While generally true, everything you stated is random and may create habitat niches as much as they destroy it. Random human activities (like walking in the woods) may be similar. But targeted human activities can selectively destroy particular habitat niches much more quickly than natural processes, as they target those specific niches rather than acting randomly.
I currently view a lot of habitats where dead trees aren’t common, and where the particular habitat niches created by the bark of large fallen trees aren’t easy to find, despite the area being mostly forest. Logging practices have mostly eliminated large trees and significantly reduced the prevalence of dead trees in our area. I’m extremely uncomfortable with iNat users promoting an ethic of “stuff happens, so who cares what I do?” as an excuse for intentional habitat destruction.
I should point out that there are many state and national parks where you can get in serious trouble for peeling bark and they will consider it illegal habitat destruction, regardless of our personal feelings about the matter.
This thread reminded me of the Observer Effect in physics – you can’t observe something without the action affecting the thing you are observing. Mainly an idea in particle physics involving delicate instruments that are designed to measure some phenomenon, but the idea when applied to nature study is similar. As in physics, the effect of observation by the naturalist can vary substantially from negligible to significant.
I don’t think anyone here is promoting such an ethic as you claim. Nor do I think anyone is specifically recommending disturbing every individual habitat feature of a certain type (such as loose bark) for the sake of documenting the organisms utilizing them, let alone “intentional habitat destruction.” As you hint at, the relative rarity of these habitat features in certain locations is not because people disturb them, but because of the way the larger ecological community is managed (for example, removing all old, hollow, or decaying trees during logging), which I think is a good reason to know how these habitat features are being used; how can we change management practices and restore a habitat feature when no one knows or cares enough about it to call for change?
Reading through all of these replies, I have realized that one point has been missed. Not everyone has to go out and explore the world. There is an entire field of data science dedicated to just looking at pictures and analyzing data. I would technically fall into this category, since I do not go out much, even when there is a Pandemic going on. I learned different species by just reading literature and by staring and comparing pictures. Understandably, analyzing data is not for everyone, but it is an important aspect of science that should not be overlooked. Also, analyzing data has less environmental impact than collecting it.
But somebody has to collect the data/photographs before you can analyze them…
The key is common sense and being conscience of the impact that we do make…i.e. no intentional destruction on a large scale or outside of reasonable exploration in context of the ecosystem. Common sense exploration/observation is no more destructive than two bear cubs running and playing or two organisms, such as elk, moose, hippo’s, etc. fighting over territory or even the gathering of nest materials (moss, bark, etc) by birds or a beaver building it’s dam and lodge…
If done in a conscience manner the impact will be less than what some creatures cause in their quest to survive…
Come on get real here people…go watch a video of two large mammals fighting over territory or food or breeding rights…
Responsible observing/exploring and common sense…it works…
I noticed this, in looking at it a bit closer, the study was an update of an earlier systematic assessment of threats from 1998 to rare species in order to (1) prioritize research efforts and (2) best direct and inform policy mitigations (efforts/funding).
It seems their definition of ‘impact’ is based on a textual analysis of threats to ‘imperiled’, ‘threatened’, ‘endangered’, and ‘suspected extinct’ plant species (from NatureServe). They took these data, assessed and scored it using the IUCN threats taxonomy method scoring each threat for each species between pairs of researchers who rotated between pairs, finding ‘very high’ agreement between qualitative descriptions and the scores assigned to each threat for each species.
The IUCN method involved classifying threats under three hierarchical levels (L1-L3) based upon:
L1=“human intrusions and disturbance”, L2=“more specific (‘e.g. recreation’)”, and L3= “most detailed (‘e.g. off-road vehicular recreation’)”.
Their mean Cohen’s Kappa=0.98 for the threat analysis/quantification–this is a statistic that I am unfamiliar with, but which appears to validate convergence of quantitation of results by separate individuals on a scale from 0-1 with 0 being perfect disagreement, and 1 being perfect agreement between researchers on all scores).
So while there are limitations to the depth to which the study can characterize the threats, it does give you a numerical sense of what percentage of rare species may be affected by various classes of threats (e.g. [in order of %]: recreation, livestock, residential development, invasive species, roads/railroads, mining and quarrying, fire regime change, dams and water management/use, overharvest, etc.).
Long story short–off-road vehicles (ORVs) affected more rare plant species (19%) than hiking, bicycling, trail-riding, skiing, and recreational climbing combined (affected 13% of rare plants). Though to me, 13% vs. 19% is not significantly different, though obviously hiking is not as high-impact as ORVs on a per-person basis.
As I understand it the authors did not account for magnitude of impacts, only for potential for impact though I have to add that I need to look more into the IUCN method itself–though based on a cursory search, it does seem to stay relatively non-specific about the actual magnitude of potential threat impact itself.
Through their study, they found that based on their methodology, that threats such as missing species (e.g. pollinators), pathogens, and invasive species for example may be overstudied relative to the number of rare species they may potentially impact compared to outdoor recreation as a whole (affected 35% of these species). Interestingly, the categories which were most understudied in their results were (in order) 1) oil/gas drilling, 2) mining and quarrying, 3) landslides and volcanoes, and 4) tourism/recreation development (recreation was #7 for under-research).
@john_hall I completely agree, and hope it comes across that my main point is that we should be conscious of our impacts on the natural world and not just wave them aside implicitly.
Knowing human nature as I’ve come to know it, it’s hopeless to tell people to do nearly anything, but more important to start the conversation and make them aware of the relevant information to making an informed rather than instinctual (this can’t have much impact) or habitual (I’ve always done it this way) actions.
@t7iguy The problem lies in how you define ‘reasonable exploration’–everyone has a differing definition, which is why I cited ‘leave no trace’ as a starting place above.
I don’t think anyone is arguing this.
@jharkness again, I don’t think anyone is arguing this.
@jharkness I totally agree, though slightly disagree in the last bit, since certain spots do get (Yellowstone, Yosemite NP) and many other areas do get millions of visitors and associated high impact in many areas. Restraining ourselves totally from nature isn’t optimal, since most people need some ‘use’ and not just ‘existence value’ from nature to value and appreciate it in a manner that protects it from development and threats. What I’m getting at here is that we happen to be one of those threats when we are not conscious or aware of our collective impact!
If you read my post above, I am arguing that you can’t simply dismiss the collective impact of ‘small impacts’, this is not a binary choice, protecting nature doesn’t mean you cannot explore it, but that people need to at least consider if not redefine what they consider ‘small impacts’. I also cite research which supports the idea that recreational impacts may not only be under-studied, but also higher in impact than currently understood or ranked in the general and scientific bodies.
And in some ways, my suspicious side begins to question the motives of some “conservation” laws. When you can’t legally collect native reptiles to keep for awhile and release after study, but a commercial collector can get a permit to collect them for sale, stop and think: this just feeds the commodification of nature – there is a part of me that suspects that the real agenda of these “conservation” laws is to make it illegal to possess anything that was not purchased, to make us absolutely dependent on the financial system.
I have read about such “conservation” laws in Brazil: that a logging company can get a permit and legally cut down a tract of rainforest; but it is illegal for a horticulturist to collect (and save) the plants that have thus been doomed to die of desiccation.
I would just like to add that National Parks may not be the best example to use here, given that they aren’t so much oriented to engaging people with wild nature, but exist as a kind of tourism. I am grateful for the land preservation that National Parks are responsible for, and for bringing to light so many issues with conservation, but I question the general philosophy behind them.
I completely agree. I do not understand how parks and other ‘protected’ lands here can intensively log their forests, yet fine someone for taking a specimen, or even harvesting the fruit of a common edible plant; I suppose that only the ‘experts’ are allowed to engage in conservation?
A plant ecologist who lived and conducted much of his research in my region (eastern NY and western New England) once said, “conservation is a minor slowdown in the exploitation of natural resources, designed so that our grandchildren get the blame for the final plundering of our planet, rather than ourselves.”
A few years ago I read of a situation in Australia where you could get permission to develop wildland if you ‘rescued’ the plants, in this case mainly cycads. Rescuing included selling them, and selling cycads is very lucrative, so development was being applied for just so the cycads could be dug up and sold.
Apologies if I have mis-rememberd. Maybe someone from that region can fill in the details.
@bbk-htx I’d agree except about the last bit, there aren’t really ‘sides’ since we all obviously care about the natural world, unless we’re now talking about being pro vs. anti-environmentalism (which for the record, I don’t think you’re arguing).
I can see in some of the responses that there is some growing polarization on this issue, in my mind and based on literally stacks (entire volumes of books, journal articles, Master’s/PhD theses, and entire journals themselves) of research and occupational fields (biological consulting, environmental law, etc.) dedicated to researching, documenting, and quantifying/understanding the human impacts on the natural world and how to mitigate them, we do have negative impacts to ecosystems, regardless of what we’d prefer to believe!
@jharkness nteresting point, but a different issue entirely that I don’t want to get sidetracked on.
I used National Parks as an example solely due to their well-known high visitorship to illustrate my main point, which is that high visitorship and/or high impact activities such as peeling bark, turning stones without replacement, walking off-trail, transferring plant seeds/diseases on boots/tires, ORVs etc. ORV parks through desert habitats, for instance, can destroy cryptosoils which stabilize and build soils, and which can take decades to centuries to build up. In a similar fashion, off-trail hiking, or activities like peeling bark can act to heavily disturb and destroy habitat in an unsustainable fashion.
@stanvrem This is again a false choice (false dichotomy), just because there are strip mines or unsustainable logging practices doesn’t mean you have to join in on habitat destruction. This is essentially an illustration of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which is what led the last tree to be cut from Easter Island, and what is broadly to our extreme detriment in climate change arguments and inaction globally.
To make my main points on the original question clear:
1) all human activities have an impact on the natural world, including naturalizing (this is not debatable as I have described above).
2) all human impacts on the natural world can be minimized through consideration of, and adherence to, a code of ethical principles such as ‘leave no trace’ particularly #4 and #7 (leave what you find, and respect wildlife)
3) we should all try to understand the impacts of our activities and try to minimize them in order to protect and preserve habitat and nature.
It starts getting tricky when discussing the acceptable scale of negative impacts associated with our activities, but I have difficulty imagining valid arguments against the above three points (though it’s interesting to debate them to some extent).
In my mind at least, the only productive debate to have here is over what is acceptable level of impact. Again, I’m not advocating that people shouldn’t enjoy and explore or document nature (I wouldn’t be on iNaturalist if I believed that), but the original question is a good one “are we loving nature to death?” with the answer (yes or no) depending in part on how we on iNaturalist and collectively as a whole conduct ourselves.
There is another way in which we “love nature to death”, and that is by misguided protection. In the early days, protecting plants meant putting a fence round them so they didn’t get grazed. I think one of the butterworts (Pinguicula) went extinct in Britain because its last site was protected with a fence, and the butterwort was soon overwhelmed by rank vegetation. You might think such mistakes wouldn’t happen any more, but only a few years ago I was taken to a breeding site for the marsh fritillary butterfly in a cow pasture on a reserve. Except it had been fenced off so the caterpillars wouldn’t get trampled and the habitat had progressed to waist-high monoculture rushes.
And today I read of an endophyte, a natural part of tree growth, that has been found to cause uptake of Phosphorus from soil, thereby reducing Phosphorus pollution from chemical fertilizer applications, while improving plant growth in crops…or presumably any plants…and the endophyte concerned has been “licensed” by a company!!!
I really appreciated Yerba Santa’s post. I agree that a code of conduct would be worth having. I personally can’t see any reason to move insect homes, unless I am teaching (docenting) a hike with kids, when I can talk about the impact as well as the excitement of discovery.
