Each spring half term I go camping with my family and we visit a different British Isle. Its a week when I meet young conservationists out in the field - putting the hours in protecting tern colonies, showing visitors nesting peregrines, doing vegetation transects and the many other time-consuming seasonal tasks that conserving our nature
In March I introduced my students to protected area professionals working to conserve the unique biodiversity and landscapes of Tenerife -Europe’s popular vacation island located off the north coast of Africa. Tenerife is becoming a city island. It has developed rapidly since the rise of package holidays in the 60’s and nowadays receives upwards of
Originally published in The Conversation on 21 April 2016 To mark Earth Day, Apple has launched Apps for Earth: a one week fundraiser for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) involving 27 popular gaming and utility apps that have developed special paid-for content and an environmentally themed front page to the App store. This
Originally posted to Geographical in Opinions 24 Nov 2015 When the histories of 21st century conservation are written 2015 might, just might, be identified as a pivotal year: the year when the focus of conservation shifted from a defence of past natures to the active creation of a wilder anthropocene This year rewilding has moved
Originally published in Rewidling Britain Magazine on 3 Nov 2015 Or, as Oxford academic Paul Jepson puts it, nature conservation badly needs an upgrade. Here he presents the case for experimental rewilding Originally posted to Rewilding Britain 03 Nov 2015 In the 1700s, Lord Cobham’s experimental landscape garden at Stowe blew the mind of cultured
First published in The Conversation on 15 July 2015 The restoration of natural ecosystems – “rewilding” – ought to be a chance to create inspiring new habitats. However the movement around it risks becoming trapped by its own reverence of the past; an overly nostalgic position that makes rewilding less realistic and harder to achieve.
Originally published in The Conversation on 1 Oct 2014 Full marks to colleagues at the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London for the Living Planet Report 2014 and its headline message which one hopes ought to shock the world out of its complacency: a 52% decline of wildlife populations in the past
Originally posted to the FreshwaterBlog on 30 May 2014 The designation and management of protected areas has been a cornerstone of biodiversity policy for more than a century. In the 1970s, for example, the international community agreed to expand the global protected reserve area system guided by the representation principle – the idea that populations
Originally posted on May 16, 2014 to The Freshwater Blog A beautiful photograph of Lake Vendel, Sweden by BioFresh scientist Sonia Stendera In the coming weeks, this blog will transition to the new Freshwater Blog run by the MARS project. To mark this transition, Paul Jepson and Rob St. John discussed the process of running the BioFresh
Originally posted on the Freshwaterblog on 28 March 2014 Freshwater scientists are passionate about the state of freshwater life, but making our science relevant to policy means building a friendly dialogue with policy-makers. The recent Water Lives science-policy symposium was a land-mark for freshwater policy in the EU. It established a foundation of collegiate understanding
