Biodiversity is threatened, and conservation is urgent. The reality of limited resources for conservation requires prioritization among actions, species, and places, and the building of capacity in countries where threats are high.
Freshwater ecosystems are essential for humans and biodiversity, yet they threatened by human activities. Sebastian Martinuzzi’s study assessed the consequences of future land use change on freshwater ecosystems in the US.
Understanding the factors influencing people’s perceptions of a protected area is a win-win solution for biodiversity conservation and sustainable local people livelihoods.
Forests of Mexico are under threat due to development, both for urban and agricultural purposes. However, it is not clear the spatial and temporal extent to which this is happening. SILVIS PhD candidate, Carlos Ramirez Reyes is exploring this using remote sensing data, and a novel method, spectral mixture analysis.
Extreme weather events are becoming both more frequent and intense. These events could be shifting bird numbers and their normal distributions in the United States. Ultimately, these weather events could lead to the extinction of highly-sensitive species.
Attitudes of people living in close proximity to protected areas can reflect on the effectiveness of management strategies within their borders, and understanding the spatial scale at which these perceptions occur may help to focus conservation efforts.
Land use change and forest fragmentation are a worldwide problem. Isabel Rojas-Viada is employing a novel solution by focusing on riparian forest corridors in Chile.
Extreme weather events are expected to increase in the future. Extreme weather could result in population declines if these strike during the breeding season for North American passerines.
Brooke Bateman examines if fine scale weather data provides more information for modeling bird distributions than long-term climate data.
Satellite imagery provides invaluable information regarding land cover features over time. However, since many satellite-based image sensors cannot see through clouds, imagery researchers need to screen cloudy pixels from cloud-free pixels in order to analyze land change through time.
Research topics range from economics to entomology, and research locations literally span the globe. Some might call administering such a grant challenging, but to Shelley Maxted, it’s a treat.
