To Err is Human
Understanding how outside influences unbalance ecosystems
By Jessie Bach & Taylor Holmes
Ecosystems are a complex machine.
From filtering air and water, to decomposing dead plant and animal life, spreading seeds and helping the landscape grow and expand, each organism plays a part in the health of the environment. However, these systems can become threatened when we start to lose natural spaces and the species within them. Plants, animals, and insects have spent millennia evolving in order to thrive in their ecosystems, and when there are disruptions to their habitat the whole system is in danger.
Due to the fragility of their community and inhabitants, ecosystems need to not only adapt to changes, but be resilient to them. Tonya Mousseau PhD., an entomologist and biology professor at Mount Royal University, describes the misconceptions with biodiversity.
Tonya Mousseau is an entomologist and biology professor at Mount Royal University.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Bach
“Biodiversity is the end result of speciation with evolution. And that takes a very, very long time. And so when we lose these species, some people have misconceptions that oh, well evolution will bring new ones to us. And it doesn't happen in that short of time. For new populations to evolve into new species can take millions of years.”
Speciation is the evolution of an organism until it becomes genetically and functionally distinct from its origin. Biodiversity is the variety of species within an ecosystem.
But we have to ask, why is this important? Why do we need so many different organisms?
The truth is unexpected catastrophes can hurt all that we have come to rely on. But, biodiversity can act as our armor.
Fire, disease, and invasive species are all real threats to these ecosystems, but even more than that is the human effect. The destruction of habitats, the development of land and redirection of resources are doing more damage to our ecosystems than anything else. This is where the importance of biodiversity comes into effect. Increased biodiversity makes ecosystems more resilient to fire, disease, and invasive species. However, there isn’t much environments can do to protect themselves when it comes to human interference.
Plants and animals aren’t the only ones suffering from manmade changes to ecosystems.
Rae Callan has lived in the Alberta Foothills — West Priddis to be specific — for 23 years, and even she is feeling the effects land development has on her environment. Her property is located on a ridge and relies on the groundwater in aquifers to feed her wells but, as land development occurs, her water supply dwindles.
Rae Callan stares absentmindedly about her dwindling water supply.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Bach
“At the moment, we have four wells that we've dug around the property and none of the wells are producing. So we are hauling water now and we have been probably been hauling water now for about 15 years,” says Callan.
Callan is having 5,000 gallons per month trucked to her property to be able meet her family and their livestock’s needs. That doesn’t include drinking water, which she buys bottled every month. Callan goes on to explain that when they first moved to the farm the dugout was full of water, and now it's about a third full.
“There are two things going on there,” Callan says.
“Yes, there's less runoff. There's less moisture, but also the fact that we've put a road in and our neighbors to the west of us have put a road in.”
Something as simple as installing a driveway onto the property has had detrimental effects to both her neighbour’s and her own water supply. Additionally, Callan has started to notice changes to the wildlife that visit the property.
Rae Callan has noticed that less wildlife, including elk, have traveled through her property of late.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Bach
The moose population has grown scarce, the herd of elk that used to pass through every fall is about half the size it used to be, and in the past they used to have to stop their car a couple of times while on the road to clean the insects off of the windshield. Now, they don’t have to stop at all. Even in the bird population, pelicans have stopped visiting the land altogether. She can’t say definitively that this is due to the water, but something is causing a decrease to the organisms that live in this area.
When it comes to the ecosystem itself, everything is interconnected. Plants and animals affect each other, but as Mousseau points out, the harm to humans is just as prevalent. Our health and livelihoods heavily rely on the natural world. Our antibiotics are largely developed from fungus, and as bacteria becomes resistant to the current antibiotics, we need to be discovering and developing new ones.
“The problem is,” Mousseau says, “we're destroying the habitats that these new species of fungus would be living in. So we haven't been able to discover them because they're being wiped out as we speak.”
When it comes to livelihoods, Mousseau highlights how overfishing has caused the collapse of the fishing industries and with it people are losing long-held jobs. Not to mention, our livelihoods can cause equal disruption to ecosystems. Fertilizer run-off is creating algae blooms which take oxygen out of natural water sources, and ends up killing insects and the other organisms living in it. Protecting biodiversity requires consideration in all aspects of life. It also requires vigilance, as without it we lose much more than our wild lands.
“Alberta's grasslands are not sustainable. And that's because even though there are places that are said that they're protected, that can always change,” Mousseau concludes.
“And even if you do have those protections, such as not being allowed to build houses in a certain area, you're still going to get invasive species, you're still going to get garbage, you're still going to get pollution.”
Another issue that needs to be taken into account is that the prairies don’t operate in isolation from the rest of the continent or world. This means that while looking at issues within Alberta’s prairies is important, factors outside of the province and prairie must also be assessed.
Ken Rosenberg is a retired conservation scientist with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In 2019, Rosenberg and his colleagues published Decline of the North American Avifauna, which found a net loss of 2.9 billion birds across the continent since 1970, with the greatest losses occurring in the grasslands. While this study focused on birds, the data speaks to a problem far beyond a single group of animals.
Birds play many vital roles in the ecosystem. This Bald Eagle helps to keep our prairies clean by eating carrion that could otherwise cause disease.
PHOTO CREDIT: Taylor Holmes
Birds play several important roles in the prairies, from seed dispersal, to pest control and even sanitation services – so the loss of birds in-and-of-itself will disrupt the environment. However, what we are seeing with birds suggests steep declines are almost certainly happening across other groups of animals, these losses are just harder to measure.
It also became apparent to Rosenberg and other researchers that saving North America’s declining bird populations would require looking outside of the continent and ecosystems as recorded. While North American grassland species saw the most severe declines, not all of the species saw the same declines. Many birds that reside in the prairies of Alberta are migratory, and may fly hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from the prairies over winter. What was discovered by Rosenberg and his colleagues was that birds that migrated to certain regions had greater population declines than others.
“There's a group of birds, a subgroup that we've identified that all go and spend the winter in the Chihuahuan desert grasslands of Northern Mexico. So they're coming from the short grass prairies of where you live [Southern Alberta] and the Northern U.S. and migrating to northern Mexico – that's the group that's experiencing the steepest declines of all the grassland birds,” explains Rosenberg.
While migratory bird conventions do exist throughout the Western hemisphere, their weight varies across countries. Some birds that are protected in Canada and the US, for example, are hunted in their winter nesting grounds in Central and South America. Recognizing our interconnectedness, addressing the cultural barriers, and finding balance between the needs of people with the needs of our ecosystems are therefore a vital component of conserving our prairies and their biodiversity.
Despite the losses, Rosenberg is optimistic about the future. Several of the scientists who worked on the 2019 paper, including Rosenberg, founded Road to Recovery in 2020, an organization that aims to identify the most at-risk species and target conservation efforts on the biggest threats.
“Road to Recovery brings together biological but also social scientists in the US and Canada and [analyze] the full annual cycle of the birds and where they are experiencing the greatest threats and where they’re most limited, that’s still one of the most challenging scientific questions” explains Rosenberg.
Four bird species serve as pilot projects, and while the project is still in its infancy, the results have been promising. Rosenberg says the organization will soon be publishing a list of around 100 “On-Alert” species which require immediate scientific action and targeted conservation – including Alberta prairie resident the endangered greater sage-grouse.
