ATBI 6/7 Homework

Tue Apr 13 16:09:23 CDT 1993

ATBI WORKSHOP, 16-18 April 1993  Part 6 of 7

PRE-WORKSHOP HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT FOR THE ATBI AGENDA 16-18 April
_________________________________________________________________

It is a fair statement that everyone at this workshop has implicitly or
explicitly agreed to think about how to conduct an ATBI and how to have it
achieve its multiple goals (and what can they be), rather than have the
workshop be an argument about whether an ATBI is possible or whether
intensive inventories are a useful and valuable element of biodiversity
understanding and management. However, the workshop as a whole should
produce, among many other things, a convincing statement about the
"whether".

If someone laid a $25 million check in front of you and said "you have
five years to tell me all the species that are in those 1OO,OOO ha, at
least one place where each of those species lives, and the beginnings of
their natural history, all in an electronic data management format", what
would you do? That is to say, what would your battle plan look like? The
situtation is analogous to a war, and in a war you have doctors driving
tanks and farmers flying airplanes. We are moving fast into a geopolitical
climate that will support serious development of biodiversity management
as a major social activity. We as whole-organism biologists are not
currently prepared to mount a unified response to such a challenge, even
though each of us as individuals has a block of skills that are highly
appropriate for the task. This workshop, to begin to focus these
individual activities on a collective large goal, is in parallel to other
efforts to organize world-wide networks of biodiversity monitoring and
censusing, and to develop a systematics industry with the resources to
deal with the massive taxonomic challenge that is generated by
biodiversity management for all sectors of society.

At this workshop we should be very much focused on proposing solutions to
questions and situations, rather than simply restating the existence of
problems we have all been becoming aware of. For example, if there might
be a new species of bacteria on average in the gut of each of the 2OO,OOO
species of insects in an ATBI, that is not a reason to say that wild
bacteria are impossible to inventory, but rather to ask how does the
entomologist help the bacteriologist get the samples needed while the
entomologist conducts the insect inventory (e.g., by not trapping all
insects into alcohol). Of like nature, if there is no tardigrade
taxonomist available, the question is how can tardigrades be inventoried
interim until a tardigrade taxonomist appears, and how can (if necesssary)
one stimulate the appearance of such a taxonomist.

This workshop is also an exercise in the pragmatic approach to science. It
is taken as a given that

  - the budget will be large,
  - the site large and ecologically as well as taxonomically biodiverse,
  - participation heavily national as well as international,
  - the time period for the inventory short and defined, and
  - the priority products are a (functionally taxonomically clean)
species-level inventory that is linked to knowledge as to where the
species occur in the site and the beginnings of their natural history
knowledge.

There will be a multitude of add-ons to the basic ATBI and its basic
time/$ budget, but they should be viewed as just that - add-ons (and
products). We cannot afford to confuse the generation of the skeleton
known universe - the basic ATBI - with the multitude of things that can
then be built on top of this known universe. That is to say, monitoringthe
fluctuations of a frog population or the periodicity of fruiting of a tree
species is not a primary goal of a five year ATBI, even though it should
often be possible for the ATBI to both generate many kinds of start-up
data for this monitoring, and even constitute the first five years of a
long data run. Equally, the ATBI primary goal is not the development of
sampling methodologies, but rather, the creation of known universes on
which sampling methodologies may be developed. Again, however, it should
often be possible for the ATBI to in fact develop and test sampling
methodologies while conducting the ATBI. The basic tension between an ATBI
and the very human desire to get on with the next logical step of doing
ecology, chemistry, population dynamics, etc. once a taxon is relatively
well known will be a repeating theme throughout the workshop (and
throughout any given actual ATBI). This workshop should not be an exercise
in trying to think up and analyze all possible add-ons to an ATBI, but
certainly should be "add-on-sensitive".

For example, if the basic ATBI for birds (what species are there and at
least one habitat where each can be found) can be conducted by one
experienced field ornithologist, some shotguns and mistnets, and a couple
of experienced field assistants working for a year at the site (and with
little or no serious quantification of bird population numbers or
microgeographic distributions), then what happens next? Does that person
(or team) then move into the large and complex area of validating
methodologies of sampling bird biodiversity (quick or slow), making use of
this "known" bird universe? And do it as an add-on to the basic ATBI and
its budget? Or does one declare the ATBI for birds "done" and take these
"field naturalist" skills and aim them at doing the mammal (or frog, or
snake, or, or, or.....) ATBI for the site, thereby continuing to be
supported by the ATBI budget? Or does one declare birds "done" and take
these skills and put them to work helping the bacteriologists get bird gut
bacteria, and the parasitologists get bird ectoparasites, etc.?

Your first homework assignment is therefore, for each of you to please
write a two page essay (double or single spaced) in response to the
question, "if you had to design an ATBI, what would the design look like"
and send it to me by e-mail by 5 March at the latest. If there is
absolutely no e-mail access point within 1O km of you, then I will accept
it by FAX (215-898-878O). Please send it to djanzen at mail.sas.upenn.edu. If
you get this after 5 March, then do it the day you get it. I will put
these together with your half page descriptions of yourself (see other
letter) and have this as a packet to distribute before the workshop.
Rushed? Yes. Working rushed and goal-directed on questions not packaged in
the best format? Essential for this dawning day of biodiversity management
planning. Why do this? To organize your thoughts, to give us raw material
to work with in the final document, to give your associates an
understanding of how different sectors of biodiversity workers view the
same question.

Next, we would like to ask each of you to sit down with the workshop
agenda (attached) and attempt to give a written reply to each and all of
the questions or implied questions on the agenda. We realize that this
will be a many page document. Please bring this with you to the workshop
to deliver before the workshop begins (keep a copy for yourself). Ideally,
send it before the workshop so that we can use it to familiarize ourselves
with its content, but we know that time is short..... Pass it around to
anyone.

What is meant by a written reply? Not an essay (unless you are willing and
interested), but rather comments or replies in a listed/outline phrase
format.  The goal is two-fold. First, to get you to take time out of your
busy schedules and organize your thoughts vis a vis these points and vis a
vis your particular taxonomic backgrounds, before you have these same
thoughts exposed to (perhaps widely divergent) thoughts on the same topic
by others. If it is written down, we also have the advantage of the
before-after comparison. During the course of the workshop, each of you
will undoubtedly expand your thoughts on these points, write out new
versions, and hand them in to be worked with by the editorial committee in
producing the actual workshop document.

It would be extremely valuable if you could write a report or essay
specifically on a given topic of personal interest to you (e.g., "orphan
taxa", "field vouchers in inventories", "variance in malaise trap
catches", "field inventory data bases"), or if you know of a paper(s) that
addresses specifically that topic - big or small.  If you write an essay
or can identify a very central paper, please get that document to me
before the workshop so that we can copy it for distribution to all at the
workshop. We can of course copy things during the workshop itself, but the
more out of the way beforehand, the better. You can also bring things to
distribute during the workshop, but please bring 55 copies. If you want to
mail them in advance, the mailing address is D. H.  Janzen, Department of
Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 191O4.

Please do the best that you can in a short time, rather than let it go "so
as to have more time to think it out more". These are drafts and memory
aids, not polished manuscripts for publication.

The second goal is to encourage you to analyze the workshop agenda in
writing beforehand. In contrast to many workshops you have attended, you
will not be asked to give presentations, and in contrast, you will be
encouraged to make your comment(s) on a given topic as absolutely short
and concise as possible (the more frequently in written form, the better).
Ideally, for each topic we end up with long lists of points and comments,
derived from many different people. Post-conference these lists will get
converted into a section of prose that is then circulated past all
participants for comments, additions, deletions, further assignments, etc.

Everything that can be said by putting it down on paper and distributing
it should be conveyed in that manner. Message discipline should be a major
goal.  And may we add that we have as much to learn about this as does
anyone.

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