It's Good to be Liked: Effective conservation outreach in the Age of Facebook

Efforts to secure roadless areas will need to address current and likely future human usage patterns. Thus, “roadless” areas of ocean will need to consider commercial shipping as 90% of world trade is carried by ship. Shipping is the most efficient way to transport goods per weight and distance in terms of fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Increasing oil prices are thus driving an increase in local sea freight transport, known as short-sea shipping. This will bring more ships into coastal waters and increase risk of collision with whales and other species. Similarly, the opening Arctic will bring more traffic into largely unused northern areas of ocean. Bringing pollutant sources closer to the Arctic environment, particular concern surrounds black carbon and noise. Black carbon (mainly soot) is not generally transported over large distances in the atmosphere. Local sources could thus rapidly and dramatically increase heat absorption by Arctic ice sheets. Likewise, increasing vessel passage will substantially alter the acoustic environment of the high Arctic Ocean. The commercial value of shipping will be a large obstacle to establishing roadless ocean areas, especially in the economically importance of coastal and Arctic waters. Compromise and potentially sacrificial areas will be needed. However, given the lack of physical roads in the marine environment and the existence of mitigation technologies, road-impact-less areas might be a more realistic goal.

Brown bear Ursus arctors is the largest carnivore on Tibetan plateau.Human-bear conflicts such as house damaging and livestock killing have become serious problems in the past decade and retaliatory huntings were increasing.Understanding ecological process of them will be the first step in making a conservation plan. We conducted sign surveys and community-based interviews since 2009. 3 bears were captured and tracked with GPS collars, which was the first time to collar brown bear in China. In addition, 12 electric fences were set for a pilot houses-protection experiment. GPS collar data suggests both male and female bears had ~2,000 km2 annual home range area,which is large for females compare to other studies.27% feces contained human-related food and the main natural food is marmot.The peaks of house damaging occurred in May and Aug,when local people moving to summer range and leaving their food storage unguarded while most marmots were hibernating.In addition,77% of livestock killing happened in Sep and Nov, right before bears went into hibernating.Binary logistic regression shows that conflicts are significantly correlated to the efforts people paid to looking after their house. The study indicates that brown bears are more likely to seek human-related food when the availability of natural food drops down.Therefore measurements should be taken to protect bears' prey,taking care of houses,as building electric fences partially reduced human-brown bear conflicts

African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) cultivation has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, often in megadiverse countries with highly threatened lowland tropical forests. Sustainable oil palm standards (e.g. RSPO) require the preservation of riparian and high conservation value areas (HCV) without evidence that these practices benefit biodiversity. Colombia is the fourth largest oil palm producer in the world and home to significant biodiversity. The objective of this study was to understand how different taxa are affected by oil palm agriculture and how management practices influence these impacts. In summer 2011, conventional and RSPO-certified farms were sampled in César, Colombia. Standard methods were used to survey birds (point-counts), butterflies (Van Someren-Rydon traps), and amphibians (visual encounter survey transects). Birds, butterflies, and amphibians showed different responses in diversity and abundance related to farm management practices, suggesting that the impacts of oil palm are not uniform. Mostly wide-ranging, disturbance tolerant species were found on farms. Overall, oil palm has limited value for conservation of endemic or threatened species, but riparian corridors and reserve areas did maintain some of these species. These results show that oil palm could serve as a corridor and that remnant habitat has conservation value, particularly in converted landscapes.

Over the past decade landscape scale conservation has risen to surprising prominence in Australia. These efforts are ambitious in their scale and scope, seeking to connect public, private and civil society actors to align conservation efforts across very large spatial and temporal scales. While these efforts have significant government and civil society support, they face significant challenges of collaboration and communication across vast, diverse landscapes, communities and agendas. Building on a long history of collaborative conservation practice, these efforts provide fertile lessons for a newly emerging National Network for Wildlife Conservation in the US. This presentation draws on the experiences of Habitat 141°, an emerging initiative which faced significant challenges at the outset of the collaboration. Despite strong support for the goals and aspirations of the initiative, Habitat 141° struggled due to an inability to reconcile fundamentally different perspectives on how to turn their vision into action. These challenges can be traced to a lack of funding and capacity as well as an inability to build the necessary relationships to link science with practice. The story is not entirely negative, as a number of local to regional scale initiatives emerged from Habitat 141°’s conservation planning efforts. This presentation will give an overview of the structure of Habitat 141°, critical factors shaping the negotiations and lessons to be learned from their experiences.

Grounding environmental science courses in Aldo Leopold's evolutionary-ecological land ethic can link students to the ecological interactions of the natural world. Applying Leopold's philosophy to environmental science would allow students to learn ecology in the context of daily life and environmental issues. It can also improve teaching of the concept of sustainability by integrating it with ecology. This presentation describes why framing environmental science in the evolutionary-ecological land ethic is a useful approach for learning the ecological concepts, environmental issues and sustainability of environmental science. It also presents a model for how to root courses in this theme. This model unlocks the evolutionary-ecological complexity that connects everyday human actions to environmental issues and sustainability by depicting environmental issues as the result of human actions that disrupt normal ecological function. This ecological framing is in contrast to current models that do not integrate ecology. Performance of 2,230 students on pre/post exams that measured student learning of ecological function and environmental issues was compared between secondary school students who used the model and students who used their regular human impact program. Results indicate that students who used the model for learning performed significantly better on the post-test exams than the students who used their regular human impact program.

Based on 20 years of research on ecosystem-based management in diverse social and ecological contexts, Steven Yaffee and Julia Wondolleck will report on the similarities and differences among land and ocean-focused ecosystem-based approaches. They will highlight a just released online database that includes 65 marine ecosystem-based management cases from around the world, and the lessons learned from this large set of comparative cases. Key themes addressed in these analyses include management strategies pursued, accomplishments, facilitating factors, challenges, governance, monitoring, evaluation, and ways in which science was used to advance ecosystem-based management in different settings. They will conclude with a perspective on how the policy environment surrounding the adoption of terrestrial EBM evolved in ways that undermined a shift in management toward an ecosystem approach, and ask whether the conditions underlying management of marine systems are likely to follow the same pathway.

In our Portland-Vancouver ULTRA-Ex project, we are examining the role of governance in urban ecosystem sustainability in cities in our bi-state metropolitan region. We are assessing multiple pathways through which human actions, governance systems, and the built and social infrastructure affect ecosystem functions and services provided by landscape vegetation pattern and regional water quality. Our findings suggest that local land use, rather than regional governance, is the primary determinant of water quality in streams. Hedonic analyses show that water quality is correlated with property values in residential areas. Our findings also suggest that while green infrastructure strategies (e.g. bioswales) provide environmental benefits, the perception of their value by local citizens is mixed. We have also found that heavy metal accumulations (i.e. Cu, Pb, Zn, Cd) have not reached toxic levels in bioswale soils; yet, bioswales were found to retain these metals effectively during storms. For urban greenspace conservation, while the rates of riparian area losses have continued over the past two decades, those rates are slowing in our six study cities; in Portland gains in riparian areas due to restoration efforts have even begun to outpace riparian losses. Overall, our preliminary findings indicate variations in levels of civic engagement among municipalities, but general social and ecological differences among municipalities and between states are not yet clear.

Landless extractivists are often the poorest, most marginalized sector of Brazilian society whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. This research focuses on the importance of babassu (Attalea speciosa), a native palm of Brazil, for women quebradeiras ('nut breakers' in Portuguese) who harvest babassu for cash income, charcoal, cooking oil, construction material and other products. The objective of the research was three-fold: (1) reveal the current livelihood strategies of babassu extractivist communities of the Extremo Norte Extractive Reserve, a RESEX established in 1992 by the Brazilian government to provide quebradeiras with natural areas for harvest, but remains a paper-park; (2) highlight the challenges quebradeiras face; and (3) understand the role of diverse stakeholders in supporting or hindering babassu extractivist activity. I used surveys and semi-structured interviews to collect quantitative and qualitative data from people who derive income or subsistence products from babassu in Tocantins, Brazil. I conclude that implementation of the RESEX would provide greater economic opportunities for the region's landless babassu extractivists, but without strengthening the market for babassu products, babassu activity will decline and the RESEX will likely fail. Such an outcome would represent a lost opportunity for forest conservation at the deforestation frontier and loss of a local culture and economy featuring the sustainable harvest of forest products.

Many vascular plants are threaten by various drivers such as land use change and overpopulated herbivores. More than 500 citizen botanists have archived quantitative information on population size and changing rate of population size for 1610 Japanese plant taxa twice (1994-1995 and 2003-2004). Those surveys enable us to quantify extinction risks by Monte Carlo simulations. However population size and changing rate of population size contain large uncertainty. Furthermore there is no guarantees that trend of changing rate of population size will not change in the future. We developed a robust decision-making model against those uncertainties using information-gap decision theory to derive optimal investment of conservation effort in Chiba prefecture, Japan. Our analysis recommended that different regions should be protected when we incorporated uncertainty of population size and trend of changing rate of population size. This result highlights the importance of dealing with uncertainty properly to select conservation areas effectively.

Roughly two thirds of freshwater mussels native to North America are considered imperilled, and there is a strong need for modelling of these species to inform management and recovery of at-risk populations. Growth of native mussel populations may be hindered by their dependence on the presence of suitable fish hosts for the obligate parasitic life stage; management of host fish species for at risk mussels may also be necessary. Existing mussel population modelling has assumed that host populations are non-limiting and can be ignored. Using the framework of population matrix modelling we incorporate host density dependence to test the sensitivity of the model to the assumption of non-limiting hosts. Model results showed that a mussel population whose host is limiting is much more sensitive to the parasitic phase than a mussel population with a non-limiting host. Mussel abundance depended on: host abundance, host population trajectory, mussel life history, and host capacity for mussel transformation. When the host population was stable, a predictable, stable mussel abundance was reached. This equilibrium was sensitive to the life history of the mussel species, and to the availability of juvenile hosts but not that of adult hosts. Our work highlights areas of freshwater mussel research that are most important for answering management questions, such as the poorly understood relationship between host/mussel abundance and successful attachment to the host.

Understanding food webs is one of ecology's earliest pursuits: who eats whom and what are ramifications of those patterns? Stable isotopes are a powerful tool for elucidating trophic relationships, but our understanding of natural background variability of stable isotope signatures separate from anthropogenic effects remains limited, impeding our analytic and predictive capacity. We used carbon and nitrogen isotopes to examine variability in the fish community of Lake Hövsgöl, a near-pristine lake in Mongolia. The lake is subject to almost no commercial or recreational fishing or nearby development and has only nine species of fish with no introduced species, offering an unusually pristine and ecologically simple study system for study. We found inter and intra-annual variability to be comparable for all fish species, with coefficients of variation ranging from 2-15%. We also did not find that piscivores demonstrated greater variability than planktivores as expected, suggesting that variability does not transfer simply up trophic levels. These data provide important context for conservation and management of aquatic ecosystems; studies assessing anthropogenic impacts on or restorations of aquatic systems will be more robust if they take such background variability into account.

Mercy release is a traditional Buddhist practice, which encourages followers to save captured animals and release them. However, more animals are captured and harmed due to the practice. For example, magpies became hunting targets since some Buddhists believed releasing them would bring good fortune and ordered them. Suggestions offered for being more merciful include: (1) Consult an expert to assure the animals to be released are able to survive in a new environment and will not compete with native species; (2) observe animal habitats, report poaching, and protect animals against poaching instead of releasing poached animals; and, (3) do not buy or sell animals to release.

Understanding the population's change patterns in time and space is essential for decision-making to conservation of the rare and endangered species. However, most populations of these species are small, and it is difficult to use traditional quadrat sampling techniques for demographic analysis. The Ripley's L-function was used to analyze the spatial pattern of different development stages of Alcimandra cathcartii, based on the investigation data from 4 hm2 plot in a primary evergreen broadleaved forest in Gaoligong Mountain, Yunnan. The results showed that the age structure of the species was inverted "J" shape curve, and the population is stable. The distribution pattern is closely related to the spatial scale, with an aggregation distribution in less than 75 m and a random distribution in more than 75 m spatial scale. The smaller individuals showed aggregation distribution at smaller spatial scale, while larger trees were random distribution type at all spatial scales. The spatial relationships among different development stages are negative correlation at smaller scale, while it tends to be no association at larger scale. This indicates that there may be different mechanism on the formation of distributions at different spatial scales and growth stages. The results of this study implicates that it is important for conservation of small populations of A. cathcartii to strengthen the protection of the forest ecosystem with these rare and endangered species.

Since the introduction of Perna viridis (Asian green mussel), Mytella charruana (charru mussel) and Megabalanus coccopoma (acorn pink titan barnacle) into Florida waters, they have expanded both north and south along the Atlantic coast from their initial sites of introduction. Little is known about how these non-native species affect the already vulnerable Crassostrea virginica (Eastern oyster). A manipulative experiment was designed to test if P. viridis, M. charruana and M. coccopoma prevent C. virginica larvae from settling and metamorphosing. Our results indicate that overall, the number of settled larvae was significantly reduced with the presence of P. viridis, M. charruana and M. coccopoma when compared to a control of C. virginica shells (Random block ANOVA, p = 0.0364). However, we found there was no difference in larval settlement on oyster shells with attached non-native species versus adjacent oyster shells without non-native species (Random block ANOVA, p = 0.0864). This data indicates that P. viridis, M. charruana, and M. coccopoma do limit oyster larval settlement and suggest that non-native species can be detrimental to the native oyster ecosystems.

Abstract. The current diversity richness and species conservation status of amphibian from the Democratic Republic of the Congo are herein recognized as bio indicator for setting priorities for biodiversity conservation and improving the ongoing protected areas management. Historical and prospective data gathered from the most recent fieldworks are used for determining sites of herpetological importance. Between 2007 and 2012 several fieldworks were carried out throughout the whole country and seasons. Standard sampling techniques and methods including time-constrained, visual observation, and site scanning were used. Data analysis was referred to the IUCN's criteria for determining the key important areas. Presently, 241 amphibian species are known from the DR Congo and include 64 endemics (26.5%) along with two endangered species while 6 are vulnerable (VU). The sites of priority for conservation are those concentrate assemblage, endemic, rare and threatened species. Accordingly, the following eight sites are defined as KAA: Itombwe Massif, Mount Kabobo, Ituri forest, Marungu Plateau, Lendu Plateau, Upemba, Virunga, and Kahuzi-Biega landscapes. Threats to species are habitat degradation or loss, and pollution. Therefore, it is evident that conservation actions should be undertaken and then be focused on these KAA for conserving the whole biodiversity in DR Congo.