The Future of Wildlife Management?

I recently attended the Western Black Bear Workshop and like many of these meetings the theme was on how to reduce human-bear conflict.  The workshop is mostly a forum for managers from different states and provinces to gather and exchange ideas on management problems and solutions, population trends, and hunting regulations.  I tried to capture…

Keep Wildlife Wild: Don’t Feed the Animals

I was having lunch with several wildlife managers during the 24th International Conference on Bear Research and Management, and asked them, “what is the one conservation message you want to get out to the public?”  And I loved this response from Colleen Olfenbuttel (North Carolina’s bear and furbearer manager): “Keep bears wild.” There are several…

What We’re Reading: May 6, 2016

Location, Location, Location It’s easy for people who live far from wildlife to criticize management and/or policies without considering how people who live near wildlife feel about the salient issues.  Particularly with species which may have an economic impact or are potentially dangerous, regulators ignore the human dimensions of human-wildlife interactions at their peril.  This…

What we’re reading: Aug 1, 2014

Oh, you know we calculated our Kardashian Index scores! This little 3 page paper created quite the stir this week. We’re guessing that scientists with large Twitter followings lablasted it and scientists not on Twitter cheered. In a nutshell, the K-Index is the ratio between observed and expected followers on Twitter and author Neil Hall…

Gentlemen, We Can Rebuild It: a Potential Application of Synthetic Biology in Biodiversity Conservation

A few months ago, National Geographic hosted a TEDx De-Extinction meeting in Washington, D.C. What followed the meeting was a flurry of op-eds, thought pieces, and opines on the merits and risks of species de-extinction. Although exciting in its own right (or terrifying, depending on where you stand), I felt that the most interesting part…