Reseacher Spotlight – Nick Haddad

Please describe what you do in your own words

My research is on the most important cause of biodiversity loss, which is the loss of natural areas that support plants and animals. My lab studies creative solutions to overcome the negative effects of this loss of natural areas. The most popular landscape scale conservation strategy is to reconnect natural areas with landscape corridors. Corridors can be as small as urban greenways and as large as the length of entire mountain chains. They are relatively long and thin strips of habitat that can serve as dispersal highways for plants and animals, allowing them access to larger areas of habitat and supporting their populations. I primarily work in large landscape experiments, and my group has shown that corridors increase dispersal of plants and animals, and increase the diversity of species.
I also study North America’s rarest butterflies. I study three different species on the east coast, one species lives only on one military base (and is most concentrated within artillery ranges), another lives along a 30 mile stretch of sand dunes on North Carolina barrier islands (a hotspot for vacation homes), and one lives on tiny, remote islands off the Florida Keys. Habitat conservation, and potentially landscape corridors, are important in rescuing these butterflies from extinction.

How did you come to study corridors/fish/population ecology/toxicology/anthropology?

As an ecologist concerned with the fate of plants and animals, I decided early on to focus my attention on the key cause of species loss, which is the loss of their habitats. It is easy to document species decline, and I decided to focus my research on conservation solutions, leading me to studies of habitat corridors. I’ve also been fascinated by plant and animal dispersal. Historically, dispersal has been a difficult process to measure, and corridors – structures meant to increase dispersal – are a great place to study it.

Were you interested in nature as a child?

I spent summers in natural areas, including in northern Minnesota lakes and on the Chesepeake Bay. My grandparents lived on a farm bordering the Bay, and I’d spend a couple of weeks each summer there, mainly outdoors. We fished, crabbed, hunted, and gardened – all outdoor activities – and there was lots of time for exploring woods and estuaries on the farm. I also watched as the Bay deteriorated, degraded by increasing human populations, increasing pollution, and over-exploitation of fisheries.

Have you had a personal experience that brought the consequences of global change home to you?

My grandparent’s farm on the Chesepeake Bay is ground zero for sea level rise. Although sea level rise is happening everywhere, the Chesepeake Bay area also suffers from rapid land subsidence under the weight of the extra water. Erosion at the edges of my grandparents property caused by sea level rise is already evidence, and I watched as a child as a small island offshore went under water during my lifetime.

Where did you grow up? What was the ecological environment like around you when you were growing up?

I grew up in Minnesota, and it was easy to get to natural areas, especially lakes and wetlands that cities developed around.

What is your favorite paper that you have written (we will link it here)? Why?

I have to choose Haddad, N.M. 1999. Corridor use predicted from behaviors at habitat boundaries. The American Naturalist 153:215-227 – the first paper from my dissertation. What I still like about this paper is that it takes a behavioral approach – tracking butterflies as they moved from flower to flower through a grassland – and predicts the effects of those behaviors for dispersal across larger landscapes. This was the first paper to come out of a large experiment that I still work on to this day.

Do you have a species whose fate you are particularly attached to or concerned about?

I am deeply concerned about all the rare butterflies I study. Of these, I am currently most concerned about the Miami Blue. Fifty years ago, it was widely distributed around south Florida and the Keys. Its range has continued to decrease, and last year was lost from the last island where it had been found on the Keys. Now, to find it, one must take a boat ride 10 miles from Key West, where the remaining population are on tiny islands and habitat areas can be measured in a few football fields. Scariest of all is that we do not yet know the key threats that are causing the butterfly to decline. The butterfly is just a hurricane (or a couple feet of sea level rise) away from total extinction.

What would you do if you were given 500,000 to spend on something significant to the world?

I would study the economic costs and benefits of corridors. Over the last 20 years, we have done a lot to address the ecological effects of landscape corridors. Regardless of the size of the ecological benefits of corridors, however, there are limited funds to invest in conservation, and the bottom line is whether corridors deliver more conservation benefit for the buck. A critique of corridors is that they are more expensive than other conservation strategies (enlarge existing reserves, for example). But no one has actually done that analysis, or actually tallied the additional economic benefits that corridors may provide (as recreational greenways, or as riparian buffer areas).