Climate Change, Wildlife and the Environment: Three Scientists Traveling the World to Assess the Effects of Climate Change on Flora and Fauna
Governments around the world are starting to pay attention. China, in particular, has made “rapid progress” with its climate and conservation-related policies in the past five to ten years, says Choi. For instance, in 2017, China began implementing the Ecological Conservation Redline strategy, aimed at preserving areas that are highly fragile or have crucial ecological functions by expanding the number of protected sites, improving their management, and restricting or banning development from taking place. When Choi and his collaborators assessed the strategy, they found that it could potentially triple the number of key coastal waterbird sites under protection in the country2. Less natural wetlands are being converted into ponds for fish farming as a result of the policy change. This is really encouraging to see this change.
Although the speed at which these actions are being carried out is impressive, it does make it challenging for researchers to keep up, says Choi, especially when they’re not brought in on the planning stages.
“Sometimes, things change a little too rapidly,” he says. It’s hard for researchers to evaluate the impacts because these policies have been implemented so quickly.
The ability to see first-hand the effects of climate change on vulnerable flora and fauna underlies the work of these three scientists, who have traveled all over the world to look at the effects of climate change. It is about more than the fieldwork. For these scientists, a commitment to outreach and behaviour change is just as important in the fight to stave off the worst impacts of a warming planet.
Chi-Yeung (Jimmy) has been a fan of birds since he was a child. When he moved to Australia to complete his education, his friends introduced him to birdwatching, which gave him a new world to explore, and set his future career path.
Growing up in the landlocked state of Querétaro in central Mexico, a nine-hour drive from the coast, Marina Banuet-Martínez was intrigued by the ocean from an early age. She recalls her teacher asking the class to illustrate what they wanted to be when they grew up. She wanted to become a marine biologist and drew a picture of the ocean.
At the age of 16 years old Banuet-Martnez stood on the shore along Mexico’s north Pacific Coast, fulfilling a dream that had been fulfilled years earlier when she was a student at the university. “The first time I got there, I was like: ‘Oh man, I drew this.’”
Source: Three scientists on the front line of climate and conservation research
Climate Change in Baja California, Mexico: Fieldwork on glaciers with satellites and non-radio-sensors as a tool to study climate anomalies
She would study how climate anomalies affect the health of the California sea lions over the next seven years, before focusing on people. “The impact on the sea lions’ physiology was huge, and I wondered if it was the same for the people who share the same space and resources with them,” she says.
Banuet-Martnez is currently a PhD student in epidemiology at the University of Alberta in Canada, with a focus on Climate Change in Baja California, Mexico. With partners from Comunidad y Biodiversidad, a non-profit organization in Guaymas, Banuet-Martínez has been conducting surveys and interviewing fishers and their families to understand how changes in daily catch have affected their diets and livelihoods. “Their knowledge about environmental change is amazing — they can give you really valuable information about what is happening to the species they depend on,” says Banuet-Martínez.
In 2022, Banuet-Martínez received the prestigious International Doctoral Research Award from Canada’s International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, a prize that supports research to improve lives in the global south. She says that being able to conduct fieldwork in her home country has been invaluable: “I think it’s a great opportunity for me, as a Mexican, to bring resources and knowledge and my scholarship there.”
Romain Millan assumed that he would be supported by data when he began his PhD at the University of California, Irvine. “When my supervisor told me that I was going on two expeditions to Greenland in the same summer, I couldn’t believe it,” he recalls.
Millan uses airborne-sensor data to monitor glaciers. 98% of the world’s total mountain glaciers were mapped in a high-resolution map. The team used data captured by satellites equipped with optical and radar sensors and converted them into flow and volume results using computational models. A total of more than 800,000 pairs of glacier images were included in the study.
Source: Three scientists on the front line of climate and conservation research
The Nature Index: Terms, Methods, & Resources for the Definition, Analysis, and Analysis of Scientific Research published in Australia and New Zealand
The survival of migratory waterbird has been adversely affected by global temperatures. He points to the red knot (Calidris canutus), a species of Arctic-breeding sandpiper. The reason for the smaller chick population is that their hatch dates are out of sync with insect activity, which now occurs earlier in the year due to premature snowmelt.
A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.
To glean a country’s, territory’s, region’s or an institution’s contribution to an article, and to ensure that they are not counted more than once, the Nature Index uses Share, a fractional count that takes into account the share of authorship on each article. The total Share available per article is 1, which is shared among all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally. An article with 10 authors means that each author gets a Share of 0.1. Authors affiliated with more than one institution have their author’s Share divided equally between the institutions. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors. The process for countries is similar, but complicated by the fact that some institutions have overseas labs that will be counted towards their totals.
The total number of articles in the Nature Index journals are compared with adjusted share. It is arrived at by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the base year levels.
The bilateral collaboration score between the two institutions is the sum of their shares on the papers that both have contributed to. There can be a bilateral collaboration between any two institutions and countries that are co-authoring an article in a journal.
Each query will return a profile page that lists the country or institution’s recent outputs, from which it is possible to drill down for more information. Articles can be displayed by journal, and then by article. Research outputs are organized by subject area. The page has information on the institution or country’s top collaborators and relationship with other organizations. Users can see how their institution is performing over time, by creating their own indexes.
Many of the countries that publish this research are way ahead of the global average. The interactive chart shows the proportion (climate and conservation %) of a country or territory’s total Nature Index output (measured by the Nature Index metric Share) that aligns with SDGs on Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12), Climate Action (SDG 13), Life Below Water (SDG 14) and Life On Land (SDG15).
Digital Sciences use machine learning to tag research articles if they align to certain goals. Some articles have more than oneSDG, so percentages may not add up.
These countries do have a relatively low volume of research output for SDGs 12–15 (as shown by the size of the bubbles), but Australia (10.4%) is notable for having higher output that is also well above the global average.
Brazil is an outlier for Life On Land, but Australia, France and the UK all have easy access to extensive coastlines.
The charts are interactive and show the proportion of a location’s total climate and conservent output in the nature index that relates to eachSDG with the size of the bubbles showing the volume.
High-quality research from scientists in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Scandinavia tends to lean the most heavily towards tackling climate and conservation issues, according to an analysis of data in the Nature Index.
Almost one-fifth of Nature Index research published by Norway, for instance, is related to these SDGs, and 14.5% of New Zealand’s output in the database align with the four goals. Finland and Denmark also have a high proportion of their research related to these topics.