How do you save a species or protect a habitat?
For the past few decades, scientists have been calling for an increased use of scientific evidence — carefully controlled, peer-reviewed scientific studies — to make conservation decisions.
However, things don't seem to have changed much. Despite the rise in peer-reviewed scientific evidence being generated, intuition, personal experience and anecdotes remain at the center of conservation practice, William J. Sutherland and Claire Wordley of the University of Cambridge, U.K., report in a new article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Trophy hunting of lions, the killing of selected individual animals for sport, is highly controversial, and there is much debate about what it contributes to conservation. A new article highlights significant 'unknowns' that thwart conservationists from making any robust conclusions.
The authors note that we know surprisingly little about the causes of lion mortality, or even the amount of land used for lion trophy hunting. Similarly, the extent to which trophy hunting depends on lions for financial viability is generally unknown, and it is extremely difficult to predict what would happen to the land where trophy hunting currently occurs if trophy hunting were to cease.
As South Africa celebrates World Ranger Day on Monday, the Minister of Environmental Affairs, Dr Edna Molewa, has paid tribute to game rangers who have dedicated their lives to the protection of South Africa's rich biodiversity.
"Rangers in certain parts of South Africa face daily hardships in their efforts to protect many of our species, such as the elephant, rhino, cycad and abalone, from unscrupulous poachers.
Our country's natural beauty derived from our enormous biodiversity is a key income generator and thus an important contributor to our economy through job creation and tourism. It is through the actions of these brave men and women, who risk their lives daily to protect our natural world and our many species," said Molewa.
Tiger deaths linked to poaching has reached an all-time high in India, the World Wildlife Fund has said, urging tiger-range governments to strengthen anti-poaching efforts.
On Global Tiger Day, it said wire snaring is threatening wildlife across Asia, especially the 3,900 remaining wild tigers.
Easy to make with bicycle cable wires and quick to set up, wire snares are rapidly becoming the deadliest method of poaching in Asia.
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), working in collaboration with Cambodia's Ministry of Environment (MoE), announced today that 19 nests of the giant ibis (Thaumatibis gigantea) have been discovered during the current breeding season in the Northern Plains of Cambodia in Preah Vihear Province. Community members and conservationists are working together under the Bird Nest Protection Program to protect these nests from human disturbances and other threats.
Efforts are being undertaken to protect and preserve the unique and fragile ecosystem of Lake Danao Natural Park in Ormoc City, one of the Region's seven protected areas declared under the National Integrated Protected Area System (NIPAS) Act of 1992.
The move of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in the region is in response to a report from Community Environment and Natural Resources (CENRO) in Ormoc disclosing that the 6.5 quake which jolted some parts of Leyte caused numerous landslides in Mt. Banao and other areas within the protected area including Brgy. Lake Danao and Brgy. Milagro and damaged forests in said areas.
It also disturbed the biodiversity and the natural habitat of wildlife species in the area.
British reality TV star turned adventurer Ben Fogle is urging Arsenal fans to boycott the football club after revelations that its American owner has launched a controversial online hunting channel.
The Outdoor Sportsman Group, owned by Stan Kroenke, the club's majority shareholder, launched an online platform (My Outdoor TV) in Britain over the weekend which has been described as the "Netflix of the hunting, shooting and fishing world". The subscription channel allegedly shows animals like elephants and lions being killed for sport.
Lyft has added three new partners to its Round Up and Donate Program, which lets riders round their trip payment up to the nearest dollar and donate the difference to one of a few select participant programs. The new partners are Girls Who Code, Habitat for Humanity and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Lyft is also going to match donations made when riders pay via Apple Pay for the entire month of August.
"This means that in seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than the Earth was able to produce in the same period," World Wildlife Fund and Global Footprint Network said in a statement.
Bangladesh has more than doubled the size of the wildlife sanctuary in the world's largest mangrove forest to try to protect endangered Bengal tigers whose numbers have fallen sharply, officials said Tuesday.
More than half or 52 percent of the 6,017 square kilometre (2,325 square mile) Sundarbans – one of the largest habitats of the tigers – has been declared a sanctuary this week, said the government's chief forest conservator Shafiul Alam.
The Sundarbans, which also straddles parts of eastern India, is home to some rare animals including the Irrawaddy dolphins and the Bengal tigers. Both have been declared endangered because of poaching and a loss of their habitat.
Finding his large and clear pugmarks in the sandy riverbed of the Banas River proved to be even more fascinating than finding them in his regular habitat. We have been following a "straying" male tiger some 23km outside of the boundaries of the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve. The field director requested my assistance in monitoring the movement of this tiger, who was drifting away from the reserve, possibly to explore new territory away from the park.
Meerkats are endearing creatures. Indeed, they are so endearing that they have been turned into characters in a long-running series of advertisements on British television for a price-comparison website. But nothing comes from nothing. Thirty years ago, few non-zoologists would have heard of these social mongooses and the joke would not have worked. The animals were brought to public prominence by a television documentary, "Meerkats United", which described the doings of a group of them in the Kalahari, where they live. That documentary relied, in turn, on a research project run by David Macdonald, a zoologist at Oxford University. In essence, meerkats as a cultural phenomenon were created by this project.
We Americans are constantly "upgrading" our Smartphones and similar devices – the new software demands new hardware, the fashions change, the company carefully makes things fall into place so the device is out of date within about a year ("planned obsolescence.") In fact, the average U.S. Smartphone user will ditch the old phone and buy a new one every 14 months. Many obsolete phones end up in landfills. Others sit invisibly in their owner's forgotten enclave, waiting for the trouble to be taken to recycle them. Meanwhile, the constant manufacture of more and more consumer electronics leads to more and more mining for elements such as tungsten, tin, gold and coltan (a.k.a. tantalum).
Wildlife conservation is big business in Kenya. The tourism sector, which is mostly wildlife-based, is regularly among the top three contributors to the country's GDP. As a result, the Kenyan government and the Western media are more than eager to focus on the positive aspects of conservation. But, unfortunately, the real story is not that straightforward.
In Kenya, there is an ongoing battle between white settler conservationists from the Laikipia plains and pastoralist communities occupying the neighbouring northern rangelands.
More than 12,000 examples of Papua New Guinea's flora are being planted as part of the nation's largest ever landscaping project aimed at providing international visitors with the ultimate herbarium of plants found in PNG.
Over 5600m² of planting, 566m² of artificial turf, water features and hard landscaping will be laid at the Star Mountain Plaza in Port Moresby where construction is expected to be completed ahead of the 2018 APEC conference.
Landscape architect Louise Dunning said the project was designed to create a rainforest oasis in the nation's capital.
Minister Rambharat made the remark at the launch of the national website for forest and protected areas – www.protectedareastt.org.tt. The site was launched at a brief ceremony on Thursday at the Conference Room of the Environmental Management Authority in St Clair.
Nearly two tons of trinkets, statues and jewelry crafted from the tusks of at least 100 slaughtered elephants were destroyed in a rock crusher in Central Park to demonstrate the state's commitment to smashing the illegal ivory trade.
The artifacts included piles of golf ball-sized Japanese sculptures, called netsuke, intricately carved into monkeys, rabbits and other fanciful designs.
It is an old, old story. A wealthy man comes to town, promising change and a brighter future. He's the expert. He knows best. Inevitably, it doesn't exactly work out that way.
Stephanie Hanes, an American correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, spent three years watching one particular version of that fairy tale unfold in central Mozambique.
The wealthy man was Greg Carr. An Idahoan, Mr. Carr had made millions first by selling voice-mail systems and then by running Prodigy, an early internet service provider. At age 40, he turned to philanthropy and in 2004 went to Mozambique to see if he could help that southern African nation still recovering from centuries of under-development and a vicious civil war. He took over a former national park, called Gorongosa, pledging $40 million to bring back the wildlife and tourists that would restore this so-called Lost Eden and support the neighboring communities.
At the turn of the 20th century, half a million rhinoceroses roamed the Earth. Now fewer than 30,000 are left, threatened by habitat loss and the spread of poaching.
Wildlife royalties—a future for conservation?
Should people who profit from the cultural representation of wildlife pay towards conservation?
That is the question asked in new research conducted by zoologists from Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU).
Writing in the journal Animals, they muse on whether organisations that profit in some way from wildlife imagery and popularity, could establish a corporate responsibility to contribute a portion of this income to the conservation of the animals represented.
In the forest near Liliya-Krakach, noisy little cubs are seen sauntering around a small pond. Some are playfully pouncing on their mother who sits relaxed but watchful. These scenes in Asiatic lion's abode are not limited to Amreli district. Several forest areas outside the Gir National Park are brimming with lions, mostly in the age group of one to two years.
According to a recent internal lion count by the forest department in July this year, there are nearly 650-odd lions in the reserved forests and even outside the national park in Amreli, Bhavnagar and Gir-Somnath districts.
Mateus Liung headed to the Tanjung village hall just as dusk started to gather. A walking stick in his right hand supported his now-fragile legs. A torch in his left lit the path.
Since an Indonesian Constitutional Court decision in 2013 stating that indigenous people have rights to their land, NGOs have encouraged adat groups, as they are known in this Southeast Asian country, to map their traditional territories. For decades, the state has failed to recognize their rights, instead allowing loggers, miners and plantation firms into their territory, with or without the local community's consent.
The hills of Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary (CWS) loom over Duntoor village, a few hours' drive from Bengaluru. Banana, coconut, and mango plantations and vegetable farms separate the sleepy hamlet from the 1,028 sq.km. sanctuary, the largest in the State, and habitat to elephants, leopards, wild dogs and two endangered species of vulture. Duntoor also happens to be the site of a fast-escalating man-animal conflict.
A few weeks ago, around 5.30 p.m., anxious villagers spotted a herd of elephants standing on a rock face, seemingly eyeing the farmland. As they descended, the undulating valley hid them from view for a few moments.
In 1924, the makers of the original King Kong movie travelled from Thailand to Laos, where they spent three years filming rivers and jungles teeming with elephants in their film documentary "Chang", the Thai language word for elephant.
Once known as "the land of a million elephants", Laos now has less than a thousand of the great beasts as the landlocked communist country sacrifices its wildlife legacy for a growth-dominated economy.
When she was one-and-a-half years old, world-famous primatologist Jane Goodall brought home earthworms and was caught trying to take them to her room.
It started the 83-year-old on a journey which led her to being an eminent nature conservationist.
On Sunday (Aug 6), Dr Goodall, who is in Singapore, spoke about the importance of nature conservation at an event to mark the 10th anniversary of the local chapter of the environmental group she founded, the Jane Goodall Institute (Singapore).