九州大学生物多様性戦略国際シンポジウム
開催がいよいよ明日に迫りました。講演要旨が揃いましたので、以下に掲載します。
九州大学創立百周年記念 「グローバル化する世界と多様性」 国際シンポジウム2011
九州大学生物多様性戦略国際シンポジウム『持続可能な自然共生社会の基盤としての生態学と生物多様性科学』
Asian conservation ecology: Kyushu University's efforts ranging from our new campus to tropical Asia
Tetsukazu Yahara
Environments are changing globally, regionally and locally under the pressure of increasing human activities. We are facing a turning point of human history in that sustainability of our environments is critically threatened. Under this threat, Kyushu University made challenges to harmonize the development of a new campus (Ito campus) with conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem so as for local environments to be sustainable. We developed new principles of landscape design, new methods of biodiversity assessments, new methods of conservation including forest transplantation and made many other new attempts. I summarize these efforts and illustrate how our efforts have been successful. Subsequent to our challenges in the new campus, we are extending our efforts to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem in many Asian countries, under the support of JSPS grant for the Global Center of Excellence Program “Asian Conservation Ecology as a base of Symbiotic Society”. I introduce our on-going efforts of this program.
Complex Adaptive Systems and the Challenge of Sustainability
Simon A. Levin , Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
The continual increase in the human population, magnified by increasing per capita demands on Earth's limited resources, raise the urgent mandate of understanding the degree to which these patterns are sustainable. The scientific challenges posed by this simply stated goal are enormous, and cross disciplines. What measures of human welfare should be at the core of definitions of sustainability, and how do we discount the future and deal with problems of intra-generational and inter-generational equity? How do environmental and socioeconomic systems become organized as complex adaptive systems, and what are the implications for dealing with public goods at scales from the local to the global? How does the increasing interconnectedness of coupled natural and human systems affect the robustness of aspects of importance to us, and what are the implications for management. What is the role of social norms, and how do we achieve cooperation at the global level? All of these issues have parallels in evolutionary biology, and this lecture will explore what lessons can be learned from ecology and evolutionary theory for addressing the problems posed by achieving a sustainable future.
Reconnecting ecology and evolution to understand biodiversity and global change
Michael J. Donoghue
Sterling Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Yale University
Ecology and evolutionary biology are often studied separately, and evolutionary perspectives have tended to play a limited role in discussions of biodiversity and global change. I will argue that the integration of ecological and evolutionary perspectives provides the best hope of understanding biodiversity, its distribution, and its likely changes in the face of global change. It is increasingly appreciated that rapid evolutionary change (especially in short-lived organisms) can have an important impact on ecological systems, and that the possibility of evolutionary change needs to be incorporated in predicting responses to global change. Much less attention has been paid to the importance to studies of global change of evolutionary changes that are much slower and have taken place only over much longer time periods. I will briefly discuss an example involving the movement in plant lineages between tropical and temperate biomes. Understanding this slow end of the spectrum is equally important in making predictions about which major lineages are likely to be most impacted by various global changes. Phylogenetic knowledge should also be integrated in assessing the vulnerability of ecosystems to the loss of key functions and services. Finally, I will argue that increased value should be placed on the services provided by evolutionary systems and the opportunity costs associated with biodiversity loss.
Neutral theory as a predictor of avifaunal extinctions after habitat loss
Yoh Iwasa
The worldwide loss of natural habitats leads not only to the loss of habitat-endemic species but also to further and protracted extinctions in the reduced areas that remain. How rapid is this process? We use the neutral theory of biodiversity to answer this question, and we compare the results taken with observed rates of avifaunal extinctions. In the neutral model, we derive an exact solution for the rate of species loss in a closed community. The simple, closed form solution exhibits hyperbolic decay of species richness with time, which implies a potentially rapid initial decline followed by much slower rates long term. Our empirical estimates of extinction times are based on published studies for avifaunal extinctions either on oceanic islands or in forest fragments, which span a total of six orders of magnitude in area. These estimates show that the time to extinction strongly depends on the area. The neutral-theory predictions agree well with observed rates over three orders of magnitude of area (between 100 and 100,000 ha) both for islands and forest fragments. Regarding the species abundance distribution, extinction times based on a broken-stick model led to better agreement with observation than if a log-series model was used. The predictions break down for very small or very large areas. Thus, neutrality may be an affordable assumption for some applications in ecology and conservation, particularly for areas of intermediate size.
Sustainable river management in harmony with nature
Yukihiro Shimatani
We are facing with a drastic change of our societies that we have never experienced during our human history. Under this circumstance, we need to create a new paradigm of land management. In the old paradigm, we advanced technologies to prevent disaster and extended our city towards areas where is a higher risk of disaster. Using the most advanced technologies, however, we failed to prevent new disasters. Under urbanization, flood arrival time is remarkably shortened, peak flow rate was mostly doubled, and we are threatened by a new type of “urban flooding”. Collapsed by the earthquake and tsunami, many lives were lost in coastal cities. In the future, people may better to live in areas at lower risk of disasters by restoring natural environments in the higher risk areas. We also need to restore culture in harmony with nature, and create a society in which warmer interaction between people as well as interaction between people and nature is advanced. As an attempt toward creating such a society in harmony with nature, I will introduce our experiences of river management considering nature and culture, with an emphasis upon the importance of collaboration with citizen.
