Increasingly, people are becoming less likely to have direct contact with nature (natural environments and their associated wildlife) in their everyday lives. Over 20 years ago, Robert M Pyle termed ...this ongoing alienation the "extinction of experience", but the phenomenon has continued to receive surprisingly limited attention. Here, we present current understanding of the extinction of experience, with particular emphasis on its causes and consequences, and suggest future research directions. Our review illustrates that the loss of interaction with nature not only diminishes a wide range of benefits relating to health and well-being, but also discourages positive emotions, attitudes, and behavior with regard to the environment, implying a cycle of disaffection toward nature. Such serious implications highlight the importance of reconnecting people with nature, as well as focusing research and public policy on addressing and improving awareness of the extinction of experience.
With ongoing environmental degradation at local, regional, and global scales, people's accepted thresholds for environmental conditions are continually being lowered. In the absence of past ...information or experience with historical conditions, members of each new generation accept the situation in which they were raised as being normal. This psychological and sociological phenomenon is termed shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), which is increasingly recognized as one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today's global environmental issues. Yet our understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete. We provide an overview of the nature and extent of SBS and propose a conceptual framework for understanding its causes, consequences, and implications. We suggest that there are several self-reinforcing feedback loops that allow the consequences of SBS to further accelerate SBS through progressive environmental degradation. Such negative implications highlight the urgent need to dedicate considerable effort to preventing and ultimately reversing SBS.
Ecologists require spatially explicit data to relate structure to function. To date, heavy reliance has been placed on obtaining such data from remote-sensing instruments mounted on spacecraft or ...manned aircraft, although the spatial and temporal resolutions of the data are often not suited to local-scale ecological investigations. Recent technological innovations have led to an upsurge in the availability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - aircraft remotely operated from the ground - and there are now many lightweight UAVs on offer at reasonable costs. Flying low and slow, UAVs offer ecologists new opportunities for scale-appropriate measurements of ecological phenomena. Equipped with capable sensors, UAVs can deliver fine spatial resolution data at temporal resolutions defined by the end user. Recent innovations in UAV platform design have been accompanied by improvements in navigation and the miniaturization of measurement technologies, allowing the study of individual organisms and their spatiotemporal dynamics at close range.
The ecology of human-nature interactions Soga, Masashi; Gaston, Kevin J
Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences,
01/2020, Letnik:
287, Številka:
1918
Journal Article
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The direct interactions between people and nature are critically important in many ways, with growing attention particularly on their impacts on human health and wellbeing (both positive and ...negative), on people's attitudes and behaviour towards nature, and on the benefits and hazards to wildlife. A growing evidence base is accelerating the understanding of different forms that these direct human-nature interactions take, novel analyses are revealing the importance of the opportunity and orientation of individual people as key drivers of these interactions, and methodological developments are increasingly making apparent their spatial, temporal and socio-economic dynamics. Here, we provide a roadmap of these advances and identify key, often interdisciplinary, research challenges that remain to be met. We identified several key challenges, including the need to characterize individual people's nature interactions through their life course, to determine in a comparable fashion how these interactions vary across much more diverse geographical, cultural and socio-economic contexts that have been explored to date, and to quantify how the relative contributions of people's opportunity and orientation vary in shaping their nature interactions. A robust research effort, guided by a focus on such unanswered questions, has the potential to yield high-impact insights into the fundamental nature of human-nature interactions and contribute to developing strategies for their appropriate management.
The existence of a synthetic program of research on what was then termed the “nocturnal problem” and that we might now call “nighttime ecology” was declared more than 70 years ago. In reality, this ...failed to materialize, arguably as a consequence of practical challenges in studying organisms at night and instead concentrating on the existence of circadian rhythms, the mechanisms that give rise to them, and their consequences. This legacy is evident to this day, with consideration of the ecology of the nighttime markedly underrepresented in ecological research and literature. However, several factors suggest that it would be timely to revive the vision of a comprehensive research program in nighttime ecology. These include (i) that the study of the ecology of the night is being revolutionized by new and improved technologies; (ii) suggestions that, far from being a minor component of biodiversity, a high proportion of animal species are active at night; (iii) that fundamental questions about differences and connections between the ecology of the daytime and the nighttime remain largely unanswered; and (iv) that the nighttime environment is coming under severe anthropogenic pressure. In this article, I seek to reestablish nighttime ecology as a synthetic program of research, highlighting key focal topics and questions and providing an overview of the current state of understanding and developments.
Understanding of the determinants of species' geographic range limits remains poorly integrated. In part, this is because of the diversity of perspectives on the issue, and because empirical studies ...have lagged substantially behind developments in theory. Here, I provide a broad overview, drawing together many of the disparate threads, considering, in turn, how influences on the terms of a simple single-population equation can determine range limits. There is theoretical and empirical evidence for systematic changes towards range limits under some circumstances in each of the demographic parameters. However, under other circumstances, no such changes may take place in particular parameters, or they may occur in a different direction, with limitation still occurring. This suggests that (i) little about range limitation can categorically be inferred from many empirical studies, which document change in only one demographic parameter, (ii) there is a need for studies that document variation in all of the parameters, and (iii) in agreement with theoretical evidence that range limits can be formed in the presence or absence of hard boundaries, environmental gradients or biotic interactions, there may be few general patterns as to the determinants of these limits, with most claimed generalities at least having many exceptions.
Interacting with nature is widely recognised as providing many health and well-being benefits. As people live increasingly urbanised lifestyles, the provision of food for garden birds may create a ...vital link for connecting people to nature and enabling them to access these benefits. However, it is not clear which factors determine the pleasure that people receive from watching birds at their feeders. These may be dependent on the species that are present, the abundance of individuals and the species richness of birds around the feeders. We quantitatively surveyed urban households from towns in southern England to determine the factors that influence the likeability of 14 common garden bird species, and to assess whether people prefer to see a greater abundance of individuals or increased species richness at their feeders. There was substantial variation in likeability across species, with songbirds being preferred over non-songbirds. Species likeability increased for people who fed birds regularly and who could name the species. We found a strong correlation between the number of species that a person could correctly identify and how connected to nature they felt when they watched garden birds. Species richness was preferred over a greater number of individuals of the same species. Although we do not show causation this study suggests that it is possible to increase the well-being benefits that people gain from watching birds at their feeders. This could be done first through a human to bird approach by encouraging regular interactions between people and their garden birds, such as through learning the species names and providing food. Second, it could be achieved through a bird to human approach by increasing garden songbird diversity because the pleasure that a person receives from watching an individual bird at a feeder is dependent not only on its species but also on the diversity of birds at the feeder.
There is growing recognition that interactions with nature provide many desirable human well-being outcomes, yet increasing urbanization is degrading the quality and quantity of nature experiences. ...Thus, it has become increasingly important to understand how and why urban dwellers interact with nature. Studies of urban green space use have largely focused on the availability and ease of access to green space, suggesting that greater opportunities to experience such space will lead to increased use. However, a growing literature emphasizes the potential for an individual's nature orientation to affect their interaction with green space. Here we measure the importance of both opportunity and orientation factors in explaining urban park use. An urban lifestyle survey was deployed across Brisbane, Australia in November 2012 to assess patterns of green space use. Participants (n=1479) were asked to provide information on demographics, private yard use, park visitations in the past week, and their orientation toward nature. About 60% of those surveyed had visited a park in the past week, and while this park user population had significantly greater nearby park coverage (within a 250 m radius; p=0.006), a much stronger determinant of visitation was their higher nature orientation (p<0.00001), suggesting that while both opportunity and orientation are important drivers for park visitation, nature orientation is the primary effect. Park users also spent significantly more time in their yards than non-park users (p<0.00001), suggesting that yard use does not necessarily compensate for lower park use. Park users with stronger nature orientation (i) spent more time in their yard, (ii) traveled further to green spaces, and (iii) made longer visits than park visitors with weaker nature orientation. Overall, our results suggest that measures to increase people's connection to nature could be more important than measures to increase urban green space availability if we want to encourage park visitation.
Surveying threatened and invasive species to obtain accurate population estimates is an important but challenging task that requires a considerable investment in time and resources. Estimates using ...existing ground-based monitoring techniques, such as camera traps and surveys performed on foot, are known to be resource intensive, potentially inaccurate and imprecise, and difficult to validate. Recent developments in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), artificial intelligence and miniaturized thermal imaging systems represent a new opportunity for wildlife experts to inexpensively survey relatively large areas. The system presented in this paper includes thermal image acquisition as well as a video processing pipeline to perform object detection, classification and tracking of wildlife in forest or open areas. The system is tested on thermal video data from ground based and test flight footage, and is found to be able to detect all the target wildlife located in the surveyed area. The system is flexible in that the user can readily define the types of objects to classify and the object characteristics that should be considered during classification.
Birds and ecosystem services Gaston, Kevin J.
Current biology,
10/2022, Letnik:
32, Številka:
20
Journal Article
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What do birds do for us? Some may find this an inappropriate or perhaps distasteful question, suggesting as it might that the importance or value of birds lies principally in the ways that they ...benefit people, and with perhaps an unspoken implication that if they do not do enough then we should not be too concerned as to what befalls them. Nonetheless, it seems vital to understand the benefits or enhancements to human wellbeing, commonly known as ecosystem services, that birds provide for two main reasons. First, birds are under high and increasing threat, and thus these ecosystem services are also under pressure; around 4% of the known bird species of the Late Pleistocene is estimated to have become extinct, a much higher percentage of local populations has been lost or seriously eroded, and around 13% of current extant bird species is considered globally threatened with extinction. Second, and arguably more importantly, our ability to answer the question of what birds do for us is in some sense a measure of how well we understand, and place adequate ‘value’ (in the broadest, and not simply an economic, sense) on, the interaction between people and birds, and more generally that between people and nature. Indeed, birds provide a particularly valuable test of such understanding because they have been subject to a long and rich history of human interest and study.
Kevin Gaston describes the diversity of ecosystem services that birds provide and considers how these services might change in the future.
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