The saiga is a Star-Wars looking Critically Endangered antelope from Central Asia, whose horn is used in traditional Chinese medicines (TCM). Last month, a new rulling by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora strengthened trade regulations around saiga product exports (1).…

Making progress on Sustainable Development Goal 14 – life below water – is a complex and increasingly urgent challenge. A new handbook offers practical guidance on monitoring, evaluation and learning for SDG14, and emphasises the importance of using systems thinking.

Casting a net from the beach in Sri Lanka; people around the world depend on…

Understanding costs and designing creative economic instruments for shark conservation in Indonesia

“We roll on three, because ‘go’ sounds like ‘no’... 1, 2, 3...”

We all roll backwards off the boat with a splash…

As modern-day conservation science is said to have been born from quantitative biology, it is no surprise that it has a strong background in the use of predictive models. However, conservation today also has a prediction problem. Put simply, prediction isn’t used enough, be that in identifying future problems before they arise, working out which of a variety of intervention options…

In May of 2015 a Kazakh population of the saiga antelope was hit by an extreme mass mortality event, during which over 200,000 animals died.  Reporting in 2018, an international group of scientists lead by Prof. Richard Kock of the Royal Veterinary College identified the cause of death as haemorrhagic septicaemia, caused by a specific serotype (B) of the bacterium…

Conservation is challenging and often highly complex. Researchers are increasingly required to understand the motivations and drivers of a growing diversity of damaging behaviours, in order to determine how to most effectively steer the public, governments and businesses towards more sustainable behaviours. In response, conservation researchers are increasingly…