38 Australian scientists have done a huge survey and characterized the continent in terms of 19 different ecosystems, and then assessed each of the 19 under a range of survivorship criteria. Adam Morton of the Guardian has done his usual sterling service by summarizing the scholarship, if an article suits you better. Me, I decided to focus on Australia’s Cranes. The southern population of Brolgas is tiny, threatened, and doesn’t really live in an ecosystem; it just survives courtesy of private farmers. The much larger and thriving population of Brolgas, and the smaller but apparently coping population of Sarus Cranes, inhabit, if I understand the research paper correctly, just one of the nineteen Australian ecosystems, namely the “Australian tropical savannah” across the Far North to northern Queensland. Quite substantial numbers of Brolgas and Sarus Cranes also migrate annually to the Atherton Tablelands inland from Cairns, which looks like it falls under another ecosystem, the “wet tropical rainforest,” but mostly these Cranes come for farmers’ leftover grains and probably are not dependent on forest. Anyway, Ecosystem #2, the tropical savannah, is vulnerable to 10 of the 17 possible climate change pressures, and is vulnerable to abrupt, smooth, and fluctuating collapse profiles. That doesn’t inform me about exactly what will happen to our Cranes, but hey, it does say the Anthropocene will test the two species. No surprises, then.
