Spotting elephants from space: a satellite revolution

December 27, 2020

The population of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) has plummeted over the last century due to poaching, retaliatory killing from crop raiding and habitat fragmentation. To conserve them requires knowledge of where they are, and how many there are: accurate monitoring is vital. Existing methods are prone to error. Inaccurate counts lead to misallocation of scarce conservation resources and misunderstanding population trends. Currently ... Read full story

An in-depth insight into the roosting behaviour of bats

December 10, 2020

Our recently published study in the Journal of Zoology has provided a novel and detailed insight into the summer roosting behaviour of three bat species native to the UK. We used a long-term comparative dataset of individually tagged bats across multiple bat box monitoring schemes in south-west England, including our own long-term study in ... Read full story

Renewed conflict over endangered fruit bats in Mauritius calls for new approaches

December 7, 2020

Alexandra Zimmermann (WildCRU & IUCN SSC Human Wildlife Conflict Task Force), Ewan Macdonald (Oxford University Said Business School & WildCRU) and Tigga Kingston (Texas Tech University & IUCN SSC Bat Specialist Group) explain in their article published in The Conversation.   An endangered bat is once again the centre of a controversial cull, as the Government ... Read full story

Cecil’s Legacy – 5 years on

December 21, 2020

Lion numbers have disappeared from 92% of their historical range. The death of Cecil the lion and the resulting global outcry brought this sobering fact into sharp focus. Cecil was first fitted with a GPS satellite collar in November 2008 when he was between five and six years old. He was a male lion coming ... Read full story

Supporting Citizen Scientists

December 8, 2020

A partnership between WildCRU and the charity Butterfly Conservation, funded by Oxford University’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund, is helping to find out more about the impact of digital communications on citizen science research. Citizen science has tremendous potential for engaging the public in research and for generating valuable data. One scheme, the ... Read full story

WildCRU’s Luca Chiaverini’s blog post for Institute of Population Ageing

November 26, 2020

In the context of his collaboration with The Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, WildCRU's DPhil student Luca has written a blog post in which he discussed a talk he recently attended, held by Professor Ruth DeFries. In the talk, entitled "Navigating the Anthropocene - What Would Nature Do?", Professor DeFries explored four strategies from natural systems, ... Read full story