protection | ConservationBytes.com

Which countries protect the most of their land?

1 09 2017

forest One potentially useful metric to measure how different nations value their biodiversity is just how much of a country’s land its government sets aside to protect its natural heritage and resources. While this might not necessarily cover all the aspects of ‘environment’ we need to explore, we know from previous research that the more emphasis a country places on protecting its biodiversity, the more it actually achieves this goal. This might sound intuitive, but there is no shortage of what have become known as ‘paper parks’ around the world, which are essentially only protected in principle, but not in practice.

For example, if a national park or some other type of protected area is not respected by the locals (who might rightly or wrongly perceive them as a limitation of their ‘rights’ of exploitation), or is pilfered by corrupt government officials in cahoots with extractive industries like logging or mining, then the park does not do well in protecting the species it was designed to safeguard. So, even though the proportion of area protected within a country is not a perfect reflection of its environmental performance, it tends to indicate to what extent its government, and therefore, its people, are committed to saving its natural heritage.

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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, environment, legislation, national park, paper park, Protected Areas, protection
Categories : conservation, environmental policy, habitat loss, logging, management, protected area, reserve

Keeping lions from livestock — building fences can save lives

23 06 2017

Seeing majestic lions strolling along the Maasai Mara at sunset — a dream vision for many conservationists, but a nightmare for pastoralists trying to keep their cattle safe at night. Fortunately a conservation success story from Kenya, published today in the journal Conservation Evidence, shows that predation of cattle can be reduced by almost 75% by constructing chain-link livestock fences.

The Anne K. Taylor Fund (AKTF) subsidises over 70% of the cost of building a fully fortified chain-link livestock enclosure (‘boma’) to keep cattle safe from predators at night, in the hope that this will lessen the retaliatory killings of lions by frustrated farmers. While lions, leopards and cheetahs draw in crowds of tourists who marvel at their strength and beauty, living alongside big predators can be tough. Traditionally, local people keep their animals overnight in bomas made of acacia thorns — but depredation by lions and other large carnivores cause losses of on average more than nine head of cattle per year, or US$1870 that farmers see disappear down the throat of big, hairy animals. Building a solid fortification of chain-link fence costs just $890, of which the AKTF paid $638, helping to make this an affordable option for hard-pressed locals. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: farming, human-wildlife conflict, lion, lions, Maasai Mara, Panthera leo, pastoralism, predator, prey, protection
Categories : Africa, agriculture, cattle, conservation, livestock, management, predator

Seeing the wood for the trees

11 07 2016

The Forest Synopsis: Photo of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, India, by Claire Wordley

From the towering kapoks of South America to the sprawling banyans of South Asia, from misty cloud forests to ice-covered pines, forests are some of the most diverse and important ecosystems on Earth. However, as conservationists and foresters try to manage, conserve and restore forests across the world, they often rely on scanty and scattered information to inform their decisions, or indeed, no information at all. This could all change.

This week sees the launch of the Forest Synopsis from Conservation Evidence, a free resource collating global scientific evidence on a wide range of conservation-related actions. These aim to include all interventions that conservationists and foresters are likely to use, such as changing fire regimes, legally protecting forests or encouraging seed-dispersing birds into degraded forests.

Making conservation work

“We hear a lot about how important it is to do evidence-based conservation”, says Professor Bill Sutherland at the University of Cambridge, UK, “but in reality getting a handle on what works is not easy. That’s why we set up Conservation Evidence, to break down the barriers between conservationists and the scientific evidence that they need to do their jobs.” Read the rest of this entry »