Evolving Architecture for Internet of Things and Wildlife Conservation

The Internet was neither inevitable nor a simple happy accident. Similar to the evolution of our planet, the creation of the internet was a mess of interactions and a series of colliding forces and experiments. Most histories of the internet focus on geniuses that changed the world of computing; but they ignore the larger picture...

Divided Desert: New Wall & Biodiversity in the Borderlands.

The border between USA and Mexico spans approximately 2000 miles and the region has been under continuous socio-political and ecological struggles (Lorey, 1999). Mexico is the nearest and therefore the easiest way into the U.S. for the Latin-American organized crime cartels and the traffic between these nations creates social circumstances with the majority resulting in...

Blue Planet II: a Splash Hit for Ocean Conservation

14 million people in the UK tuned in to watch Blue Planet II on the 29th October 2017 - the largest TV audience of the year and a record-breaking viewership for any nature show. In attracting such a large audience, Blue Planet II has engaged an island nation with its greatest asset – the ocean.

Sleepwalking towards Armageddon? We need more long-term ecological studies

Widely-reported research has led some to suggest we are “on course for ecological Armageddon”. Behind these headlines: an analysis of a German dataset spanning nearly three decades detected a 76 percent plummet in flying insect biomass. So is now the time to be building our apocalypse bunkers? Forming the base of most food chains and...

Devolution and Conservation: Revitalizing Community Forest Associations in Kenya

Devolution is synonymous with governance in post-2010 Kenya. Empowering CFAs is necessary for counties’ natural resource conservation.

The last stand for the world’s largest mangrove forest

Figure 1. Chital deer standing in mangrove swamps. Source: Wikipedia.com Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal share the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, one of the Indian sub-continent’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Historically, emblematic Asian species, such as the Javan rhinoceros and leopards roamed the area, but they became locally extinct primarily due to human...

Conservation.com: the internet as a source of information or innovation?

The rise of the internet offers exciting opportunities for conservation. But it is currently mostly used for citizen science and crowd sensing, methods to gather information to support scientific research. This article explores the possibility of the internet to open up conservation to different groups and fresh ideas.

Agriculture and “Land-sparing versus Land-sharing” in a Post-Brexit Britain

Since the controversial decision to leave the European Union in June 2016, the topic of food production has been lost in the subsequent storm of media coverage, overlooked in favour of more attention-grabbing headlines. However, the quiet surrounding the topic should not be taken to mean that it is less worthy of our concern. On...

Solutions from the Sea: Can coastal communities benefit from the world’s growing seaweed industry?

Rameswaram is a small village in the South of India that has a very unique connection with the sea. Situated here is the countries’ only successful seaweed extraction enterprise, run by women. Every day at dawn, the women make their way to the bay and take a boat out into the waters of the Gulf...

The Price to Pay for Pangolin Poaching

October 24th, 2017 – Rachel Bale reports in National Geographic that 101 pangolins, captured and headed to their deaths, were on a boat in Malaysia when Indonesian authorities seized the collection of priceless pangolins.  These pangolins were en route to eastern Asia, where the demand for pangolin scales is high – which has led to...