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Date
Made in the Shade Part I
This series of two posts is about shade, and lizards, and black plastic balls. You’ll see – it will all come together nicely.
Let’s begin here in Part I…with the lizards. Like them or not, lizards are an important part of our ecosystem. And not only are they endangered, there is now a new level of uncertainty in the speed at which they may become extinct. According to this study from the University of Southern California, 20% of all lizard species could go extinct by 2080. That’s bad enough, but recently, according to this story from NPR, those numbers relied on certain assumptions about how easy it is for lizards to find shade from the increasingly hot sun. Lizards, being cold-blooded, of course, don’t really regulate their body temperature – they adjust it based on their environment. And that environment is generally getting warmer for them.
And so, per the article, a scientist from Clemson University named Michael Sears, recently did a study – we would say, completed a project - using computer modeling and real-world experiments to see how the kind of shade available affects a lizard's ability to keep its body temperature in the optimal range.
Sears’ project team surgically implanted tiny temperature sensors into dozens of spiny lizards, and then did experiments in special enclosures constructed in the New Mexico desert.
"We use these pieces of shade cloth to cool down temperatures in spots to see how the animals react to it," Sears says.
They published their findings here in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the bottom line conclusion is that the lizards did much better when they had access to lots of small patches of shade, compared to just a few big patches.
This uncertainty as to how lizards are able to find these (decreasing) small patches of shade makes the prediction of the effect of climate change on lizard extinctions much harder to do and most likely indicates that the estimated forecasts issued so far may actually be optimistic – and at a minimum, closer to ‘uncertainty’ than to ‘risk’. As the NPR article puts it:
In general, lizards that live in already-warm places probably will suffer from increased temperatures, while lizards that live in cool places might actually benefit to some extent, says Sears.
"Everything in between, all bets are kind of off now," he says, "because what our study suggests is that how bushes are placed in an environment might really impact the lizards just as much as the temperature itself."
Here are the project management lessons from our lizard friends (and more importantly from these intrepid researchers):
- When it comes to risk analysis, there usually is more than meets the eye
- There is a distinction between risk and uncertainty
- Read more about this subtle but important difference at this blog post
- More significant risks (and we’d put extinction in that category) deserve further quantitative analysis
- This is yet another example of a green-by-definition project
In part II of Made in the Shade, we will discuss an effort to provide shade for evaporating reservoirs by using (this is real) plastic balls partially filled with potable water.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: September 11, 2016 10:00 PM |
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