I’ve spent the last week or so looking into ways that we can all contribute to giraffe conservation- it’s true that many of us don’t live near wild giraffe populations, but there are still a number of ways that we can support them, most of which don’t involve travel. One organization was mentioned time and […]
Archive for the ‘conservation’ Tag
Raising the status of giraffes
Giraffes at home on the range
In my last post I mentioned that giraffe populations have been falling since at least the start of the 20th century, in part due to habitat loss, poaching, and changing climatic conditions. Has the past decade given us clearer insight into the problems facing them and ways to counteract those losses? In some ways things […]
Are giraffes a big conservation story?
Based on what I’ve been reading over the last two weeks, I am not the only person to ask this question, nor is it a recent development. At least as early as 1926, published literature was asking whether African big game populations were declining (Friedmann 1926), and in 1931 an article quoting Major RWG Hingston […]
Getting the long view of giraffes
Perhaps I’ve been overly influenced by recent media events, but I’ve decided to look into giraffe conservation in my next series of posts. Whether or not a baby giraffe is being born at a zoo, there are a number of reasons that focusing on giraffes makes sense right now. There have been concerns about big […]
Growing a moss conservation conversation
I’ve been looking into our options for helping with moss conservation and, honestly, the list is about as long as moss is tall, which suggests that moss conservation really isn’t on many people’s radars at this point. Here’s what I did find- the Irish Peatland Conservation Council recommends gardening without using peat moss the Lancashire […]
If you give a moss a forestry rotation
As I mentioned in my previous post, mosses are very sensitive to changes in microclimate. Forestry practices can, therefore, have a big impact on moss diversity and persistence in any one location. Over the last few years we’ve gotten a better sense of the scale at which those management decisions affect local mosses. Researchers in […]
Are we at critical moss?
I’ve spent the last two weeks looking into moss conservation around the world– how are mosses faring? have we taken conservation action? do we need to? And I feel like the most common response I found in literature dated as recently as nine years ago was ‘We don’t have enough information to judge.’ This is […]
An emerald carpet
I recently read a book telling the fictional story of a woman from the 1800s who studied mosses, and it occurred to me that I have really no clue about moss conservation or even moss ecology. I know that mosses tend to grow in moist locations, they don’t get very tall, and, like all plants, […]
Go (help a reef) fish!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve described some of the big challenges facing reef fish and the coral reefs they inhabit- some of those issues are very big, such as the scale of climate change and ocean acidification, and some of those issues occur on a much smaller scale, such as when fishermen use cyanide […]
Regenerating a coral reef
In my last post I mentioned some of the challenges facing reefs and reef fish, particularly overexploitation and habitat degradation. Although these issues affect reef fish in different ways, they can work in tandem to intensify conservation problems. The good news is that we have better insight into how to lessen or even remove some […]