Imagine: A wild salmon nursery, brimming with life, waiting for the great migration out to sea.

It begins here, where cottonwood smoke drifts across the yard at Mae Syvrud’s home each summer. It wafts from the smokehouse where her family’s prized wild salmon will cure for days at a time. This salmon comes from Alaska’s Bristol Bay — center of the salmon universe.

For Mae and her children and grandchildren, living with salmon is a long-held custom dating back thousands of years to when, as one Yup’ik fisherman once told me, “time was thin.”

Thousands of years. Millions of fish.

Why is Alaska’s Bristol Bay, even in 2010, home to tens of millions of wild salmon?

People here have an answer. This headwaters menagerie of big rivers, giant lakes, ponds and willowy streams is perfect habitat. To keep it healthy, this habitat needs protection.

Which is what brought me far into the remote Bristol Bay headwaters last summer. As Mae tended the fire in her family’s salmon smokehouse — yes, I’ve tasted her very own smoked salmon, and it’s heavenly — I went far upstream with fisheries biologists working to protect the places wild salmon need to survive.

Just what does a wild salmon need to survive? Scientists have a list of exactly what salmon do need, and briefly, they need big landscapes where water is clean and rivers flow free.

Bristol Bay is a wild Idaho-sized chunk of Alaska where common environmental challenges of our day — urban sprawl or air pollution or invasive species — seem distant. Roads are mostly absent. Bears and wolves and caribou roam here. Trout. Wolverine. Waterfowl. Moose. For a salmon, it’s perfect. Which is exactly why Alaska’s Bristol Bay is home to the largest runs of wild salmon anywhere on earth.

To help protect the most remote and as-yet uncharted salmon habitat at a time when large-scale copper and gold mining is proposed for the region, The Nature Conservancy sent a crew of fisheries biologists to survey lakes and rivers for wild salmon.

On a day when I joined the crew, I waded shin-deep waters and carried a fine-meshed net on a long fiberglass pole. Our biologist, named Sarah, held a battery-powered electro-shocker that works like a big magic wand. When you poke this where the young three-or-four-inch-long fish are — beneath an undercut bank or down in a pool — they are momentarily stunned with a brief pulse of electricity.

If the guy with the net (me, in this case) is quick enough, fish are scooped from the water, then identified by species and photographed before they’re returned to the water. When scientists document the incredible habitat value of these waters in this way, it triggers existing regulatory levers in state and federal law.

Their lives begin in these streams, but salmon need up to four years and a trip to the Pacific Ocean before they’ll return. Along the way, they feed an entire ecosystem, beginning with the brown bears — see the iconic image on the Alaska state quarter. Some salmon fill the nets of a 125-year-old sustainable commercial fishery. Anglers come from around the world to test their luck with a fishing rod. Families like Mae’s catch some for the smokehouse.

But the migration journey of the salmon ends after they finally spawn in the very waters it began: the lakes and lacy network of tributaries that confluence into rivers such as the Nushagak and Kvichak.

So far, in two field seasons, we have discovered wild salmon in more than 90 miles of streams. This effort also has told us something more: Salmon are everywhere. We discovered salmon in 75 percent of the waters at the time of our surveys.

The image of a wild salmon nursery comforts people like Mae Syvrud, even as change whirs closer. Mae and a lot of her neighbors wrestle with the prospect of big-time development here. Most are simply opposed. In the meantime, Mae and her grandchildren tend the smokehouse, where she keeps the fire burning.

(Image: Brown bear fishing for salmon at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park of Bristol Bay, Alaska. Salmon are considered a “keystone species” and are one of the first species to suffer when stream water quality declines. Image credit: Ami Vitale.)

Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy. For more information about our editorial policy and legal terms of use, see our About This Blog page.

1. The latest issue therapists are hearing about from bickering couples? Green disputes. (NY Times)
2. A  critic of nuclear power finds reason to argue in its favor: France. (Green Inc.)
3. New insights into why birds migrate such long distances. (Bright Green Blog)
4. Who needs casinos? The new source of wealth for Indian tribes could be solar power. (Christian Science Monitor)
5. Just how fast are the Himalayan glaciers melting? (NY Times)

1. Why are meteorologists more likely to be skeptical of climate change? (Columbia Journalism Review, hat-tip The Vine)
2. Refuse is the new fuel of choice for California’s garbage trucks. (The Christian Science Monitor)
3. What are the green IT solutions for energy consumption by businesses?  (Environmental Leader)
4. The EPA has proposed strict new health limits for smog. (Washington Post)
5. The latest setback for Massachusetts’ Cape Cod wind farm? A Native American ritual of greeting the sunrise. (The New York Times)

How can communities be warned of impending danger from rising floodwaters in an area with little or no access to telephones or electricity?

For centuries, people along the Zambezi River relied on drumming to communicate information about river conditions, ranging from rapid flood warnings to less-urgent updates about gradually rising waters that helped people plan when to begin packing for the annual migration to higher ground.

This annual migration symbolizes a very different relationship to floods than exists today along the lower Zambezi, and indeed, in most parts of the world. Now floods are assumed to be controlled and traditional warning systems have faded. It is true that the annual floods that were so beneficial for both rural communities and ecosystems are largely gone. But what remains are the occasional sudden and deadly large floods that devastate communities without warning.

Restoring traditional connections between communities and flooding can reinvigorate ecosystems, enhance livelihoods and save lives.  Making the connection between these objectives is a great challenge and opportunity for conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy as we work on the Zambezi River.

For millennia, the Zambezi collected the summer rains from the highlands, swelling and then easing out of its banks into vast surrounding floodplains. These floodplains were the engines of productivity for both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems as well as rural communities. People depended on the floodplains’ abundant wildlife and fisheries, lush grasses for livestock, and groundwater–replenished after each flood–which supported crops as the waters receded.  Life centered around the river and its annual flood, as beautifully celebrated in this poem from the Barotse people who live along the Zambezi in western Zambia:

It is flood time in Bulozi.

The floodplain is clothed in the water garment.

Everywhere there is water!

There is brightness!

There are sparkles!

Waves marry with the sun’s glory

Birds fly over the floods slowly,

They are drunken with cool air.

They watch a scene which comes but once a year

Floods are beautiful.

This poem goes on to describe a festival—the Kuomboka (literally, “moving out of the water”)—which is still practiced today along a free-flowing section of the Zambezi.  The festival is preceded by drumming that alerts communities that the river is rising and it will soon be time to move to higher ground.

In the Zambezi delta (where the river enters the Indian Ocean in Mozambique), people also previously used the floodplain only seasonally—for fishing, hunting, grazing and agriculture—and built their permanent buildings on higher ground. Drumming may have been an important source of information about river conditions hundreds of miles away, helping communities plan the timing of their movements, as well as a source of immediate warning of flash flooding from tropical cyclones. (Anthropologists call this practice “drum telegraphy” and it has been used by cultures throughout the world).

Today the Zambezi Delta is a different place. A massive hydroelectric dam, Cahora Bossa, dramatically changed the river’s flows and stopped floods in nearly all years.

After the dam, fish harvests in the river and prawn harvests in the estuary dropped precipitously and, as the floodplains dried up, so did the availability of good forage for livestock and groundwater for crops. Wildlife also suffered and numbers declined steeply.

Perversely, the reduced flooding may have actually increased the flood danger to people. Historically, the annual floods served as a frequent reminder of how high the river could reach; communities thus sited their homes and economic activities to avoid dangerous floods and maximize the benefits from productive floods. Once the dam stopped the frequent floods, permanent communities were established in the floodplains. The drum-based flood warning system no doubt faded away. The river is now more-or-less tamed.

Except when it isn’t.

While in the past the river rose relatively slowly as the flood gathered strength from far-flung tributaries, now the dam-managed river occasionally—and suddenly—breaks out from its confinement.  The results can be catastrophic.

In 2007, heavy rains lead to a surge of inflow to Cahora Bassa’s reservoir that then “spilled” over the dam with little warning, killing people and displacing hundreds of thousands in the downstream Delta.

Not only have the communities lost their economic and cultural connections to the productive annual flood, they now associate flooding with catastrophe. This perception complicates our efforts—as part of a coalition that includes WWF, the International Crane Foundation and agencies and universities from Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique—to restore the ecological health of the Zambezi River. 

Restoring a managed flood release from Cahora Bassa into the Delta has the potential to significantly improve conditions for both wildlife and people, particularly the rural poor who depend on the Delta’s fish, prawns, grasslands, and groundwater. However, managed flood releases must overcome the newly developed biases against floods shaped by tragic events in recent decades.

One way to do that may be to clearly demonstrate that, in addition to improving the health of the delta, the release of managed, intentional floods can actually make people safer from uncontrolled floods.

Currently, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is working on a project to reduce flood vulnerability in the Zambezi basin, including development of early warning systems. The flood-warning system will strive to deliver accurate and timely information to communities using everything from the most current technology to traditional means such as colored flags and drumming. Other ideas include self-powered radios and taking advantage of the rapid proliferation of cell phone ownership in Africa to institute a “reverse 911” system, wherein a network of sophisticated monitoring instruments can quickly (perhaps even automatically) send out warnings as text messages on cell phones.

How does this relate to the Conservancy’s goals of restoring managed floods to the delta? While the “restoration” floods will be no where near as high, rapid, or dangerous as the rare uncontrolled floods, they will still require effective communication with remote and hard-to-reach rural communities. Thus, these managed floods can provide an excellent opportunity to prepare and test flood warning systems with actual, albeit much less dangerous, floods. Government agencies, relief organizations and communities can practice communicating in advance, and in real time, about floods.

Linking managed, intentional floods with the development and testing of flood-warning systems is just one piece of a larger concept — floodplain restoration and reconnection can make people safer from all floods by promoting land uses that reduce the potential for catastrophic losses while allowing floodplains to provide to society their characteristic multiple benefits.

(Image credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

Sudan the northern white rhino hasn’t seen home for a very long time.

For the past 36 years, he’s lived in the chilly Dvur Kralove Zoo in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.

But on Sunday, December 20, Sudan and 3 other northern white rhinos boarded planes and journeyed overnight from Prague to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

Their journey is a last-ditch effort to save the northern white rhino from extinction. With only 8 left in the world — all in captivity, until now —scientists hope that returning these 4 to their native habitat will encourage them to breed.

The world’s second-largest mammal, the northern white rhino has been poached to extinction in the wild. But moving these 4 to Kenya could make a difference in the survival of the species. Northern white rhinos are cousins to the more populous southern white rhino and the endangered black rhino, and Kenya has recently seen success with breeding and protecting endangered black rhinos.

“This incredible effort is indicative of the potential of conservation efforts in Kenya,” says David Banks, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Africa Program. “The people of Kenya can be proud that other nations of the world look to them for conservation leadership in Africa.”

Two of the organizations behind this effort, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and Ol Pejeta Conservancy, are Kenyan partners of The Nature Conservancy. Other groups helping with the rhino transfer include: Dvur Kralove Zoo in Prague, the Kenya Wildlife Service, Back to Africa and Fauna & Flora International.

The long-term success of the northern white rhino is part of a larger strategy involving The Nature Conservancy to facilitate community-based conservation across an astounding 1.5 million acres of Kenyan grasslands and savannas — an area twice the size of Yosemite National Park.

These areas provide crucial habitat for the movement of Kenya’s iconic wildlife and the pastoral way of life that dominates the cultures here.

One of The Nature Conservancy’s partners in this effort is the Northern Rangelands Trust, a cooperative bringing together 17 tribal communal land owners in Kenya. Most recently, The Nature Conservancy worked with NRT’s local community leaders in the remote northern Kenyan outpost of Sera to develop conservation plans.

“My people are motivated to improve their rangelands and livelihoods, and they now see wildlife as an important part of their economic security,” says Tom Lalampaa, an NRT manager and native of the area.,

The journey to Kenya is just the beginning for these 4 northern white rhinos. Check back with us in early 2010 for more news about the rhinos, including video footage of their arrival in Kenya!

(Image: Sudan, the northern white rhino. Credit: Elodie Sampere/Lewa Wildlife Conservancy.)

Jon Schwedler is a media relations manager for The Nature Conservancy based in Maryland.

(Editor’s note: Conservancy Senior Marine Scientist Alison Green is on an expedition to the Raja Ampat islands in Indonesia — amidst some of the most spectacular and biodiverse coral reef ecosystems in the world. Catch up on all her posts from the expedition.)

Raja Ampat is world-famous for hosting the highest marine diversity on earth. But there’s a lot more to Raja Ampat than just coral reefs.

The area also comprises more than 600 stunningly beautiful islands (like the one in the photo above). Many of these are rugged, sharp karst limestone islands, which look like stone temples or mushrooms rising from the sea.

In Southeast Misool, there is a magnificent chain of karst islands called the Wagmab Chain. This island chain is over 10 miles long, and comprises a maze of narrow windy channels, sheltered inlets and bays, and luxuriant coral reefs.

The islands are covered in a tangle of vegetation, with orchids and pitcher plants cascading down their sides.

Did you know that pitcher plants are carnivorous — they eat insects? They are just one example of the extraordinary vegetation to be found on these islands.

In 2002, The Nature Conservancy conducted a rapid ecological assessment of Raja Ampat’s islands and reefs. Botanists found many endemic plant species on these islands, and concluded that they were of high conservation value.

(Image 1: Karst island and luxuriant coral reef, Wagmab Chain, South East Misool. Credit: Sangeeta Mangubhai. Image 2: Pitcher plants hanging down the side of a karst island, Wagmab Chain, South East Misool. Credit: Alison Green/TNC.)

A páramo ecosystem in Ecuador. The soil is like a saturated sponge.

Since I started my position as senior scientist at The Nature Conservancy a year and a half ago, I have been outspoken in the crusade to measure the impacts of the organization’s conservation strategies. Sure, I love knowing that the Conservancy has, for instance:

• Helped create new marine protected areas which cover hundreds of hectares,
• Influenced companies worldwide to implement environmental flows in their dams, or
• Converted hundreds of farms to organic practices.

But what does that really tell me about our the conservation impacts of these efforts?

• Have the marine protected areas increased fish abundance…allowing poor fishermen to recover their jobs?
• Is the freshwater biodiversity in the river enhanced or maintained now that there is an ample volume of water year round? Has anyone been denied water or electricity because a dam has to release more water during dry seasons to protect the biodiversity?
• Does organic agriculture actually reduce the sediments and pesticides that flow into our water systems?

Measuring our impacts can answer these questions and tell us if the hours we spend on planes, in the field, in meetings, on our computers, talking to partners, running models, etc., etc., etc. are actually doing something.

So why haven’t we always measured our impacts? Because although it may not be as tough or costly as we make it out to be, it’s still not easy.

Ecosystems are a giant cobweb: They look pretty, simple and shiny from afar…but are sticky, intricate and complicated up-close. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t measure impacts; we just have to approach it logically and methodically.

For the past few months, I have been working with a team of experts to design a set of impact-monitoring protocols for the Conservancy’s water fund projects – an approach to water conservation proliferating throughout the Northern Andes region.

These projects are the cobweb I just described. They are elegant, simple in design, productive and successful. But when we talk about measuring their impact and breaking the projects into their component pieces, life gets sticky.

The projects are elegant and simple: Water users pay water providers (by putting money in a trust fund) for supplying clean, regular water supply. The payment goes to conserving the watershed. Each donating water user gets a seat on the fund’s governance board, which decides how to spend the money.

But the projects are sticky because, while the water users are millions of downstream city residents, the water suppliers are poor communities dependent on these watersheds for their survival:

• The water suppliers are native ecosystems — particularly high-altitude grasslands, páramo (defined by Wikipedia as “glacier-formed valleys and plains with a large variety of lakes, peat bogs and wet grasslands intermingled with shrublands and forest patches”); and tropical forest — as well as watershed communities.
• The communities are poor and rely on income from their cattle or crops for survival.
• The native ecosystems provide fertile soils and pasture lands for these resources.

So do we save the páramo and provide water to city residents, thereby threatening the lives of poor communities? Or do we allow those communities to survive and threaten the water supply of millions — not to mention invaluable biodiversity?

Water fund projects have found a way to avoid making these choices by investing in people and in nature. Project strategies include:

• Providing alternative resources and income sources to communities,
• Hiring community-based park guards to keep cattle out of native ecosystems, and
• Investing in the productivity of communities’ farms through best management practices.

This is great, but also makes things complicated. Since we invest in it all, we need to measure and monitor it all, and that’s step 1: disentangling the cobweb to be able to ask the right questions.

Asking the right questions leads to being able to measure the impacts that we care about:

• Does keeping cows out of páramo actually help regulate water flow and improve water quantity?
• Do alternative livelihood strategies offered to communities offset any harm done to their well-being?
• Does restoring riparian vegetation reduce sedimentation levels in the river?
• Does conserving the whole watershed by investing in people and in nature improve or maintain the integrity of the basin?

To really know if this strategy is working we need to at least measure the impact on biodiversity, on hydrology, and on people.

So, first, define the objectives. Make them clear, simple, and straightforward. For example:

• Objective: Reduce sedimentation in the river by 30% in 5 years.
• Question for experimentation: Does fencing and therefore removal of cattle from riparian areas reduce sedimentation problems?
• Indicator for experimentation: Amount of sediments in the water before the fencing and after the fencing as compared to a watershed with no fencing.

But we’re still not done. There are still issues of scale (how much of the watershed needs to be fenced before we see a basin-scale impact); of choosing a control site (so we know that it’s the fencing that is causing the impact we are measuring); of ensuring the treatment area (fencing length) is long enough to see a response, among others. But the above is a start.

And it’s worth the while — because in 5 years, conservation organizations can say more than “how many acres of land we have purchased” or “how many policies we have influenced.” Imagine if we could say that, because of our efforts, 5 million people have reliable access to water for the next 200 years — where, without our investments, the same water source would be so polluted it was not potable.

That’s powerful. And slowly but surely, the Conservancy is taking steps to get there.

(Image: Páramo ecosystem in Cajas National Park near Cuenca, Ecuador. Credit: Rebecca Goldman/TNC.)

1. Google and Arnold Schwarzenegger make a formidable team: yesterday the Gov of California unveiled a new Google Earth tool that shows where rising seas and increased wildlfires could hit.
2. Is open ocean fish farming the future of seafood? Yale 360 reports on the growing movement to raise fish in farms offshore in order to avoid the deleterious environmental impacts of nearshore farming practices.
3. Denmark is hoping that incentives will get more people to buy electric cars. Even in this super-eco-conscious country, electric cars haven’t been big sellers — so now the government is offering a $40,000 tax break and free parking to help entice car buyers.
4. Residents of Shismaref, Alaska, know first-hand what climate change can do: they’re watching their homes fall into the ocean and their coastline erode due to a warming climate.
5. Brazil wants to incorporate REDD into its climate change plans, with a few conditions: the country will support saving trees as long as industrialized nations agree to use up to 10 percent of their emissions credits to invest in forest projects.

(Above video: Geoff Lipsett-Moore, director of conservation for the Conservancy’s Melanesia program, celebrates along with other Conservancy staff and chiefs from Choiseul province in the Solomon Islands celebrate the community’s support for two Conservancy recommendations at the 2009 annual meeting of the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities (LLCTC). Credit: Richard Hamilton/TNC)

“You and I are no longer partners; our partnership has developed into a relationship. In a relationship you talk with us rather than talking to us, you are a part of Lauru.”

- Honorable Reverend Chief Leslie Boseto, President of the Lauru Land Council of Tribal Communities, speaking to Richard Hamilton from TNC’s Melanesia Program

While many of today’s world leaders are struggling to find consensus on how to protect our environment, for leaders in the Solomon Islands, consensus is here.

Several weeks ago, the village of Soranamola in the remote Solomon Islands province of Choiseul played host to the annual meeting of the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities (LLCTC). At the meeting, more than  100 chiefs who represent the 21,000 residents of Choiseul provided their unanimous support for two recommendations made by the Conservancy:

• Launch a Lauru ridges-to-reefs protected Areas Network;
• Establish at least one marine protected area and one terrestrial protected area within the next two years for each of the 12 wards in Lauru.

This remarkable declaration reflects nine years of dedicated and determined work that the Conservancy’s Solomon Islands team has spent building its relationship with the LLCTC. The words of Honorable Leslie Boseto are a powerful and moving testament to the trust that the Conservancy has earned in this time, and to the importance of working with our partners as equals.

Conserving Choiseul is no small victory. Not only is Choiseul part of the Coral Triangle, it is also the most biodiverse island in the Solomon archipelago, and contains the largest stands of lowland rainforest in the entire Pacific.  The rapid expansion of logging activties in the province poses a grave threat to the forests of Choiseul, while over-harvesting of  marine resources threatens the livelihoods and food security of Choiseul communities.

Already, the decision to establish a protected areas network for Choiseul has secured support from both the provincial and national level of government in the Solomon Islands, serving as a model for expanded conservation efforts within the country as part of the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Planning Process now underway. With this, the Lauru Protected Areas Network has the potential to be a vital pillar in Pacific, and even global, conservation.

The Lauru Protected Areas Network not only shows what cooperation between global NGOs and local partners can accomplish, but it also provides one solution to a common challenge  that exists in much of the Conservancy’s international work—how to reconcile bottom-up, community-driven conservation opportunities with our organization’s systematic and science-driven approach.

Implementing the protected areas network will be a dynamic, community-driven process, one that depends on identifying the most important and complementary pieces of Choiseul’s lands and seas. We want the whole to represent much more than the just the sum of the parts; a protected areas network that conserves the full spectrum of Choiseul’s amazing biodiversity, and the vital resources which sustain the vibrant communities of Choiseul.

The leaders of Choiseul have taken a strong and decisive move to protect their natural and cultural heritage for future generations and the Conservancy is proud to have been a part of it. Let’s hope today’s world leaders will begin to demonstrate the same resolve and commitment to conservation as those in Choiseul have done.

(Image: Members of the Lauru Land Council of Tribal Communities. Credit: Richard Hamilton/TNC.)

What am I trying to illustrate in the above photo (a picture of cattle and elephant dung)? That conservation planning is a pile of poop?

No. But this mixture of excrement does show why such planning needs to incorporate extreme events like drought or flooding – especially for the impacts of those events on local people.

In the place where I took this photo — Mt Kenya – livestock herders have moved into protected areas. Why? Because of a protracted and devastating drought — one Kenya is (hopefully) at the end of. The drought has caused the displacement of huge numbers of people and the estimated deaths of half the livestock.

In times this tough, local herders have been forced to graze their animals in protected areas around the country – areas normally set aside for nature and tourism. I can’t blame them — but in a country that relies on tourism so heavily (it’s the second largest sector of the economy), this development is big and troubling news.

Obviously, conservationists should be planning for such extreme events. They will occur; we just don’t know when. We do often include in our plans responses to long-term environmental events (e.g., blow-downs, hurricanes, etc) and critical threats (such as habitat fragmentation and large-scale agriculture). We are even slowly coming to grips with consequences of climate change. But how often do we consider the effects of extreme events on local people, especially the poor, in the areas in which we work?

Probably not nearly enough.

Why should conservationists do this kind of planning? Because quite often the people living in and around the areas we are interested in protecting rely on their immediate surroundings for sustenance. And how extreme events effect these people will likely tell us how they will in turn use those local resources (in many cases, such as around Mt. Kenya, for their survival). By planning for these events and the ramifications on both nature and people, the effects can be at least reduced or muted.

To that end, many Conservancy projects have indirect benefits to people; but not many plan for direct ones. One example of direct benefits to people is grassbanking – the setting aside of land that can be used for grazing livestock in the event of an extreme drought. It’s simple and effective, and something the Conservancy has done in areas such as Montana, and in Kenya, with our partners at the Northern Rangelands Trust (http://northernrangelands.wildlifedirect.org/) where the grassbanks are being put to good use right now – helping both wildlife and people get through the current drought. And this grassbanking in Kenya has helped reduce pressure on protected areas and keep many more people off of Mt Kenya.

We will get droughts, or floods, or extremes of some sort or another — and people, especially those in poorer areas and countries, will turn to nature to help them through those tough times. We should make sure that nature is resilient enough not only to endure these extreme events, but also the pressures that will be brought to bear by local people — especially when those people’s very survival is at stake.

(Image courtesy Timothy Boucher/TNC.)