Buffalos: the last of the Mohicans of a traditional landscape in Central Romania

By Tibor Hartel

For the first look traditional societies may give the impression of permanence and stability at the level of institution and nature resource governance over centuries. Well, this is not the case, at least for the Transylvanian Saxons. As a local Saxon friend, Kuno Martini told, ‘one thing seems to be permanent in the Saxon society over centuries: the change’.

Within the many changes adopted by Transylvanian Saxons over centuries, the buffalo appeared in the Saxon landscapes of Transylvania as a result of the innovation and improvement of economy. The first records about this animal appear in the 18 century. Their number increased so much and so fast since then, that Dorner Béla noticed in 1910 that ’buffalos represent a real competition with cows’ (i.e. the ’favorite’ Saxon domestic animal). A statistic for the overall domestic animals officially recorded for the middle of the 19 century shows that till this period the buffalos were quite ’well’ established in these landscapes and the Saxon ’domestic animal culture’. At this time, in 227 Saxon villages ~47,339 cows, ~29,364 buffalos, ~40,644 horses, ~80,161 pigs, ~115,806 sheep and ~11,923 goats were recorded. This suggest a huge increase of buffalo in these landscapes. Saxons prefered them because of their milk and strong working ability.

Buffalos exploded in the Saxon landscapes. Their disappearance was at least so explosive as their arrival. Today we can find only a handful of buffalo in the Saxon villages. Many villages actually lack buffalo (the end of the story of the buffalo and Saxons, as well as their current ’status’ is very similar by the way). The sharp drop of the buffalo happened after the 1989 revolution – at least this is what local people report. ’Oooo well, buffalo were even more common in these pastures than the cow before 1989’ (a sheperd told near a commune called Bradeni). ’We had 200 buffalo in Jacobeni in the past. They had a separate pasture there. Now there are only two buffalos in Jacobeni (a woman reported in Jacobeni). ’The last buffalos disappeared five or six years ago’ (a sheperd told from Apold). ’I remember it was so nice to see how buffalos come in the village during late afternoon. They are black, big and we were children. We look to them from the door and were scared. But it was so beautiful. This was in the times when there were Saxons in Saschiz’ (a woman in Archita remembered her childhood in Saschiz).

All in all, buffalo is virtually absent from the Saxon landscapes of today. And not because of Buffalo Bill (who, by the way visited the Saxon area – Sighisoara – but for other purposes than killing buffalos). I don’t fully know the reasons. They are possibly related to the cultural shift, the economy, the payment systems  applied recently etc.

Buffalos captured my attention first, not as important cultural elements but as important drivers and determinants of biodiversity in the Saxon landscapes: buffalos love water, including ponds, I love amphibians, and amphibians love the ponds. Therefore I start to love the buffalos. And I am happy with these feelings:).

Buffalos are black and attract a lot of warm in sunny days. Probably as a result of the need for termo-regulation, they choose wetlands and use them as a kind of ’cooling system’. In this way they create a number of nice ponds in the landscape which are efficiently used by endangered amphibians such is the Yellow Bellied Toad and the endemic subspecies of the Smooth Newt. Their blood was probably a good nutrient source for the medicinal leech (which reproduces only if have access to mammal blood and have currently protected status in some European countries).

Below some pictures may show more than tens of words.

(part of pictures were made by Cathy Klein)

Imagine how many ponds were here in the ‘gold age’ of buffalos. Possibly the yellow bellied toad populations exploded when they come, who knows?

The buffalos now virtually disappeared and cows are on the same path. If not else, yellow bellied toads will miss them as current people seem to miss the Saxons. Saxons were cultural drivers and buffalos were pond biodiversity and possibly landscape dynamic drivers:).

I feel lucky to meet the buffalos – last of the Mohicans of the Saxon landscapes of Transylvania. These shy, intelligent and gentle animals have protected status in some cultural landscapes of Europe as a recognition of their historic legacy and they huge contribution for biodiversity maintenance.

It would be good to find ways (e.g. through clever compensation systems) to maintain a handful of buffalos in each Saxon village. It is still possible to restore the wetlands which start to be massively overvegetated since the buffalos dissapeared. Overvegetated temporary ponds dry faster and are not good habitats for the – endangered – yellow bellied toad. I am not sure if such a restoration possibility would be still valid in 10-15 years from now.

Why the daily news tends to be irrelevant

By Joern Fischer

With so much room for improvement in today’s world, I often feel I should be up to speed with current affairs. To contribute useful things to the world, you need to know what’s going on. And so keeping up to date with the daily news seems really important.

But then I watch the news (or listen to it, or read it), and usually there’s nothing new at all. Or rather, it’s just factoids that change on a daily basis. The important things tend to change much more slowly (if at all), and they typically don’t get reported on in the news. (The video below is different, by the way — it’s not CNN, but CNNNN, an Australian parody of CNN…)

If you’re the kind of person who gets frustrated by watching daily news, perhaps you’ll find Resilience Thinking an interesting way to look at this. According to resilience scholars, systems have “fast variables” (things that change rapidly, somewhat frequently, and can cause great disturbance in the process), and systems have “slow variables” (things that don’t change very fast at all but underpin some of the big patterns and trends). The slow variables are really important drivers of sustainability problems. They might be things like human population growth, climate change, global injustices stemming back from colonial times, dietary choices as people get wealthier. These kinds of variables are critically important to understand, and address, sustainability problems.

But the daily news focuses almost exclusively on fast variables. The weather, the latest events, the stock market. I’d go even further though: if people are informed by the news, then there will be a feedback effects back to politics — watching the news means you end up thinking that lots of these fast variables are important; thereby putting implicit pressure on politicians to think even more in terms of immediate impacts. Yet again, our culture of speed stops us from thinking about underlying issues — even though those are the issues we should be dealing with to create lasting changes (assuming we are seeking to improve sustainability outcomes).

So, is there a chance to change modern culture, so that slow, important variables receive more attention, relative to fast, less important variables? Is this already happening, just not in the daily news?  Could and should the profile of slow variables be increased, and if so, how?

Evidence based conservation or turning the non-scientific chaos into a scientific chaos?

by Tibor Hartel

I recently re-think about the evidence based conservation. In short, evidence based conservation means creating scientific evidences for conservationists because one can never be sure about the validity of ‘non-scientific knowledge’. Indeed, there are many, often contradictory ‘non-expert’ opinions about the very same thing because people differ in their perceptions and the amount and quality of information and experience also may differ between them. And science, with its rigorous methods aims to create scientific evidence: this is something clear, grounded in theories and methods, analysis and objective interpretations.

http://warriorfitness.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/confused.jpg

This is great, basically. This presents science as something good to make some ‘order’ in the chaos/disorder of non-expert opinions.

But is this really the case? I think that broadly, not necessarily. Doing science is somehow a kind of depicting a detail from the whole and documenting it. In (conservation and restoration) ecology, each scientific team does this depiction according to the resources they have. The very same type of research may be based on one year surveys, two year surveys, the number of sites may differ, sampling design may differ, the spatial scale may differ, the variables considered important and recorded, the experimental setup, the analytical framework may differ and so on. And they all generate scientific informations based on the multi ‘spatial-temporal-logistical-informational-perceptional-ecological’ hyperspace they work.

Ideally (?) each little detail/information of a system is turned into scientific evidence by being documented as such. (an absurd extreme is when information of the system which are not turned into scientific evidence will be considered as hypotheses to be tested – and till this will happen a kind of ‘pending situation’ may appear)

We witness an explosion of scientific informations in conservation biology. All with the major aim to create evidences about species decline, restoration success and so on. The number of pages written is probably several thousands of pages yearly.

My feeling is that this huge accumulation of informations dont solves the chaos. In fact, the only thing which certainly is turned into (still not scientific) evidence seems to be this: the non- scientific chaos is now ‘complemented’ with a scientific chaos and the two dimensions go nicely in parallel. Besides the non-scientific Babel tower we now have a scientific Babel tower too.

It would be interesting to check how much modern science contributes to solving problems and how much non-scientific knowledge contributes. My experience in Romania is that people which have virtually no high level education and had nothing to do with science are able to ‘push’ a social-ecological system in a better path (or keep it in good patch) – just with passion, enthusiasm, knowledge (not scientific, true, but knowledge can be valuable without being scientific – I guess) and a lot of work.

If we look for some concepts which are considered as ‘basic’ in ecology like ‘habitat’, ‘population’, ‘connectivity’, ‘habitat fragmentation’, ‘habitat loss’ the chaos seem to increase (i.e. there are many interpretations – all scientifically documented and published). The situation seems to not be better regarding the ‘best’ management strategy for a given species and habitat.

I am not suggesting that science is bad or wrong. But what seem to be certain is that it becomes harder and harder to ‘fish’ the best information from the increasing multitude of scientific informations available.

I am afraid to not be too trapped in science and make confusions between the beautiful statistics and high impact factor papers (which are generally based on short term research – therefore are just a drop in the big sea of informations no matter how nicely they look) and the real world.

If this very simplistic diagnosis about the scientific evidences is broadly right, then what should be done?

Roe deer and other benefits from nature

I am in the process of getting an overview of which benefits people in Transylvania receive from nature. Over the last few weeks I learned a bit more about this, partly because I was in Transylvania talking to people, and partly because I had time to look over an extensive household survey commissioned by the WWF. This survey covered 1200 people within a Natura 2000 area that account for quite a bit of our study area and all the numbers reported below come from that survey (for all the non-European readers: Nature 2000 is a network of protected areas within the European Union to protect certain species and habitat types).

Roe deer – a common species in central Romania

Since people are very poor in Transylvania, the average income is 474 Lei (approximately 112 Euro), people need to make large parts of their living from what they can trade or what they get from nature. Vegetables are grown in the gardens and maize in the fields. Water comes from a well in the backyard and firewood from the forest. Herbs are collected for tea and fruits grow in gardens and orchards.

All these things are nowadays considered ecosystem services, but in Transylvania, many people are not aware that they receive a valuable service. They take nature’s gifts for granted. (And they’d probably be happier if they had money and could shop for their food in the supermarkets.) Asked what was the most important factor influencing the quality of their lives, most (33%) named economic factors, second was social factors (23%), third political factors (20%), and only 17% thought that environmental factors were most important. People especially thought that the environment influences their quality of life when it affects their health (25%), or when the environment is polluted (13%). The major issues identified by people in the communities were the poor quality of roads and bridges, and the absence or failure of sewage systems and water networks.

One of the most surprising (and very saddening) findings of the survey, was that 88% of the interviewees (all living within the Natura 2000 site) responded to the question “How much do you know about Natura 2000?” with “I have never heard of such a thing”. There is definitely a long way to go to make nature conservation popular in the region!

But there is a lot of hope and I don’t want to be too pessimistic here. In the report I stumbled across something my scientist’s mind instantly categorized as a cultural ecosystem service. When asked for which species should be protected, people most frequently (36%) mentioned roe deer. And why is that? According to the report it is because people like to have such beautiful and gentle creatures around.

Predators and pest control

By Joern Fischer

The dingo in Australia is much the same thing biologically as the wolf in Europe — in fact, the two might be just different sub-species, not even different species. There’s a very nice story published today on this over at “The Conversation”, an Australian website.

Dingoes are quite controversial in Australia, as are wolves in Europe. The instill fear in people, who worry about their sheep, children, and general safety. An added problem in Australia is that the dingo is not a proper “native animal” — it was introduced, probably with Aboriginal people, a mere few thousand years ago.

Now the important bit: dingoes interact in food webs in complex ways, and they help to suppress populations of other so-called “meso-predators”. Some of those meso-predators in Australia are introduced, and major ecological problems in their own right, like the cat and fox. So, dingoes could be quite important ecologically.

This all does make me wonder about the role of wolves in the countries I now engage with most … Central Romania has lots of wolves, some shepherds report that they see them every week. Germany has a few wolves coming back now, as far as the west end of the country (they come from the eastern parts originally). What might be the effects of wolves on meso-predators in Europe? What are the differences in food webs, with and without wolves in Europe? — Frankly, I don’t know, but I’d be interested in comments on this.

Now — go read the dingo article here.

Linking statistics with ecology

Guest contribution by Henrik von Wehrden

There was a recent editorial in Science about the rising demand for statistics (M. Davidian, T.A. Louis, Why Statistics? Science 335, 12 2012). It inspired us to write a short comment in response stating our perspective on that issue. We believe that statisticians should not only be familiar with statistics but also with a given scientific field, and should facilitate methodological exchange between disciplines. Such an approach was taken quite recently at Leuphana University in Germany. Here, a Center for Methods was established, bringing together different disciplines and statistical expertise.

Find our full comment on the Science website: http://comments.sciencemag.org/content/10.1126/science.1218685

Tradition and modern: a solution for fitting them

by Tibor Hartel

Today I saw an interesting picture on Facebook, shared by a group called ‘Magyar nyelv’, under the quote of a great Hungarian philologist Kőrösi-Csoma Sándor:

‘Honour the past and keep it alive.’

Here is the picture. Beautiful combination of the past and the present.

At least at individual level, this nice woman was able to fit the tradition with change in a creative and very beautiful way.