|
|||
| Progress is only possible if we know whether our activities
are having the desired effects. There has been a flurry of targets and priority-setting
in conservation recently, such as the Millenium Development Goal of reducing
the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. This has coincided with an increasing
recognition that good quality monitoring is both essential to reducing biodiversity
loss, and involves serious intellectual challenges. There is a fast-growing
interest in evaluating the success of conservation interventions as well
as some recent progress on evaluating cost-effectiveness of conservation
action.
However, as well as monitoring to assess the outcome of a conservation strategy, two other types of monitoring are essential to successful conservation. These are monitoring of individual behaviour to ensure compliance with rules and agreements, and monitoring to detect, and act upon, ecological trends. The first of these has received particularly little attention in the literature, partly because the study of compliance is unfashionable and seen as counter to the paradigm of community participation in conservation, and partly because the intellectual tools required are within other disciplines (game theory, economics, fisheries science). Monitoring for detection of biodiversity trends has received more attention. However, monitoring is costly and more attention from both ecologists and economists, explicitly taking account monitoring costs and the costs associated with inference errors about trends of interest, is urgently needed to improve the design of effective protocols.
In this theme we consider the bio-economics of monitoring in wildlife conservation. Early work included an assessment of the incentives to hunt illegally for elephants and rhinos in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia. Our new work develops and extends these ideas into new areas, and has a particular focus on Madagascar. |
|||
| Relevant current research project: Optimising monitoring as a conservation tool | |||
| Group members working on this theme include | |||
EJ Milner-Gulland |
|||
| Selected publications (see main list for pdfs) | |||
Jones, J.P.G., . Andriamarovolona , M.M., Hockley, N., Gibbons, J.M., Milner-Gulland, E.J. (2008) Testing the use of interviews as a tool for monitoring trends in the harvesting of wild species. Journal of Applied Ecology 45, 1205-1212. |
|||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
