Wildlife & Nature

Biodiversity Blues: Much of Region’s Animal and Insect Populations Under Threat of Disappearing

Share

Habitat loss is the greatest threat to southern New England’s biodiversity, from small to large species. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)

The animals and insects that make southern New England interesting and special are being squeezed out of existence by the very species that needs them to survive.

David Gregg, executive director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, calls this problem “the unsustainable human use of the globe.”

Humans aren’t giving the natural world the space it needs and deserves. We’re crowding out non-human life, which, in turn, makes nature less productive and us less healthy. The natural world is too often viewed only through the lens of what it can give us or how it can entertain us.

Animals and plants are going extinct faster than any period in human history — a million species threatened with extinction, and extinctions now occurring some 1,000 times more frequently than before humans. The planet’s sixth mass extinction is being driven by human activity though the burning of fossil fuels and our unsustainable use of land and water.

Humanity’s disregard for wildlife began in earnest during the Roman Empire, when thousands upon thousands of lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, cheetahs, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and bears were killed in bloody spectacles to entertain the masses, according to the 2023 book Eight Bears.

Our disrespect of animals continued after the collapse of the Roman Empire, as Christian scripture came to dominate European ideology in the Middle Ages. “The church promoted the belief that humans were created superior to all other creatures — a belief that persists to this day — and it was therefore important to distinguish themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom,” author Gloria Dickie wrote.

Today, humans mostly preserve and protect wildlife habitats for ourselves — hiking trails, boardwalks, boat ramps, hunting, fishing, swimming, mountain biking. These human-centric endeavors do little to preserve biodiversity. We effortlessly shrug off the extinction of species after species, without realizing how we are all connected.

Our conservation efforts are largely about maintaining the economy of resources. They are seldom about protecting ecosystem services. We undervalue the contributions to our existence by so many species, from dung beetles to bats. We praise nonnative honeybees, brought here by our ancestors from Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia, because we take their honey, but we largely ignore the plight of native bees.

We don’t respect the importance the role biodiversity plays in keeping us healthy, mostly because it doesn’t generate a profit. Humans have been able to evolve and advance because the natural world provides the conditions and resources that make our lives possible.

We take, and rarely give. This selfishness comes with a largely ignored cost.

The loss of biodiversity, along with climate change, are “widely recognized as the foremost environmental challenges of our time,” according to a 2019 study authored by three southern New England researchers. They wrote that “proforestation provides the most effective solution to dual global crises — climate change and biodiversity loss.”

The distribution of forest cover and intact ‘wildland’ forest across the six New England states. A large portion of forest managed currently as intact is designated solely by administrative regulations that can be altered at any time. Nationwide, the percentage of intact forest in the contiguous 48 states is an estimated 7% of total forest area.

Southern New England’s appetite for open space, woodlands, and wild areas is going to leave Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut largely populated with deer, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, rats, mice, pigeons, lice, bedbugs, and cockroaches — synanthropic species that can thrive in human environments.

The region’s diversity of life is being paved over. The three states have a combined 367 animals and insects listed as species of concern (170), threatened (78), or endangered (119). Some of the species listed in each state overlap, and how often the lists are updated varies — the Rhode Island list was last updated in March 2006, Massachusetts last August, and Connecticut in January 2023. (For species listed as state historical — essentially extirpated — in Rhode Island, they were included in the endangered category.)

Massachusetts and Connecticut manage their natural heritage programs. The Bay State program has regulatory authority. In Rhode Island, however, the program, in 2007, became a victim of budget cuts.

An agreement between the state Department of Environmental Management, The Nature Conservancy, and the Rhode Island Natural History Survey left the management of the program’s species database to the latter, a small Kingston-based nonprofit with a handful of full-time staffers and a budget far less than that of DEM.

The Survey doesn’t have the power to add or remove species from the list, nor does it have regulatory authority. The staff has the knowledge to manage the database and the experience to help track and map species in need of protection, but promised funding has never materialized.

The program’s database, according to Gregg, is maintained on an Excel spreadsheet that is 42 columns wide, has 4,500 lines of observations, and is made up of 191,000 cells. It’s a difficult system to navigate, and much of the data it holds is outdated.

Gregg told ecoRI News in 2022 that the number of animals and plants identified, mapped, and tracked needs to expand, from the 500-plus currently listed to about a thousand. He said better understanding the role species play within an ecosystem is important, especially so during a climate crisis.

“We can’t be killing everything off but feel OK about it because there’s a park in the western part of the state where I can go,” he said. “Biodiversity poverty needs to be avoided … a rich, interesting, and diverse environment is better.”

In Rhode Island alone, about 40 species of turtles, snakes, frogs, toads, and salamanders can be found. Unfortunately, all face threats from habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, road mortality, and disease — most of these risks brought upon them by humans. Some are on the verge of disappearing from the Ocean State.

The same threats and consequences exist in both Massachusetts and Connecticut.

For the next 24 weeks, an ecoRI News series called Wild New England will examine the species who find themselves at risk living here.

Publication dates and stories:

Feb. 11: Freshwater mussels

Feb. 18: Snails

Feb. 25: Freshwater crustaceans
March 4: Worms

March 11: Insects (bees)

March 18: Insects (butterflies and moths)

March 25: Insects (beetles)

April 1: Insects (dragonflies and damselflies)

April 8: Birds

April 15: Birds (ducks, geese, and swans)
April 22: Birds (herons)
April 29: Birds (eagles and hawks)
May 6: Birds (owls)
May 13: Birds (sparrows)
May 20: Birds (warblers)
May 27: Amphibians

June 3: Reptiles (turtles)

June 10: Reptiles (snakes)
June 17: Reptiles (lizards)
June 24: Reptiles (sea turtles)

July 1: Fish

July 15: Mammals

July 22: Mammals (bats)

July 29: Mammals (whales)

Editor’s note: A similar look at the region’s at-risk plants is planned for later this year.

Categories

Join the Discussion

View Comments

Recent Comments

  1. Great read, look forward to reading more during the next 24 weeks on this important topic. You said it, we take selfishly and never give back. That’s what humans do, very centric.

  2. Once more and once again: Why can’t the “environmental community” in Rhode Island put forth a bill to re-establish the Natural Heritage Program?

    One would hope that the Land Trust Council, made up of local organizations operating in most municipalities, would be first and foremost in leading such an effort. That’s how you get legislation passed. You have a statewide umbrella for local organizations operating in each municipality lobbying their local Senators and Reps to get behind such a bill. Is there any other green organization in the State that has that opportunity to lead?

    But how do land trusts, right now, think of themselves?

    Stewards of ecosystems or adjuncts to municipal recreation departments?

    Or both?

    And if “Both,” how can that effectively be unless their ecosystem responsibilities are informed by the services of a Natural Heritage Program?

  3. The environmental community would be happy to support a Natural heritage program with a clean bill. Recent efforts have been truly poorly written bills that are a mish mash of 10 different programs most of which ase not only poorly written, but poorly reasoned. Get a better messenger if you want success.

  4. So looking forward to the articles to come in this series. I hope they contain action steps for average people; action can make us feel less hopeless and helpless. This was a great article. Thank you!

  5. And we should expect Save the Bay and Audubon, too, with their large memberships, to embrace the challenge of reestablishing the Natural Heritage Program and sticking with it, year in and year out, until it is done.

  6. As coordinator of the Natural Heritage Program for its 28-year existence, I can offer some clarification on a couple of points in this article. First:

    “The Survey doesn’t have the power to add or remove species from the list…the program’s database, according to Gregg, is a difficult system to navigate, and much of the data it holds is outdated.”

    These statements are not accurate because the Natural History Survey is not the Natural Heritage Program. With the imminent demise of the NHP the database was transferred to the Survey to ensure it would remain functional once the NHP was gone. Yes, it is a complex database, but that is to be expected when tracking the historic and current distributions of more than 1000 species and 100 ecosystems. It is not outdated, but understanding that requires understanding the original intent for creating the database back in 1979.

    The person responsible was Dr. Bob Jenkins, Vice President of Science at the national office of The Nature Conservancy, who was charged with formulating a system that the organization could use to evaluate the conservation value of land parcels. Jenkin’s vision was to establish natural heritage offices in each state to conduct the research for creating a national inventory of the elements of biodiversiity (speces and ecosystems), the objective being to identify locations that supported the rarest and most critically endangered.

    To accomplish this task, program biologists spent hundreds of hours in museum collections cataloging the history of each state’s flora and fauna, combing through journals and consulting with experts to derive lists of rare plants and animals. In 1982 we published Rhode Island’s first lists of rare plants and animals, about 450 total species that were listed under status categories including state endangered, state threatened, special concern, and historic. For scientific purposes, records of all rare species, current and historic, were mapped on USGS topographic sheets to gain an understanding of the distribution of rare species, the extent of the ecosystems that supported them, and the areas that needed to be protected to prevent further erosion of the state’s biodiversity.

    Mapping of rare species locations also coincidentally made the database useful for another purpose, as a reference for regulatory agencies to address rare species in the permitting process, and for informing management planning for protected sites, (e.g., national wildlife refuges, state management areas). This environmental review aspect of the NHP is what most people believe was the program’s primary function. It was not. The program was designed as a scientific endeavor to catalog the state’s biodiversity, and to identify the elements (species and ecosystems) most in need of conservation attention.

    The Natural History Survey is continuing this work by inventorying groups of organisms that have not received attention, and by coordinating volunteers who monitor known rare species populations. The Survey does not perform the environmental review function of the NHP. However, the database has lost much of its value because the NHP lists of rare species have been rendered obsolete and replaced by a new list – Species of Greatest Conservation Need. In that regard, let’s take note of Frank’s observation:

    “Today, humans mostly preserve and protect wildlife habitats for ourselves – hiking trails, boardwalks, boat ramps, hunting, fishing, swimming, mountain biking. These human-centric endeavors do little to preserve biodiversity.”

    Bingo, and nothing defines a human-centric endeavor that diminishes biodiversity more than the exploitation of wildlife. Not by the user, the hunter or birdwatcher per se, but by the wildlife manager who insists on managing land for “optimal wildlife habitat” to produce the species (commodities) desired by the user.

    There is no state or federal agency charged with the conservation of biodiversity because it is not a commodity. Most people believe the US Fish and Wildlife Service and state wildlife agencies adequately address biodiversity through federal and state endangered species laws, but in fact the management practiced by these agencies to produce sustainable populations of game species is a significant contributor to biodiversity impoverishment.

    Cutting down forests to create “early successional habitat” is a destructive process that eliminates an entire suite of forest-dwelling species, replacing them with a much smaller group of common species, opportunists, and exotic invasives. Think white-tailed deer. Yet, wildlife managers tell us these habitats are special and they codify it all in State Wildlife Action Plans. The most important thing to know about the SWAP process is how organisms are listed as Species of Greatest Conservation Need. Essentially, anything included on the SGCN list becomes eligible for research and management projects funded by State Wildlife Grants. There are two things to understand about this list.

    First, unlike the NHP rare species lists that rely on biological criteria to determine status rankings, the SGCN list includes many species that would not qualify using biological criteria but are listed to justify management for game and other commodity species. Most notable in this regard is American woodcock, a gamebird that wildlife managers claim to be declining, so much so that it serves as the poster child for early successional habitat creation. In fact, the woodcock is not declining (The Second Breeding Bird Atlas reports an increase of over 50% in the last 30 years), and it is difficult to accept the concern for a species that is harvested in the tens of thousands annually.

    The Wildlife Grant Program has limited funds and surely the disbursement of those funds should be directed to the species (and ecosystems) most in need. But the Wildlife Action Plan does Not prioritize the SGCN lists. The hundreds of SGCN species are all treated equally in a giant hodgepodge of imperilment and commonality.

    Placing a common game bird on a list of species in Greatest need of conservation action, and thus taking advantage of funding meant for truly imperiled species, is simply unethical.

    The Rhode Island Wildlife Action Plan is up for its 10-year renewal this year. The Division of Fish and Wildlife will soon be seeking public comment on the draft revision, and there will be plenty of opportunity for in-person public meetings. I would urge anyone concerned with the conservation of biodiversity to pay careful attention. If you attend a meeting, ask them why it isn’t a Biodiversity Action Plan?

    And to Gregg and Bill, you are correct that the wrong messenger has been championing the Natural Heritage Program. The big question is, why are the appropriate messengers not doing the job? High on that list is the Nature Conservancy who created the NHP and funded the data manager position for the life of the program.

    TNC has other priorities now, and biodiversity is not one of them. Instead they have bought into the Wildlife Action Plan as a substitute for the natural heritage program, to the point of being the facilitator of the Plan’s writing, and also supporter of the Division of Fish and Wildlife’s management goals. TNC endorses and facilitates management for early successional habitat on state lands, so it is unlikely they would support the restoration of a program that would limit their ability to conduct these projects.

  7. I appreciate the attempt at spreading awareness about the fates of the many other creatures we share a planet with. Sadly, not everyone is wired to care about things that are not human-focused.

    This part of the article seems confusing: “Southern New England’s appetite for open space, woodlands, and wild areas is going to leave Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut largely populated with deer, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, rats, mice, pigeons, lice, bedbugs, and cockroaches — synanthropic species that can thrive in human environments.” Is the author then suggesting woodlands, wild areas, “open space” be developed instead, to help biodiversity? I genuinely am confused.

    As to, “the wrong messenger has been championing the Natural Heritage Program,” if there’s any chance you mean Old Growth Tree Society, (and I’m open to being wrong), that makes little sense to me. That’s a group who actually does care about biodiversity. Maybe the wording of the bill needs to change, but they’ve been trying to get more people organized/make the public aware of issues, and I’m not sure who else is.

  8. If DEM, TNC, Audubon, et al were concerned about losing the Natural Heritage Program, they would have figured out a way by now to restore it. It has been 18 years. They don’t like the way the Old Growth Society is trying to do it, but they don’t come up with a better alternative, or any alternative at all. And that is simply because none of these groups want it because it would mean oversight of management plans under a biodiversity lens.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Your support keeps our reporters on the environmental beat.

Reader support is at the core of our nonprofit news model. Together, we can keep the environment in the headlines.

cookie