I’m travelling again, so here’s another set of fishy cartoons to appeal to your sense of morbid fascination with biodiversity loss in the sea. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss XLIII
12 08 2017Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, diving, extinction, Fish, fishing, oceans, over-fishing, Overfishing, sharks
Categories : cartoon, conservation, environmental policy, marine, science
World of urban rangers
2 08 2017Bridging the gap between an urban population and the wildlife we love.
The world continues to urbanise. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the developed nations of the world are 74% urban, and it is expected that by 2050, 70% of the entire world will be ‘urban’. Besides all the other consequences, people’s connection to nature will become more and more distant. With more people living in concrete jungles, a faster pace of life and a barrage of things competing for their attention, we cannot expect that nature, wildlife protection, ocean sustainability, et cetera will be high on the list of their priorities. Other than when the most sensational of news stories are released, how many of them will even think about wildlife, let alone take any personal steps that would make a difference to its survival?
If these are the people who define consumer behaviour and impact policy decisions, they are the ones who will also unwittingly drive the wildlife-conservation agenda. The conservation sector must therefore make a more concerted effort to connect with city dwellers and to do so, understand the motivations and desires of the greater public.
The good news is that despite the grander evidence against it, people do love animals. As children, we are surrounded by animals. Many of our favourite books, movies, clothes, and toys are associated with animals. Even as adults, 163 million of us have watched a video of a panda clinging to its caretaker, 100 million of us went to see Jungle Book, and 700 million more of us visited zoos last year. Marketers play into our love of animals and use the sympathetic or iconic nature of animals on a massive scale in advertising and branding.
If you threw practicality out the window, the most impactful thing you could do to convert that love of animals into a love of conservation would be to airlift those hundreds of millions of people into the Amazon, Serengeti, or Alaskan wilderness for a week. While the experience wouldn’t make all of them conservationists, it would certainly change the way they thought about the importance of nature.
Given this impossibility, the next best thing is to bring nature to them and entice them to explore more within their own means. Shows like BBC Planet Earth or Wild Kratts do a fantastic job of revealing the awesomeness of nature in a way that most everyone appreciates.
But TV shows are still a passive experience where the viewer takes in what he/she is being shown.
Our work at Internet of Elephants is to supplement this type of programming with games about wildlife that can actively be played every day. Our goal is to get people to think about wildlife for five minutes every day and convert the urban world into wildlife addicts. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: augmented reality, conservation, emotion, gamer, games, gaming, Internet of Elephants, marketing, smart phone, smartphone, wildlife
Categories : biodiversity, biowealth, conservation, conservation biology, decline, education, extinction, science communication
Paying to stop degrading
28 07 2017
We conservationists don’t get a lot of good news these days, and even when we do, I am reminded of the (slightly modified) expression: one step forward, but ten steps backward. It’s enough to lead to depression.
Still, we soldier on, and now there are more and more philosophically positive events and venues for ‘optimistic’ conservation stories. Indeed, some of them have even appeared here on ConservationBytes.com (mainly from Claire Wordley‘s excellent string of posts from Conservation Evidence — see here, here, here, here), as well as the much-publicised Conservation Optimism Summit and its American version, Earth Optimism.
A decade or so ago, payment for ecosystem services was all the rage. The idea was simple — pay people to conserve forests and other intact habitats instead of cutting them down for timber or to grow food. However, as the years passed, these types of programmes — which were often funded (or intended to be funded) through carbon-sequestration schemes) — showed little capacity to prevent deforestation at a landscape scale. Many people have therefore binned the entire idea as a result. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: carbon sequestration, Ecuador, payment for ecosystem services, PES, REDD, Socio Bosque
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, habitat loss, rain forests, REDD
Two new postdoctoral positions in ecological network & vegetation modelling announced
21 07 2017
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With the official start of the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) in July, I am pleased to announce two new CABAH-funded postdoctoral positions (a.k.a. Research Associates) in my global ecology lab at Flinders University in Adelaide (Flinders Modelling Node).
One of these positions is a little different, and represents something of an experiment. The Research Associate in Palaeo-Vegetation Modelling is being restricted to women candidates; in other words, we’re only accepting applications from women for this one. In a quest to improve the gender balance in my lab and in universities in general, this is a step in the right direction.
The project itself is not overly prescribed, but we would like something along the following lines of inquiry: Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: CABAH, Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, ecological networks, employment, Flinders University, gender, gender balance, job, jobs, mathematics, modelling, models, postdoctoral fellowship, STEM, vegetation, women in stem, women-only
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biogeography, bottom-up ecology, climate change, community ecology, conservation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, extinction, extinction debt, Flinders University, function, genetics, harvest, jobs, mathematics, meso-predator release, minimum viable population, modelling, palaeo-ecology, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predation, predator, top-down ecology
Journal ranks 2016
14 07 2017
Last year we wrote a bibliometric paper describing a new way to rank journals, which I contend is a fairer representation of relative citation-based rankings by combining existing ones (e.g., ISI, Google Scholar and Scopus) into a composite rank. So, here are the 2016 ranks for (i) 93 ecology, conservation and multidisciplinary journals, and a subset of (ii) 46 ecology journals, (iii) 21 conservation journals, just as I have done in previous years (2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008).
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Tags: bibliometrics, citations, h-index, impact factor, peer-reviewed journals, ranking
Categories : conservation, science writing, scientific publishing
Human population growth, refugees & environmental degradation
7 07 2017
The global human population is now over 7.5 billion, and increasing by about 90 million each year. This means that we are predicted to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, with no peak in site this century and a world population of up to 12 billion by 2100. These staggering numbers are the result of being within the exponential phase of population growth since last century, such that some 14% of all human beings that have ever lived on the planet are still alive today. That is taking into account about the past 200,000 years, or 10,000 generations.
Of course just like the Earth’s resources, human beings are not distributed equally around the globe, nor are the population trends consistent among regions or nations. In fact, developing nations are contributing to the bulk of the global annual increase (around 89 million per year), whereas developed nations are contributing a growth of only about 1 million each year. Another demonstration of the disparity in human population distributon is that about half of all human beings live in just seven countries (China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh), representing just one quarter of the world’s total land area. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Climate, climate disruption, conflict, degradation, density dependence, density feedback, environment, growth, Population, refugees, resources, war, warfare, World population
Categories : Africa, climate change, climate shift, conservation, deforestation, exploitation, food, human overpopulation
How to respond to reviewers
30 06 2017Just like there are many styles to writing scientific manuscripts, there are also many ways to respond to a set of criticisms and suggestions from reviewers. Likewise, many people and organisations have compiled lists of what to do, and what not to do, in a response to reviews of your manuscript (just type ‘response to reviewer comments’ or similar phrase into your favourite search engine and behold the reams of available advice).
It clearly is a personal choice, but from my own experience as an author, reviewer, editor, and the myriad suggestions available online, there are a few golden rules about how to respond:
- After you have calmed down a little, it is essential that you remain polite throughout the process. Irrespective of how stupid, unfair, mean-spirited, or just plain lazy the reviewers might appear to you, do not stoop to their level and fire back with defensive, snarky comments. Neither must you ever blame the editor for even the worst types of reviews, because you will do yourself no favours at all by offending the main person who will decide your manuscript’s fate.
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: manuscript, peer review, publication, publishing, reviewing, science, submission
Categories : conservation, science, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing
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