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Student Spotlight: Adam Smith
Student Spotlight Directory
“What does a species-poor world look like for humans?”
PHOTO/R. NORGAARD
ERG PhD candidate, Adam Smith. |
Lewisia rediviva, named after Meriwether Lewis. |
The Energy and Resources Group (ERG) is an intellectual menagerie of people concerned about the well-being of humanity and its relationship to the environment. It is this community of hopefulness, caring, and ambition that attracted Adam to ERG.
After earning a master’s in ecology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, serving as an assistant professor of biology at McPherson College, his undergraduate alma mater, and then teaching English for three years in rural Japan, Adam returned to the States. Volunteering full time with the educational/environmental non-profit Trees for Life International, Adam became inspired to return to grad school with the intent to find a place that mirrored the can-do attitude of Trees for Life. This quest led him to ERG.
Specifically, Adam came back to graduate school because he is alarmed by the rapidity with which humans are driving species extinct and the possible effects this biological pauperization of the Earth has upon the well-being of humanity. Of the taxonomic groups that have been assessed, currently one in eight birds, one in four mammals, one in three frogs and toads, and many more are threatened -- and these proportions do not take account of anticipated climate change. A steady stream of research suggests that we are driving species extinct at rates commensurate with past mass extinctions. A similar stream of research increasingly demonstrates the importance of biodiversity to ecosystem services upon which human socioeconomic systems depend. Since the problem is one of such proportions and is so multifaceted, Adam’s research is likewise varied.
The most field-intensive part of his research is a theoretical investigation of the number of species found in an area as a function of the size of that area. Knowing the ecological mechanisms that shape this relationship is important to predicting the kinds of anthropogenic changes that affect species’ persistence (for example, habitat fragmentation and alteration). This aspects of his work has involved three years of field work at UC McLaughlin Natural Reserve, one of a score of natural reserves open to researchers from the UC system. Over these three years he counted nearly a quarter of a million plants, but has managed to maintain his sanity. These plants grow on serpentine outcrops, a naturally-occurring, toxic soil which some species have evolved to tolerate. Serpentine soil covers only 2% of California’s land surface, but harbors 10% of the plant species found only in the state, and many of these species are of critical conservation concern.
PHOTO/S. CAREY
Adam (fore) and Erin Conlisk (ERGie, back) mapping a long-term plot.
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The Earth's biota recovers from extinction events, but not on a scale commensurate with any measure of human experience. |
The most computationally-intensive aspects of Adam’s research involves exploring the ways in which the relationship between species and area can be better used in conservation. For example, this relationship has been used to prioritize biodiversity “hotspots,” allocate funds amongst competing conservation actions, assess environmental impacts, and predict extinction rates. Nevertheless, the manner in which this relationship is applied is fraught with inconsistencies and has much room for improvement. He is developing better methods to apply to these issues and illustrating their efficacy using data from a tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, located in the Panama Canal.
A third aspect of Adam’s research is an analysis of the history of international conservation regimes focused on large marine mammals (whales, seals and walruses, and polar bears) and how the character of these regimes will have to adapt in light of global change. The first regimes (e.g., a suite of treaties regulating whaling in the 1930s and 1940s) encompassed a simple and direct “threat matrix” (hunting). In the 1970s and 1980s treaties began to take on more varied threats (e.g., pollution and habitat destruction). More recently, several regional regimes address a diffuse threat matrix (e.g., hunting, pollution, ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and food supply). Climate change will only add to and exacerbate threats to marine mammals, causing the threat matrix to become “over-diffuse” as threats interact synergistically (e.g., ocean acidification affects osmotic balance and thus alters prey availability; it also allows sound to travel farther underwater, adding to an already acoustically-polluted ocean). What must we anticipate in terms of adaptability, agency, and outcome in the development of future biodiversity conservation regimes for a warming world?
Adam’s research is obviously multifaceted and multidisciplinary: ERG not only allows but condones this variety of approach. He appreciates the way in which the academic setting of the department and its faculty allows students to pursue a problem over a method and encourages asking practical, important questions. His work with Professor John Harte and members of the Harte Lab has been especially enriching interpersonally and intellectually. Adam’s fellow students have been as inspiring as the faculty; their sense of close and supportive community, intriguing pre-ERG vocations, and ambition have made his experience at ERG a psychological helium.
11/08
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