Via the Christian Science Monitor, an article on a new approach to monitor waters for illegal fishing:
Environmentalists hope a new satellite service that scans the earth’s seas from space in search of illegal fishing activity can act as a watchdog service, holding those who overfish or intrude on protected areas accountable for the adverse effects of their actions.
The Google-powered technology, which has been named Global Fishing Watch, monitors more than 35,000 commercial fishing vessels using public broadcast data and is available to anyone with an internet connection, The Washington Post reported. Such information allows governments, journalists, and citizens to track the movement of boats, making it easier for nations with limited resources to apprehend the fishermen illegally depleting their oceans.
“We have to find a way to enforce [fishing laws],” Secretary of State John Kerry told The Washington Post. “We have to find a way to monitor it. And that’s very difficult in vast oceans with resources that are [limited]. We’re trying to create accountability where there is very little.”
Illegal fishing practices deplete local populations and threaten oceanic habitats while also harming regulated fishing and local economies. As the world’s population continues to grow, protecting fisheries becomes an important way to ensure a sustainable food source for nations around the world.
A group of environmentalists began using the satellite system on a smaller scale two years ago, acting as watchdogs for the practice of illegal fishing and alerting the proper local authorities when something look awry, Scientific American reported. These included members of the tech-environmentalists group SkyTruth, the nonprofit Oceana, and at Google Earth Outreach.
Together, they developed a technology that pulls public data from satellites and land-based receivers through the Automatic Identification System, allowing them to chart how ships have moved. For some in the industry, the oversight is a welcome advancement, as they also hope to curtail illegal competition that depletes and destroys regulated fisheries and protected areas. Now, Global Fishing Watch tracks between 10,000 and 20,000 vessels each day.
“American fisheries are among the most sustainable – and regulated – in the world,” Tim Sloane, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, told Scientific American. “[Illegal and unreported] fishing undercuts the steps American fishermen have taken to ensure that our fisheries are as healthy as they are.”
The technology isn’t a perfect solution. Some ships will shut their tracking services off, a move that’s only illegal in some countries where locator systems are required on large ships. Still, Global Fishing Watch has seen some initial success: After a tuna-fishing boat was seen illegally fishing in a protected area controlled by Kiribati, a Pacific island nation, the nation was able to levy a $1 million fine against the vessel’s operators, according to The Washington Post.
Those behind the technology hope that’s just the beginning, noting that Global Fishing Watch could be used to track ships for insurance purposes, or possibly to even find those who are trafficking drugs or people.
“We will be able to see a lot of information about who is fishing where,” Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for US oceans at Oceana, adding that the platform will help, told The Washington Post. She says the technology can “revolutionize the way the world views commercial fishing.”
,
Read More » Posted in Satellite | Comments Off on Using Satellites To Help Cut Down Illegal Fishing
Via the World Resources Institute, a report on new technology that can be used to help preserve forests:
The illegal timber trade creates problems for everyone. Governments lose valuable revenue and natural resources. Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission reportedthat the country lost $9 billion in revenue to the illegal timber trade between 2003 and 2014. Meanwhile, businesses sourcing legal timber lose profits and competitiveness to illegal timber supplies sold at lower prices.
So governments and businesses are starting to do more to improve timber traceability, including adopting new and existing technologies that can help track timber, manage information, and eventually, help combat illegal logging.
WRI, Instituto Nacional de Bosques (INAB) of Guatemala and IUCN Mesoamerica, with support from USAID, the European Commission, and FAO recently hosted aworkshop in Antigua, Guatemala to explore technological applications for improving forest information management and traceability in timber supply chains. Participants discussed some of the most cutting-edge technologies available today or on the horizon.
Technologies that Track Wood’s Roots
Some technologies target the tracking of timber as it moves through the supply chain to guarantee authenticity of the timber’s origin, including:
Stardust is a dust-like material that can be sprayed onto wood and detected only with a hand-held device. Stardust has the potential to be applied to timber and pulp and paper products as a cheaper alternative to barcodes, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and other tracking technologies.Greenwood, an organization that connects buyers with producers of high-quality wood products from sustainably harvested trees, is now pilot testing Stardust’s application to some of their wood supplies.
TreeTAG is an emerging smartphone-based supply chain traceability system developed by Earth Observation Systems that tracks the location of logs transported from the forest to the mill. It requires all authorized personnel—from those cutting trees to those processing logs—to report activities and volumes, raising alerts when there is suspicious activity. Only trees previously authorized for logging can enter the system. Earth Observation Systems is currently working with Sociedad Civil Custodios de la Selva (CUSTOSEL), a sustainable mahogany producer, to pilot test the system on wood used by Bedell Guitars.
Several government agencies are also developing systems for supply chain traceability. The Forestry Commission of Ghana is piloting Ghana Wood Tracking System (GWTS), developed by Ata Marie, a data platform that centralizes all formerly paper-based documentation, and allows users like auditors to upload information from their phones and computers. The Guatemalan Forest Service is developing SEINEF (Sistema Electrónico de Información de Empresas Forestales – Forest Enterprises Electronic Information System), a web platform that requires actors along the supply chain to enter volume and authorization information. The system allows government officials and law enforcement officers to follow the flow of timber products from the forest to buyers, and identify discrepancies in volumes, species and products reported. The Brazilian Forest Service also uses a traceability and information management system that not only tracks trees as they are logged and sawn into timber, but also uses remote sensing data to monitor forest management
Other technologies focus on aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and verifying supply chain information:
Global Traceability Systems’ Radix Tree is a platform that enables buyers to collect information from suppliers to establish a chain-of-custody. Radix Tree also performs legality risk assessments based on information provided, a required step for compliance with the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR). Furthermore, it also helps users manage their inventory of products and shipments, provide secure encryption and private data storage and import data from multiple formats. Some of its users include Unilever and Bureau Veritas, a leading global certification body.
BVRio’s Responsible Timber Exchange uses big data to assess whether potential sellers are complying with U.S. and European legal wood requirements. The database not only draws information from official documentation, such as logging permits and sawmill operating licenses, but also legal records of forest owners, loggers and even forest engineers involved in a shipment to assess the risk of illegality. With this information, the exchange allows buyers to evaluate sellers based on the traceability of their timber and compliance with specific legal, environmental, social and labor criteria. A similar system is under development in Brazil, led by the nonprofit Imaflora.
These technologies and systems can significantly bolster the efforts of governments and businesses to better track timber supplies and prevent illegally sourced timber from entering supply chains.
However, while timber traceability technologies and platforms can provide much needed information, it’s only worthwhile if governments and businesses translate this data into action. For governments, that means eradicating corruption, implementing systems that work for all stakeholders, and allocating more funding and resources to enforcement. For businesses, it means working with suppliers to gather information and communicate legal sourcing policies, as well as cutting ties with bad actors.
,
Read More » Posted in Deforestation | Comments Off on Five Technologies That Help Thwart Illegal Logging
Courtesy of Yale’s e360, a look at how – with new marine protected areas and an emerging U.N. treaty – global ocean conservation efforts are on the verge of a major advance. But to enforce these ambitious initiatives, new satellite-based technologies and newly available online data must be harnessed:
Over the past century, rampant overfishing, severe pollution, and runaway coastal development have taken a huge toll on the world’s oceans. Now, however, two major advances in global ocean governance are quietly unfolding, offering hope that the early decades of the 21st century will mark a turning point in which humanity can begin to repair the global seas.
Yet a key question remains: Will the new availability of sophisticated, satellite-based technologies, coupled with the democratization of online data about the health of our environment, help ensure that these positive advancements live up to their potential to protect the oceans?
The first encouraging policy development is the explosive movement by countries around the world to set up massive marine protected areas of unprecedented size. The biggest of these newly proposed mega-marine protected areas, the Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve, is three-and-a-half times larger than the United Kingdom, and more than 100,000 times larger than the historical median size for an ocean protected area. The 19 mega-marine protected areas created or announced in the last six years would comprise an area larger than all the protected ocean areas created previously. Several huge marine reserves currently being considered would add an additional 775,000 square miles of ocean protection.
The second key development is that the United Nations is now drawing up a treaty that would, for the first time, manage biodiversity across the high seas — the region outside the 200-mile exclusive economic zones of individual nations. The forthcoming United Nations high seas treaty would be setting new rules for a swath of the ocean 22 times larger than the United States. These new regulations are focused on preserving marine biodiversity, establishing international ocean reserves, evaluating processes for sharing marine genetic resources, and effectively carrying out environmental impact assessments.
These bold new policies suggest that decision-makers are finally committed to taking the kind of aggressive actions needed to stay a step ahead of industrialization in the oceans — something we failed to do when industrialization occurred on land. This issue extends well beyond industrial-scale fishing. Recent innovation and technological development have now made it possible to take the industries of farming, mining, power generation, and even data center management underwater. The scope and significance of this mass acceleration of new uses of the ocean cannot be overstated. In 2014, for example, the world began eating more fish from farms than from the wild — a marine reprise of our historic shift on land from hunting wild food to farming. Mining claims have already been staked to roughly 400,000 square miles of deep-sea ecosystems.
The campaigns to vastly expand marine protected areas and significantly improve international governance of the oceans are extremely exciting. But both of these important policy movements have an Achilles heel: Laws only matter if you can ensure that people actually follow them. These new policies cover such vast areas that they render boat, plane, and other traditional forms of ocean observation as obsolete as sextants. In the absence of systems to watch their boundaries, large marine protected areas will be nothing more than huge paper parks. Likewise, our efforts to control the exploitation of high-seas biodiversity via the new U.N. treaty will only be effective if we aren’t blind to what is happening in this large and distant part of the ocean.
But just as technological innovation is fueling a rapid acceleration of development in the ocean, high-tech solutions may also hold the key to ensuring that a marine industrial revolution advances responsibly and intelligently. These advances, when put in the hands not just of governments but also of researchers, citizen-scientists and environmental groups, promise a new era in which we can actively observe and responsibly plan out what’s going on in the world’s seas.
A vital solution lies in the use of satellite-interfacing sensors and data processing tools that are beginning to allow us to watch how ships use the oceans as easily as we track Uber taxis cruising around a city. Like airplanes, more and more ships now carry sensors that publicly transmit their position so they don’t crash into each other. We can make use of these same streams of safety data to detect where industrial fishing is concentrated, to watch as seabed mining exploration begins, and to observe how cargo ships overlap with whale migration pathways.
Seaweed aquaculture emerging in the Taiwan Strait.
Instead of the oceans being a black hole of data, our new challenge is figuring out ways to intelligently and efficiently sift through the billions of data points now pouring in. Fortunately, smart new algorithms can help pick out specific kinds of vessel behavior from this sea of big data. Ships leave unique behavioral fingerprints. For example, purse seine fishing boats make circles around fish schools when setting their nets, while long-line fishing boats travel linearly up and back along the gear they set.
In a recent report in the journal Science, colleagues at the non-profitGlobal Fishing Watch and I monitored progress as the nation of Kiribaticlosed a section of its ocean the size of California to fishing. After six months of observation, we happily saw that all vessels, save one, left to fish elsewhere. Our group also mapped out the activity of purse seine fishing boats on the high seas of the Pacific — generating the first publicly accessible view of where fishing activity occurs in the very region that the UN high seas convention may consider setting up international protected areas.
A key question ahead is whether governments will realize the value of this new data and act on calls from the scientific community to require that more vessels carry these observation sensors and use them properly. We estimate that approximately 70 percent of all large fishing vessels worldwide are already equipped with these publicly accessible tracking systems. Some captains, unfortunately, misuse the tool by turning it off after leaving port or failing to enter proper vessel identification information into the system. All such noncompliance issues are readily detectable by big data processing.
If political will can be mustered to close these loopholes, these observation technologies could shed an immense amount of light on our now-dark oceans.
Orbiting in space alongside these ship-tracking satellites is another rapidly growing fleet of nanosatellites that constantly take high-resolution pictures of the earth. This technology promises to be an important additional piece in the ocean-observation puzzle. The goal of the groups tending to these flocks of tiny electronic eyes is to be able to take a high-resolution snapshot of the entire earth, every day. These new imaging satellites may soon allow marine ecologists, ocean conservation groups, and marine park managers to begin to search in near real-time for ships in protected areas, to monitor weekly (even daily) losses of coastal mangrove forests, and to document abuses to coral reefs, such as dredging. With foresight, the intelligence derived from the vessel tracking systems may eventually be interlinked with these imaging satellites to enable them to function like space-based red light cameras that snap pictures of law breaking at sea as it happens.
Not all next-generation ocean observation has to be based in outer space. An exciting array of new marine-monitoring technologies is increasingly available that also could be useful. Aerial drones are beginning to be used to patrol coastal waters. Fleets of drone ships may follow suit and could help monitor both the health of ocean resources, as well as the behavior of those that harvest them. Shore- and aircraft-based radar and acoustic recorders that listen for boat noise could also be deployed.
Essential to effectively monitoring and controlling the industrialization of the oceans is democratization of this new ocean-observation data. Good intelligence on what was happening at sea used to only be the purview of vessel captains.
Now, anyone can keep tabs on the most remote parts of the ocean on their phones. Global Fishing Watch, for example, is releasing a product this year that will let anyone view and interact with data on fishing from across the global oceans for free. Planet Labs, a startup that manages the largest constellation of earth-observing nanosatellites, recently released a constantly updated, free library of imagery for all of California – including its estuaries, bays, kelp forests, and nearshore waters.
The challenge ahead, as we enter this new era of improved ocean stewardship and attempt to govern increasingly bigger regions of the ocean, is to ensure that our new policies are actually enforced. The stakes here are high. We have to make these emerging protected areas and treaties work, and we must do it soon, if we intend to help the oceans continue to dish out large helpings of food, energy, and wonder.
,
Read More » Posted in Satellite | Comments Off on How Satellites and Big Data Can Help to Save the Oceans
Via GreenBiz, an interesting article on the role that satellite monitoring can play in tiger protection:
Tigers are one of the world’s most iconic animals, and yet also one of the most endangered. Despite their popularity in books, films and religion, fewer than 3,500 remain in the wild today, due largely to agriculture, logging and infrastructure expansion that’s destroyed 90 percent of their habitat.
The good news is that scientists agree that the tiger population can recover as long as its remaining landscapes are effectively monitored and protected. Researchers recently measured habitat loss in the world’s 76 tiger habitats over the past 14 years using data available on theGlobal Forest Watch tool.
They found that forest loss was much lower than anticipated across all tiger landscapes (roughly 19.76 million acres, or less than 8 percent of the total habitat). Thanks to preservation of habitat in countries such as Nepal and India, tiger populations in those countries already have increased 61 and 31 percent, respectively.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota, RESOLVE, Stanford University, the Smithsonian, University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute (WRI), sheds light on who’s responsible for tiger habitat loss, and points to important measures needed to preserve habitats and increase the big cats’ populations.
Hanging onto habitat
Tigers are solitary by nature and require vast expanses of habitat to survive. One key to ensuring adequate habitat range is protecting and restoring corridors — areas of land that connect large zones of habitat and allow otherwise separated tiger populations to disperse and interact.
Habitat loss or gain in these relatively small areas have major impacts on the viability of tiger populations, as demonstrated in Nepal.
The Khata corridor in Nepal’s Terai Arc Landscape — an area that encompasses three tiger conservation landscapes critical to achieving the global goal to double the wild tiger population by 2022 — gained tree cover over 2.7 percent of its area in the last 14 years.
The gain was in part due to a community-managed forestry program and anti-poaching patrol efforts to protect the habitat and its wildlife. Tigers now use this corridor to travel between Nepal’s Bardia National Park and India’s Katerniaghat Tiger Reserve, which likely has contributed to the impressive increase from 18 to 50 tigers between 2009 and 2013 in Bardia.
The population in the Terai Arc Landscape overall also increased 61 percent from 2009 to 2014. By contrast, the Basanta corridor, also in the Terai Arc Landscape in Nepal, lost some of its forest to encroachment and land clearing and is no longer used by tigers to move to and from the northern forests.
Although the loss was small — a mere 0.7 percent — because it occurred in a bottleneck area, it’s effectively severed connectivity between the northern and southern populations in this area and reduced habitat range.
Preventing future loss across all habitats is critical to recovering the tiger population. However, the amount of habitat lost since 2001 was much lower and more concentrated than expected, suggesting that park rangers, communities and policymakers should prioritize the most sensitive areas, such as key corridors, for conservation.
The role of agriculture
But it’s not all good news.
Findings also show that habitats where large-scale agriculture is driving deforestation are suffering the most. Ninety-eight percent of the total forest loss in tiger habitats was concentrated in just 10 landscapes. Those with the highest percentage of loss were in Indonesia and Malaysia, where conversion of forest to agriculture is a major contributing factor.
The Bukit Tigapuluh landscape in Sumatra, for instance, lost 67 percent of its forest cover since 2001. Oil palm and wood fiber concessions overlap with 42 percent of this landscape.
WRI research shows that the world will need to produce 70 percent (PDF) more food calories in 2050 than it does today to feed a growing population. Much of that demand will be met by commodities such as palm oil. Strong forest management practices will be critical to balancing agricultural expansion so that it happens on already degraded lands and doesn’t cause damage to intact tiger habitat.
Preventing big cats’ extinction
The findings are as cautionary as they are positive. If done right, the world has enough intact habitat to support doubling or evening tripling the tiger population in the coming decades.
Lower-than-expected loss in the Tiger Conservation Landscapes shows that progress is possible, but we can’t afford to lose any more. The habitat lost since 2001 could have supported 400 tigers — with just 3,500 remaining in the world, every tiger counts.
Experts also project that the world will invest $750 billion annually in infrastructure projects, including a superhighway that would bisect the Terai Arc Landscape. In short, protecting tiger habitats will require a concerted effort to balance the world’s growing demands with the right forest management practices.
These efforts will be enabled in large part by near real-time forest change data available on Global Forest Watch. Monthly and weekly tree cover change data can help park rangers and communities build off this research to continue monitoring the most at-risk habitats, and take action to stop forest loss before it affects tiger populations.
,
Read More » Posted in Satellite | Comments Off on Can Satellites Help Save The World’s Tigers From Extinction?
Courtesy of Vox, a look at how an innovative “AirBnB” model may help activate monarch butterfly conservation:
The past two decades have been a grim time to be a monarch butterfly.
There used to be more than a billion black-and-orange monarchs fluttering up from Mexico each spring to lay eggs on milkweed plants across North America. But as we’ve eradicated those milkweeds with farming, mowing, and herbicide spraying, the population has shrunk 84 percent since 1995. Things are so dire that a new study inScientific Reports warns the Eastern monarchs could dwindle to near-extinction in just 20 years.
Americans are quite fond of this speckled butterfly, so, naturally, the prospect of doom has spurred volunteers into action. This year, the conservation group Monarch Watchplans to distribute 200,000 to 300,000 milkweeds for people to plant in their gardens and fields to help monarchs thrive. Some state highway departments, like Texas’s, have become more mindful about mowing the milkweeds on their roadsides during migration season, when the butterflies come up from Mexico.
But those efforts aren’tnearly enough. John Pleasants, an ecologist at Iowa State University, estimates the United States has lost more than 1 billion milkweed plants since the 1990s — in large part due to herbicide spraying on cropland in the Midwest. And we’re still losing about 2 million milkweeds each year, particularly when farmers convert grassland to cropland. “There are a lot of admirable efforts out there,” Pleasants says. “But we still haven’t made a significant dent in what’s needed.”
If we want to avoid a butterfly apocalypse, we may have to get creative. So I was intrigued to hear about a clever recent initiative that the Environmental Defense Fund is trying to set up — a program they’ve dubbed an “Airbnb for butterflies.”
The basic idea would be to create an exchange where investors and conservationists could pay farmers, ranchers, and other landowners to set aside protected space filled with milkweeds along the monarchs’ migration route. It’s not guaranteed to succeed. But if it does save the monarch from extinction, it could be an innovative model for protecting other endangered species in the future.
How an “Airbnb for butterflies” would work
Every spring, monarchs fly up from Mexico to lay eggs on milkweed plants in Texas and the Midwest, breeding two successive generations as they go. (In the fall, that third generation flies back to Mexico for the winter.) Milkweed is the only source of food for their caterpillars before turning into butterflies. No milkweeds, no monarchs.
Unfortunately, America has lost a lot of milkweed since 1995 — with 70 percent of losses occurring on cropland in the Midwest. Many experts blame the rise of modern agriculture. Farmers used to manually clear out milkweeds, which regrew every year. But in the 1990s, Monsanto developed corn and soy varieties genetically engineered to be resistant to herbicides. Farmers could spray more readily, and fields became clear of weeds. Between 1999 and 2010, Pleasants and Karen Oberhauser found, half of all milkweed vanished from the Corn Belt. The number of monarch eggs laid fell 80 percent. (Note: There’s some debate over the details here. Other shifting agricultural practices besides herbicides may have caused milkweed losses too.)
So if we want to save the monarch, planting more milkweed in gardens and highway strips isn’t enough. We need to convince farmers to protect milkweeds on their private land. And there are basically two ways to do that.
One is through legal means. Last year, environmental groups filed a petition with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the monarch as “endangered” or “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. If the FWS agrees to list the species, the federal government could start requiring farmers to limit herbicide spraying — or take other forceful measures. The downside is that this is a slow process and is sure to be fraught with controversy.
The other solution would be working through the market — and that’s where EDF’s “Airbnb for butterflies” comes in. EDF is currently trying to set up a Monarch Butterfly Habitat Exchange in which people and companies could connect with and pay farmers and ranchers to set aside land for milkweeds.
That might entail things like paying farmers to avoid spraying around the edge of their fields. Or planting milkweed on conservation land. “You don’t need any one patch [of protected land] to be huge,” says David Wolfe, the director of conservation strategies at Environmental Defense Fund. Creating a mosaic of “rented” milkweed strips across the Midwest could be enough to save the monarch.
Why would anyone pay for this? Wolfe argues that chemical and seed companies could be persuaded to fund butterfly conservation this way — in the hopes of fending off an Endangered Species Act listing that leads to more heavy-handed regulation from the federal government. “We know from our experience with energy and chemical companies that they much prefer proactive steps to help a species recover and keep it off the list,” he says. “That’s a driving force behind habitat exchange.”
(Bureau of Land Management/Flickr)We wanna be a model.
There’s a precedent here with the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird in the American West that has seen similarly perilous declines. In recent years, conservation groups have worked with ranchers, energy companies, and others to develop private initiatives to save the bird and avoid an endangered species listing. A listing, after all, could have led to sharp restrictions on oil drilling, livestock grazing, and construction on Western lands. So everyone was motivated to take preemptive action. (Audubon has a great rundown of those efforts here.)
Wolfe hopes that the monarch exchange can be a similar success story. But it’s not easy to set up. EDF is working with scientists to figure out how to assess land in the Midwest — getting a sense for which areas along the monarchs’ route would be most valuable to save. And any investors would need assurances that they’re paying for actual conservation and not just pushing farmers to spray elsewhere.
EDF is hoping to launch early monarch exchanges in Texas and California by 2017 and then expand outward. If it’s a success, the concept could conceivably work in other areas — like with threatened aquatic species in the Southeast. “We believe the idea has broad applicability,” Wolfe says.
The underlying idea here is to complement federal conservation efforts. The Endangered Species Act has been remarkably successful at saving many plants and animals from extinction. But the agency in charge remains underfunded, and there’s a backlog of hundreds of species awaiting decisions. Legal action can often take years. Adding another protective tool to the mix could be invaluable.
But Airbnb isn’t enough. The monarch also faces threats in Mexico.
Other experts I talked to thought the exchange was worth a shot, but they also pointed out just how daunting the challenge is.
Scientists estimate monarch populations by counting the number of trees the butterflies occupy in Mexico each winter. In 1996 to 1997, the monarchs took up 18 hectares of forest; this past year, that was down to just 4 hectares.
Yes, there was a small recovery this past winter that got lots of optimistic headlines, but most experts think that was a random bit of good fortune — warm weather last summer aided the breeding season. And fortune can turn very quickly. A few weeks ago, a storm hit central Mexico, drenching the butterflies in rain. When temperatures then dropped below freezing, a big chunk of the population died out.
“I’m worried that the population will get so small that, with more bad luck, we could lose the whole thing,” says Lincoln Brower, a monarch expert at Sweet Briar College. To get the monarchs back on a sustainable path, they’d likely need to bounce back to around 6 hectares in the winter, well above their average for the past decade.
And even if planting more milkweeds can help, it’s not the only problem the butterflies face. Illegal logging in Mexico has shrunk the Oyamel fir forests where monarchs reside in the winter. Brower notes that the forests continue to be under severe threat from logging — despite promises by the Mexican government to protect them. Between April and August 2015, he says, there’s evidence that illegal logging wiped out some 10 hectaresof habitat. “We’ve seen all these reports about how authorities protected the forests,” Browser says. “And it’s bullshit. Loggers are still going in and taking out truckloads of timber.”
So the monarchs are still in a precarious place. Ingenuity will help, but they’ll also need stricter environmental protections — as well as a bit of old-fashioned luck.
,
Read More » Posted in Blog, Sharing Economy | Comments Off on Could An “AirBnB for Butterflies” Save Monarchs From Extinction?
Via BRIC+ New World News, a look at the growing impact of drones on conservation:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), popularly known as drones, have the potential to revolutionise ecology and conservation, according to a study at New Zealand’s Monash University.
The report, published in the journal Scientific Reports, posits that drones are much more effective at monitoring the size of seabird colonies than traditional ground-counting methods.
“Until now, it has been unclear as to how precise drone technology might be when monitoring the size of populations of wildlife. Our latest research has demonstrated that a very high degree of precision can be achieved when using drone technology to monitor wildlife,” said Dr Rohan Clarke, ecologist at Monash University and one of the authors of the report.
Drones have long been used, primarily, for military purposes. However, in recent years, with many commercial models hitting the shelves, their uses have expanded tremendously. Recreational use is but one new market. Drones are tipped to become increasingly important in ecology and conservation.
UAVs have already been used to monitor elephant populations and nesting birds, however, their efficacy was not yet tested – until now. The report conducted two monitoring exercises on Ashmore Reef and Macquarie Island.
One experiment used traditional ground methods, the other used drones. The difference in precision was startling.
The researchers noted that drone counts were consistently larger than those conducted on the ground. The report claims that drone monitoring makes calculating fluctuations in population size much more accurate.
Not only this, but photographs of populations taken by drones were more clear, and drones had the added benefit of little disruption to the natural population.
“Our team compared the precision of drone-derived image counts with those made at the same time by human counters on the ground for colonies of three types of seabird: frigatebirds, terns and penguins.
“Counters also monitored the colonies during the drone flights for signs that the birds may be startled by the presence of the drone,” said Jarrod Hodgson, lead author of the report.
The results of the Monash University study have already begun to excite ecologists, who see this technology as a likely game-changer in the field of conservation.
“The increased count precision afforded by UAVs, along with their ability to survey hard-to-reach populations and places, will likely drive many wildlife monitoring projects that rely on population counts to transition from traditional methods to UAV technology,” reads the report.
The future of conservation may be here sooner than we think.
,
Read More » Posted in Drones | Comments Off on Drones Could Help Save The Environment
New technical innovations such as location-tracking devices, GPS and satellite communications, remote sensors, laser-imaging technologies, light detection and ranging” (LIDAR) sensing, high-resolution satellite imagery, digital mapping, advanced statistical analytical software and even biotechnology and synthetic biology are revolutionizing conservation in two key ways: first, by revealing the state of our world in unprecedented detail; and, second, by making available more data to more people in more places. The mission of this blog is to track these technical innovations that may give conservation the chance – for the first time – to keep up with, and even get ahead of, the planet’s most intractable environmental challenges. It will also examine the unintended consequences and moral hazards that the use of these new tools may cause.Read More
(Bureau of Land Management/Flickr)
(Monarch Watch)
Seaweed aquaculture emerging in the Taiwan Strait.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6235681/Monarch-Map_MW.jpg)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6235683/shutterstock_389485336.jpg)
