species-specific variables, related to the climate envelope, ecological envelope and life history, could predict recent population trends (over 17 years) of 71 common breeding bird species in France. Habitat specialists were declining at a much higher rate than generalists, a sign that habitat quality is decreasing globally. The lower the thermal maximum (temperature at the hot edge of the climate envelope), the more negative are the population trends and the less tolerant these species are climate warming, regardless of the thermal range over which these species occur. The life history trait 'the number of broods per year' was positively related to recent trends, suggesting that single-brooded species might be more sensitive to advances in food peak due to climate change, as it increases the risk of mistiming their single-breeding event. Annual fecundity explained long-term declines, as it is a good proxy for most other demographic rates, with shorter-lived species being more sensitive to global change: individuals of species with higher fecundity might have too short a life to learn to adapt to directional changes in their environment. Finally, there was evidence that natal dispersal was a predictor of recent trends, with species with high natal dispersal experiencing smaller population declines than species with low natal dispersal. This is expected if the higher the natal dispersal, the larger the ability to shift spatially when facing changes in local habitat or climate, in order to track optimal conditions and adapt to global change. Identifying decline-promoting factors allow us to infer mechanisms responsible for observed declines in wild bird populations facing global change, and by doing so allow for a more pre-emptive approach to conservation planning.
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