ASU undergraduate students who have a love for nature and the environment can join Nature at ASU. This student-led organization helps connect students with education and career opportunities in a variety of related fields.
Their mission is to build, unite and empower an inclusive community of students to study and protect Earth’s biodiversity and its wild habitats.
The two-day symposium will take place from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (7 a.m. to 5 p.m. AZ Time) at the Charles Darwin International Convention Center. Live coverage will be available via the Galapagos Science Center’s Facebook page.
In the Galapagos Islands, a large no-take marine protected area was recently established around the remote islands of Darwin and Wolf. This reserve represents one-third of the greater Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) and is entirely closed to fishing.
This new ASU-STRI effort follows a successful earlier partnership that finished in 2015. The new partnership aims to cultivate a shared research agenda to understand and manage human and ecological systems in the tropics and to train the next generation of tropical scientists. Specific research foci include:
Christine Vogt and Megha Budruk, faculty from ASU’s Center for Sustainable Tourism, joined Conservation International in Cempedak Island in Indonesia to develop a sustainable tourism and conservation revenue funding proposal for the region during a two-day workshop held April 9-10, 2018. See below for their report on this exciting initiative.
Written by Vogt and Budruk
At an October 2017 Conservation International meeting in Adelaide, a group of CI staff collectively identified potentially effective revenue generating opportunities that channel funds directly to conservation. At this workshop, tourism-related revenue mechanisms emerged at the top of the list of potential opportunity areas for further investigation. In addition, several country programs (incl. Samoa, Timor-Leste, Philippines, Indonesia and New Caledonia) identified ongoing or short-term on-the-ground opportunities to develop meaningful engagement with the tourism sector.
A recent Associated Press article highlights the ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes as an example of innovative partnerships born within universities with the potential of solving society’s most unsettling problems.
In the article, A new bond between the public and universities could brighten America’s future, Dean Amber Miller writes, “These kinds of partnerships do exist inside universities, such as the Johns Hopkins Community Health Partnership, Arizona State University’s Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, the USC Dornsife Southern California Earthquake Center, and elsewhere,” states Miller. “But they are often forged by individual centers and institutes and exist as isolated efforts within their home institutions.”
The ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes is hiring a summer 2018 student. The ideal candidate would facilitate a research project aimed at developing a decision tool for conservation investments, as well as assist with center communications and marketing.
Essential duties include collaboratively design the tool structure, compile and clean data and metadata for input; incorporate modeling framework into R; use R Shiny to build an interactive web application; work one-on-one with the center's communication manager; develop web-based communication materials, including blogs, social media posts and newsletters.
$15/hr, 20 hrs/wk. Click here for a complete job description.
This guide is a useful resource to assist researchers in navigating common issues regarding science team collaborations.
Some of the topics include vision, communication, research collaborations, emotional intelligence, leadership, mentoring, recognition, addressing conflict and disagreement, as well as navigating and leveraging networks and systems.
The ASU-Conservation International annual retreat was held April 23-26, 2018 at the ASU Tempe campus. The retreat celebrated the successful first year of the partnership and outlined priorities for subsequent years.
“As we reflect on the past year of our unique partnership, we are keeping our eye on the horizon,” Project Manager Amy Scoville-Weaver said. “The sky is the limit for our two organizations.”
On April 25, 2018, the ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes and the Global Drylands Center hosted Daniel Miller, an assistant professor in Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for the Hugh Hanson seminar series.
During his talk, co-authored by Anthony Waldron, and titled “Frontiers in the assessment of global funding for biodiversity conservation,” Dr. Miller discussed findings from a recent paper published in the journal Nature examining the impacts of conservation spending on biodiversity loss. He explained how evidence-based model can be used to quantify how conservation spending reduces the rate of biodiversity loss.
The ASU and Conservation International partnership continues to advance one of its three main goals, which is to train the next generation of conservation leaders. A recent article by CI’s Editorial Director Bruno Vander Velde titled “To tackle environmental challenges, start with students” offers great insight into the advancement of this strategic goal, which is at the heart of ASU’s innovative model for The New American University.
As part of their Fulbright Fellowships to Ecuador, Professors Leah Gerber and John Sabo are experiencing the interface between people and nature in the Amazon rainforest and on the Galapagos Islands.
Sabo’s work focuses on strategic development of hydropower in the Amazon basin and Gerber’s focus is on the social, ecological and economic dimensions of marine conservation in the Galapagos Islands.
During their time in the Galapagos Islands, the pair are also piloting the ASU-CI Professor-in-Residence program. The converse of our ASU-CI Professor of Practice program where CI scientists engage with ASU scholars. Professor in Residence work on the ground with conservation practitioners.
In this piece, Professor Polidoro provides key facts and insights on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
“The garbage patch was discovered in the late 1980’s. However, the size and amount of garbage has exponentially increased, especially over the past decade,” explains Polidoro. “Plastic use — and discards in general — have exponentially increased and are projected to reach more than 400 million tons per year by 2020.”
The vaquita is a small porpoise that can only be found in the northern waters of the Gulf of California, Mexico. Acoustic monitoring programs indicate that less than 30 individual vaquitas remain in the wild, and are threatened by fishing activities and by illegal trade in the swim bladders of the totoaba, an endangered fish species which shares the vaquita’s habitat in the Gulf.
The free public event will occur on Sunday, March 25 from 3-5 p.m. at the university’s Memorial Union in Room 230 (Pima). The event will also be live streamed. More details are available at the following link: http://links.asu.edu/VaquitaEvent
The ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes will be hosting three sessions this spring dedicated to highlight important biodiversity conservation research taking place at the university.
Each session will explore a different focal area: Stakeholder engagement; biodiversity evidence, metrics and monitoring; decision science.
Case statements will be presented, followed by an open Q&A session. Light refreshments will be served.
For additional information and to RSVP, please click here.
For its third year participating in the program, the center organized three activities designed to teach students about conservation. This included asking participants to put together a giant jigsaw puzzle of the Amazonian rainforest, matching animals and people to certain biospheres and letting children dig for (fake) insects in a tin of soil.
Prizes were handed out for completion, which included nature-themed bookmarks and stickers. For the first time, a TED-ED video was shown on loop at the table explaining biodiversity and its global importance.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to watch children, from babies to high-school students, learn about the natural world and have fun doing it,” Project Manager Amy Scoville-Weaver said. “I hope they all came away with a new interest in biodiversity and the role they can play in conserving it.”
Initial numbers estimate as many as 4,000 people participated in the event.
Learn from the top water resource academic experts in the world through this ASU Study Abroadinitiative, while exploring the intersection of water, ecosystems and governance.
ASU students will be joining students and faculty from the two other universities as well as the University of Botswana to participate in an interdisciplinary course centered on water resource management.