Ebook "CyberStorm" a scary warning about disasters and preparedness

For Hawai`i residents, the next disaster is overdue--and there's a new book out that could just scare you into readiness.

It’s been a couple of generations since a significant tsunami, more than 20 years since a major hurricane, and the issue, of course, is not whether we have another big disaster, but when. 

Author Matthew Mather  explores the issue in a new ebook, CyberStorm, which combines a major storm with a pulse of hacking and cyberterrorism events. Mather frighteningly and convincingly outlines how vulnerable we are, and how quickly societal order can collapse.

When food supplies are short, and security is gone, and power supplies and communications are out, individuals react in different ways. Some band together in supportive communities, but others may band together as outlaws.

On Kaua`i during the weeks following Hurricanes Iwa and Iniki, we saw mostly the former. But we are a small community where most folks know each other. What might have happened if Honolulu had been hit, and help hadn’t been only hours and days away? That’s one nightmare scenario. And what might have happened in a big city where you don’t know, and perhaps can’t trust your neighbors?

I won’t reveal Mather’s secrets, other than to say that it’s a compelling read, which is being sold at a compelling price. Here’s the Amazon Kindle link.

The ebook will also provide you with a new appreciation for having a cache of emergency supplies for a crisis. You know, the Family Disaster Kit that’s outlined in the front pages of every phone book.

Matthew Mather’s previous book is “Atopia Chronicles.” His specialties in cybersecurity, weather prediction systems, and nanotechnology are on  display in CyberStorm.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2013

A case for Hawaiian native bee conservation: save the plants!

Hawai`i in the 1800s had abundant natural pollinators in its native yellow-faced bees.

So common were these members of the genus Hylaeus that the great British naturalist Robert C.L. Perkins called them the “most ubiquitous of Hawaiian insects.” Perkins was author of the three-volume “Fauna Hawaiiensis” or “Zoology of the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Isles.”

(Image: Hawaiian yellow-faced bee on  `ilima blossom at Kilauea lighthouse on Kaua`i. Credit: Forest and Kim Starr.)

Perkins identified 52 species of closely related Hawaiian bees. Many of those are now rare and some may be extinct.  Most of us don’t have a clue what they look like: they tend to look waspier than honey bees, tend to be black, with white or yellow markings on the faces. They are solitary and not hiving bees, nesting in the ground or in hollow branches.

Causes of their decline? Probably habitat loss, predation by ants (no ants are native to Hawai`i) and wasps like the Western yellow jacket, and competition with species like honey bees. 

As they declined, their pollination role was partially filled by the imported honey bee. 

Today, modern scientists are arguing that wild pollinators must be protected to assist the pollination by honey bees, which are themselves are under such an onslaught from pests, pesticides and other threats. 

Indeed, in many cases, the original native wild pollinators are more effective pollinators than honey bees, the authors say. 

The paper, “Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance,” has an exceedingly long list of co-authors, from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. It argues that there are “universally positive associations of fruit set with wild-insect visits to flowers in 41 crop systems worldwide.”

Indeed, the authors report that wild insects produce fruit set at a significantly higher rate than honey bees do. 

“Overall, wild insects pollinated crops more effectively, because increase in their visitation enhanced fruit set by twice as much as an equivalent increase in honey bee visitation,” they wrote.

That argues, they say, to support the health of both honey bee and wild insects to further agricultural goals.

“Our results suggest that new practices for integrated management of both honey bees and diverse wild-insect assemblages will enhance global crop yields,” they wrote.

That will take some work in Hawai`i.

Native bees are so rare today that if you go to modern Hawaiian dictionaries, the only name for bee is related to the honey bee: nalo meli, literally honey fly.  

The Xerces Society, which supports invertebrate conservation, has urged greater attention to the plight of the native bees, and has petitioned the federal government to list several Hylaeus species as endangered.  

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2011 determined that endangered species listing is warranted for seven species of Hawaiian bees and that the agency plans to get around to it, but that there are higher priorities now. 

The state Department of Land and Natural Resources has also been studying Hawaiian bees. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2013

Nature Conservancy restores Moloka`i dune habitat

Fragile sand dunes of Moʻomomi on Molokaʻi, once overrun with alien kiawe thickets, are blooming with new native growth.

(Image: Native vegetation restored to a Mo`omomi, Moloka`i sand dune. Credit: The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i.) 

A 14-year passive restoration program by The Nature Conservancy and the Molokaʻi Land Trust  is letting the blue blossoms of paʻu o Hiʻiaka and the yellow flowers of  ʻilima bloom amid the spiky native ʻaki ʻaki and shimmering hinahina.

That’s on dunes that once held single-species thickets of the introduced legume, kiawe (Prosopis pallida), which was brought to Hawai`i to support cattle ranching.

“Kiawe transforms the ecosystem. It forms dense thickets. If there’s a fire, it burns hot and hard. Since it’s a legume and fixes nitrogen, it changes the soil,”said Russell Kallstrom, graphical information system coordinator for the Conservancy's Molokaʻi Program.

Kiawe removal combined with predator and weed control benefits not only native plants, some of them rare, but also the uaʻu kani or wedge-tailed shearwater. The number of wedge-tailed shearwater burrows has increased from 3 nests in 1999 to 704 nests in 2012.

“It seems like the shearwaters were trying to recolonize before 1999, but feral cats used the safety of kiawe thickets as staging areas for raids on the nests,”said Wailana Moses, the Conservancy's Moloka'i weed coordinator. “When we removed some of the kiawe clumps near the bird colony, we would find piles of shearwater wings.”

The shearwaters face a three-pronged mammal threat: mongooses would prey primarily on eggs, cats would take birds one at a time, and dogs would occasionallywipe out dozens at a time. In 2009, a single dog killed 60 shearwaters in one night.

The Nature Conservancy began kiawe control at its 921-acre Moʻomomi Preserve in 1998, under the direction of its Molokaʻi Program manager, Ed Misaki.

“The idea of passive restoration was to focus on removing invasive species and let the natives naturally regenerate—removing the threats and allowing thenative system to heal itself, basically,” Misaki said.

The conservation crews learned as they went along. One key strategy was to remove kiawe next to intact native sand dune habitat so the natives could reclaimthe open area naturally.

Another technique was to quickly paint a small amount of herbicide on the cut kiawe stump, to prevent it from re-sprouting. Still another was to use a chipper to grind up kiawe branches,

creating mulch that helped the native crawling plants and inhibited weeds.

“We learned that if we took out too much kiawe, we would have a hard time keeping up with removing weeds coming into the area—primarily buffel grass, foxtail, golden crownbeard,

Australian saltbush and a non-native goosefoot,” Moses said.

The ʻakiʻaki grass was generally the first species to move in after kiawe removal. “The chips slowed the weeds down a little and helped the ʻakiʻaki grow into the area,” she said.“Little by little, the other species came in like ʻenaʻena, kaunaoa and ʻakoko, even the rare Solanum nelsonii (popolo),” Moses said.

Kallstrom said the native plants do better on some of the land you’d think was the worst habitat for them—the northeast sides of dunes, which are blasted by the trade winds and regularly doused with salt spray. Most of the weeds can’t handle the salt; the coastal natives by contrast are adapted to it.

“It’s really an amazing thing to see. After the kiawe is removed and the chips cover the open area, the natives just crawl in from the outside. The ʻakiʻaki turns fluorescent green when it hits the nitrogen left by the kiawe chips," he said.

The kiawe occurs in patches across the Moʻomomi dunes, and the removal process, since increments must be small, has cleared a little over 9 acres in the program’s 14 years. For most of that period, it was done by Conservancy staff and volunteers, but since 2010, some of the work has been contracted to the Molokaʻi Land Trust, which also does weed control.

The results are remarkable. Some of the cleared areas, originally bare sand, now support dense mats of Hawaiian coastal species.

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.

The Conservancy and its more than 1 million members have protected nearly 120 million acres worldwide. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.

 

Using tech to better understand Hawaiian weather

It wasn’t all that long ago that we didn’t know a hurricane was headed our way unless a ship had sailed through it and radioed a warning.

Satellite technology—allowing us to see tropical storms develop from infancy to powerful systems with distinct eyes—has changed all that.

But a satellite—the ability to see water vapor and heat signatures from a distance—doesn’t tell us everything we need to know. That’s why pilots and crews put themselves at risk to fly into the heart of cyclones to gather data.

The June-to-November hurricane season is of concern, but in winter, the Islands  face different weather systems that also have the ability to cause massive damage—like fronts that bring intense downpours, sweeping flash floods down narrow valleys. They can close roads, wash away homes and cars, and flood vast lowlands.

Kaua`i knows that more than most. Falling trees and rocks regularly close roads during rainstorms, and residents of the North Shore know too well the problems of a highway under feet of muddy water.

We still need understand some of these weather systems better.

As this story is published, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is sending one of its hurricane-hunter aircraft on regular flights into the North Pacific to better understand the genesis of severe weather patterns over the ocean. It is a mission that has been underway winters since 1999.

A specialized NOAA jet, a twin-engine Gulfstream IV-SP, is flying into the North Pacific out of Hickam Air Force Base through Feb. 27 and then from Anchorage, Alaska, through March 10.

On each of multiple trips, the plane will release multiple recording devices called dropsondes.

Each device will fall for 17 minutes before broadcasting the data it has collected. That data will include recordings of pressure, temperature and humidity four times per second, and the GPS location and wind speed and direction twice per second.

The direction of the flights will be dictated by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, a branch of the National Weather Service.

The recorded data will be immediately available to weather forecasters in the Islands, said Jack R. Parrish, flight director and meteorologist with NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations.

The data is valuable in part because it establishes a three-dimensional view of the weather, rather than a satellite image, which only looks down from on high.

 “These additional targeted observations, combined with data from other observing systems, enhance the accuracy of the forecasts, especially for high impact winter weather events. By improving our forecasts, we can alert the public, emergency managers, air carriers, utility companies and others sooner so they can prepare more effectively for significant storms, and save lives, property and money,” said NCEP Chief Science Officer Barry Choy.

Whether a ship at sea or a dropsonde falling from a jet, the best weather data still comes from folks actually traveling in the storm.

DROP-IN: If you want to follow what’s happening in the weather on social media, see http://www.noaa.gov/socialmedia.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2013

Saved from goats, silversword succumbs to climate change

The impacts for Hawai`i of climate change are numerous and troubling.

They range from coral death due to warm waters, to coastal inundation from sea level rise, to changes in ecosystems due to weather pattern changes, to dramatic reductions of rainfall.

(Image: The impressive bloom of a Haleakala silversword, Argyroxyphium sandwicense, against a background of its volcanic Maui home. Credit: USGS; Paul Krushelnycky, UH-Manoa.)

Those are macro kinds of changes. At a micro level, looking at a single iconic plant, the issues come into focus.

The Haleakala silversword, that unearthly spiked globe that dots the high volcanic desert on Maui, is likely to be a victim of the changing environment. Indeed, it is already a victim, its numbers declining now for nearly a generation. Previous studies have shown that high-elevation Hawaiian rainfall has been reduced significantly in recent decades.

Not the first time the silversword has been threatened (goats were killing them off in the early to mid 1900s), but after a significant rescue effort, they now face a new problems that fences won’t solve.

“Despite the successful efforts of the National Park Service to protect this very special plant from local disturbance from humans and introduced species, we now fear that these actions alone may be insufficient to secure this plant's future,” said Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Researchers are finding that since the 1990s, they have once more begun to decline, due to more frequent drought conditions on the Maui mountaintop where they live. Silverswords are adapted to high elevation, and extreme solar radiation, and well-drained cinder. But heat and extreme dry periods are increasing the threats faster than they can adapt further.

They are dying from moisture stress, and that’s a caution for many other plants that might not be so well studied, and thus whose response to changing conditions haven’t been identified.

“The silversword example foreshadows trouble for diversity in other biological hotspots,” said University of Hawaii biologist Paul Krushelnycky, of the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources.

“Even well-protected and relatively abundant species may succumb to climate-induced stresses,” he said.

A scientific paper on the research into climate impacts on the silversword is entitled “Climate-associated population declines reverse recovery and threaten future of an iconic high-elevation plant.” It is published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology. The authors are Krushelnycky, Lloyd Loope, Thomas Giambelluca, Forest Starr, Kim Starr, Donald Drake, Andrew Taylor and Robert Robichaux.

The continuing work is funded by the new U.S. Department of the Interior Pacific Islands Climate Science Center, one of eight such centers throughout the country.

The paper abstract is here. 

The USGS news release is here. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2013