"A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examines how the Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) program has succeeded in stabilizing wildlife while improving agriculture in the Luangwa Valley."
This report provides a new approach to examining the links between ecosystem services (the benefits derived from nature) and the poor.
Through a series of maps and analyses, the authors focus on the environmental resources most Kenyans rely on such as soil, water, forest, rangeland, livestock, and wildlife. The atlas overlays georeferenced statistical information on population and household expenditures with spatial data on ecosystems and their services (water availability, wood supply, wildlife populations, and the like) to yield a picture of how land, people, and prosperity are related in Kenya.
Follow an osprey's migration online: "As part of a two-year research project, we have outfitted a male Osprey nesting at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge with a GPS pack in order to follow him on his local hunting trips during the summer and his yearly migrations south."
Students learn about a few key migratory bird species and the USFWS National Wildlife Refuge System that conserves them, as well as the impacts of oil spills on the Gulf Coast ecosystem and its human communities. Introduces a variety of natural resource careers and the academic experience and job skills needed to be successful in these conservation positions.
The Conservation Education Strategy Toolkit contains resources developed by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (AFWA) to support conservation educators.
Includes lots of useful stuff: downloadable lessons, "Benchmarks for Conservation Literacy," "Field Investigations: Using Outdoor Environments to Foster Student Learning of Scientific Processes" etc.
Taza set up this crowd-funding site to fund satellite transmitters for better tracking of Clark's Nutcrackers than she's been able to do with the hand-held units.
"Clark's nutcrackers are pivotal players in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, dispersing whitebark pine seeds and enabling the trees to reproduce and regain their population amid a decline. The whitebark pine trees are critical to the ecosystem because of their role in feeding wildlife and stabilizing the water supply. In light of the severe decline of whitebark pine trees, tracking the movement of the nutcrackers will yield crucial findings which will help managers ensure persistence of the Clark's nutcrackers, whitebark pine and the nutcrackers' important seed dispersal function.
Please help support this first-ever satellite tracking of Clark's nutcrackers by giving to this project, which will cover the satellite transmitter costs for one full year. Read on for more information!"
Visit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Endangered Species Program's multimedia gallery to hear podcasts about featured species, such as the whooping crane, Gila trout, piping plover, desert tortoise, Florida panther, and Jesup's milk-vetch. Most appropriate for use with middle and high school students, each 5- to 10-minute episode describes the species and reports on its status, updating listeners on the progress of any programs working to aid it protection. Teachers can download a written transcript of each podcast.
NCSR is a national clearinghouse for natural resource curriculum materials used
by college faculty and high school science teachers. Materials cover major
subject areas of environmental science and natural resources. They include
fisheries, forestry, wildlife, and environmental science topics used in college
programs.
High-resolution earth imagery has provided ecologists and conservationists with a dynamic new tool that is enabling everything from more accurate counting of wildlife populations to rapid detection of deforestation, illegal mining, and other changes in the landscape.
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times The strict new federal standards limiting pollution from power plants are meant to safeguard human health. But they should have an important side benefit, according to a study being released on Tuesday: protecting a broad array of wildlife that has been harmed by mercury emissions.
" Richard Turere, a 13 year-old from Kenya, has been making waves at the TED conference with his innovative invention - a LED system that prevents lions from killing livestock (and also humans). Richard, whose family lives within the Nairobi National Park boundaries and raises livestock, had always seen lions as a threat to their livelihood."
"More Animals Are Dying, but the Causes Have Not Yet Been Determined:
As of Aug. 16, more than 7,000 birds, sea turtles and dolphins have been found dead or debilitated in the gulf since the oil spill began. A majority of the dead were not visibly oiled, and officials have yet to determine why they died. But they have confirmed that many more animals are dying than during the same time period in previous years."