Conservation Activities

I am a founding board member and science advisor for SC Wildlands. After 5 years of full-time field work in California (1988-1992), I can't stop caring about this landscape. Our major project, South Coast Missing Linkages, is a true collaboration among two dozen state, federal, and nongovernmental conservation groups. We serve as the catalyst. We have developed conservation plans to protect each of 15 critical landscape linkages in southern California. I like to joke that "I work for frequent flyer miles" - but in truth I work for the vision. You can download 2006 book chapter that describes this project. Please visit the SC Wildlands website to download Linkage Designs and view simulated flyovers of linkages. The January 2008 issue of The Wildlife Professional offers a brief overview of the effort and describes some lessons for scientists on being effective in conservation. Our goal is a green infrastructure for southern California that matches its world-class human infrastructure (photo).

The confluence of 4 highways, a rail line, power lines, microwave towers, and the 450-km-long California Aqueduct. We plan to add one more layer of infrastructure to this scene, namely a wildlife corridor. To do so, we need to protect & restore the ridge in the background, which provides the only wildland link between the Santa Susana Mountains (left of photo) and the San Gabriel Mountains (right of photo).

Free GIS tools for wildlife corridor design!

Please visit www.corridordesign.org for information on most everything I know about designing corridors, and several ArcGIS toolboxes with good plain-English documentation. It's all free..

Arizona Wildlife Linkage Workgroup is collaboration to plan for connectivity throughout the state of Arizona. After our initial statewide Linkage Assessment (2006), we developed detailed plans for 16 priority linkages that will be integrated with ADOT 5-year and 20-year plans, the state Comprehensive Wildlife Plan, Forest Plans, and other efforts.

I also serve the Western Governors' Association as a Science Advisor on their Wildlife Corridors Initiative. The governors of the 19 Western States passed a unanimous resolution that all future highways, canals, energy developments, and new land-use plans should be consistent with conservation of important wildlife corridors. Although this is a broad-brush approach, I believe it will profoundly impact the face of the conserved landscape of the Western US.

Since 2002, I have served on the Board of Governors for the Society for Conservation Biology; my term as President will begin in July 2011. SCB is the leading professional organization working on the science of maintaining and restoring biodiversity. During 2003-4, I chaired the ad-hoc committee that drafted SCB's first-ever Code of Ethics and wrote an Editorial on Ethics for the February 2005 issue of the journal. During 2006-7, I chaired our initiative to offset SCB's greenhouse gas emissions. We are investing in a project that not only stores carbon, but also alleviates poverty and promotes biodiversity by restoring subtropical thicket (photo at left), a globally endangered biome.

I work with Nature Conservation Research Centre of Ghana on several projects, most notably the Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary. In a true bio-social experiment, a dozen communities along a 40-km stretch of the Black Volta River in northern Ghana established, own, and manage this wildlife sanctuary. Created in 1999 to protect one of the 2 remaining hippo populations in Ghana, the project generates enough income from ecotourism and cultural tourism (most visitors are Ghanaian) to pay for 15 full time staff. The Sanctuary has dramatically improved access to safe drinking water, roads, and schools. More important, the Sanctuary is creating new ways for people to work together with increasing fairness to all. The approach is briefly described in an essay by Patrick Adjewodah and me. We are now writing two papers evaluating successes and challenges of the first 8 years of this project. These papers will not only provide information about this ambitious project, but will also serve as one of the first honest, detailed assessments of a community-based conservation project.

Paramount Chief of Wechiau & Beier

Patrick Adjewodah of NCRC

IYou are invited to visit the Wechiau Community Hippopotamus Sanctuary! You will enjoy the opportunity to live in a warm, welcoming community where cowrie shells can still be used as money and traditional life has not changed much. You'll stay in a well-screened, clean mud hut with good drinking water, bucket showers, and no annoying electricity or telephones. Most important, you will be participating in a true experiment in conservation. Contact NCRC for more information. If you want to see many of the 200 species of birds on the sanctuary, ask for Agba Tungbani to be your guide, and bring along your Wechiau Bird List.

Picathartes_Weckstein Ecology & conservation of the Bare-headed Rockfowl. What bird is the size of a crow, has no feathers on its head, nests in a mud cup on a cliff, forages for arthropods in forest litter, and wasn’t seen in Ghana during 1968-2002? – It’s the bare-headed rockfowl Picathartes gymnocephalus, of course! After the bird was re-discovered in 2002, we are mapping breeding sites in three Forest Reserves in Ghana, monitoring reproduction, and using radio-tags to determine where birds forage. We are also developing an ecotourism project that will provide bird-watching revenues to local communities.

I serve on the Recovery Team for the ocelot in the United States (2003-2007). To assist the recovery team, I built a page of literature on the ocelot, containing some hard-to-find theses and other publications. I no longer update this literature list, but I'll keep it around until about 2009, by which time it will be hopelessly stale.

Conservation Victory at Coal Canyon. For a decade, I worked to protect an important regional habitat corridor (Coal Canyon) in southern California, which was recently added to Chino Hills State Park. In recognition of my role in this effort, I was a keynote speaker at the Coal Canyon dedication ceremony on 29 November 2000. In my short speech, I emphasized that the real heroes in conservation are the bureaucrat and the citizen conservationist - not 'ologists' like me.

Like most academics, I like to tell management agencies to set quantitative goals, monitor progress, and make adjustments in light of monitoring results. I also believe goals should be ambitious rather than minimalist.

In 2000, I set a personal goal to invest 6% of my annual gross income and 200 hours of work per year in causes dear to me. During 2000-2004, I underachieved on cash investments (averaging about 5% ). Now that my daughters are (mostly) out of college, I increased my goal to 10%, and I am still falling short (averaging 9%). I consistently overachieve on time investments (240-340 hours per year). I'm tempted to increase my time goal, but my wife would probably leave me if I did.

During 2005-2009, I am on a 4 year plan to reduce my carbon footprint by 65% and offset the balance. As part of this plan, we downsized our house by 40%, and installed solar panels that generate more electricity than we use. I commute by bicycle 52 weeks per year. Our last step is to switch to renewable heating.

What are your goals?

Wildlife overpass!!