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Be wise about what you put online

21 03 2022

While you have little choice these days about posting your data and code online when you publish, here are some things to consider when contemplating putting potentially sensitive data online (modified excerpt from The Effective Scientist).

One aspect of making your data publicly available is the prickly issue of whether your data contain sensitive information.

Of course, there are many different types of ‘sensitive’ information that might accompany the more basic quantitative measurements of your datasets, with perhaps the most common being personal details of any human subjects. For example, if you are a medical researcher and your data are derived primarily from living human beings undergoing some procedure, trial, or intervention, then clearly you are bound by your human ethics approvals not to publish information like names, addresses, or anything that could be used to identify the subjects in your sample. In fact, human ethics approvals generally prohibit any sort of public accessibility to medical data that has personal information included; thus, the scientists concerned are being pulled in two different directions — keeping their subjects’ personal information out of the hands of the public, while still making the data available to other scientists.

There are ways around this, such as publishing only generic information online (i.e., by excluding personal identifiers) that could then be linked to the more sensitive data via unique identifiers. In these cases, any other researcher requiring the additional information would have to seek specific permission from the primary researchers, pending additional human-ethics approvals.

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Tags: black market, data theft, fossils, illegal trade, ivory, online repositories, orchids, poaching, rhino horn, social media
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, exploitation

Neo-colonialist attitudes ignoring poachernomics will ensure more extinctions

14 01 2022

No matter most people’s best intentions, poaching of species in Sub-Saharan Africa for horn and ivory continues unabated. Despite decades of policies, restrictions, interventions, protections, and incentives, many species of elephant and rhino are still hurtling toward extinction primarily because of poaching.

Clearly, we’re doing something heinously wrong.

Collectively, we have to take a long, hard look in the conservation mirror and ask ourselves some difficult questions. Why haven’t we been able to put any real dent in the illegal trade of poached elephant ivory and rhino horn? How many millions (billions?) of dollars have we spent seemingly to little avail? Why haven’t trade bans and intensive security measures done the trick?

The reasons are many, but they boil down to two main culprits:

neo-colonialist sentiments driven by the best intentions of mainly overseas NGOs have inadvertently created the ideal conditions for the poaching economy — what we term poachernomics — to thrive by ensuring the continued restriction of legal supply of wildlife products; and
shutting off conservation areas to local people and directing the bulk of ecotourism profits away from source communities have maintained steady poaching incentives in the absence of other non-destructive livelihoods.

In our new paper — Dismantling the poachernomics of the illegal wildlife trade (led by Enrico Di Minin of the Universities of Helsinki and KwaZulu-Natal, and co-authored by Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes of the University of Oxford, Jeanetta Selier of the South African National Biodiversity Institute, Maxi Louis of the Namibian Association of Community-Based Natural Resources Management Support Organizations, and me) — published quietly in late 2021, we describe how poachernomics works, and why our efforts to incapacitate it have been so ineffectual.