As the saying goes “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Instead —to continue along with the egg analogy—, by putting your eggs in multiple baskets you are diversifying your risk: drop one basket, and eggs in the other baskets will still remain intact.

So does this idea of ‘risk diversification’ have relevance for conservation planning? In their 2012 PNAS paper Amy Ando and Mindy Mallory argue that yes it does, using a case study involving the prioritisation of land for conservation under climate change uncertainty to demonstrate how and why. Their paper, “Optimal portfolio design to reduce climate-related conservation uncertainty in the Prairie Pothole Region” focuses on adopting a well-established technique from finance – Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), to develop a diversified land portfolio for conservation in the US Prairie Pothole Region that hedges against future uncertainty due to climate change impacts. Continue reading →

Last week it so happened that the UK government hosted an international conference on illegal wildlife trade and we had decided to discuss Challender & MacMillan’s policy perspective “Poaching is more than an enforcement problem”. Most likely a topic that every conservation biologists have an opinion about.

Challender & MacMillan argue that enforcement will never be enough to combat poaching, and especially the trade in high-value species. Instead they stress the importance of getting locals on-board, using regulated trade to take down prices, and finally to reduce demand through social marketing programs. The authors stress that enforcement approaches cannot address the underlying drivers of poaching and illegal trade, and will therefore fail. Continue reading →

In last week’s GCC Journal Club meeting we discussed an article by Jeremy et al. (2012, see reference below), a paper that uses a nice framework and an impressive “multilevel design and model-fitting approach” to evaluate to what extent Community-Based Conservation (CBC) projects have been successful around the world. The study tests hypotheses about different features of the national context, project design, and community-level characteristics, an approach that provides for many possible links and explanations and a wealth of data as well as multiple options of bivariate and multivariate data analysis explaining the success CBC case studies.  Continue reading →