Via Ecological Society of America, an abstract of an interesting look at the potential for crowdsourcing intelligence to improve decision making around conservation:
Incorporating relevant stakeholder input into conservation decision making is fundamentally challenging yet critical for understanding both the status of, and human pressures on, natural resources. Collective intelligence (CI ), defined as the ability of a group to accomplish difficult tasks more effectively than individuals, is a growing area of investigation, with implications for improving ecological decision making. However, many questions remain about the ways in which emerging internet technologies can be used to apply CI to natural resource management. We examined how synchronous social?swarming technologies and asynchronous “wisdom of crowds” techniques can be used as potential conservation tools for estimating the status of natural resources exploited by humans. Using an example from a recreational fishery, we show that the CI of a group of anglers can be harnessed through cyber?enabled technologies. We demonstrate how such approaches – as compared against empirical data – could provide surprisingly accurate estimates that align with formal scientific estimates. Finally, we offer a practical approach for using resource stakeholders to assist in managing ecosystems, especially in data?poor situations.
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Via Raconteur, an interesting look at how mobilizing a global citizens’ watch over the oceans is helping to combat the crime of illegal fishing:
Fishing is not the obvious focus for a major project that features both a Hollywood star and the world’s most valuable brand. However, this is not just a tale about food – this is a modern-day, global crime story.
Fish stocks worldwide are getting squeezed by legitimate operations, but also illegal activity, explains Toby Middleton, programme director of the Marine Stewardship Council. “Globally, about a third of fish stocks are overfished,” he says. “But stocks fished to their sustainable limit have steadily increased over the past 15 years from 47 per cent to 58 per cent. However, between 11 and 26 million tonnes of fish are illegally caught every year.”
In response, September last year saw Leonardo DiCaprio and then-US Secretary of State John Kerry officially launch Global Fishing Watch. The platform provides a digital tool powered by Google that adds more than 22 million data points daily to help track fleets, and expose rogue and illegal activity harmful to ocean biodiversity and marine ecosystems.
GLOBAL COLLABORATION
The information is free to browse and available to anyone with an internet connection, from governments and NGOs, through fisheries, seafood suppliers and buyers, to journalists and private individuals anywhere around the world.
The input of activists, campaigners and other citizens concerned about overfishing is directly encouraged and enabled; in effect, the crowd is invited to help police the problem.
The most important element of success for the project among all our partnerships and stakeholders is a common goal of promoting transparency at sea
Fundamentally, though, it is not the technology itself that is unique, but the mix of partners in collaboration. Global Fishing Watch harnesses the technological muscle of digital mapping and big data in support of advocacy. It brings together expertise in satellite imagery and remote sensing from SkyTruth, with the internet and cloud platform capabilities of Google, plus the campaigning focus of Oceana, an international group formed to protect oceans. Funding partners include the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Governments also have a key role to play in the project, not just with their political endorsement, but their data. Earlier this month, both Peru and Indonesia committed to publishing government-owned vessel tracking data on the platform, taking major steps towards fishing transparency.
Despite the complexity of managing such a multi-stakeholder project, however, the metrics of its success remain relatively simple, says Jacqueline Savitz, Oceana’s senior vice president for US oceans and Global Fishing Watch. “The success of Global Fishing Watch is best measured by the impacts it creates, impacts like assisting in getting a vessel fined for fishing illegally in a protected area or convincing a local community to protect its areas from encroaching fleets,” she says.
It is all about getting eyes on the problem, concludes Ms Savitz: “The most important element of success for the project among all our partnerships and stakeholders is a common goal of promoting transparency at sea. To restore fisheries and address problems like illegal fishing and overfishing, activities at sea need to be visible; the global community needs to see what is actually happening beyond the horizon. Only then can we effectively protect our oceans.”
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.
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Via the Wall Street Journal, an interesting report on how habitat exchanges are bringing the ‘sharing economy’ to conservation:
For too long, the Endangered Species Act has served as an emergency room for at-risk wildlife. By the time a species arrives on the endangered list, it’s too far along in its decline to be saved without intensive and expensive treatment that could have been avoided with preventative care.
That’s what is so remarkable about the Interior Department’s recent decision not to list the greater sage grouse. Thanks to foresight, planning and collaboration across multiple industries and 11 Western states, the bird dodged a trip to the ER and the region’s two biggest economic engines—energy and agriculture—avoided the strict land-use restrictions that typically accompany endangered-species listings.
The species will be on the mend for years to come, and industry and landowners will have to live up to agreements to conserve sage-grouse habitat to facilitate the population’s recovery. But the pre-emptive effort signaled an overdue shift in the way we think about conservation.
The Endangered Species Act is necessary, but it is also a last resort. To ensure healthy wildlife populations and a healthy economy, we must initiate care much sooner and the prescription must be collaborative.
Human development and climate change are taking their toll on America’s wildlife. More than 250 species await listing decisions under the Endangered Species Act, and there simply aren’t enough national parks and wildlife refuges in the U.S. to house them. Though there is a lively debate about how best to protect species on public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, most wildlife is on privately owned land. Buying that land or taking it out of production is neither feasible nor advisable.
So how do we tap those private lands—which account for 70% of the lower 48—for wildlife stewardship? We crowdsource it, pooling funds to help landowners across the country sustain wildlife habitat, and reward those who step up voluntarily.
In collaboration with ranchers, developers, academics and state resource agencies, the Environmental Defense Fund (the organization I head) is pioneering a new solution to tackle the species crisis—habitat exchanges, which bring the “sharing economy” to conservation.
Think of it as an Airbnb for wildlife. Just as the online company Airbnb allows homeowners to get paid for opening a spare bedroom to travelers, habitat exchanges allow landowners to get paid for providing quality habitat for vulnerable wildlife. The revenue is supplied by infrastructure, energy and other developers, which need to mitigate the environmental impact of their projects. But concerned individuals, nongovernmental organizations or corporations can also share in the cost, donating funds to an exchange.
Habitat exchanges unlock the potential of farmers, ranchers and forest owners to become conservation heroes without taking their land out of production or signing it over to the government. Developers benefit from a predictable value for the mitigation credits they buy and a standard set of rules that ensure projects move forward.
We’re in the early stages, but habitat exchanges are gaining momentum. In Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration helped to develop an exchange for sage grouse that is expected to launch by the end of this year. Nevada is beta testing its version of a sage-grouse exchange, and a citizen group, the Wyoming Conservation Exchange, has developed a proposal for sage grouse and mule deer. This group has already hired an administrator to manage the market as soon as it is approved by federal and state regulators.
In 2006, an earlier version of the habitat-exchange idea worked to recover golden-cheeked warblers in Texas and allow the U.S. Army to continue military exercises. In California, a consortium of state agencies and NGOs is hoping to launch an exchange in 2016 that will allow water and transportation developers to purchase credits from farmers who maintain habitat for Swainson’s hawk, Chinook salmon and riparian songbirds. And the Environmental Defense Fund is developing a habitat exchange for the monarch butterfly.
Though it would be ideal to set aside enough habitat to ensure the survival of the nation’s critters, practically speaking we can’t. The best alternative is to share resources so everyone wins.
The early adoption of habitat exchanges is a positive sign that crowdsourced conservation is no longer in the concept stage. It’s ready for prime time.
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)
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