Examination of Witnesses (Questions 162-179)
Professor Richard Battarbee, Professor Richard Gornall
and Dr Alastair Culham
25 MARCH 2008
Q162 Chairman: May I welcome you.
You probably heard a little about the sort of proceedings that
we hope to follow for the next hour or so. We are on air, you
will keep that in mind I dare say, and I thank you for the written
evidence that has been submitted, it is very much appreciated,
and as you will have gathered we do pay very close attention to
it. Could you please start by introducing yourselves, just for
the microphone, indicating your allegiance or your home base or
whatever seems appropriate. Can we start at this end?
Professor Battarbee: I am Rick Battarbee from
University College London.
Dr Gornall: I am Richard Gornall from the University
of Leicester, but I am here also on behalf of the BSBI, the Botanical
Society of the British Isles.
Dr Culham: Alastair Culham from the University
of Reading.
Q163 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. To start with a general question that tries to relate
to what was done in the last report that we produced in 2002,
much of the focus of the thinking of that group was based on the
link between taxonomy and conservation as the base science that
it seemed to be serving, but of course in the wider world the
whole issue of climate change has very much magnified its impact
and I think it would be helpful for the Committee if you were
to expand a little on that and perhaps draw any particular lessons
out about the importance of your area of study for the whole discussion
of global warming. Who would like to start on that?
Professor Battarbee: I could start if you wish.
I think that is true and when I put my submission in I also suggested
that we should think more broadly than just global change but
also consider environmental change in general, as it is often
I think a mistake to think that the only problems that we are
facing are from climate change as there are many problems of pollution
and human impact on the environment that we also need to be concerned
about. In my research group of the things which we are focusing
on is the interaction between climate change and its impact on
land use change and pollutant change, so there is a real complexity
of interactions there that we need to be concerned about, and
it is global change in the broader sense I think. In that context,
understanding how plants and animals will respond to those interacting
stresses, and conversely how we can use the response of plants
and animals to actually indicate change is absolutely fundamental
and, clearly, taxonomy is central to that endeavour.
Dr Gornall: Species are the currency of understanding
or measuring environmental change. Environmental change happens
in a biological context and what species are, where they live
and where they have gone extinct and so forth is one way of how
you measure its impact, so unless you can answer those questions
you cannot really do much about it.
Dr Culham: The basis that taxonomy provides
for evolutionary studies is really fundamental to the longer-term
understanding of the change in species or the change in climate,
so if we do not have an underpinning taxonomy system of reliable,
authenticated identification of species we do not have phylogenetic
studies, we do not have evolutionary studies and therefore we
do not have the ability to link those into broader questions.
I think the next question might deal with this in more detail.
Q164 Chairman: Just a supplementary
before we get to that, NERC's new strategy seems to be paying
more attention to these connections; is it a bit late in the day
for such a forward-thinking group of scientists and administrators
to be preaching that point? Sorry, I will rephrase that question
so you find it more diplomatically put: have they been a bit slow
to react?
Dr Gornall: In some ways I suppose they have;
better late than never of course, but on the other hand you could
argue that perhaps the taxonomy community has been a bit slow
to react as well in not picking up that climate change could be
such a major issue to which they could contribute useful data,
so to some extent it is a two-way process, a two-way criticism
if you like.
Q165 Chairman: Does anyone else want
to venture into the discussion?
Dr Culham: NERC have been quite proactive in
funding studies of climate change from a physical point of view.
The University of Reading is part of a group including an internationally
famous meteorology department who have been working for many decades
on the climate models needed both to predict climate change in
the future but also to look backwards and model past climate changes.
The detail of those models and the complexity of those models
has only recently got to a stage where we can tie it into systematics
and taxonomy, so climate change is happening, we accept it happens
and the level of detail and the complexity of the computer models
has been dependent on very expensive and very time-consuming research,
and it is only now at that stage of completion where we can use
it.
Professor Battarbee: There are two aspects to
that: one is where we are now in terms of understanding the impact
of climate change on biodiversity and the structure and function
of ecosystems. We are only just reaching the point where there
is a general acceptance that we will have climate change in the
future. The models seem to be robust and there has been a major
emphasis and a lot of money spent on modelling. It is right that
we should now be looking very, very carefully at impacts, and
to a certain extent we need robust models to project the future,
to actually then ask the question how might ecosystems and how
might plants and animals respond. So it is timely in that sense
and perhaps not too late. We can see that changes are already
taking place and have been, perhaps, for the last few decades.
The second part of this is that there has been some contribution
already by taxonomists and ecologists in looking at the changes
in plant and animal distributions in the past in an attempt to
reconstruct past climate change through time and by so doing to
try to test General Circulation Models. So there has been a role
if you like of taxonomy in a fairly ecological sense already,
but now is the time to move on and begin to look at ecosystem
impacts in the future.
Q166 Chairman: In the discussions
between different groups of scientists has there been an adequate
discussion between environmental scientists and taxonomists about
the need to have a capacity in taxonomy? Are both sides aware
of their need for each other?
Dr Gornall: To some extent the two groups tend
to operate independently. It is good when it happens when you
get the people with disparate disciplines coming together with
a holistic view of something, but I would have to say it tends
not to happen, unfortunately. There are exceptions but on the
whole the people who are interested in grassland communities,
for example, may not talk directly to a taxonomist for their actual
input into that. They may use taxonomic products and they may
perhaps chat over coffee on some specific points, but the taxonomists
will not be present on the research team as an integral part of
the investigation, that is probably true.
Professor Battarbee: I come at it from the environmental
science perspective and environmental scientists who are ecologists
tend to have taxonomy as part of their trade. They are often trained
in taxonomy, or are self-trained in many cases in taxonomy and
use taxonomy as the research question demands. To a certain extent,
therefore, ecologists may not need to have an interaction with
taxonomists until problems arise or there is a need to do some
fundamental research. There is certainly the need to have that
professional taxonomic base available so that when questions are
asked that require that interaction can take place, and there
are numerous examples of that.
Q167 Lord Methuen: We have to some
extent already touched on this: what does the taxonomy and systematics-based
evidence from past climate change tell us about the possible biological
impact of the climate and environmental change that we are now
seeing around and about us?
Dr Gornall: Historically there is a lot of evidence
that environmental change greatly affects the biological environment.
If you go back to when the land flora and fauna first emerged
from the primeval swamp, for example, about 460 million years
ago, there have been intervals where we know that the environment
has changed quite directly and, correlated with that, there have
been some quite dramatic changes in not only species distributions
but also species composition, with speciation events occurring
and also extensions occurring.
Q168 Lord Methuen: Obviously some
of these are due to cosmic events rather than more naturally occurring.
Dr Gornall: Some of them have been linked to
plate tectonic movements, some have been linked to atmospheric
conditions, the most recent one of course was the last Pleistocene
ice age and it is obvious that those wrought havoc amongst the
populations of Northern Europe, so it is clear that environmental
change and climate change can have dramatic consequences.
Dr Culham: This is an area I have been focusing
on in the last five years, initially funded by e-science money
from BBSRC—another case of disguising taxonomy in another
hat to get funding. The use of molecular phylogenesis in evolutionary
trees based on DNA sequence and the dating of those trees based
on fossil evidence has allowed linking of plant evolutionary trees
with paleo climate models, models of ancient climates. Those climate
models are validated by running them through to the present to
see if they correctly predict what we have now and the linking
is very much a taxonomic point, it is taking a particular group
of organisms, a taxonomical group of organisms, looking at their
relationships in an evolutionary way and then tying in the pattern
of diversification of lineages to model patterns of climate change,
and those models of course are linked to geological evidence and
fossil evidence, but only slimly. There are not many fossils although
there are bits—all over the world there are some fossils
but the fossil data is more gap than evidence. Bringing together
very modern techniques of DNA sequencing and taxonomic sampling
techniques has allowed novel compilations that have given a new
insight to the way in which plants might have reacted over millions
of years to climate change, and some of those results suggest
less change than might be expected.
Professor Battarbee: If I might be a bit more
specific and talk about more recent times, traditional taxonomic
techniques applied to fossil material have revealed very, very
clear evidence of naturally varying climate on lots of different
timescales as has just been alluded to. The question is which
is the most relevant timescale for our current issue? We can look
at the interglacial cycles, of which there have been many, and
they tended to be cooler than the present time; the previous interglacials
tended to be about the same temperature—we can see that
from interglacial after interglacial. Many of them have occurred
with more or less the same temperature and more or less, in Europe,
the same flora and fauna for the last half a million years or
so. What is interesting is this recent period that we are living
in; we call it a warm period and it is the equivalent of an interglacial
and until recently, until global warming, we were convinced there
would be another glacial period coming, but now we are not so
sure. But we do know from the fossil evidence, from using standard
palaeoecological, taxonomically-based techniques, that, North
West Europe, was warmer by about two degrees centigrade than at
the present time 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, for astronomic reasons,
and there has been a general cooling in that timescale. We can
now see we have had a recent warming and so one of the questions
is the extent to which the recent warming we see is due entirely
to greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations and to what extent
there is natural variability in the system as well, and the evidence
suggests that it is mainly greenhouse gas forcing it, but we are
still not as warm—despite the scaremongering we have had—as
we were in Europe 8,000 years ago when July temperatures were
about two degrees centigrade higher than they were on average
between 1960 and 1990. That is interesting because it tells us
that at least the in northern hemisphere, the world can function
at two degrees centigrade warmer, and we are heading very much
towards that two degrees centigrade increase. The European Union
has taken two degrees centigrade as being the level at which it
would like to cap the temperature; as far as I can see the community
would actually agree that there is no analogue for any warming
greater than two degrees centigrade in the past, so once we get
beyond two degrees centigrade then in fact we will be into a new
world.
Q169 Lord May of Oxford: Is the two
degrees centigrade eight thousand years ago that you were talking
about the global average or Northern European?
Professor Battarbee: This is a European inference
in fact.
Q170 Lord May of Oxford: That was
issued in a way that may have misled some. The temperature he
is talking about is typically two to two and a half times the
global average of warmness, so on that basis we would be talking
about five degrees by the middle of the century; I just thought
people should be clear.
Professor Battarbee: We know from that time
that the plants and animals, for example, were more widely distributed
to the North and since then there has been a relocation. This
is very interesting in terms of biodiversity conservation because
it shows that plants and animals do migrate with the climate,
but 7,000 or 8,000 years ago of course there were very few people
and we now live in a polluted, fragmented landscape and the plants
and animals will probably not be able to migrate to the same extent
as in the past, so with this warming that is taking place now
and likely to take place more in the future there is much more
chance of extinctions and species loss.
Q171 Earl of Selborne: I would like
to address my question to Professor Battarbee who has given us
very interesting written evidence about the role of taxonomy in
monitoring the aquatic environmental change and the implication
on classification of the effects of climate change, My Lord Chairman,
and in your written evidence you refer to the fact that Defra
proposed a massive reduction in the 20-year programme of monitoring
lakes, rivers and streams with which you have been concerned.
We heard from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency that
they are also concerned about the capacity in aquatic taxonomy
and they take the view as you appear to that the taxonomic requirements
in this area are expanding. We hear from Defra a rather different
story, they refer to "short-term demands" and they submit
that it "has not identified any specific major impediments
to delivering our priorities deriving from the spheres of systematics
and taxonomy". I wonder if Professor Battarbee would like
to give us his comments on that.
Professor Battarbee: I was really quite surprised
to see that. I am not quite sure who was giving the evidence and
where that statement came from, whether they were thinking about
the problems for freshwater ecology, freshwater taxonomy, or not.
I think the SEPA view would be widely held, not just in Scotland
but certainly by the Environment Agency, by Natural England, by
CCW, by all the agencies that are charged with freshwater protection.
The environment agencies in the UK now have to respond to the
needs of the Water Framework Directive which requires that all
surface waters are restored to good ecological status by 2015,
and this is defined ecologically and biologically. The Environment
Agency, SEPA in Scotland, are now doing their very best to try
to characterise surface waters in the UK with respect to phytoplankton,
to macro-invertebrate populations, and to aquatic macrophyte populations,
the main constituents of the freshwater ecosystems, and they are
having great difficulty in finding the right consultants to do
that. They do not really have sufficient taxonomic and ecological
expertise within their own ranks to do that, and I know from even
very recent experience the great shortage of people with phytoplankton
identification skills is serious, to the extent that I know one
colleague in the Environment Agency is looking to Scandinavia
to let contracts because these kinds of skills are still strong
there. If I could influence you in any way I would urge you to
either go back to Defra and ask for some clarification or perhaps
even discount it. I brought with me a review of freshwater ecology
in the UK because we are concerned that freshwater ecology as
a science in general is actually decreasing and fragmenting and
taxonomy for freshwater systems of course is part of that concern.
Q172 Earl of Selborne: Could I specifically
just follow up the point about the Water Framework Directive;
I understand that for every river it has to be determined what
is meant by good ecological status, and that is something on which
we are already, apparently, falling behind the timetable. Presumably
aquatic taxonomy here will have a role.
Professor Battarbee: It is absolutely fundamental.
Q173 Earl of Selborne: Would you
think you could achieve good ecological status while at the same
time reducing the expenditure on this monitoring?
Professor Battarbee: The monitoring I am talking
about refers specifically to acid rain and the impacts of acid
rain, and Defra have significantly reduced the network that we
have been running to look at the responses to that reduction in
acid deposition. The answer in short is not as much as we would
have done had they continued to fund. There are 22 lakes and streams
that we have been monitoring for 22 years and that has been reduced
now to a handful, so it is no longer a network, and in that network
it has been the monitoring of chemistry and biology and different
biological groups, and after 20 years now we are just beginning
to see some signs of biological recovery, and so this network
has now been reduced, just at the time where we are beginning
to see some success in fact with the government policy. My concern
is partly the loss of it from the point of view of monitoring
recovery from acid deposition and acidification, but mainly from
the fact that we have 20 years of excellent, high quality chemical
and biological data for lakes and streams across the whole of
the uplands of the UK just at the time when we need to have those
kind of long-term data sets to monitor the future effects of climate
change. No thought has been given to that, in fact, in the decision
to reduce the funding for this particular network because the
decision was taken by the air quality division in Defra and not
by the division that was concerned with climate change. In our
dealings with Defra we find there is very little joined-up thinking
in fact which allows one department—Lord May mentioned silos
in the past in a different context but there seem to be silos
in Defra and a decision in one part of Defra was taken without
any real regard to the wider need in fact to keep this network
going. I speak with a vested interest but we have plenty of evidence
to show that other people and other parties in the UK would actually
support that particular remit, and in fact the Joint Nature Conservation
Committee has just written Defra a long letter saying how much
they think this is a wrong decision.
Chairman: We have an interest too although I
hope not vested in monitoring what is happening in the watercourses
of the country. Lord May.
Q174 Lord May of Oxford: We have
heard quite a bit of evidence from people in the taxonomy and
systematics community that their subject is in a worrying state
and yet, rather oddly, the BBSRC—I was not at the meeting
but read the minutes—and NERC have suggested that they just
do not see a problem, partly because they do not see basic taxonomy
systematics as part of their business; to quote from the minutes
"it is not a hypothesis-driven science" which I find
rather bizarre. More importantly, they say "these concerns
are not reflected from the user community". We see you as
perhaps representing the user community, is it your experience
that the user community is perfectly happy with the health of
taxonomy and systematics in the UK at the moment?
Dr Gornall: I wonder who they have asked.
Q175 Lord May of Oxford: It is not
clear that they actually asked anyone.
Dr Gornall: I will give you at least one example
from one area of the user community which is ecological consultants,
who are widely employed by councils up and down the land to do
ecological surveys of various plots of land which are subject
to planning permissions and so forth. They are really struggling
for properly qualified people with taxonomic identification skills,
so at least some of these surveys—goodness knows how many—will
be substandard because the people employed are not properly qualified.
Some reference was made in an earlier session to at what point
is this tipping point. One of the panellists suggested we might
have already got to it and I suspect that in terms of ecological
consultancies we might be there now because it is certainly true
that if you have got taxonomic skills you will be snapped up like
that by these ecological consultants because there is a real shortage
currently.
Dr Culham: Perhaps I could come in here as somebody
who is both a user and a trainer of this group, I run an MSc that
has been running continuously now for 38 years on taxonomy in
various guises, but we lost one of our plant group ecologists
recently through retirement and for low impact RAE work the university
were not interested in replacing him; we gained a replacement
through industrial funding, one of the ecological consultancies
paid 50 per cent of the salary for a new member of staff, just
for a basic replacement. We train and we provide those trained
individuals that Richard has said are in such short supply, we
train students every year in the identification of the British
flora. It is specialist knowledge but it is now in huge demand
from a number of consultancies. We have no research council-funded
studentships for the Masters course, we have a small number of
places funded again by consultancies and one place in fact funded
by the Royal Horticultural Society as a result of the last House
of Lords inquiry into systematics, they came forward with the
money for one student placement. Money is tight.
Q176 Lord May of Oxford: It sounds
like it would be a fair summary of your response to say that from
your perspective as users the statement that we heard from the
research councils is daft.
Dr Gornall: Absolutely.
Q177 Lord May of Oxford: On the other
hand, the user community is a very diverse and varied community.
Might it be that there are other sectors which do not see a problem
and, if so, what might they be and why is it that the research
councils are different from them and what can we do about it—or
maybe they just did not ask anybody.
Professor Battarbee: We need to know who they
asked really and who gave the answers.
Dr Culham: Yes, we do. Looking through scientific
publications that are predominantly on molecular biology it is
not unusual to refer to organisms by their common name, it is
not unusual to have no substantiated taxonomic back-up on those
papers to prove that the organism that is claimed to be in use
was used. Part of the increase in research quality controls surely
should be a requirement for editors of journals to check that
organisms that are claimed to be in use in research are those
organisms.
Q178 Lord May of Oxford: Of course,
if we had full bar-coding that would work.
Dr Culham: Yes, but we need to get through the
expertise gap to get to the barcode database; we need the morphological
taxonomists I think to link molecular data to the morphological
data.
Dr Gornall: Can I just add one more thing, and
that is that there is a reservoir of taxonomic expertise out there.
It is found amongst the amateur community, people who do it for
fun. They are not employed, by and large, as ecological taxonomists,
they are not by and large academics, they are just keen naturalists
and they derive their skills from each other and from the very
few academics whose paths they might cross. The Botanical Society
of the British Isles, for example, has a network of over 150 people
who look after what are called vice-counties—that is old-fashioned
counties or sub-divisions thereof—and for particular projects
the society can put out into the field something like 2000 people
all with various levels, medium to high levels, of botanical expertise.
Q179 Lord May of Oxford: We already
know that Defra is delivering part of the action plans largely
through organisations like yours and the RSPB, they are dependent
on it, but do you think the future is as secure as today, do you
think those amateur societies are going to continue to attract
young people who will go on in adult life?
Dr Gornall: It is very precarious, because it
relates back to some of the questions you asked in the previous
session about encouraging young people into the field. Although
there are initiatives taken by various bodies there is not a national
effort to try and get people back into whole organism biology,
which is what is actually suffering and, as has been referred
to earlier, taxonomy is one component of that, perhaps at the
sharp end.
Professor Battarbee: It also differs between
organism groups. I can imagine that the more charismatic groups
will attract interest and amateurs will remain attracted throughout
all age groups, as we heard again in the previous session. The
groups that we work with are not so charismatic perhaps—we
work with algae, particularly diatoms, which are beautiful organisms
but you need a really high quality microscope just to see them;
20 or 30 years ago there was a thriving amateur community but
they have all died now. We have a British Diatom weekend every
year and gradually, over the last 20 years, the amateurs stopped
coming, mainly because they had died. They have not been replaced
at all, so there are lots of important groups, perhaps among the
indicator groups rather than the groups that are very attractive,
where expertise is gradually being lost and, as someone said before,
there is a tipping point but it is a very slow and gentle decline
as experienced professionals have retired or gifted amateurs have
slipped away and not been replaced.
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