By Francisco Javier Ancin-Murguzur This blog accompanies the paper: Drones as a tool to monitor human impacts and vegetation changes in parks and protected areas. Read the full paper here Monitoring trails is an essential part of the conservation work in protected areas to assess how visitors affect the trails and their surroundings. When we…
By Tim O’Brien This blog is an accompaniment to the paper: Camera trapping reveals trends in forest duiker populations in African National Parks. Read the full paper here Presence-absence surveys (more properly detection-nondetection surveys) and occupancy surveys, are often used as indicators of the health of wildlife population. Occupancy surveys use a replicated sampling design where…
by Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research Species are often involved in complex interactions with other species, which can affect their occurrence, abundance, feeding habits and disease transmission. Observing and studying species interactions can be difficult. To circumvent this problem, ecologists increasingly rely on remote devices such as camera traps. In a recent study…
Rasmus Erlandsson Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Sweden Some ideas stick in your mind until you do something about them, and in 2011 an idea popped up in my head when I was chatting with a friend on the metro on my way home from university: Are colour infrared aerial photos, one of the…
Merry Crowson Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK “The world is one big data problem.” (Andrew McAfee) There is a lot of excitement in the scientific community surrounding the potential of big data – that is, the recent exponential increase in the amount and variety of data, as well as the…
Julie A. Fortin School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Beginning over a hundred years ago, the Canadian government hired land surveyors to map out the mountains of western Canada. These surveyors used unique photo-topographic methods to create topographic maps . As a byproduct of their work, there are…
Evelyn Piña‐Covarrubias, Andrew P. Hill, Peter Prince, Jake L. Snaddon, Alex Rogers, C. Patrick Doncaster, 2018, Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.97 The rapid evolution in miniaturisation, power efficiency and affordability of acoustic sensors, combined with new innovations in smart capability, are vastly expanding opportunities in ground‐level monitoring for wildlife conservation at a regional scale,…
Alison Beresford RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, Edinburgh, United Kingdom Every autumn, millions of Afro-palearctic migratory birds make the long journey from their breeding grounds in Europe to wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, returning north again in the spring. Over the last 50 years, the European breeding populations of many of these species have…
Pen-Yuan Hsing and Philip Stephens, Conservation Ecology Group, Department of Biosciences, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom DH1 3LE (@MammalWeb) This blog post is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. You can read the full research paper here. To conserve biodiversity effectively, we need to know where and in what abundance it occurs. Breeding bird…
Caitlin Jacobs Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA Camera traps are a powerful research tool that is becoming increasingly important in the field of wildlife biology. Researchers all over the world use camera traps to assess a wide range of ecological questions, such as wildlife distribution, composition, abundance, density, population trends…
From 7–11 May, the GeoHab community met in Santa Barbara, California, for its annual conference. GeoHab, which stands for Marine Geological and Biological Habitat Mapping, is an international and multidisciplinary community of marine scientists that includes acousticians, biologists, ecologists, geologists, oceanographers, and spatial scientists, to name a few. One of the objectives of GeoHab is…
Over the past 15 years, there has been great effort to inspire and engage women and girls in science. However, according to a study conducted in 14 countries, the probability of women graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and PhD in science-related field are 18%, 8% and 2% respectively, while those percentages for male…
