Category Archives: News

Two recent reports guide orienteering in the jungle of protected areas

Posted on by

On Monday, The European Environment Agency published an overview of European protected areas, which at the moment cover one fifth of the EEA member countries’ territory. At a first glance, the report seems to provide a very useful reference manual about how different national and European schemes come together to form a network of areas subject to various policy and management schemes.

Protected Areas in Europe couples nicely with Protected Planet Report 2012, which was published by the IUCN and UNEP-WCMC in September. Protected Planet Report goes into measuring progress towards the UN Convention on Biological Diversity targets at a global level.                     Continue reading →

Piero Visconti visiting from Rome

Posted on by

We’ve had a visiting researcher with us this week, Dr Piero Visconti, from the Global Mammal Assessment programme, Sapienza University of Rome (http://globalmammal.org/staff/piero-visconti/). I invited him over for some collaborative research and to get to know our crew in general, as we clearly have many shared interests. Piero gave a talk at the department with a slightly provocative title: “Mitigating future biodiversity loss, how much can protected areas do?” Mammal conservation clearly attracts people, as we had a full house at the seminar even though it’s mid-June and the department appears half empty. Piero has selected the paper for this week’s journal club, and will make a guest appearance in the blog shortly!