Where is most biodiverse?

 iNaturalist can be used to compare biodiversity in different locations.  

To do this, it is important to allow for different search effort in different areas: for example, a search of the middle of the Amazon might not return many species, not because there aren't many, but because people haven't observed them.

For the U.S., we will assume that search effort is at least somewhat comparable.  We will also look at total observations and divide them by total species to get some idea of the effort required to document a new species in that area.

We decided to investigate my home town in Washington State, Alexandra's home town in Ohio, one of our favorite places: Maui, and our current home in Arizona.

Port Orchard, WA

A 100 km search radius includes most of Puget Sound, the Olympic mountains, and Seattle.

Dublin, OH

A 100 km search radius includes most of central Ohio creeks, woodlands, agricultural lands, and all of Columbus OH.

Prescott, AZ

A 100 km search radius includes canyons and mountains between Flagstaff and Phoenix.

Maui, HI

A 100 km search radius includes all of Maui as well as ocean channels and nearby islands.

Summary Table

According to this analysis, Washington is most biodiverse, followed by Ohio, then Arizona, and in last place is the island paradise of Maui.  

Island biogeography teaches that islands, although unique for their level of endemic plants and animals, should be deficient in overall biodiversity if there hasn't been enough time for biodiverse taxa to colonize or evolve on the island.  This seems to be the case with Maui, which is especially depauperate in insects, given its tropical location.

Arizona, despite its diverse environments, is significantly lacking in Fungal diversity, which could be due to the arid climate.

The American Midwest, with its perfect seasonal growing climate, is remarkably biodiverse, and would probably surpass Washington if this search had included a more varied part of the Midwest with more mountains and/or rivers and lakes.

Washington tops the list as most biodiverse, probably because of the presence of diverse environments, with everything from alpine mountain tops to ocean kelp forests, and everything in between.  This is despite the lower number of insect species compared to a lower latitude place like Ohio.

A caveat to this entire analysis is revealed by the Total Observations in each area and the resulting Observations per Species.  While I had assumed that search effort would be equivalent across the US, it is evident that many more people are using iNaturalist around major cities like Seattle and Columbus.  Arizona is more sparsely populated and has many less observations, and Maui, despite the huge numbers of tourists, is even less populated.  This means that is only takes 20 or 27 new observations (on average) to observe a new species in Maui and Arizona, respectively, while it takes 47 or 72 new observations in Ohio and Washington, respectively, to observe a new species.  So even though Washington has the most observed biodiversity in iNaturalist, it may be easier to find new, previously-unobserved biodiversity in Maui or Arizona.

OTEC: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

OTEC has the potential to harness the power of the ocean, while pumping water from the depths to the surface has challenges and opportunities. It can fuel plankton growth and may help sequester carbon.

1982 National Energy Laboratory Report on OTEC

The xerox scan of the old scientific report is dark and stained, with primitive printing and poor font and layout.  But the columns and official investor report style belie the real science presented, without preamble or typical science summary.

The 1-mile long cold water pipe was deployed successfully in 1981, thanks to "Calm weather and much hard work."  The pipe extends from the surface to 2,000 feet deep. It can pump 500 GPM of deep cold 9-10 C) water. The warm water pipe pumps 2,000 GPM of surface seawater (24-28C).  When allowed to foul freely, it showed immediate increase in resistance to heat transfer, which biofouling countermeasures ameliorated.

The article presents a glowing portrait of research advancing at a fast pace, but is offset with somber photos of cloud-mottled skies and the inclusion of disturbing headings like "biofouling countermeasures". (Biofouling is when nimals get sucked in, and the system can become clogged by marine animals and plants.  This could also be used positively to grow algae) Funding is flowing in from multiple sources like the cold and warm water siphoned from the rich offshore resources...

The project is strategically located with nearby availability of cold, deep ocean water and a warm ocean surface layer that is not subject to strong seasonal cooling. The warm water intake only 15 feet offshore may explain the much more rapid initiation of biofouling than previous experiments.  A 300 foot extension has been designed and was to be installed in 1983.  They plan to add 2 new 500 GPM pumps to replace the original coldwater pump that only pumped from Feb to June at 340 GPM before failing.  They propose reconfiguring the OTEC-1 coldwater pipe to provide a capacity of 22,000 GPM, which would "satisfy their coldwater needs for the foreseeable future."







What ever became of all of this? The Makai Engineering website presents research from the 2010s that seems directly related to work done in the early 1980's, as if a 30 year gap is missing from the story, a lull in research perhaps while people's careers stagnated, limited by something mundane like the size or strength of piping availability or funding.  Maybe the ocean was still there but the money stopped coming from Washington.  Reagon took the solar panels off the white house, and the country went back to sleep for 30 years while a couple of billion people were born and the climate inched toward the 2 degree warming threshold. 

This dark paper seems to hold secrets of the past, arcane mad science experimentation. All that is not said, like the sea creatures sucked up.  So that today when ocean researchers wonder about the effects of cold water outfalls they have to design and bring their own small pipes and pumps.

2008 Reserach: Artifically Induced Upwelling
Used to understand how marine microbial ecosystems respond to large-scale perturbations. Diatoms will consume nitrogen, leaving some amount of phosphorus in the water, which will stimulate a second-stage bloom of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. These blooms are often observed during summer months in open ocean waters when there are almost no nutrients at the surface and the winds generally are calm. What triggers the blooms and where are the nutrients coming from? We need to know.

Vast, seemingly barren regions comprise more than two-thirds of our oceans and nearly 40 percent of the entire Earth.  Need to replace about 10 percent of the surface waters with upwelled water to fuel a bloom.  Some scientists have looked at iron fertilization as a way to trigger biological growth in nutrient-poor areas of the ocean, but “everything responds to iron,” Letelier said. “You can’t control what grows.”

The researchers believe they can control plankton growth by determining which species respond to specific nutrients, and then adjusting the rate of nutrient feeding by the frequency and duration of water pumping.

Where the ocean is about 4,500 meters deep, the bottom layers of water have too much CO2 because of the decaying organisms that have sunk to the floor.  Their studies have shown, however, that water at a depth of 300 to 700 meters has the proper ratio of nitrogen and phosphorus to trigger a two-stage phytoplankton bloom.

Currently, they are able to pump about 50 cubic meters of water per hour (=4 GPM) using wave energy. "If we want to generate a bloom in an area of one-square kilometer, we would need to replace about 10 percent of the surface waters with upwelled water, which would take about a month at the rate we pumped.”

The scientists used undersea gliders in their Hawaii study to monitor the water from the pump so they have an idea how widely and quickly it disperses, and how much of an impact it can have on surface waters.





Resources
List of OTEC plants around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion

1982 report about OTEC work at NEL Hawaii: https://nelha.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NELH_AnnRpt_1982.pdf

Upwelling Press Release: https://today.oregonstate.edu/archives/2008/sep/scientists-test-%E2%80%9Cartificial-upwelling%E2%80%9D-learn-more-about-complex-ocean-ecosystem-be

More NEL reports: https://nelha.hawaii.gov/resources/library/

Makai Engineering: https://www.makai.com/ocean-thermal-energy-conversion/