Hawaii Tropical Low Shrublands: inspiring news from Papahanaumokuakea

This site’s blogs are intended to showcase ideas about ecoregions, conservation, and birds. But for the second time in a row, I veer to the political, and President Obama pops up in my thoughts. I just wrote about the President’s declaration of an important new national monument in Maine on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the US Park Service. He followed that up a few days later by quadrupling the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) in Hawaii, now one and a half million square kilometers, and which becomes the largest protected area in the world. The PMNM is centered on the Northwest Islands of the Hawaiian islands chain. President Obama can now claim responsibility for having protected a larger area than any president before him, as PMNM’s area exceeds the rest of all of the US national parks put together!

Commercial fishing will no longer be allowed in the PMNM, nor other activities such as sea bed mining which could have had a major impact on ocean ecosystems. The prohibition of long-line fishing, with major accidental mortality of albatrosses and other pelagic bird species, will be tremendously important. Clearly this was a very controversial move which was opposed strongly by sectors of the fishing industry. Even some conservationists question focussing on bigger and bigger parks in remote marine areas rather than concentrating on strategically protecting more threatened continental inshore areas. From my ecoregional perspective however, privileging the importance of conserving large areas where ecoregional dynamics can continue to play out, there cannot be too many large protected areas.

While the PMNM is mostly marine, the entirety of the terrestrial parts of the Northwest Islands (including Midway, Kure, Laysan, Nihoa, and countless others) are in the Hawaii Tropical Low Shrublands Ecoregion (OC0710). See this link for a map and more information on the ecoregion. This is an ecoregion very important for birds, hosting four extant endemic species on the remoter islands and 14 million nesting seabirds. The ecoregion also occurs on all the main Hawaiian islands, typically on the lower-elevation leeward sides. The ecoregion paradoxically can now be thought of as one of the best protected ecoregions in the US from a marine perspective but on dry land, one of the most devastated, as virtually all of the original fauna and flora have been lost and these areas are now largely dominated by introduced exotics.

Daughter Camille and I spent the last couple of days in Oahu, mostly in this ecoregion, exploring from our base on the Waianae coast. We unsuccessfully tried to see Laysan Albatrosses, which will be one of the most important beneficiaries of the new PMNM. A very small population will arrive in a few months to breed on Oahu but 99% of the species breed in this ecoregion on the Northwestern Islands. There are some nice birds to be seen in the ecoregion, but they are almost all introduced exotics; see some of Camille’s photos below. We saw many of them on a super bird tour with Mandy of Oahu Nature Tours (she also took us to the highlands to record both of Oahu’s extant endemic species, the Oahu Elepaio and Oahu Amakihi, but those were in a different ecoregion, the Hawaii Tropical Moist Forests).