Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: New paper

New paper on flagship individuals in conservation

Defining characteristics of flagship individuals, presented through the example of an African elephant (Loxodonta africana). A flagship individual (the central composite image with four shades of green) is distinguished by species characteristics, individual traits (here, larger body size and prominent tusks), its level of exposure to humans (tourism), and its individual fate (a victim of poaching).

Figure 1 in the paper, showing defining characteristics of flagship individuals, presented through the example of an African elephant (Loxodonta africana). A flagship individual (the central composite image with four shades of green) is distinguished by species characteristics, individual traits (here, larger body size and prominent tusks), its level of exposure to humans (tourism), and its individual fate (a victim of poaching).

Another new paper is out today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment thanks to the leadership of Ivan Jarić at Université Paris-Saclay, systematizing the use of individual animals and plants as so-called ‘flagships’ of conservation campaigning. Titled Flagship individuals in biodiversity conservation (and happily open access), the paper describes the characteristics of a typical flagship individual, drawing on examples from around the world, and their potential utility for drawing attention to conservation needs. As with fundraising for humans, it is the individual story that will often move people to act. The paper also considers some of the challenges or drawbacks of such personalization, both for the individual in question and for the cause.

 

Dam houseboat tour paper out

The Mactaquac houseboat flow-cus (floatus?) group team in August 2013: Beckley, Sherren, Keilty, Demerchant, Mittelholtz, Gutierrez Hermelo and Marmura (clockwise from top left).

The Mactaquac houseboat group team in August 2013 (clockwise from top left): Beckley, Sherren, Keilty (researchers), Demerchant (boat pilot), Mittelholtz, Gutierrez Hermelo and Marmura (videographers).

Back in August 2013, we ran three houseboat tours of the Mactaquac headpond, to elicit locals’ perspectives on the landscape and what they would like to see for its future. A paper about that work, Learning (or living) to love the landscapes of hydroelectricity in Canada: Eliciting local perspectives on the Mactaquac Dam via headpond boat tours, is now out in Energy Research and Social Science (free for 50 days at this link). This was a novel research approach that presented undeniable technical challenges, but generated rich stories of the place and their connection to it, some of which were produced into a short documentary, Mactaquac Revisited.

Despite the trauma that accompanied the construction of the dam in the late 1960s, the local population has demonstrably adapted and come to cherish the new landscape: the need to rebuild the dam, with power or not, was almost unanimously expressed in the focus group elements. In the landscape elicitation, however, done alone or in smaller groups, many people expressed a nostalgia for the old river, and even occasionally an openness to seeing it returned to that state. In fact, it was the misinformation and fear we heard on the boats about what the removal option entailed that inspired our storymap, Before the Mactaquac Dam. This paper shows (again) the adaptability of people to drastic landscape change such as caused by hydroelectricity, where some amenity can be found. The implications of this for proponents of hydroelectricity (and other large-scale energy) schemes is more fraught: “You’ll get used to it” is clearly an inadequate response to stakeholder concerns, yet clearly it is sometimes true.

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