We conducted research to understand online trade in jaguar parts and develop tools of utility for jaguars and other species. Our research took place to identify potential trade across 31 online platforms in Spanish, Portuguese, English,... more
We conducted research to understand online trade in jaguar parts and develop tools of utility for jaguars and other species. Our research took place to identify potential trade across 31 online platforms in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Chinese, and Vietnamese. We identified 230 posts from between 2009 and 2019. We screened the images of animal parts shown in search results to verify if from jaguar; 71 posts on 12 different platforms in four languages were accompanied by images identified as definitely jaguar, including a total of 125 jaguar parts (50.7% posts in Spanish, 25.4% Portuguese, 22.5% Chinese and 1.4% French). Search effort varied among languages due to staff availability. Standardizing for effort across languages by dividing number of posts advertising jaguars by search time and number individual searches completed via term/platform combinations, the adjusted rankings of posts were: Portuguese #1, Chinese 2 (time) & 3 (searches), Spanish 3 & 4; French 5 & ...
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This publication is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of the Living Landscapes Program of WCS and do... more
This publication is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of the Living Landscapes Program of WCS and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
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Human rights matter for marine conservation because people and nature are inextricably linked. A thriving planet cannot be one that contains widespread human suffering or stifles human potential; and a thriving humanity cannot exist on a... more
Human rights matter for marine conservation because people and nature are inextricably linked. A thriving planet cannot be one that contains widespread human suffering or stifles human potential; and a thriving humanity cannot exist on a dying planet. While the field of marine conservation is increasingly considering human well-being, it retains a legacy in some places of protectionism, colonialism, and fortress conservation. Here, we i) provide an overview of human rights principles and how they relate to marine conservation, ii) document cases where tensions have occurred between marine conservation goals and human rights, iii) review the legal and ethical obligations, and practical benefits, for marine conservation to support human rights, and iv) provide practical guidance on integrating human rights principles into marine conservation. We argue that adopting a human rights-based approach to marine conservation, that is integrating equity as a rights-based condition rather than ...
Exurban development is a prevalent cause of habitat loss and alteration throughout the globe and is a common land-use pattern in areas of high natural amenity value. We investigated the response of bird communities to exurban development... more
Exurban development is a prevalent cause of habitat loss and alteration throughout the globe and is a common land-use pattern in areas of high natural amenity value. We investigated the response of bird communities to exurban development in two contrasting North American regions, the Adirondack Park (New York) in the eastern US, and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Montana) in the Rocky Mountain West. We combined social and ecological data collection methods to compare the effects of exurban development on avian communities between the two landscapes, and, in exurban residential areas within them, to compare the relative roles of habitat structure, resource provisioning, and human disturbance in influencing avian habitat use. Contrasting with an earlier pilot study, we found differential effects of exurban development in the two regions, with birds generally more responsive in the Adirondack Park. Characteristics of habitat context and structure had larger influences on bird habit...
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The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to saving wildlife and wildlands, to assure a future for threatened species like elephants, tigers, sharks, macaws, or lynx. That mission is achieved through a conservation program that... more
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to saving wildlife and wildlands, to assure a future for threatened species like elephants, tigers, sharks, macaws, or lynx. That mission is achieved through a conservation program that protects some 50 living landscapes around the world, manages more than 300 field projects in 53 countries, and supports the nation's largest system of living institutions — the Bronx Zoo, the New York Aquarium, the Wildlife Centers in Central Park, Queens, and Prospect Park, and the Wildlife Survival Center on St. Catherines Island, Georgia. We are developing and maintaining pioneering environmental education programs that reach more than three million people in the New York metropolitan area as well as in all 50 United States and 14 other countries. We are working to make future generations inheritors, not just survivors. WCS has been an active force in North American conservation since 1895. Bison reintroduction, legislation to protect endang...
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Research Interests: Geography and Archaeology
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The order in which individuals receive information about wildlife may influence their attitude toward wildlife differently. We explored order effects of a threat message that induced more fear versus a suffering message that elicited more... more
The order in which individuals receive information about wildlife may influence their attitude toward wildlife differently. We explored order effects of a threat message that induced more fear versus a suffering message that elicited more compassion on attitude toward wildlife. Specifically, we focused on bats, a risk-laden species also suffering massive mortalities due to a disease affecting bat populations across the United States. We randomly assigned 1,506 U.S. adults to one of eight message conditions as part of a 2 (message order: suffering → threat vs. threat → suffering) × 2 (suffering messages) × 2 (threat messages) between-subjects factorial design or a control (no message) condition. We found a significant two-way interaction between message order and biospheric values on attitude toward bats. For people with high biospheric values, reading a suffering message first led to a more positive attitude than reading a threat message first, whereas reading a threat message first...
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Collaboration provides one tool for managing the complicated and often the contentious natural resource issues. Successful collaborative arrangements involve a mix of actors bringing key attributes to the table: power, capacity,... more
Collaboration provides one tool for managing the complicated and often the contentious natural resource issues. Successful collaborative arrangements involve a mix of actors bringing key attributes to the table: power, capacity, motivation, mandate, and synergy. These attributes, if missing or if one overshadows the rest, can derail the collaborative process and/or the conservation outcomes. We offer a case study of natural gas field development impacts on America's only endemic ungulate-pronghorn (Antilocapra americana)-winter range in the Upper Green River Basin (UGRB), Wyoming, USA. We illustrate how a collaborative process can go awry, given asymmetries between the relative strengths and the associated attributes of actors, and the subsequent extent to which this imbalance created an unfavorable situation for continued collaboration. The case study reveals disagreements on technical data and potential insight on agency capture operating at a local scale. Despite these proces...
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Abstract Accurate field identification of illegally traded wildlife and wildlife products is critically important in the detection and suppression of wildlife crimes. Yet many law enforcement officers and concerned citizens lack access to... more
Abstract Accurate field identification of illegally traded wildlife and wildlife products is critically important in the detection and suppression of wildlife crimes. Yet many law enforcement officers and concerned citizens lack access to resources for identifying species and products; this is particularly true for those with no formal expertise in biology, zoology or wildlife training. Emerging digital technologies such as mobile applications may provide important easy-to-use decision-tree style tools for in situ identification. With local government and civil society partners, we are piloting such tools in China and Vietnam to identify whole animals and ivory products; and in the United States developing tools that will be used at U.S. military bases in Afghanistan to identify species from wildlife products. We are coordinating these efforts to minimize redundancy and overhead; we benefit from shared backend support for a photo database and species ID keys that can be translated easily to ensure enough flexibility for targeting needs of the specific country and audience. Planned inclusion of ‘ask the expert’ and geolocation functions will increase accuracy in identification and aid monitoring and research of supply chains. For these emerging technologies to be successful, deployment must be accompanied with on-the-ground trainings to recruit and retain enforcement personnel. The establishment of a supporting network of experts and a user community will be critical for long-term implementation and evaluation of success. Preliminary response from users of a pilot app in China demonstrates high potential for employing these technologies as routine tools to help fight wildlife crimes.
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Exurban development is an increasingly common form of sprawl impacting rural areas of North America. Since these developments consist of 10-40 acre tracts outside of the urban/suburban boundary sometimes in deep isolation of other... more
Exurban development is an increasingly common form of sprawl impacting rural areas of North America. Since these developments consist of 10-40 acre tracts outside of the urban/suburban boundary sometimes in deep isolation of other developments, the toll they take on the landscape seems insignificant; yet as open valleys are fenced, unbroken forests are divided into parcels, and generalist species replace specialists in the region, these unique landscapes are becoming altered. Indeed, exurban development, or “rural sprawl,” is changing the landscape ten times faster than urban and suburban sprawl combined. The research project examines if and how individual land ethics or the regional land-use context influence landowners\u27 activities and land-use decisions at two study sites: the Adirondack region of upstate New York and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in Montana. Data will come from a mail survey with 80-90 exurban landowners at each test site and follow-up in-depth interviews with a subset of these same landowners entities governing land-use, such as town and county planning departments and homeowner associations. This mixed methods research design builds on social-psychological frameworks such as hierarchy and structuration theory, as well as the theory of planned behavior, to develop a concrete understanding of the social forces at play that impact how landowners manage their land. The results of this social inquiry will be integrated with ecological field data on avian community structure from a broader project to provide a clearer picture of how exurban development affects natural resources and the steps that can be taken to better manage the land and mitigate for any negative externalities of exurban land-use. Explicit understanding of how landowners navigate outside constraints and internal values to influence local biota will yield better management opportunities and potentially ecologically healthier landscapes
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The difficulty of collecting occurrence and population dynamics data in mammalian populations of low density poses challenges for making informed management decisions. We assessed the use of scat-detection dogs to search for fecal pellets... more
The difficulty of collecting occurrence and population dynamics data in mammalian populations of low density poses challenges for making informed management decisions. We assessed the use of scat-detection dogs to search for fecal pellets in a low density moose ( Alces alces ) population in the Adirondack Park in New York State, and the success rate of DNA extraction from moose fecal pellets collected during the surveys. In May 2008, two scat-detection dog teams surveyed 20, 4-km transects and located 138 moose scats. In 2011 we successfully amplified DNA from 39 scats (28%) and were able to uniquely identify 25 individuals. Improved storage protocols and earlier lab analysis would increase the amplification success rate. Scat-detection dogs proved to be a reasonable, non-invasive method to collect useful data from the low density moose population in the Adirondack Park.
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Low density rural sprawl, or exurban development, results in significant negative impacts on wildlife including birds. We describe the results of a decade of field studies to document the response of birds and other taxa to exurban... more
Low density rural sprawl, or exurban development, results in significant negative impacts on wildlife including birds. We describe the results of a decade of field studies to document the response of birds and other taxa to exurban development in the Park. We have investigated: the size of the ecological impact zone associated with exurban houses and roads in the Adirondacks, the characteristics of avian communities before and after residential construction, whether exurban development alters the health of individual birds, whether the ecological context of the development regulates the intensity of its impacts, and how individual land ethics and land use decisions, operating with a regional land use context, shape human impacts on biological communities. We briefly describe these studies and draw conclusions across them to provide insight into the state of the birds in the exurban Adirondacks. Broadly, we find that: the size of the impact resulting from exurban development can exce...
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State wildlife agencies (SWAs) manage natural resources for the benefit of the common good. However, effective management in today’s complex world requires institutional capacity that can address specific challenges. Nongovernmental... more
State wildlife agencies (SWAs) manage natural resources for the benefit of the common good. However, effective management in today’s complex world requires institutional capacity that can address specific challenges. Nongovernmental organizations can enhance SWAs’ ability to manage wildlife as a public resource for which competing demands exist. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) led a participatory process to identify a suite of landscape species representative of habitats and human-caused threats in the Adirondack Park of northern New York. This effort benefitted the management of resources under the public trust doctrine. WCS brought additional capacity, specifically personnel, resources, programming, and credibility with partners, to conservation initiatives focused on boreal birds, moose, and black bears over a 15-year period in the Adirondack Park, NY. This investment resulted in several long-term projects that enhanced the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation’s ability to provide improved management and multiple benefits from these resources to the public.
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Research Interests: Engineering and Geography
Research Interests: Geography, Climate Change, Natural Resources, Environmental policy, Politics, and 12 moreEnvironmental Management, Medicine, Multidisciplinary, Policy making, Humans, Animals, North America, Ecosystem, Organizational Innovation, Planning Techniques, Conservation of Natural Resources, and Socioeconomic Factors
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We explored factors influencing people's perceptions of human–wildlife interactions in residential areas, reporting interactions to authorities, and potential conservation implications. Data were obtained from a mail survey of 1,439... more
We explored factors influencing people's perceptions of human–wildlife interactions in residential areas, reporting interactions to authorities, and potential conservation implications. Data were obtained from a mail survey of 1,439 landowners. We used logistic regression to predict probabilities of having non-positive perceptions and reporting interactions to authorities. Our models predicted perceptions relatively well; factors influencing perceptions included attitudes toward wildlife, experiences with wildlife, age, urban or rural upbringing, and location of current residence. Our models did not predict reports of human–wildlife interactions with satisfactory accuracy. Overall perceptions of wildlife interactions were more positive compared to perceptions of experiences with specific species around respondents' homes. Those not having positive interactions demonstrated less support for land and wildlife conservation. Future research should explore species-specific and incident-specific details to anticipate potentially negative perceptions of human–wildlife interactions, develop mechanisms for engaging those indifferent to wildlife interactions, and determine interventions that maintain support for conservation endeavors.
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Effective methods to identify areas and people prone to human–wildlife conflicts help wildlife and land managers develop strategies that minimize unwanted human–wildlife interactions. We combined landscape variables (i.e., housing... more
Effective methods to identify areas and people prone to human–wildlife conflicts help wildlife and land managers develop strategies that minimize unwanted human–wildlife interactions. We combined landscape variables (i.e., housing density, habitat quality) with data on local land use practices and sociodemographics from a mail survey of 730 landowners to anticipate perceptions of human–black bear (Ursus americanus) interactions in the Adirondack
Research Interests: Land management, Biological Sciences, Human dimensions of wildlife, Spatial autocorrelation, Environmental Sciences, and 10 moreLand Use Planning, Information Exchange, Land Use, Wildlife Management, Habitat Quality, General Linear Model, Development Strategy, Spatial Clustering, Human Wildlife Conflict, and Ursus Americanus
ABSTRACT Partnerships between local people and conservation organizations can make significant contributions to long-term success in conserving biological diversity, and managing resources sustainably. Strong partnerships help give... more
ABSTRACT Partnerships between local people and conservation organizations can make significant contributions to long-term success in conserving biological diversity, and managing resources sustainably. Strong partnerships help give conservation the broadly based political legitimacy that it often lacks, and create adaptive capacity to address pressing conservation needs, which is unlikely to develop without the combined efforts of multiple groups. Establishing strong partnerships remains a challenging task for conservation organizations. The Capitanía de Alto y Bajo Isoso, an indigenous organization in the Bolivian Chaco, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, a global conservation organization, established a successful partnership that made important contributions to conserving a critical part of one of the world's most threatened ecoregions. Key lessons emerged that may help conservation organizations build partnerships that contribute to improve wildlife management across diverse settings. Long-term, on-the-ground engagement is a crucial step to creating situational awareness that leads to successful conservation outcomes.