Last Saturday, on the United Nation’s International Day for Biodiversity, an open letter from hundreds of British organisations warned of the importance of our rapidly eroding biodiversity, while a UN report discussed the economic consequences of this erosion. The general principle of conserving biodiversity has inarguable value but there’s much more debate about how best to do it.

Take national parks and reserves –these protected areas save wildlife but they stop local people from using the land for farming and from using its resources. The argument that such limitations prioritise “cuddly animals” over “poor people” is particularly sharp in developing countries, where rural communities are said to bear the costs of protected areas without reaping their benefits.

But a new study in Costa Rica and Thailand says that such objections are unfounded. By actually comparing similar communities on a small scale, Kwaw Andam from Washington’s International Food Policy Research Institute has shown that protected areas actually help to alleviate poverty.

In 2003, the so-called Durban Accord from the World Congress on Protected Areas urged commitments to “protected area management that strives to reduce, and in no way exacerbates, poverty”. Well and easily said, but studying the link between poverty and protection is quite difficult. The two seem to go hand in hand, but protected areas are often set up in far-flung areas where poverty if rife. How can you actually tell if they worsen the situation?

Andam did it by focusing on protected areas in Costa Rica and Thailand. These developing nations have very different cultures and histories but they are both hotspots of biodiversity that set up protected areas a long time ago. And importantly, they both have good sources national statistics.

Using these data, Andam’s team compared communities where at least 10% of the land had been protected with those where less than 1% had been. This difference aside, they compared like for like, matching the various communities in terms of their forest cover, their access to transportation, the productivity of their land, and how poor they were before protected zones were set up. The analysis was very detailed, zooming in at a fine regional level and taking data about poverty from household surveys. The team also focused on protected areas that had been around for 15 years or more, to get a sense of their long-term impact.

On the surface, the link between poverty and protection seemed clear. As with many other countries, the Costa Rican and Thai communities with high levels of protected biodiversity were much poorer than those with little protection. But these areas were already among the poorest parts of the two countries before the protected zones were set up.

Taking this into account, Andam’s matched comparisons revealed that protected areas don’t exacerbate the economic shortfalls of local communities. If anything, they actually make things better. Put it another way, if the protected areas hadn’t been set up, the local people would probably be even worse off than they actually are.

Could there be other explanations? Certainly, but Andam systematically ruled them out. Andam showed that the genesis of the protected areas didn’t affect the population growth of the relevant areas, which shows that poor people weren’t being pushed out into neighbouring regions. Andam also considered the possibility that the costs of protected areas were spilling over into neighbouring communities, affecting a far wider catchment area than he suspected. But when he left out control regions that were within 10km of a protected area and re-ran his analysis, he got the same result.

This is an important study, which provides some much needed evidence in the area of conservation policy. It’s also very encouraging. Previously, Andam has shown that the networks of protected areas have slowed the pace of deforestation and his latest results show that this success hasn’t come at the cost of local development. If anything, things have improved for local people as a result. It’s not clear how, but it could be that protected areas bring opportunities from business and investments, promote tourism, or improve local infrastructure.

However, Andam is rightly cautious. He notes that his results present an average trend over several decades. In the short term, things may get worse before they get better, and not all districts would benefit equally. Poverty is also only one aspect of a community’s wellbeing and there’s no data on their ability to maintain their cultural traditions, or to feel in control of their fates.

And, obviously, Costa Rica and Thailand are but two countries. Both have enjoyed a lot of investment in their protected areas and in eco-tourism so the same trends may not apply in other parts of the world. (Andam also writes that they had “relatively stable political systems” but the current Thai situation probably doesn’t support that statement!)

Andam calls for other researchers to do a similar analysis in other parts of the world to get a global picture of the impact of protected areas. For now, we have a restricted view of this picture, albeit a positive one. As he writes, “Our results… suggest that protecting biodiversity can contribute to both environmental sustainability and poverty alleviation, two of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.”

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914177107 If this link isn’t working, read why here

Image: by Haakon S. Krohn

More on conservation:

• Fish make rapid comeback in the world’s largest no-fishing zone
• Fishing bans protect coral reefs from devastating predatory starfish
• Farmed salmon decimate wild populations by exposing them to parasites
• Shark-hunting harms animals at bottom of the food chain
• Human hunters unwittingly shrink their prey species at incredible rates
• How research saved the Large Blue butterfly

Our solar system is pretty neat and orderly. Yeah, it has some issues, but in general we can make some broad statements about it: the planets all orbit the Sun in the same direction, for one thing, and they also orbit pretty much in the same plane. If you look at the system from the side, the orbits would all look flat, like a DVD seen from the side.

That’s left over from the formation of the solar system itself, which happened when a cloud of dust and gas collapsed into a disk. The planets formed from that disk, so they all orbit in roughly the same plane. We see other systems forming in the same way, so we assume that when we look at those planets, they’ll also have all their planets in a plane.

Oops. Maybe not so much. Astronomers have just announced that they’ve confirmed a system where the planets are not all aligned this way, and in fact the planets are titled relative to each other by as much as 30°!

Ironically, the parent star is Upsilon Andromedae — that made me chuckle, because it was one of the very first stars found to have planets orbiting it, back in 1996. It’s actually a binary star, two stars orbiting each other; one is a star slightly more massive and hotter than the Sun, and the other a dinky red dwarf orbiting pretty far out (well outside the frame of that illustration of the system above). Three planets (called Upsilon Andromedae b, c, and d) at least are known to orbit the primary star. The planets were initially detected by their gravitational pull on the star; as they orbit they move the star in a mutual tug-of-war. We can’t (usually) see that motion directly, but it can be detected as a Doppler shift in the star’s light.

Due to the physics of the situation, that method only gives us a minimum mass for a planet. The actual mass might be much higher. It also doesn’t tell us the tilt of the orbit of the planet, or of any of the other planets in the system.

What’s new here is that astronomers used telescopes on Hubble called the Fine Guidance Sensors, which are incredibly accurate and highly precise. The FGSs are so accurate that they could see the physical motion of the star on the sky, the wobbling as the planets tugged on it this way and that. Think of it like a harried parent at a mall with two little kids holding her hand. As the kids see one store or another they want to visit, they pull on her in different directions as she walks with them, so her path down the mall corridor shifts left and right.

Combining the new Hubble data with the older Doppler data has revealed a wealth of information about the planets in that system. For one thing, it nailed the masses. Instead of lower limits, we now have accurate masses for planets: Ups And c is 14 times the mass of Jupiter, and Ups And d is 10 times Jupiter’s mass^*. Mind you, Jupiter is a bit of a bruiser, so these are hefty planets. These masses are far larger than thought before, so the new observations really changed our thinking here.

But the amazing thing is that it looks like Ups And c and d are in wildly different orbits: instead of being almost exactly in the same plane as expected, they are tilted relative to one another by 30°! The illustration on the right compared those orbits with those of planets in our own solar system, and you can see how weird this is.

But does this mean astronomers are wrong about how planets form?

Probably not. We’re pretty sure we understand how planets form, at least in general terms. What this does mean is that something happened to the planets after they formed, something that tossed one or both of these planets into different orbits than the ones they were born in.

This isn’t a huge surprise. Pluto may or may not be a planet by your definition, but it orbits the Sun at an angle of 17° with respect to the Earth. Sedna, an object about the same size as Pluto in the outer solar system, also has a large tilt. We know there is some mechanism that can change the orbits of big objects in the solar system, so why not in other systems, too?

In the case of Upsilon Andromedae, we have some culprits. The data hint that there may be a fourth planet orbiting the star. It’s not clear if it’s there or not, but if it has an elliptical orbit it could gravitationally affect the inner planets. There’s also the red dwarf star orbiting farther out. Far more massive than a planet, its gravity may have some effect on the system as well. It’s also certainly possible that there are other influences we haven’t seen or thought of yet. [Update: I just got off the phone with the team who did this research, and Rory Barnes told me that a strong possibility as well is that there were more planets in the system initially. They would have interacted via gravity, and affected each others' orbits. A likely scenario is that a planet with about ten times the mass of Jupiter could have messed up the orbits of the other two, then been ejected out of the system. This is a common outcome when you have lots of massive objects in one system.]

The point here is that in general, our theories of how planets form is pretty good. As we study more of these systems, we’ll get more and more data under our belts that will help us catalog and understand where these systems follow our theories, and where they seem to diverge. That’s all good news! Theories only go so far in explaining everything, and as we observe more we modify those ideas, add to them, so they better represent the Universe around us. That’s how science works, and that’s how we learn.

Related posts:

Wrong way planets screw up our perfectly good theories
A tiny wobble reveals a massive planet

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

[Note: I expect antivaxxers to flood the comments below with their typical spin and distortions. I urge everyone to read my comments policy. I also note that the article here is extensively linked to other sources backing up my claims about Wakefield and the antivax movement. The debunking of the vast majority of antivax claims can be found in those links.]

Andrew Wakefield, the man who more than anyone started the modern antivaccination movement that has led to the rise of measles, pertussis, and other preventable diseases, has been struck off the UK General Medical Council’s register. The GMC registers doctors in the UK, and oversees their conduct. To be struck off is essentially the same as being disbarred.

This is indeed good news, but forgive me if I don’t dance in the streets. It hardly makes any difference, and is years too late.

In 1998, Wakefield published a paper which led to people thinking vaccines caused autism. His research was shoddy, poorly done, unethical, and, frankly, wrong. Eventually the original paper was withdrawn by the medical journal in which it was published.

That’s all great, in that eventually truth won out. But has it, really? Sure, he’s disbarred, and reality-based people understand he’s totally wrong. But the antivax movement still rolls on. Wakefield moved to Texas where he still spreads his antivax propaganda; he was on NBC’s TODAY show just this morning — what a coincidence! — still proclaiming his innocence, and still spreading falsehoods about vaccines.

And falsehoods they are. From the NBC page:

When [host Matt] Lauer asked Wakefield whether it’s dangerous to continue promoting an MMR-autism link when it causes many families to shy away from vaccinating their children, Wakefield answered, "Matt, you’re missing the point.

"The point is that despite denying it, in the public relations campaign they’ve used against me and against the parents, they are conceding these in vaccine court."

Actually, that’s completely wrong, and he should know better. For one thing, courts have ruled over and again that there is no evidence to link vaccines and autism. What Wakefield is most likely referring to is the Hannah Poling case, which can be twisted and spun into making it sound like it connects vaccines and autism, but it doesn’t. Read Steve Novella’s entry on that case to see how once again the truth eludes Wakefield.

For another, Lauer was not missing the point at all. Wakefield was dodging the point. Lauer was precisely correct; it is dangerous to promote a link that doesn’t exist between autism and vaccines, for exactly the reason Lauer stated.

It would’ve been interesting indeed to see Matt Lauer following up that question with asking Wakefield about his huge financial conflict of interest in all this, since Wakefield was developing an alternative to vaccines when he wrote that paper. Or if he had anything to say about investigative journalist Brian Deer — a man who has been at the forefront of exposing Wakefield all along — and the evidence he found that alleges Wakefield was paid by lawyers to start a vaccine scare?

Anyway, for years Wakefield has been claiming he’s the victim here. This news won’t change that, and will in fact make him a martyr to his reality-impaired followers.

He’s not the victim here. The real victims are people who get measles, people who get rubella, people who get pertussis. Most of the time these folks recover and are fine, though miserable. But sometimes it’s not such a happy ending. Dana McCaffery, a four week old girl in Australia, died last year because the herd immunity was too low where she lived. Because people chose not to vaccinate — and the antivax movement was strong there — that little girl died.

We’re seeing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases all over the world, and in many of those regions the voices of Wakefield and the antivaxxers are strong. I’m glad the GMC finally took action and did the right thing, but this does not mean we must rest in our fight against those zealots who believe — without any evidence, and plenty of evidence against them — that vaccines cause autism.

They don’t. But how many kids will get sick before everyone finally realizes that?

Syringe picture from ZaldyImg’s Flickr photostream, used under the Creative Commons license.