Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for September 2005

Killing Elephants

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Up TO 10,000 elephants, including whole families, are facing slaughter as South Africa prepares to end its ten-year ban on culling according to various news reports, including at Times Online.

The South Africa government is expecting an outcry from animal rights groups across the world and is trying to temper this through an 18-month ‘consultation period’ to precede the cull. The cull will involve rounding up and shooting entire family groups.

The cull is necessary because the thriving elephant population in the Kruger national park is eating itself out of vegetation and drinking itself out of water.

An adult elephant consumes about 170kg of vegetation a day. And this is what it produces …

Photo taken in Kenya in about 1990 .

The article in Times Online continues,

The inevitable outcry about the cull disguises South Africa’s remarkable achievements in bringing the Kruger elephants back from the brink of being wiped out. At the beginning of the 20th century there were only 50 or so wild elephants in the whole of South Africa.

Major James Stevenson-Hamilton, a short, stocky Scot, Laird of Fairholm in Lanarkshire, started the recovery when he created the Kruger Park in 1902 at the end of the Boer War. There are now 17,000 elephants in 31 separate South African reserves.

It is unknown how many elephants there are globally. It is generally accepted/quoted that in 1930s there were 5-10 million elephants in Africa. But by 1979 only 1.3 million. The current estimate is about 600,000. But I am not sure how any of the above figures were calculated/estimated.

I can’t find any information on elephants numbers at the CITES site.

It seems particularly sad if there are so few, that any have to be killed. Many of the Kenyan National Parks were being poached out when I was working there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

‘Red Poles’ Also Costs Lots

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Louis was perhaps somewhat baffled by my recent post on salinity. A reader of this weblog who lives closer to the issue sent in this comment from ‘The Ringer’, Download file. It perhaps provides an additional perspective.

The Ringer suggests the random red splotches on that map are just as controversial and costly to tax payers as the National Gallery’s Blue Poles.

And all this reminds me of the ‘National Land & Water Resources Audit Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000’ which appears to provide detailed statistics on the extent and magnitude of our salinity problem. But on careful analysis it is evident that the document always presents a prediction – even when data is presented for 1998. The entire document is concerned with ‘hazard’ and ‘high risk’ without providing a single statistic indicating the actual measured extent of dryland salinity.

And then there is the ‘National Land and Water Resources Audit Australian Water Resources Assessment 2000’ which is also meant to provide salinity information. However, without presenting a single trend line for any water quality indicator, the report purports to provide, “the first overview of Australia’s declining surface water quality with salinity, nutrients and turbidity issues revealed across most of the intensively used basins”.

Good News for Four Dolphins

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The NOAA Fisheries Service and the Marine Life Aquarium of Gulfport, Miss., working with a number of other partners, rescued the last four of the eight trained bottlenose dolphins that were swept out of an aquarium tank torn apart by the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina on August 29. Normally held in captivity, the dolphins don’t have the necessary skills to survive on their own. They have survived various injuries and predators and have stayed together since the storm. … read more here http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2510.htm .

And isn’t this a beautiful picture, http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/images/katrina-dolphin-rescue-09-2005.jpg .

Minister Likes His Tuna

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The Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell has decided not to include the southern bluefin tuna on the threatened species list, according to the news at ABC Online.

The report states that the Minister made the decision on the basis it would not be good for tuna to be listed as threatened despite a recommendation by the Government’s scientific committee to make tuna fishing illegal and that only around 3 per cent of the stocks that existed in 1960 remain. (I would like to see this data – my understanding was that while stocks are low they are not this low.)

Democrats’ environment spokesperson, Senator Andrew Bartlett,has commented, “To just say that it will be detrimental to the survival of the species listed, I think is extraordinary and is a contempt of the law as it stands”.

What I don’t get is how the Great Barrier Reef coral trout fishery that was sustainable gets more and more restrictions placed on it, while the southern tuna fishery which is apparently under pressure is left to operate.

In the case of tuna the Minister has stated, “The future of the industry for communities like Port Lincoln are crucial”. What about coastal Queensland fishing communities?

I have previously commented that southern bluefin tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) is classified as overfished by AFFA. The fishery is shared with Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea and New Zealand.

The total global catch peaked in 1961 at 81,605 tonnes and was then in general decline for three decades. Since 1990 the total catch has ranged from between 13,231 tonnes (1994) to 19,588 tonnes (1999). Stock assessments suggest that the parental biomass is low but stable and unlikely to recover to target levels unless all countries agree to abide by national allocations as determined by the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. Australia operates within its allocation, Japan has not agreed to operate within its allocation, and Indonesia does not recognise the Commission.

Maybe the solution is for the Australian government to put pressure on Indonesia and Japan. So why doesn’t Minister Campbell put some efforts in here – rather than jumping up and down over whaling when Minke whales populations (the species the Japanese and Noreweigans want to harvest) are not under threat.

In summary, as I see it, coral trout and minke whales can be sustainably harvested but the Minister opposes whaling and is putting coral trout fishers out of business. The Minister acknowledges problems with the southern bluefin tuna fishery but will do nothing.

Another Hurricane

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According to this map, at the time of writing this post, there are 5 hurricanes in the West Pacific, Central Pacific and North Atlantic.

When Dennis struck in July, I followed its path at Jeff Master’s blog. He is now following Hurricane Rita and there are links to satellite imagery at his site . The comments are also interesting.

Mapping Salinity: What a Mess

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Two weeks ago I received an email from Rob Gourlay letting me know that Brian Tunstall’s response to the 2005 Spies and Woodgate Report on salinity mapping methods was available at the ERIC website.

Some of the issues Brian Tunstall raises in this review, include the same issues that I raised in my Land column of May last year, titled Challenging Belief on Dryland Salinity in which I wrote:

A recent released technical report, Salinity Mapping Methods in the Australian Context (January 2004), from the Australian Academy of Science restates the cause as ‘changes in the water balance of landscapes following the removal of native vegetation and the introduction of European agricultural practices’ (pg. 8).
It predicts that the area affected by dryland salinity will continue to increase because of continuously rising saline water tables from the changed water balance.

This basic premise, however, was challenged by NSW government scientist Dr Christine Jones, who had articles published in The Australian Farm Journal in 2000-2001.

She contends that the ‘rising groundwater model’ has failed us because it makes false assumptions about the nature of pre-European vegetation and the way water moves in the landscape.

Rob Gourlay and Dr Brian Tunstall of Environmental Research and Information Consortium Pty Ltd (ERIC) independently came to similar conclusions through the development of an airborne gamma radiation salinity mapping technology.

According to Gourlay, ‘Dryland salinity (in the Murray Darling Basin) is really a soil health issue, a symptom of soil degradation not a rising water table issue.

The Academy of Science report compares salinity mapping methods with the conclusion that the main ‘knowledge gap’ is the location of salt at depth and whether it is likely to be mobilised by rising groundwater.

The electromagnetic (EM) mapping technique that the report advocates for plugging this knowledge gap is expensive—up to 10 times the cost of doing the gamma ray mapping that focuses on the top metre and that Gourlay has commercialised.

The Academy of Science report was dismissive of the gamma ray technology for salinity mapping describing it as not having a scientific foundation and advising potential users of the technology to seek ‘independent advice on claims made by the vendors’. Gourlay regards this as an attack on his ‘professionalism and capacity to trade’. He questioned how ‘publicly funded scientists who compete with the private sector can get away with using taxpayer money to discredit the only technology that has delivered benefits to clients at a paddock, farm, catchment and regional scale across Australia since 1992’.

One of the authors of the Academy of Science report, Brian Spies, works for the CSIRO and has been involved in the development and commercialization of the TEMPEST electromagnetic mapping system.
CSIRO provides commercial services based around the TEMPEST technology and hence the Australian Academy of Science report could be interpreted as knocking a competing service as well as promoting the CSIRO method.

The saga drags on.

It is interesting to reflect back to November 2000 when the Council of Australian Governments endorsed the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality with a funding package of $1.4 billion over 7 years.

As part of this package state governments produced a series of salinity hazard maps.

On 2nd August 2002 industry representatives gathered with media at The Salinity Summit at Queensland’s Parliament House to hear speeches from State Premier Peter Beattie, Federal Minister for Environment and Heritage Hon Dr David Kemp and others.

The Premier’s speech included:

“The first thing that we have to avoid is denial, and I am going to come back to this. The first thing we have to avoid is denial about the problem. There is a problem. … We have to accept there is a problem, and denial is not on the agenda. It will not be on the agenda. It cannot be. We have got an action plan where all the stakeholders have a say in the solution. …I want to make it clear that we stand by the science in the map. Its methodology has been checked and endorsed by the CSIRO, the National Land and Water Audit and AFFA. As I said before, I want to thank Dr Kemp for taking this constructive approach and lending this support to our science …” (pg. 2)

A lot of government policy decisions, and government dollars were allocated, on the basis of the map the Premier proudly displayed that day. The map was all over Brisbane television that evening.

Ian Beale (a local landholder with a PhD) was reported in the Queensland Country Life (QCL) explaining that according to the government’s own Salinity Management Handbook (QDNR 1997) the area west of the 600mm isohyet could not be at risk of dryland salinity – yet is shown on the Premier’s map as bright red and therefore at high risk. The map with the isohyte marked by Beale can be downloaded here (600 Kbs).

This map that the Premier had proudly displayed at the summit, but with the isohyet as drawn by Ian Beale, was published in the QCL.

In March 2005 at the Australian Water Summit in Sydney I listened to a speaker from Geoscience Australia explain how technology used by the Queenslnd government to develop the salinity hazard maps and other maps used in catchment management planning were based on old technology. I queried this during the question session and Brian Spiers (a member of the Conference audience) volunteered that the Queensland scientists who put the original maps together were not skilled in the technology that they were using. This includes the map Premier Beattie said he stood by at the Summit and that he said CSIRO had endorsed.

Meanwhile Tunstall and Gourlay continue to explain how CSIRO has got it so wrong with the new review at ERIC. Tunstall summarizes part of the problem:

… This error could reflect deficiencies in the
presentation of hazard and risk in the report as, while hazard is implicitly identified as being categorical, this was not explicitly
stated. However, it demonstrates the limited ability of those producing the report [and maps] to integrate the disparate information it contains. If the information in the Report is inadequate for the authors to draw correct conclusions then it would be considered grossly inadequate for those that are meant to use it. If the authors get it wrong from the material presented then it
would be reasonable to expect that most people will get it wrong.

This inability to integrate diverse information derives from a failure to apply basic scientific considerations such as the
form of variable (e.g. continuous variable or category), independence of observations (the advocated use of information that is
not independently derived results in circular arguments) and mutual exclusion between categories. This latter condition is illustrated by the failure to discriminate between soil water and ground water, and
the apparent confusion between geology and hydrology.

…………
Relevant documents/links:

Peter Beatties speech at the Salinity Summit,
Download file .

The Spies and Woodgate report, (I am having trouble uploading my copy of this report, perhaps someone can send me a link? 19/9 at 6.30pm) (4,000 Kbs).

The Tunstall report at ERIC, Download file (678 Kbs).