NEB Podcast #76 -
Transcript
Interviewers: Lydia Morrison, Marketing Communications Manager & Podcast Host, New England Biolabs, Inc.
Interviewee: Eric Dinerstein, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Senior Conservation Counsel, Conservation X Labs
Lydia Morrison:
Welcome to The Lessons from Lab & Life Podcast, brought to you by New England Biolabs. I'm your host, Lydia Morrison, and I hope this episode brings you some new perspective. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Eric Dinerstein, a field biologist who's dedicated his career to wildlife conservation efforts. Eric is the Chief Scientist and Senior Conservation Counsel at Conservation X Labs, an organization focused on preventing a sixth mass extinction event on our planet. Eric, thanks so much for being here with me today. Could you tell our listeners about Conservation X Labs and its mission?
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Sure, I'd be happy to. Conservation X Labs was founded 10 years ago in support of a critical mission of saving life on Earth and particular of preventing the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth. Many of your listeners may know that there's been five major extinction events in the history of life on Earth. This is the first one, though, where humans have been involved, and most species are going extinct because of human activities. And so a major effort by Conservation X Labs is to invest in technologies and approaches and innovations and policies and improve management that truly prevents the sixth extinction and reverses biodiversity loss.
Lydia Morrison:
And you've spent much of your career supporting and promoting conservation efforts. What led you to conservation in the first place and what keeps you energized in the pursuit of conservation now?
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Well, I'm one of those late bloomers. I didn't really become, I guess, a biologist until I was a junior in college. I thought I was going to become a filmmaker, and then like everybody who becomes biologists, you have your sort of epiphanal moment when I was walking through the woods and I came upon a green heron, and I scared it and it flew up and I'd never seen anything like that before. And I wondered, "What bird was that?" And I went back home. We were living on this farmhouse north of the university where I was at, and pulled down a Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson and found that it was the green heron. And I saw all the other kinds of herons that were also in the Field Guide and I thought, "Oh, this is interesting." And one thing led to another, I decided to become a biologist.
And so from there, I didn't look back and went on to study tigers and rhinos in Nepal with the Peace Corps, with the Smithsonian, studied tropical fruit bats in Costa Rica with the Organization for Tropical Studies. And then for 25 years became the chief scientist at a group called the World Wildlife Fund, and then another 11 years at another nonprofit. And then recently joined CXL basically to I have to describe it as rejoining my tribe, both people who are committed to conservation and to protecting nature using really creative, innovative ways to do it, which is what we desperately need. And so it's really been a great merging of effort and I'm truly delighted to be working with CXL. I think they're the most innovative group out there that's addressing these critical problems.
Lydia Morrison:
Well, I'm so glad that you were able to refind your tribe. That sounds like a very fulfilling place to be in your career. You mentioned the mission of CXL is to prevent a sixth mass extinction event. As one of the lives on this planet, I couldn't agree more that that is one of the most important and pressing concerns of our lives. I think for me, it's hard to understand how close are we really to a sixth mass extinction event. We see the effects that humans have had on temperatures, on green landscapes, on airway travel and on ocean health. But it's hard for me to grasp how close we might actually be to an extinction event. Is that something that you can put a timeline on?
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
You know, the classic response of any biologist starts out with, "It depends," but it does depend on a variety of factors because biodiversity, by its very definition of the variety and variability of life on Earth, means that with all these different species and ecosystems is that some species are much more prone to extinction than others. And I think that one of the important things to realize, a couple of things that can help guide our thinking is that most species on Earth are actually pretty rare, that the number of species that are widespread in common, they're actually rare.
So wherever you go, you walk outside your door into a natural community, and if you could list all of the species that are found like in the forest near you or along the ocean or in a lake nearby, you would typically find a few species that are really, really common and then a long tail of species where there's only a few individuals in that area, or maybe one or maybe none until you go to the next place that's wild and maybe you find one of them there. And this is a phenomenon that we see in nature. And so it's one to be aware of and concerned about.
So there's the extinction of species, and depending on what scientific source you're talking to, the number of species on Earth could be 6 million, 10 million species. It's not entirely clear, but somewhere in that range, and a number of species are known... a certain percentage are known only from a very small area. You burn that area, you flood it, you pave it, and that species is gone forever. A number of years ago when the great evolutionary biologists and one of the fathers of biodiversity, Edward Wilson, was describing this sixth extinction event, and someone asked him, they said, "Okay, Dr. Wilson, you say species are going extinct at the rate of a hundred a day. Name them."
And he couldn't do that because how we come up with our estimate of how fast extinction is occurring, is it happening faster than the natural background rate of extinction> All species on Earth go extinct. More species on Earth have gone extinct than are present today in the history of life on Earth, so we know extinction is a natural phenomenon. The problems is that we're just accelerating that rate, and we're doing so in places that are concentrations of lots of rare species. So to answer that question that was put to Dr. Wilson, a group of biologists and I got together in around the year 2001, and we looked at all of the species that had gone through the IUCN Red List, the official body of assessing the status of a species, whether it's endangered or critically endangered or threatened.
And we took all the threatened species that lived at a single site. So you lost that site for whatever reason, and that species has gone extinct. And we found that among vertebrate species and some plants, that's only about 800 sites where there are species that it's the only place on Earth that we know of where they occur, where 95% of the population. So that's a good thing is that we know where these places are, and if we can protect those, that would go a long ways to avoiding extinction. There's another dimension to this that most people aren't aware of, which is just as there's extinction of species, there's extinction of populations within a species.
And for that, we use the scientific term extirpation. It means that a population of... Let's say there's 10 populations of a bird in Ecuador, and one of them disappears, that population's been extirpated. The species hasn't gone extinct, but its genetic diversity is probably diminished. Its total population has diminished. The species hasn't gone extinct, but its genetic diversity is probably diminished. Its total population has diminished. And what biologists have found out, let's just take mammals, for example, over 6,000 species of mammals, and what they found is that many species of mammals are known only from a few populations, less than five. So we can think of this extirpation that there's a population extinction crisis embedded underneath the overall species extinction crisis. And so we're trying to fight that, too.
Now, the solution for that that we've been promoting here at Conservation X Labs is two years ago, colleagues and I got together and asked the question, "What's the distribution of species that we know of that are very rare or ranked as endangered, critically endangered, that are currently living outside the network of protected areas of the world?" And we did that study, and we called it Conservation Imperatives because it's imperative for us to act first. Think of it as if the listeners to this show have heard about 30x30, or the Global Biodiversity Framework of protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030. You could argue that protecting these Conservation Imperatives is the tip of the spear of what we need to be doing to avoid extinctions.
And the good news is that it's affordable and doable. Doable in the sense that only 1.2% of the Earth's terrestrial surface remains outside protected areas, that if they were protected would go a long ways to heading off extinctions of those species most at risk. So that's not the full need of what we need to do to conserve biodiversity, but just for that element that is highly threatened with extinction. So that's the key message is that the species most threatened that are currently unprotected don't occupy a very large area, and 164 million hectares, and it should not be difficult to try and protect those. And so that's been a huge part of our mission and our effort over the last two years. Now that we have this map, it's our blueprint for avoiding extinctions.
Lydia Morrison:
Well, when you put it like that, it sounds achievable, although I know that there's still a lot of work to be done, but it's nice to hear that with these efforts underway, there is, I guess, a finite amount of land that we could protect in order to preserve a majority of these species.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
As I said, this is not the be-all end-all. It's the tip of the spear or the bullseye, whatever image you want to create to express this. There's other elements of biodiversity that are the opposite, that are not narrow-range endemic species that are only found in like one mountain top or an isolated river valley or a small desert or a desert lake. So there's two forms of rarity in nature that we really need to protect. One is what I've just articulated, the species that are found in very limited environments, narrow ranges, and they may have always been rare and had narrow ranges. And then there's species that range widely, but always occur at very low densities. So think about tigers or jaguars or elephants, species that have very large ranges, but wherever you go, you're not going to find very many of them for a variety of reasons.
And these species are what we call area-sensitive. That means they need very large landscapes to persist and maintain what we call viable populations, populations that can withstand fluctuations or environmental change. And so that's the other part. Think of this as like the yin and yang of conservation strategy is the yin is what I just articulated with Conservation Imperatives, that 1.2% that we need to protect that harbors the rarest species that are unprotected. And then the yang is these wide-ranging species that occur at low densities. Think like your top predators, the herbivores that are like what we call landscape engineers that shape the environment that they live in.
For those who need really large areas, and we've just undertaken another study that we call Iconic Species where we show where their landscapes are that we need to protect. And that's about another... So the Conservation Imperatives sites, there's about 17,000 sites of these species that are extremely rare, narrow ranges. And then, there's these Iconic Species landscapes that are over 5,000 square kilometers, that there's over a thousand of those. And if we protect those as well, we go a long way, combined with Conservation Imperatives, to heading off the sixth extinction.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, it sounds like really understanding both the populations and the geographical location of these species is really helping inform the plan. Could you explain what the Extinction Solutions Index is and how you use that?
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Well yes. The Extinction Solutions Index is trying to get at the drivers that are pushing species to extinction. And you can look at those in a number of different ways. One of the things that we're undertaking now that... I'll give two examples. If I could wave my magic wand and make major changes, introduce new innovations that could have a dramatic effect on avoiding the sixth mass extinction, two of the ones aside from what I've talked about earlier about protecting lands that currently do not receive protection, there's two other drives that are really important that we need to make progress one.
One of the biggest programs at CXL, Conservation X Labs, right now is called alternative proteins. And alternative proteins is a science, a movement, a philosophy of recognizing that the Earth, that most of the land that's being converted is because of either conversion to pasture, critical habitats, conversion to pasture for raising domestic livestock, or 70% of the agricultural land in the world is used to raise the feedstock for domesticated animals. And so it's an incredibly inefficient system that's leading to the clearing of rainforest for cattle pastures, the erosion of habitats, and other effects like potential spreads of disease, and degradation of habitats, drying of habitats, and disappearance of aquifers. And the challenge is how do we change that?
And what scientists and conservationists are working on now are new approaches to create alternative proteins that would be much more benign to the environment and to create proteins that could replace chicken, especially beef. Chicken is less of a problem, but certainly beef is the major one where we could grow, create proteins from plants that would mimic exactly the taste and the mouthfeel, the texture of the meat that we eat today with a replacement that would be much healthier and much cheaper. This sounds a little bit like a pipe dream, but the reality is it's moving in this direction quickly, and we have to do this because, one, the issue is how do we feed 10 billion on Earth in a few years with a very inefficient system that we have that we probably can't create more productivity from already?
It's leading to overfishing of the seas, as I said, deterioration of the terrestrial environment. And so a critical component of our future for a life on Earth, forgetting just about extinction, is to really promote these Alternative Proteins. And happily, a number of groups see this as a major initiative going forward. And I think we're starting to see some traction there. So that's a big one. Now, another major innovation that we need is if you look at the data and ask the question, where have species gone extinct in the highest numbers around the world? And the answer would be on tropical islands in the last 50 years.
Lydia Morrison:
Hmm.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
And the reason that's the case is because island systems, because they've been isolated, by that very nature of isolation have seen the rise of new species. And these species that occur there on islands don't occur anywhere else. In many cases, these islands have never experienced mammalian predators or large herbivores. One reason why you don't see large herbivores and large predators on islands far from mainland is that we mammals are mammal species. Humans are pretty good swimmers, but most mammals are not. And we can't drink seawater, and so when you hear of invasions or arrivals of exotic or alien species on islands, we're hearing about the survivors.
Most dispersers never make it, and we don't hear about them because no one writes their obituaries. But the ones that have made it can do tremendous damage to the native biotas that often have evolved without the presence of those species. So take New Zealand, for example, which the only two native species are two species of bats, and everything else, every other mammal that's gotten to New Zealand has been introduced-
Lydia Morrison:
Wow.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
... and there are 14 species of flightless birds there now that are on the verge of extinction. So flightlessness in birds is often a quality that you see on islands, whether it's the Galapagos or New Zealand or elsewhere, where birds no longer need to fly because they're not being chased by anything, and so they become flightless.
But then they become very susceptible to predation by their number one enemy, which is the different kinds of rats that get to islands. Whether it's the Norway rat or the black rat or Polynesian rats have been responsible for a lot of extinctions. And so what we need to avoid that is a very humane way of reducing rat population numbers. And that can either be through new techniques called gene drive that are being used now to introduce, say, sterile male mosquitoes in Hawaii to prevent avian malaria from spreading, a kind of malaria that affects birds that is wiping out the endangered native bird fauna of Hawaii, or a targeted rodenticide that only kills rats and not any other species that's on the island as bycatch.
Rats never occurred on these islands, and they're decimating the populations of native species with birds and reptiles, and it's a major problem. And so those are two factors that really are part of the Extinction Solutions Index, whether formally or not, of finding alternative protein sources for humanity so we do have a smaller footprint on the environment. And then on the places most stricken by invasions of alien species, exotics, is to have a very targeted way of controlling that.
Lydia Morrison:
That's really interesting. There's so many factors affecting the survival and the prosperity of individual species. I had no idea that rats were such a huge predator to these birds on islands. That's very interesting to hear.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Mostly going after like eggs and hatchlings, so rats, they'll eat almost anything. And the problem is is that these species are naïve to rats. It's like they could just sit there in their nest, the adults, while the rats eat the young or the eggs because they don't have the experience over time of how to avoid these predators. They didn't evolve with them. And so we're heavily weighting the system by introducing these species, however inadvertently at times, and causing basically to turn these systems upside down. And so, A, we have to recognize we've done that, and B, take measures to reverse it.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
So I give you two examples of things we can do. There's obviously what's in the climate space as well that we have to address, but this is more on the direct biodiversity side.
Lydia Morrison:
Sure. I know there are other solutions that Conservation X Labs has available, some other technologies like Sentinel, NABIT, and Wild Me. Could you tell us some more about those other solutions that are available and in use?
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Sure. Let's start with Sentinel. So the idea is if we could only have, let's use a better term, eyeballs all over the environment, we'd not only be able to count the number of rare and endemic species I talked about with Conservation Imperatives, we'd be able to sense as tigers and elephants, like I talked about with the Iconic Species Index. We'd be able to look at which species might be spreading diseases because we can see their behavior and we can monitor the recovery of species with all the other interventions that we make. We need to have data that demonstrate that our management interventions are having a positive effect or they have no effect at all. Or worse, they have a negative effect. And for that, you need data. There's no substitute. The challenge has been in some of these remote areas where animals that we want to protect are often very low in numbers or secretive or both.
How do we know if they're there or not? And so that's where we can rely on this revolution in technology. In part, integrating artificial intelligence into our work that helps us become much better sentinels of the environment. SO Sentinel itself is a camera alert system embedded with AI that can tell you, are there rats on this island? Have they appeared? Or after an eradication of rats, have the rats come back? We can use it for one of the most pressing problems in wildlife conservation today. For example, if you traveled across Asia, where I spent many years working, or even in Africa, and you asked wildlife managers like, "What's your biggest problem?", it wouldn't be extinction. It would be conflict between wildlife and humans, particularly the poorest communities that live near national parks where wildlife come and either raid their crops, like elephants do, or kill their livestock.
We recently published some studies using a technology very similar to Sentinel that we'll be manufacturing here at Conservation X Labs that helped reduce incidences of negative interactions between tigers and livestock and people and elephants and people. In India today, or last year, tigers killed 116 people and elephants killed 605 people.
Lydia Morrison:
Wow.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Now, think about in the United States when you had those mountain lions that I think in Northern California killed some hikers, I believe, or bicyclists, I can't remember when, mountain bikers, but just imagine if we had mountain lions in the United States killing 116 people a year like tigers have in India, there probably wouldn't be a mountain lion left in the United States. There would be such an intense outcry. Yet in India, people coexist with wildlife. It's in part, and with elephants the same thing, it's elephants are the reincarnation of the Hindu god Ganesh, and so they're worshiped. So people tolerate them, and everybody loves elephants and tigers unless you have to live next door to them.
Lydia Morrison:
Sure.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
So what our technology does is it helps create an opportunity for coexistence by giving communities a real-time alert system of, "Oh, there's a tiger in this area," or, "There's an elephant herd coming towards our village," an early alert so that forest guards can get out there and intervene. Or people could not graze their livestock, say, in an area where a tiger is approaching, and they get those early alerts. And it's been incredibly effective. Where we've installed this system, these systems, we've reduced livestock depredation to a very low level. In one area in West Bengal in India where we tried this out, we went from multiple deaths and serious injuries from elephants to zero by giving forest guards these early alerts to get out there in time. So the alerts come in 30 seconds on their cell phones, and it's turned out to be a really miraculous invention. Now, so that's the Sentinel part.
Lydia Morrison:
Are the alerts driven by AI recognition of these animals on surveillance cameras?
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Exactly, exactly. So it's turning like your stupid, say your dumb trail cam that probably a lot of you aren't familiar with, embedding it with AI, we call on-the-edge, which means running in the camera. So it runs an algorithm to, say, detect tigers or elephants or jaguars or leopards or whatever species you want, and then gives you if it's a positive ID, it then sends that on to the server, to the cloud, to the end user, and that can happen as fast as 30 seconds. So that's one of the revelations of getting these real-time alerts using AI because 90% of the images taken by trail cams are often useless.
They're blanks. There's nothing in them of interest, and the AI weeds that out at-the-edge before it gets transmitted because transmitting images is 20 times more costly energetically to the batteries than running on the inference, the algorithm. So it's a huge advantage there and saves on battery life. So you're absolutely right. It's the real-time alerting that makes this so valuable, and that's only done because of AI, or AI makes it much more efficient.
NABIT is another invention that's very clever where it enables researchers, managers to know about the presence of species of interest through looking at the DNA indicators or presence of those species there from their signature of the DNA that's available. And what NABIT's doing is basically putting that on your hip so that you could go to the field and take readings in places like, were there rats here on this island? Is there a rare species of antelope here in Vietnam that nobody has seen in 10 years, but we've found the DNA of this? That there's evidence in this area to go look for it. Things like that help us rediscover species where we thought they were extirpated or probably in the future, help us to give a better sense of, like I said before, how are our management interventions? How are they helping the recovery of these species?
So all of these technologies are really about how to give us a better window onto what's going on in nature because we're making these interventions to try to prevent extinctions. Are they working? Are they working effectively? Over what area? Is it worth it considering how much it costs? Are some interventions more effective and cheaper than others? To answer those questions, we have to have the data, to have the data give us real numbers on wildlife. They give us abundance, which is the gold standard for wildlife populations. And without that, we're sort of flying blind. We just have to hope for the best. So that's a critical role of Conservation X Labs is providing the technology that gives us this important data that tells us how effective we are in trying to prevent extinction.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, super powerful tools for field biologists to be able to monitor species without being able to visualize them themselves. I can see how those are real game changers in terms of being able to establish what's present, what has been present, and sort of where those migratory patterns are.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
That's right. And there's another element to this, too, which is that let's say we are wildly successful in protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030, or even as a number of ecologists and I have argued for is 50% of Earth by 2050. It's highly unlikely, if not impossible, that resources will be available to scale the protection effort of hiring that many more rangers. We're only at 17% protected terrestrial right now. So we have a lot of work to do to get there by 2030, so another 13% in five years. But it's highly unlikely that we're going to see protected area staffs ramp up in numbers to be able to protect these large areas, these new areas.
So what we have to do is to use technology to become what we call a force multiplier for us, where in the case of the technology that I talked about that we used in India, we estimated that one of our camera alert systems could do the work of 20 rangers. So-
Lydia Morrison:
Amazing.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
... that starts to give you a sense of how having eyeballs on the trail or in the forest or whatever, or acoustic monitoring or NABIT, if it can give you that information accurately and quickly, then it's amazing because it's doing the work of so many more people that we don't have the resources to hire. It gives you the situational awareness, to use that term, of what's going on to make interventions quickly. So I think we're about to see an amazing emergence of new technologies to help us better manage life on Earth and try to save as much as we can.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, it's wonderful to see a company putting efforts into harnessing the technology and the technological advances that we've seen, which have been amazing in terms of artificial intelligence over the last five, seven years, and seeing those really applied to help protect the planet, help save species, help understand the world around us. So really phenomenal efforts. And thank you to both yourself and to Conservation X Labs. What can our listeners do to learn more about Conservation X Labs or to help your efforts?
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Please go to our website to learn more about our programs and see how you can get involved or support us. We in turn try to... The way we look at it is there are not many groups that have the resources or the programmatic interest, I'll leave it that, for diving deep into the technologies that can make our conservation work much easier. We happen to be in the forefront of that, which is why, as I said earlier, I'm back among my tribe that I'm with people that share the same mission and live it and breathe it every day, that it's our responsibility to produce these technologies, to innovate, and make them available to everybody.
And so we don't need a hundred groups doing this, but we need a few and they need to be well-funded so that we can make this available to all the groups out there that don't have the resources to develop them or the technological background. But we've been... All of our work stems from having been field biologists. We know firsthand what's needed and where the gaps are. And so that's where we train all of our efforts to try to fill those gaps and make conservation as efficient as it can be.
Lydia Morrison:
Well, I think there are field biologists out there who greatly appreciate the efforts that you and Conservation X Labs is putting forth, and I believe that the greater global community at large should appreciate it as well because we're all going to be hopefully seeing the benefits of this application of technology within our lifetimes.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
I hope so, too.
Lydia Morrison:
Thanks so much for joining me today, Eric.
Dr. Eric Dinerstein:
Okay. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Lydia Morrison:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Lessons from Lab & Life Podcast. We invite you to check out the episode's transcript on neb.com for helpful links from today's discussion, and we hope you'll join us next time when I'm joined by a New England Biolabs legend, Dr. Bill Jack. He's about to retire after spending nearly four decades working at NEB. Bill has held many positions here from senior staff scientist to executive director of research to emeritus scientist. Please join us as we capture his lessons from Lab & Life at NEB.
