Resilience: A new Conservation Strategy for a Warming World

Daniel Feldman

Robbins J., (2015). Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World. Yale Environment 360. Available at:

http://e360.yale.edu/features/resilience_a_new_conservation_strategy_for_a_warming_world

1. I knew that limestone was a geological indicator of a biologically diverse environment. I didn’t know that environmentalists were using abiotic makers and sediment to determine where animal migration due to climate change will occur.
2. I learned that the Bay Area is moving sediment from behind dams in lakes and rivers to places where the marshland cannot naturally recede as ocean levels rise, i.e. where roads are built near the ocean. I didn’t know that moving sediment could increase biodiversity and, therefore, resilience.The low acidity, calcium rich sediment behind these dams provides a great ecosystem for bacteria, small biomes, and, eventually, larger environmental biomes to exist. Not only are environmentalists using calcium rich soil to actively increase resilience of systems, but they are also looking at geological records to determine where different species may migrate as the climate warms. The nature conservancy is buying land based on the potential biodiversity of the soil, particularly, where there is limestone soil. But, only using an abiotic method of predicting animal and environment migration as the climate changes is not reliable because of invasive species. What's more, the nature conservancy has also created a software called circutscape, which analyzes where corridors could be for highly fragmented areas. This would provide safe routes of migration given an environmental crisis or disaster.
3. This article directly talks about the importance of resilience in conservation issues (Chapter 4). It stresses that simply conserving at risk landscapes are not enough, and that for environments to survive climate change. Like in the Bay Area, those at risk environments need biodiversity to become more resilient.
4. The article did not address how increasing biodiversity by adding sediment to shorelines may change the ecological system there. I am curious whether or not there is the possibility for the ecological system to change into a completely different ecosystem. If so, is there the possibility that the new ecosystem is less resilient than the last? Similarly, is it possible to completely fabricate more hospitable ecosystems by introducing new listemstone-like sediment to ecosystems?