Making Conservation Profitable
Conservationists in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are witnessing the growing enthusiasm for carbon credit trading. PNG is a poor country where most of the land is still forested and owned by customary landowners. Recently, a landowner in a remote village surprised me by asking when the World Bank was coming to pay […] Read More »
Books
Summer 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 3)
Some books reviewed in our book review section are available through Amazon.com. To make your purchase easier we have included a link when available. When you purchase a book through this service on our website Conservation In Practice receives a portion of the purchase price.
Win-Win Ecology: How […] Read More »
Journal Watch
Restoration as Weed Control
Summer 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 3)
Although it makes sense that restoring native plants could help control invasive weeds, no one knows if it would really work. New research makes a good case for this approach: restoring tallgrass prairie in old fields decreased the weed biomass by nearly 95 […] Read More »
Although it is well known that roads can spread invasive weeds, new research shows that some roads are worse than others. In Utah, areas along paved roads were far more likely to be invaded than those along 4-wheel-drive tracks. This suggests that limiting road improvements could help keep out invasive weeds.
“Each step of road […] Read More »
Catching coral reef fish for the aquarium trade used to mean using cyanide or even dynamite, which destroyed much of the reef ecosystem. Today, the trend is to use nondestructive methods such as hand-net fishing, and fish importers argue that this means coral reef fish can be harvested continuously — but new research suggests otherwise. […] Read More »
New research reveals a surprising risk factor for extinction: monogamy. In reserves in Ghana, large mammals that live in pairs or have small harems are far more likely to die out than those with big harems.
“In avoiding extinction, it pays to be promiscuous,” says Justin Brashares of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, […] Read More »
Current theories for designing reserves are based mostly on land ecosystems. This is not surprising because reserves protect much more of the Earth’s land than of its marine realm (nearly 6 percent versus less than 1 percent, respectively). But key strategies that work for reserves on the land may not work in the sea.
Perhaps […] Read More »
Most conservationists pay more attention to species’ survival than to their evolution. But recent research shows that some of the major factors that threaten biodiversity can also make populations evolve amazingly quickly, often within decades. A new analysis shows how this “contemporary” evolution can complicate conservation, and suggests ways of addressing it in management plans. […] Read More »
One barrier to protecting biodiversity is that there are no good ways to figure out how many species there are in large areas. Now, we may finally be able to find out: a new method accurately predicts the total number of North American butterfly species even when only a tenth of the ecoregions are sampled. […] Read More »
By Sarah DeWeerdt
Summer 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 3)
In 1993, a group of Dutch and Tanzanian biologists working on a survey of Lake Victoria’s fish fauna pulled up a small, vermilion-finned fish in a trawl conducted along a transect in the Mwanza Gulf, near the southern shore of the lake. This handsome fish […] Read More »
By William Sutherland
Summer 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 3)
Some patients with heart blockages have additional ventricle beats and it has been shown that these can be suppressed by various drugs; this treatment thus became common practice (1). This follows the conventional methodology of identifying a problem and finding ways of alleviating it. However, analysis […] Read More »
By Douglas Fox
Summer 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 3)
It’s a warm May morning in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Kilimanjaro’s frosted peaks dominate the south, and to the north, rolling plains of grass and stooped acacia gradually sink into swamps.
Slowly wading through is a tagalong troupe of 17 elephants (Loxodonta Africana) — […] Read More »
By Jon Christensen
Summer 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 3)
When The Nature Conservancy of California asked Silicon Valley venture capitalist Seth Neiman for a multimillion-dollar contribution to help protect local open space, no one involved had the slightest notion that they were about to step into one of the deepest and most difficult questions […] Read More »
