Imminent Extinction Research Articles

Wildlife trade, captive breeding and the imminent extinction of a songbird

The illegal cage bird trade is increasingly recognised as a major impediment to the survival of a large number of songbirds. Indeed some bird species are now more common in captive private hands than they are in the wild. This includes the black-winged mynas (Acridotheres melanopterus, A. tricolor and A. tertius), three species of Critically Endangered songbirds endemic to Indonesia. Only 20 years ago these species were not considered globally threatened but high levels of trapping from the wild for the largely domestic cage bird trade has brought all three species to the brink of extinction. It is estimated that less than 500 black-winged mynas remain in the wild. Here we investigate the trade in black-winged mynas, online and in bird markets, and make an assessment of the role captive breeding played in the conservation and management of the species over the period 2009–2018. We found prices peaked in 2014 at ∼ US$140 (∼75% of the monthly minimum wage) per bird and have subsequently gone down to US$85 (now ∼33% of the minimum wage), possibly indicating higher supply and lower demand. In 2015–2018 we surveyed seven bird markets in western Java and in 127/145 visits observed 1253 black-winged mynas for sale. Turnover was high, with ∼50% of birds sold after one week upon arrival in the market. We estimate that between 1300 and 2300 mynas (retail value ∼ US$170,000) are sold annually in these seven bird markets. Few birds had closed leg-rings, but were in all likelihood a combination of captive-bred, first-generation captive-born and wild-caught individuals; some appeared to be crossbreeds between the three recognised species. With additional bird markets in Java and Bali and a thriving online trade, we estimate that the number of black-winged mynas in private ownership in Indonesia is in the order of 40,000 birds. Without proper registration and regulation in the trade of captive-bred mynas, even a small amount of wild-caught birds entering this now substantial trade will act as a serious impediment to the conservation of black-winged mynas. With the species already being ecologically extinct, we anticipate that it soon will join the ranks of species like Père David's deer Elaphurus davidianus and scimitar-horned oryx Oryx dammah that are extinct in the wild but that have captive populations in the tens of thousands. In order to prevent the imminent extinction of black-winged mynas in the wild, we recommend (1) that the Indonesian authorities invest in more effective law enforcement and prosecution of lawbreakers; (2) establishing a multi-stakeholder three species black-winged myna management plan, in which commercial captive breeders participate; and (3) better coordination of reintroduction programmes.

The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals.

A widespread opinion is that conservation efforts disproportionately benefit charismatic species. However, this doesn’t mean that they are not threatened, and which species are “charismatic” remains unclear. Here, we identify the 10 most charismatic animals and show that they are at high risk of imminent extinction in the wild. We also find that the public ignores these animals’ predicament and we suggest it could be due to the observed biased perception of their abundance, based more on their profusion in our culture than on their natural populations. We hypothesize that this biased perception impairs conservation efforts because people are unaware that the animals they cherish face imminent extinction and do not perceive their urgent need for conservation. By freely using the image of rare and threatened species in their product marketing, many companies may participate in creating this biased perception, with unintended detrimental effects on conservation efforts, which should be compensated by channeling part of the associated profits to conservation. According to our hypothesis, this biased perception would be likely to last as long as the massive cultural and commercial presence of charismatic species is not accompanied by adequate information campaigns about the imminent threats they face.

The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Memory Politics by Stavroula Pipyrou

Reviewed by: The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Memory Politics by Stavroula Pipyrou Nicholas Doumanis (bio) Stavroula Pipyrou, The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Memory Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016. Pp. ix + 246. Cloth $59.95. There are two small corners in Italy where indigenous Greek-speaking communities survive. One is located inland within the heel of Italy (Apulia), and the other, which is slightly smaller but better known, is found just beneath the toe in Calabria. Among a handful of villages there—a century ago there were as many as 12 but now there are 5 at best—live people known as the Grecanici, who still speak a local Greek dialect (Grecanica) and regard it as their mother tongue. As with their counterparts in Apulia, the people of the southern Aspromonte area appear to be a remnant of what centuries ago was a much larger Greek-speaking presence in Southern Italy. In The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics, anthropologist Stavroula Pipyrou offers a painstakingly researched [End Page 223] ethnography. Given Calabria's limited communion with the broader Greek-speaking world further east, the mere existence of the Grecanici is an issue that fascinates many. Thankfully, Pipyrou does not burden the reader with such trite questions as: are the Grecanici Greeks? Are they, as some Greeks believe, "brothers" who have suffered "the suppression of the Italians" (64)? According the book's author, the Grecanici are autochthonous Calabrians, whose faith is Roman Catholicism and whose language, Grecanica, is only used as an everyday language by an ever-shrinking number of elderly people. Grecanica's imminent extinction as a living language, however, is a source of deep concern for a much larger community that includes the descendants of Grecanica speakers, many of whom nowadays live in the regional capital Reggio. Despite the symbolic violence of the state (particularly governments since Berlusconi's time), which has played mere lip service to the interests of minorities, and despite the prejudices of other Calabrians, who have looked down on them as mountain yokels, the Grecanici not only treasure their ancestral language and culture but also value it for its political worth. Pipyrous's ethnography is not about the culture, per se. Instead of treating the reader to an in-depth account of the Grecanica folklore, song, dance, customs, and language, the book interprets the social and political dimensions of their struggle for cultural retention with a view to examining how power is negotiated in everyday life and within voluntary associations. It investigates what the community's struggle reveals about how fellow Grecanici kin and immediate family relate to one another. Relatedness and its functions is one of Pipyrou's key themes, as it is through the utilization of a dense patchwork of social networks that the Grecanici can achieve personal and communal ends that are otherwise unattainable. They were once counted among the poorest people in one of Italy's poorest regions. Although the Grecanici are no longer impoverished, memories of la miseria and discrimination are often invoked in the struggle to preserve their cultural identity. Since the 1960s, however, when Italy formally recognized the status of minorities, Grecanici have inverted their subaltern status to create a place for themselves "in contemporary politics through minority claims" (4). Associations have sprung up since the 1960s in order to manage the questione Grecanica, primarily to preserve a culture that is regarded as endangered, but also to utilize what has become an asset that has given them access to national and international forums. Here they can voice their concerns, and sometimes their efforts find traction. Pipyrou demonstrates how actors call on relationships (blood, friendships, godparenthood, clientististic friendships, mafia, church, political parties, and global organizations) to assert claims and effect desired outcomes. As such, The Grecanici of Southern Italy is about [End Page 224] governance, which Pipyrou distinguishes from government, since it more accurately relates the range of institutions (such as the state, the church, the N' drangheta [the Calabrian mafia], families, and civic associations) and noninstitutional actors that must play a part in decision-making and resource management. The author also notes the agonistic nature of governance, which...

An evolutionary tipping point in a changing environment

Populations can persist in directionally changing environments by evolving. Quantitative genetic theory aims to predict critical rates of environmental change beyond which populations go extinct. Here, we point out that all current predictions effectively assume the same specific fitness function. This function causes selection on the standing genetic variance of quantitative traits to become increasingly strong as mean trait values depart from their optima. Hence, there is no bound on the rate of evolution and persistence is determined by the critical rate of environmental change at which populations cease to grow. We then show that biologically reasonable changes to the underlying fitness function can impose a qualitatively different extinction threshold. In particular, inflection points caused by weakening selection create local extrema in the strength of selection and thus in the rate of evolution. These extrema can produce evolutionary tipping points, where long-run population growth rates drop from positive to negative values without ever crossing zero. Generic early-warning signs of tipping points are found to have little power to detect imminent extinction, and require hard-to-gather data. Furthermore, we show how evolutionary tipping points produce evolutionary hysteresis, creating extinction debts.

Further knowledge and urgent action required to save Orange-bellied Parrots from extinction

ABSTRACTOnly three wild-bred female Orange-bellied Parrots returned from migration in the 2016/17 breeding season, representing the lowest point of a long-term decline. In this context of imminent extinction risk we (i) update knowledge of population parameters, (ii) critically evaluate current recovery actions, and (iii) identify new management options. We present new data from the 2016/17 breeding season. Orange-bellied Parrots were only observed at the last known breeding site where fire suppression may havecaused shortage of natural food. Recently burned habitat elsewhere support abundant food, but no parrots. Fecundity of captive-bred individuals was significantly worse than wild-bred individuals (0.8 vs. 3 fledglings respectively), mostly due to infertility. Bacterial septicemia due to contaminated food caused mortalities of at least four nestlings. Fostering captive-bred nestlings to the wild showed some potential as a recovery tool, with 2 of 4 nests accepting a foster nestling, and one of these fledging successfully. Captive-bred birds had poorer feather condition than wild birds. Addressing food shortages and the addition of new managementactions to improve population recruitment are critical and urgent recovery priorities. We suggest recovery priorities for the species arising from our results, including emergency intervention to prevent imminent extinction.

Toward an imminent extinction of Colombian glaciers?

ABSTRACTThis study documents the current state of glacier coverage in the Colombian Andes, the glacier shrinkage over the twentieth century and discusses indication of their disappearance in the coming decades. Satellite images have been used to update the glacier inventory of Colombia reflecting an overall glacier extent of about 42.4 ± 0.71 km2 in 2016 distributed in four glacierized mountain ranges. Combining these data with older inventories, we show that the current extent is 36% less than in the mid-1990s, 62% less than in the mid-twentieth century and almost 90% less than the Little Ice Age maximum extent. Focusing on Nevado Santa Isabel (Los Nevados National Park), aerial photographs from 1987 and 2005 combined with a terrestrial LiDAR survey show that the mass loss of the former ice cap, which is nowadays parceled into several small glaciers, was about −2.5 m w.e. yr−1 during the last three decades. Radar measurements performed on one of the remnant glaciers, La Conejeras glacier, show that the ice thickness is limited (about 22 m in average in 2014) and that with such a mass loss rate, the glacier should disappear in the coming years. Considering their imbalance with the current climate conditions, their limited altitudinal extent and reduced accumulation areas, and in view of temperature increase expected in future climate scenarios, most of the Colombian glaciers will likely disappear in the coming decades. Only the largest ones located on the highest summits will probably persist until the second half of the twenty-first century although very reduced.

Introduction

Introduction Arien Mack this is the fourth issue of social research since 2009 that is concerned with changes occurring in universities both in the United States and elsewhere. It may seem a disproportionate number given the many other subjects we might have considered, but we do not think so, given our history. Social Research, the journal of the New School for Social Research, was first published in 1934, established by the University in Exile scholars who were the founding faculty members of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at The New School, now known as the New School for Social Research (NSSR), a division of The New School. Since its founding, Social Research and the NSSR have been deeply concerned with maintaining freedom of inquiry, which we take to be a core value of all institutions of higher learning. That core value is now facing challenges from many directions. As is now well known, the University in Exile (UIE) was the home at The New School for primarily German Jewish scholars who had been rescued by The New School's first president from almost certain imminent extinction by the Nazi regime, which was then rising to power. The Nazi regime, while it was at work doing many evil things, was launching a frontal attack on the principle of free inquiry at German universities. The UIE was meant not only to protect these endangered scholars but also to protect the prized principle of free inquiry, and it has continued to do so through its several name changes. It is for this reason, if not for others, that it seems completely right for Social Research to put together a series of special issues on universities, which are subject to many different kinds of pressures today, some of which have the potential to encroach on or erode freedom of inquiry, whether directly or indirectly. [End Page xix] Our first two issues explicitly concerned with universities both appeared in 2009 and were titled "Free Inquiry at Risk: Universities in Dangerous Times." One focused primarily on the United States, the next on universities in other countries. A third issue appeared in 2012 and was titled "The Future of Higher Education." The current issue addresses an aspect only touched on in earlier issues: the effect on universities of the growing pressure for accountability, which appears to stem from their increasing corporatization and other kinds of societal pressures. The questions that are front and center here are: • This accountability is to whom and for what? • Who sets the standards and what ends do they serve? • Why should the state pay for higher education unless its own purposes are served? • What are these purposes and how do they affect what gets taught and what research gets supported? These are the questions that the authors in this issue were asked to grapple with. While their answers are not uniform, all are interesting and some are provocative. There seems to be little doubt that what is at stake here in the arguments surrounding accountability is the future of universities and of scholarly knowledge more generally. The papers in this special issue were first presented at the conference entitled "The Future of Scholarly Knowledge: Principles, Pressures, and Prospects," which was held October 13–14, 2016, at the New School for Social Research. I am grateful to Sage Publications for its generous support of the Future of Scholarly Knowledge Project, directed by Kenneth Prewitt at Columbia University's Global Policy Initiative. I am also deeply grateful to Ken himself for conceiving the conference and working with me to put it together, and for guest co-editing this special issue with me. [End Page xx] Copyright © 2017 The New School

Informing decisions on an extremely data poor species facing imminent extinction

AbstractSome of the species that are believed to have the highest probability of extinction are also amongst the most poorly known, and this makes it extremely difficult to decide how to spend scarce resources. Assessments of conservation status made on the basis of loss or degradation of habitat and lack of records may provide compelling indications of a decline in geographical range and population size, but they do not help identify where conservation action might be best targeted. Methods for assessing the probability of extinction and for modelling species’ distributions exist, but their data requirements often exceed the information that is available for some of the most urgent conservation cases. Here we use all available information (localities, expert information, climate and landcover) about a high-priority Vietnamese bird species (Edwards's pheasant Lophura edwardsi) to assess objectively the probability of its persistence, and where surveys or other conservation action should be targeted. It is clear that the species is on the threshold of extinction and there is an urgent need to survey Bach Ma National Park (including the extension) and to consider surveying Ke Go Nature Reserve. This approach has potential to help identify where conservation action should be targeted for other Critically Endangered species for which there is an extreme scarcity of information.

Ijäs, Miia ‘Res publica’ Redefined? The Polish-Lithuanian Transition Period of the 1560s and 1570s in the Context of European State Formation Processes (review)

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 558 The fall of the Soviet system saw the Baptist church in Georgia break off membership of the Soviet Baptist Union. With ethnic Georgians the largest part of the church, their aspirations to a closer link with Georgian culture and traditions could now proceed. The church had male and female clergy of all ranks, bishops, vestments, liturgy, icons, singing and chanting — and a positive attitude to Orthodox traditions. Yet now it faced hostility — along with almost all other non-Orthodox communities — from an at times overbearing Orthodox church. Songulashvili’s account is full of interesting details and original materials on a little-studied community. However, the book recounts the emergence of the Baptist community in Western Europe, or a wider account of the revival of organized religion under Stalin, where a concentration on the specifics of the Georgian Baptist community might have made it more focused. Songulashvili has dutifully mined European and North American archives for reports of those visiting or in contact with Georgia, as well as Soviet publications in Georgian and Russian. Yet the biggest single gap is the failure to examine the Soviet-era archives in Tbilisi and Moscow. All religious communities were so closely scrutinized and recorded that much of interest lies there. ‘Little attention has been paid to the age of state-directed persecution in 1929–1940, because of the lack of written materials’ (p. 150), he merely notes. Despite this gap, Songulashvili’s book — with copious notes and appendices of documents — will be of interest to those studying Baptist history, the history of Georgia, religious communities in the region and the troubled independence period. London Felix Corley Ijäs, Miia. ‘Res publica’ Redefined? The Polish-Lithuanian Transition Period of the 1560s and 1570s in the Context of European State Formation Processes. Eastern and Central European Studies, 5. Peter Lang Edition, Frankfurt am Main, 2016. 304 pp. Notes. Bibliography. €56.00: £45.00: $72.95. In this ambitious book, Miia Ijäs analyses one of the crucial turning-points in the history of the Polish-Lituanian union, the first two free elections of the king in 1573 and 1575. Her book, based on a doctoral thesis written at Tampere University in Finland, is conceived as a study of state-formation, and draws on recent literature on composite states, in particular by John Elliott and Harald Gustafsson. She is influenced by fashionable notions concerning transnational history, but the book’s central concept is taken from the model of social function proposed by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, which postulates a framework for political decision-making based on four functional REVIEWS 559 imperatives: pattern-maintenance (latency), integration, goal attainment and adaptation. These stages of the decision-making process shape the four main chapters of the book, which look at the way in which the Polish-Lithuanian nobility confronted the prospect of the imminent extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty in the male line in the 1560s (taken to represent the Parsonian concept of identification of the forthcoming change); the difficulties it faced before and after the 1569 Union of Lublin in the face of the religious divisions following the Reformation (integration); the royal elections of 1573 and 1575 (goal attainment); and the confirmation of Polish-Lithuanian statehood during the reign of the second elected king, Stefan Batory (adaptation). It is a bold plan, and the approach is a fresh one. The author has a lively, questioning mind, and approaches the elections from interesting angles, deploying useful material from the Vatican archives and from Swedish collections. She criticizes scholars for concentrating too much on the domestic political context for the elections, stressing that foreign affairs played as great a part in influencing the decisions taken in 1573 and 1575, and supporting Dariusz Kołodziejczyk’s suggestion that it was the attitude of the Ottoman sultans, Selim II and Murad III, that helped decide the ultimate choices made in 1573 and 1575: like Sigismund August, the nobility wished to preserve the long peace with the Ottomans, and it was this factor that ensured the failure of the Habsburg candidacy in both elections. There are, however, a few problems with the book. For this reviewer at...

Toponyms: Neglected wallflower or pot of lenty

Threats of imminent extinction motivate language documentation; they also allow place name neglect. This paper examines settlement names within Africa’s Edoid group. Village nomenclature converges on a restricted range of conventions; however, interethnic contact has led to non-Edoid toponyms for three villages. Two derive from the trade language Hausa. A third links to Igbo blacksmiths supporting rainforest penetration with iron tools, as is evident in cognate vocabulary. Iron use most naturally follows a pastoral era outside the rainforest, which number prefixes on herd-animal nouns support. Toponymic studies thus remind us of the benefit accrued when documentation looks beyond “the single ancestral code.”

Marasmodes (Asteraceae, Anthemideae), the most threatened plant genus of the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa: Conservation and taxonomy

We confirm Marasmodes to be the Cape Floristic Region and South Africa's most threatened plant genus, classifying ten, of the thirteen species recognised here, as Critically Endangered (of which one, M. reflexa, is possibly extinct), and the remaining three as Endangered. The species are all highly localised to specialised, transitional habitats along moisture gradients or across soil-type boundaries. All are restricted to lowland vegetation of which more than 80% have already been lost, predominantly to agriculture and urban expansion. The remaining fragments are threatened further by significant development pressure. Historically, the conservation of Marasmodes has been impeded by a lack of collections and taxonomic confusion. We present here a revision of this highly threatened genus, in which we describe two new species, Marasmodes crewiana Magee & I.Ebrahim and Marasmodes oppositifolia Magee & Koopman. We also reduce two species, M. beyersiana S.Ortiz and M. schlechteri Magee and J.C.Manning, into synonymy (with M. polycephala DC and M. oubinae S.Ortiz, respectively). We therefore also review the conservation status of all the species in light of the revised taxonomic concepts and new distribution and population data. Urgent interventions, particularly habitat restoration and ex situ cultivation of plants for reintroduction to the wild, are needed to prevent the imminent extinction of most of the species.

A global problem requires a global multifaceted solution

A global problem requires a global multifaceted solution

Mark-recapture models identify imminent extinction of Yaqui catfish Ictalurus pricei in the United States

Data describing population abundance, survival, and recruitment informs species conservation status and conservation actions. Acquiring these data remains challenging for rare and endangered species, especially freshwater fish, with ~37% threatened or extinct. The absence of data risks inaction, ineptness and ignorance that can contaminate conservation decisions to the species detriment. The solution is obvious: ensure credible data underpin species conservation. We focus on Yaqui catfish (Ictalurus pricei), an endangered, freshwater endemic to the Sonoran desert (Arizona, US and Sonora, Mexico). Our method incorporates mark-recapture data, coupled with hierarchical Bayesian state-space formulations of the Cormack-Jolly Seber models and Jolly-Seber models, to quantify species growth, survival probability, recruitment probability, abundance and trends for the US population. Yaqui catfish growth matched other Ictalurid species. Population recruitment is essentially zero (<0.01%) and annual survival high (>70–75%). Overall, the US Yaqui catfish population declined by 15% per year (λ=0.85). Remaining catfish represent remnants of stocked progeny from the 1990s (age of 19–21years), with US extinction predicted by 2018. A pulse of conservation activity followed by 20years of unsuccessful management resulted in the US population collapsing while habitat degradation and introgression from non-native fish threaten most populations in Mexico. Now approaching global extinction, saving Yaqui catfish requires collaboration between Mexican and US biologists to establish species status in Mexico, hatchery cultivation, habitat protection, habitat restoration and appropriate monitoring. Work herein springboards recent conservation efforts to secure this species.

DNA barcodes for dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata) of Mindanao, Philippines

Reliable species identification provides a sounder basis for use of species in the order Odonata as biological indicators and for their conservation, an urgent concern as many species are threatened with imminent extinction. We generated 134 COI barcodes from 36 morphologically identified species of Odonata collected from Mindanao Island, representing 10 families and 19 genera. Intraspecific sequence divergences ranged from 0 to 6.7% with four species showing more than 2%, while interspecific sequence divergences ranged from 0.5 to 23.3% with seven species showing less than 2%. Consequently, no distinct gap was observed between intraspecific and interspecific DNA barcode divergences. The numerous islands of the Philippine archipelago may have facilitated rapid speciation in the Odonata and resulted in low interspecific sequence divergences among closely related groups of species. This study contributes DNA barcodes for 36 morphologically identified species of Odonata reported from Mindanao including 31 species with no previous DNA barcode records.

Carl Watkins, Stephen: The Reign of Anarchy. (Penguin Monarchs.) London: Allen Lane, 2015. Pp. ix, 109. $19.95. ISBN: 978-0-141-97714-0.

Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsCarl Watkins, Stephen: The Reign of Anarchy. (Penguin Monarchs.) London: Allen Lane, 2015. Pp. ix, 109. $19.95. ISBN: 978-0-141-97714-0.David CrouchDavid CrouchUniversity of Hull Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe reign of King Stephen (1135–54) remains one of the most historiographically complex of the English Middle Ages, with perhaps only that of John as a serious rival. The reason is that Stephen’s failures as a king became an obsession of the Oxford constitutional history school in the 1860s, and the profession has not really stopped worrying away at them till recently. Generation after generation of historians have used the reign to explore major themes. Was “anarchy” innate in any feudal society, as Montesquieu suggested? How did the supposedly nascent constitution of medieval England survive the reign to be revived by the jurist king Henry II, Stephen’s successor, and thus set a course for Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and its apotheosis in the Victorian British state? Is the turbulence of the reign a result of a seismic shift in perceptions of property law? The richness of the source material for the reign, which has been edited, discussed and analyzed, and indeed continually added to until the present generation has tantalizingly augmented the historiography, offering, as it does, some possibility of resolution to these large questions. Despite their complexity and the length of the bibliography the questions have generated, the study of Stephen’s reign has actually been advanced by some slim but influential volumes. One of the most stimulating, elegant, and sometimes amusing of these was R. H. C. Davis’s remarkable little study King Stephen, first published in 1969 (London: Longman) and a mere 178 pages even in its augmented third edition (1990). Yet between its covers Davis suggested quite a revolutionary explanation of the reign: that the aristocracy of England provided the resolution to the political crisis of the reign, rather than the cause. Similarly, Keith Stringer’s Reign of Stephen (London: Routledge, 1993) provided in a mere 93 pages a cool and analytical study of why “anarchy” was an insufficient term to cover what was happening in mid-twelfth-century England. Carl Watkins’s brief study is another instance of what can be done with the reign in very few pages. The series in which his book appears is one of those that offer reign-by-reign summaries of the history of England and is intended for a broad readership. So Watkins is not offering anything new to the historian of the reign; his guiding genius (if any) seems to be principally Davis. He adopts Davis’s curious Cold War image that waiting for Henry I’s death in the early 1130s was like “waiting for the Bomb.” The comparison with expectation of imminent extinction by nuclear flame always seemed to me a bit overstated as a simile, even as a child of the “duck-and-cover” generation. What Watkins aims to do and achieves with some panache is to offer a vivid study of the personality of Stephen of Blois and its impact on the political community of his realm, which is something that the depth of the sources allows. He has a very good ear for the way the theological rhetoric of contemporary writers can illustrate the broader insecurities of the day. Like Davis, he explains the reign as a catastrophe brought on by Stephen’s overambition—a man born to be a count, not a king. The historical verdict on Stephen as a human being has been increasingly favorable in recent years. Davis thought him shifty and treacherous, which seems to be Watkins’s tendency too, countenancing the view that there was “something of the night” about him. Stephen was, however, in person brave, dogged, courtly, and (as Edmund King has recently illustrated) intensely religious; the tragedy of the man was that as a politician he was vacillating and sadly lacking in judgment. Watkins weaves all these ideas seamlessly into his narrative of the reign, which becomes an excellent illustration of the way that kingship as a way of organizing a nation was too vulnerable to the inadequacies of the king’s own personality (38–39). But what the reign also illustrated for the first time was one potential solution to its problems: for the king to be brought into dialogue with the community he ruled and to accept a conciliar check on his executive power. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 92, Number 1January 2017 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689998 Copyright 2017 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Extinction debt from climate change for frogs in the wet tropics.

The effect of twenty-first-century climate change on biodiversity is commonly forecast based on modelled shifts in species ranges, linked to habitat suitability. These projections have been coupled with species-area relationships (SAR) to infer extinction rates indirectly as a result of the loss of climatically suitable areas and associated habitat. This approach does not model population dynamics explicitly, and so accepts that extinctions might occur after substantial (but unknown) delays-an extinction debt. Here we explicitly couple bioclimatic envelope models of climate and habitat suitability with generic life-history models for 24 species of frogs found in the Australian Wet Tropics (AWT). We show that (i) as many as four species of frogs face imminent extinction by 2080, due primarily to climate change; (ii) three frogs face delayed extinctions; and (iii) this extinction debt will take at least a century to be realized in full. Furthermore, we find congruence between forecast rates of extinction using SARs, and demographic models with an extinction lag of 120 years. We conclude that SAR approaches can provide useful advice to conservation on climate change impacts, provided there is a good understanding of the time lags over which delayed extinctions are likely to occur.

Mexican alpine plants in the face of global warming: potential extinction within a specialized assemblage of narrow endemics

Alpine ecosystems occur under extreme climatic conditions and, as a result, house a unique and vulnerable biota. They are very scarce at tropical latitudes; in Mexico occur mainly along the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, where species richness is not high but narrow endemics stand out. We investigate the effects of climate change under hypothesized contrasting climate warming scenarios using ecological niche modeling of five microendemic alpine species. Occurrence data was obtained mainly from field trips, but herbaria were also examined. A total of 21 climatic and topographic variables, as well as individual selections of 12–16 variables were employed to construct models with Maxent and GARP. Depending on the number of occurrences, current models were validated with Partial-ROC or Jackknife procedures; and projections to 2050 and 2070 were made using two Representative Concentration Pathways and two Global Circulation Models. All species’ models showed a clear pattern of contraction under the explored scenarios; over 58 % of contemporary climatic distribution disappeared, suggesting that analyzed species face imminent extinction due to climatic habitat loss. The models are useful in representing the endemic component of Mexican alpine grassland by reciprocal correspondence in geographic distribution, and we consider it as a highly endangered ecosystem due to climate change, which is probably applicable to other tropical alpine ecosystems. The Pico de Orizaba volcano seems the best option to preserve due to its extension and elevation. However, further studies at finer scales are needed to improve in situ preservation and conservation strategies that include translocation, assisted migration and seed banking.

Are Isolated Indigenous Populations Headed toward Extinction?

At least 50 indigenous groups spread across lowland South America remain isolated and have only intermittent and mostly hostile interactions with the outside world. Except in emergency situations, the current policy of governments in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru towards isolated tribes is a “leave them alone” strategy, in which isolated groups are left uncontacted. However, these no-contact policies are based on the assumption that isolated populations are healthy and capable of persisting in the face of mounting external threats, and that they can maintain population viability in the long-term. Here, we test this assumption by tracking the sizes and movements of cleared horticultural areas made by 8 isolated groups over the last 10–14 years. We used deforestation data derived from remote sensing Landsat satellite sensors to identify clearings, and those were then validated and assessed with high-resolution imagery. We found only a single example of a relatively large and growing population (c. 50 cleared ha and 400 people), whereas all of the other 7 groups exhibited much smaller villages and gardens with no sizable growth through time. These results indicated that the smaller groups are critically endangered, and it prompts an urgent re-thinking of policies toward isolated populations, including plans for well-organized contacts that may help save lives and rescue isolated indigenous populations from imminent extinction.

Are passwords finally dying?

People have been talking about the death of the password for years. In fact, Microsoft founder Bill Gates first declared its imminent extinction at the RSA Security Conference in 2004 as, he attested, it was simply unable to “meet the challenge” of keeping critical information secure. The seemingly endless security breaches of 2015 have once again led to a flurry of speculation over the imminent demise of the key offender, the password. Possible alternatives such as biometrics have proven too costly and complex to implement to take off in the corporate space. Moreover, it seems that passwords are being given a new lease of life by technology such as password vaults and by their inclusion in two-factor authentication solutions that are growing steadily in popularity, explains Cath Everett.

New large threatened populations of Phengaris nausithous discovered in the SW of Europe

The near threatened Phengaris nausithous is distributed in two large mountainous areas in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula, living in small dispersed populations. During July and August of 2012–2015 we systematically searched for the species in the southeastern part of the Cordillera Cantabrica. We found 38 new populations grouped into seven metapopulations. Two of the latter are the largest known, representing 34 % of the species’ occurrence range in Spain. The discovery of these new metapopulations does not improve the conservation status of P. nausithous in the SW of Europe because a land consolidation project currently underway and an established peat extraction plant could lead to the imminent extinction of the largest metapopulations. However, there is still time to reverse the present course of change. Knowledge of these recently discovered populations allows the establishment of management measures to protect them over the long term.