Researchers’ new outreach strategy succeeds, sets blueprint for detecting invasive species in Florida

University of Florida

 

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Nile monitor in Florida

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Credit: UF Croc Docs

Invasive species in Florida like Nile monitors and Argentine black-and-white tegus pose a growing threat to the Sunshine State’s environment, economy and public safety. South Florida’s warm climate, disturbed habitats and bustling pet trade have made it a hotspot for these non-native, cryptic reptiles. However, finding these elusive creatures has always been a challenge – until now.

University of Florida researchers are showcasing how a focused outreach initiative in Palm Beach County has led to a successful increase in reports of invasive reptiles in Florida. The findings are documented in the latest study published in Scientific Reports and authored by researchers at UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.

This initiative addresses the growing threat posed by non-native reptiles to the environment, economy and public health in South Florida.

 “When species are rare and hard to find, it helps to get a lot of eyes looking for them. Targeted outreach does that,” said Frank Mazzotti, professor of wildlife ecology and lead author of the study. “Community involvement not only proves to help us find invasive species but provides opportunities to increase awareness as well.”

Targeted outreach involves delivering specific messages to audiences in designated locations to achieve desired outcomes. In this case, the goal was to encourage residents and workers in the C-51 Basin and surrounding areas in Palm Beach County to report sightings of large invasive lizards, such as Nile monitors, to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) IVE-GOT1 hotline or through EDDMapS.

EDDMapS is a website that maps the distribution of non-native species in the United States and Canada through documented reporting provided by experts and the general public throughout those two countries.

From 2018 to 2020, the project’s targeted outreach efforts reached over 112,000 people and households through various methods including in-person, online and virtual.

Subsequently, researchers engaged 53,657 people on social media, presented webinars to 229 individuals, sent email newsletters to 34,350 recipients, conducted an online survey with 520 participants and potentially reached up to 20,000 people through print media.

These efforts led to 55 reported sightings of Nile monitors and Argentine black and white tegus in Palm Beach County and the surrounding area, with 32 of these reports directly attributed to UF/IFAS’ outreach.

The data gathered by the project showed that newspapers brought in the most reports, helping UF/IFAS researchers identify more invasive reptiles. In-person methods, such as door hangers and presentations allowed for face-to-face engagement, making residents feel more confident in reporting what they spotted. Social media proved to be a time-efficient way to spread the message far and wide, allowing even more people to become part of the effort.

 “We learned valuable lessons regarding the effectiveness of different targeted outreach methods for detection of invasive wildlife,” said Mazzotti. “Targeted outreach can be done by a broad community of environmental educators. These methods can be replicated in other locations with different target species, which could lead to an increase in local understanding of the status and range of invasive species in Florida, and ultimately improved management and monitoring programs.”

Invasive species in Florida like Nile monitors and Argentine black-and-white tegus pose a growing threat to the Sunshine State’s environment, economy and public safety. South Florida’s warm climate, disturbed habitats and bustling pet trade have made it a hotspot for these non-native, cryptic reptiles. However, finding these elusive creatures has always been a challenge – until now.

University of Florida researchers are showcasing how a focused outreach initiative in Palm Beach County has led to a successful increase in reports of invasive reptiles in Florida. The findings are documented in the latest study published in Scientific Reports and authored by researchers at UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.

This initiative addresses the growing threat posed by non-native reptiles to the environment, economy and public health in South Florida.

 “When species are rare and hard to find, it helps to get a lot of eyes looking for them. Targeted outreach does that,” said Frank Mazzotti, professor of wildlife ecology and lead author of the study. “Community involvement not only proves to help us find invasive species but provides opportunities to increase awareness as well.”

Targeted outreach involves delivering specific messages to audiences in designated locations to achieve desired outcomes. In this case, the goal was to encourage residents and workers in the C-51 Basin and surrounding areas in Palm Beach County to report sightings of large invasive lizards, such as Nile monitors, to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) IVE-GOT1 hotline or through EDDMapS.

EDDMapS is a website that maps the distribution of non-native species in the United States and Canada through documented reporting provided by experts and the general public throughout those two countries.

From 2018 to 2020, the project’s targeted outreach efforts reached over 112,000 people and households through various methods including in-person, online and virtual.

Subsequently, researchers engaged 53,657 people on social media, presented webinars to 229 individuals, sent email newsletters to 34,350 recipients, conducted an online survey with 520 participants and potentially reached up to 20,000 people through print media.

These efforts led to 55 reported sightings of Nile monitors and Argentine black and white tegus in Palm Beach County and the surrounding area, with 32 of these reports directly attributed to UF/IFAS’ outreach.

The data gathered by the project showed that newspapers brought in the most reports, helping UF/IFAS researchers identify more invasive reptiles. In-person methods, such as door hangers and presentations allowed for face-to-face engagement, making residents feel more confident in reporting what they spotted. Social media proved to be a time-efficient way to spread the message far and wide, allowing even more people to become part of the effort.

 “We learned valuable lessons regarding the effectiveness of different targeted outreach methods for detection of invasive wildlife,” said Mazzotti. “Targeted outreach can be done by a broad community of environmental educators. These methods can be replicated in other locations with different target species, which could lead to an increase in local understanding of the status and range of invasive species in Florida, and ultimately improved management and monitoring programs.”

  

A tegu captured in South Florida

Credit

UF/IFAS Cat Wofford

Eric Suarez, invasive species research program coordinator, holds a tegu

Credit

UF/IFAS Cat Wofford

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Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-024-73286-y 

Article Title

Employing targeted outreach to improve community involvement in detecting invasive Nile monitors (Varanus niloticus) in Florida

 

Study shows natural regrowth of tropical forests has immense potential to address environmental concerns

A potential regrowth area larger than Mexico could store 23.4 gigatons of carbon

University of Maryland Baltimore County

 

image: 

Joshua Slaughter (left) and Matthew Fagan discuss a map of forest patches in Costa Rica. A global map of potential natural forest regrowth areas developed in a new Nature study led by Brooke Williams and Hawthorne Beyer and based on a global forest patch database developed by Fagan suggests that an area larger than the size of Mexico in the tropics has the potential to regrow and store 23.4 gigatons of carbon. (Marlayna Demond/UMBC)

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Credit: Marlayna Demond/UMBC

A new study in Nature finds that up to 215 million hectares of land (an area larger than Mexico) in humid tropical regions around the world has the potential to naturally regrow. That much forest could store 23.4 gigatons of carbon over 30 years and also have a significant impact on concerns like biodiversity loss and water quality. The study showed that more than half of the area with strong potential for regrowth was in five countries: Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, China, and Colombia. 

“Tree planting in degraded landscapes can be costly. By leveraging natural regeneration techniques, nations can meet their restoration goals cost effectively,” says the study’s co-lead author, Brooke Williams, a researcher at  the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and the Institute for Capacity Exchange in Environmental Decisions. “Our model can guide where these savings can best be taken advantage of,” she says. 

A culmination of decades of work

Matthew Fagan, associate professor of geography and environmental systems at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and second author on the new study, developed a data set the authors relied on.

In that work, “We used satellite images to identify millions of small areas where tree cover increased over time. We then excluded the areas planted by humans with machine learning, focusing on natural regrowth,” Fagan says. The study tracked regrowth between 2000 and 2012, and then checked if the regrowth was maintained through 2015. “Those natural patches were the input data for this novel study,” he says, “the first to predict where future forest regrowth will occur, given observed past regrowth.” 

The study, co-led by Hawthorne Beyer, head of geospatial science at Mombak, a Brazilian startup which aims to generate high-quality carbon credits through reforestation of the Amazon, and director of science at Institute for Capacity Exchange in Environmental Decisions, also pulled in global data sets describing factors like soil quality, slope, road and population density, local wealth, distance from urban centers and from healthy forest, and more. “Any time you build one of these global studies, you’re standing on the backs of so many other scientists,” Fagan says. “Each one of these studies represents years of work.”

The study found that the factors most strongly associated with high regrowth potential were a patch’s proximity to existing forest, the density of nearby forest, and the content of carbon in the soil. Those factors in particular “seem to do a really good job explaining the patterns of regrowth we see across the world,” Fagan says. Being close to existing forest, for example, is key to supplying a variety of seeds to the area to support diverse regrowth, Fagan explains. 

Keeping it local—by supplying a global map

The end product of the study is a digital map of the global tropics, where each pixel—representing 30 x 30 square meters of land—indicates the estimated potential for regrowth. That map, made possible by an extensive international collaboration of researchers, is a boon to environmentalists worldwide hoping to advocate locally for their efforts.

“Our goal and our hope is that this is used democratically by local people, organizations, and localities from the county level all the way up to the national level, to advocate for where restoration should happen,” Fagan says. “The people who live there should be in charge of what happens there—where and how to restore really depends on local conditions.”

Fagan points out that some of the potential regrowth areas the study identified are unlikely to be restored for a variety of reasons, such as being in active use for ranching or crops or located on prime real estate near roads and urban centers. However, a meaningful portion of the 215 million hectares is abandoned and degraded cattle pastures or previously logged forests, where encouraging natural regeneration would have minimal cost to local economies and a long list of benefits.

“If you restored that to rainforest, the benefit to water quality, water provision, local biodiversity, and to soil quality would be immense,” Fagan says. “It would also be an immense benefit for pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, so really it’s just a question of, ‘Where can we do this most efficiently?’ That’s what this paper is all about.”

 

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08106-4 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Global potential for natural regeneration in deforested tropical regions

Article Publication Date

30-Oct-2024

Large meltwater accumulation revealed inside Greenland Ice Sheet

A new study unveils a surprising discovery: a substantial amount of meltwater is temporarily stored within the Greenland Ice Sheet during summer months

Delft University of Technology

 

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GNET station “TREO” in southeast Greenland

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Credit: Credit: Thomas Nylen (Technical University of Denmark, DTU)

A new study published in Nature unveils a surprising discovery: a substantial amount of meltwater is temporarily stored within the Greenland Ice Sheet during summer months. For the first time, an international group of researchers was able to quantify meltwater with positioning data. The finding challenges current models of how ice sheets contribute to global sea level rise.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is currently the largest single contributor to global sea-level rise, with the potential to raise the mean sea level by up to seven meters if it fully melts. While scientists have long studied the melt processes of the ice sheet, one crucial question has remained unanswered: how does meltwater storage evolve within the ice sheet throughout the summer melt season? A new approach provides an unprecedented view into the movement and storage of meltwater.
"During the melt season, we found that a significant fraction of meltwater mass is stored temporarily within the ice sheet," says Jiangjun Ran, associate professor at Southern University of Science and Technology. "This water buffering effect peaks in July and slowly recedes in the following weeks."

Novel approach to water monitoring
"Understanding how water is stored and released within the ice sheet has always been a challenge," says Pavel Ditmar, associate professor at Delft University of Technology. The team has utilised data from the Greenland GPS Network (GNET). The network consists of several tens of stations around Greenland that continuously provide positioning data. The team developed an innovative method that interprets the detected vertical displacements of the bedrock. These displacements are caused, among other, by the mass of melting water, pushing the bedrock down.

Implications for climate models
This discovery will help improve climate models, which often underestimate the complexity of water storage within ice sheets. Especially during warmer years, models that predict water runoff towards the ocean may easily underestimate that process. The study finds that these models could require scaling adjustments of up to 20% for the warmest years. "These findings are crucial for improving forecasts of the Greenland Ice Sheet's contribution to future sea-level rise," says Michiel van den Broeke, professor at Utrecht University. "With climate change making the Arctic warmer than ever, accurate predictions are essential for preparing coastal regions for potential sea-level rise."

Years in the making

The study has taken years of preparation and required difficult expeditions to some of the most remote areas of the planet. "The work we've done not only improves our understanding of ice sheet dynamics but also opens the door to new measurement techniques and campaigns," says Shfaqat Abbas Khan, professor at the Technical University of Denmark. The study highlights the importance of international collaboration in addressing one of the planet's most pressing environmental challenges.

The study was published on Oct. 30, 2024 in Nature: Vertical bedrocks shifts reveal summer water storage in Greenland ice sheet. Jiangjun Ran, Pavel Dimar, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Lin Liu, Roland Klees, Shfaqat Abbas Khan, Twila Moon, Jiancheng Li, Michael Bevis, Min Zhong, Xavier Fettweis, Junguo Liu, Brice Noël, C.K.Shum, Jianli Chen, Liming Jiang & Tonie van Dam.

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08096-3 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Vertical bedrocks shifts reveal summer water storage in Greenland ice sheet

Article Publication Date

30-Oct-2024

 

Into the great wide open: How steppe pastoralist groups formed and transformed over time

Genetic study of the wider Caucasus region shows how movement of people and innovation transfer enabled pastoralists to exploit the steppe zones of Eurasia

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

 

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Burial mounds are the most emblematic archaeological monuments of Bronze Age Eurasia. In the Caucasus Mountains, they were built up to great heights and mark the communication networks through which knowledge and innovations were transmitted.

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Credit: © Sabine Reinhold, DAI Eurasia-Department

The wider Caucasus region, between the Black and the Caspian Seas, connects Europe, the Near East and Asia. It displays a huge geographic, ecological, economic, cultural, and linguistic range today, from the steppe zone in the north, the Caucasus mountains in the center, to the highlands of today’s Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran in the south. This diversity was no different in the past, where the archaeological record attests to many different influences from many surrounding regions.

“It is precisely this interface of different eco-geographic features and archaeological cultures that makes the region so interesting to study”, explains Dr. Wolfgang Haak, senior author and principal investigator of the study. “By establishing a time series across many consecutive archaeological periods, we wanted to capture the time periods when, for example, the first farmers arrived in the region, or when the combination of new innovations in e.g., herd management, dairying, and mobility, enabled an autonomous nomadic lifestyle adapted to exploit the vast Eurasian steppe zone”.

The team observes an alternating series of interaction and gene flow between inhabitants of the major eco-geographic zones of the mountainous upland regions and the steppes to the north of the Caucasus. “Initially, we find two distinct genetic ancestries among the hunter-gatherer groups north and south of the Greater Caucasus”, adds lead author Ayshin Ghalichi, PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

This picture changed with the arrival of early farmers from northern Mesopotamia in the 6th millennium BC, which led to two initial processes of mixture: one between these early farmers farmers and Caucasus/Iranian hunter-gatherers, which formed the predominant ancestry south of the Caucasus mountains, and a second one between the aforementioned hunter-gatherer groups, which resulted in the ancestry profile in the steppe zone north of the Caucasus. During the following 5th and 4th millennium BC, Eneolithic cultures emerged in the river valleys of the North-Pontic steppe and became archaeologically visible as they built characteristic earthen burial mounds, known as ‘kurgans’. New Eneolithic groups arriving from the south led to a period of contact and exchange between both groups and resulted in the emergence of the Maykop culture phenomenon in the 4th millennium BC, which represents a horizon of technical and social innovations in archaeology.

Into the great wide open

“This is a peak time of knowledge and technology transfer in the North Caucasus region, when we see very similar cultural elements in genetically different groups, but also many signs of mixing and mingling”, explains Dr. Sabine Reinhold, co-lead author and principal investigator at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. “We uncover the moments when groups began to adapt their lifestyle to a more mobile economy, more suitable to the seemingly endless grasslands of Eurasia.” Indeed, the archaeological record attest to critical innovations in herd management, dairying practices, and mobility such as wheels and wagons, of mobile architecture, and the incipient horse domestication, besides many more. “The global dairy industry today is built on the back of these Bronze Age innovations,” says Prof. Christina Warinner, co-author and professor of anthropology at Harvard University. “They turned a somewhat niche practice into a multicontinental phenomenon.”

Durable foodstuffs such as the early forms of cheese, together with innovations in transportation, made it possible to populate the Eurasian steppe permanently and establish continent-wide networks of communication. The combination of innovations paved the way for a fully nomadic pastoralist life-style at the turn the 3rd millennium BC, practiced for instance by groups associated the Yamnaya cultural complex, which soon after expanded across the entire western steppe zone, as far as Mongolia in the east, and the Carpathian Basin in the west. Interestingly, it was also a time when Caucasus groups expanded to the south, such as the Kura-Araxes culture of Georgia, which extended to regions in east Anatolia, the Levante, and Iran, albeit with little or no connections to the steppe zone in the north.

The team also explored the social structure of prehistoric groups by analysing patterns of biological relatedness and consanguinity and found differences between the steppe and the Caucasus groups. The more stationary Caucasus groups showed higher levels of consanguinity and close connections between individuals buried in the same and/or nearby kurgans, whereas the steppe groups revealed very few of such connections, hinting at a different form of social organization of mobile pastoralist groups.

Dissolution and transformation

However, the turn to the 2nd millennium BC represents another period of interaction between the steppe and Caucasus populations. Triggered by a period of aridification and possibly over-exploitation of the ecologically fragile steppe environment and unreliable levels of precipitation, the steppe zone became largely depopulated. The archaeogenetic study finds clear evidence of assimilation and mixture of Caucasus groups, while the resulting Middle and Late Bronze Age groups retreated further into the Caucasus highlands where they established a sedentary mountain economy. This transformation also formed the cultural and genetic basis for the present-day populations of the North Caucasus.

“Our integrated study is a beautiful example of human resilience, adaptability and innovation in the light of ecological, economic and socio-political changes”, concludes Prof. Svend Hansen, director of the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute, and co-senior author of the study.

Sheep are essential to the prosperity of mobile livestock herders in the steppe. Secondary products such as milk and wool were already being used in the 4th millennium BC.

Credit

© Jana Eger, private

The first steps towards domesticating the horse were taken north of the Caucasus in the late 4th millennium BC. Using horses made it possible to roam greater areas and tend larger herds.

Credit

© Sabine Reinhold, DAI Eurasia-Department

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08113-5 

Article Title

The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus

Article Publication Date

30-Oct-2024

 

Ancient DNA brings to life history of the iconic aurochs, whose tale is intertwined with climate change and human culture

Trinity College Dublin

 

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An aurochs skull, from St Petersburg.

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Credit: Prof Dan Bradley, Trinity College Dublin.

Geneticists from Trinity College Dublin, together with an international team of researchers, have deciphered the prehistory of aurochs – the animals that were the focus of some of the most iconic early human art – by analysing 38 genomes harvested from bones dating across 50 millennia and stretching from Siberia to Britain. 

The aurochs roamed in Europe, Asia and Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. Adorned as paintings on many a cave wall, their domestication to create cattle gave us a harnessed source of muscle, meat and milk. Such was the influence of this domestication that today their descendants make up a third of the world’s mammalian biomass.

Dr Conor Rossi, Trinity, first author of the article that has just been published in leading international journal Nature Communications, said: “The aurochs went extinct approximately 400 years ago, which left much of their evolutionary history a mystery. However, through the sequencing of ancient DNA, we have gained detailed insight into the diversity that once thrived in the wild as well as enhanced our understanding of domestic cattle.” 

Although fossils of aurochs found in Europe date back 650,000 years ago, about the time archaic species of human appeared in the continent, animals from the east and west extremes of Eurasia share a much more recent common ancestry, pointing toward a replacement around 100,000 years ago, probably by migrations out of a southern Asian homeland. 

In an echo of human prehistory, this replacement was not complete, with traces of earlier ancestry surviving in European aurochs.

Dr Mikkel Sinding, co-author and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, said: “We normally think of the European aurochs as one common form or type, but our analyses suggest there were three distinct aurochs populations alone in Europe – a Western European, an Italian, and a Balkan. There was thus a greater diversity in the wild forms than we had ever imagined.”

Intriguingly, climate change also wrote its signature in aurochs genomes in two ways:

First, European and north Asian genomes separated and diverged at the beginning of the last ice age, around 100,000 years ago, and did not seem to mix until the world warmed up again at its end. And second, genome-estimated population sizes dropped in the glacial period, with a more pronounced hard time endured by European herds. These lost the most diversity when they retreated to separated refugia in southern parts of the continent before repopulating it again afterwards.

The most pronounced drop in genetic diversity occurs between the period when the aurochs of southwest Asia were domesticated in the north of the Fertile Crescent, just over 10,000 years ago, to give the first cattle.  Remarkably only a handful of maternal lineages (as seen via mitochondrial DNA which is handed down via mothers to their offspring) come through this process into the cattle gene pool.

“Although Caesar exaggerated when he said it was like an elephant, the wild ox must have been a highly dangerous beast and this hints that its first capture and taming must have happened with only a very few animals,” said Dan Bradley, Professor in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, who led the study.

“However, the narrow genetic base of the first cattle was augmented as they first travelled with their herders west, east and south. It is clear that there was early and pervasive mating with wild aurochs bulls, leaving a legacy of the four separate preglacial aurochs ancestries that persists among the domestic cattle of today.”

A Pleistocene aurochs from the Upper Rhine Valley, dated to around 50,000 years old.

Credit

Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten Hessen.

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08112-6 

Reversing environmental decline: Lessons from African communities

Stanford-led study analyzes how various African communities have attempted to reverse land degredation

Stanford University

 

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Collective potato harvesting in Senegal.

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Credit: Camille Jahel

In rural Africa, where livelihoods are often tied directly to the land, environmental degradation poses a critical threat to both ecosystems and people’s well-being. New research reveals ways to tackle the dual challenges of land degradation and poverty.

In rural Africa, where livelihoods are often tied directly to the land, environmental degradation poses a critical threat to both ecosystems and people’s well-being. A new study co-authored by researchers at Stanford University and the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) analyzes how various African communities have attempted to reverse this trend and offers valuable insights into what works. The study, published Oct. 30  in Sustainability Science, emphasizes that long-term coalitions among local communities, governments, and organizations are essential to foster transitions to sustainability.

“Every place is different and one should avoid a ‘one size fits all approach’ to environmental policy, but we should also learn from past experiences to identify conditions that lead to success in turning around environmental degradation,” said study co-author Eric Lambin, the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Reversing degradation
For decades, many African communities have faced the dual challenge of addressing environmental degradation while improving people’s livelihoods. As land becomes less productive due to low soil fertilization, deforestation, or climate change, the pressure on these communities intensifies. Lambin and study co-author Camille Jahel of CIRAD point out that, in many cases, this situation is inextricably linked to a history of colonialism in which authorities denied people’s rights to natural resources and broadcasted a narrative of overexploitation of natural resources. This led to top-down restoration efforts with often limited success, according to the researchers.

More recently, in many areas, new efforts have been made to reverse these negative trends, often with support from governments, NGOs, or international organizations. However, results have been mixed, with some initiatives leading to significant improvements, while others fell short.

After examining 17 cases representing various initiatives to reverse land degradation across 13 African countries, the researchers found that successful interventions typically share a few key characteristics. First and foremost, they often involve strong social arrangements between actors, supported by well-functioning institutions. In cases like the Shinyanga region of Tanzania, where 90% of the population was involved in reforestation efforts, the results were impressive. The region saw the restoration of 300,000 to 500,000 hectares, or about 1,100 to 1,900 square miles, of woodland, which enhanced livelihoods through the provision of resources like wood for fuel.

Another critical factor is the alignment of incentives with environmental goals. In Burkina Faso, for example, farmers began planting cashew trees, driven by the opportunity to sell their produce in international markets. This not only provided a new income stream but also helped to combat desertification as more trees were planted. These cases highlight the importance of ensuring that environmental restoration efforts also address the economic and social needs of communities.

“Incentives were mostly economic in nature, but some also concerned security of access to land or improved provision of ecosystem services following restoration of natural resources,” said Jahel, a research fellow at CIRAD. Jahel was funded by the Stanford France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies for a collaborative research project with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment while doing the research.

Supporting restoration
In addition to local coalitions, the study emphasizes the importance of external support, particularly in the form of resources and technical assistance. In many successful cases, such as in Niger and Burkina Faso, NGOs and government agencies provided the necessary tools, knowledge, and financial backing to get projects off the ground. This external support was often vital in the early stages of interventions, reducing the risk associated with the adoption of new practices in a context of resource scarcity and climate variability.

However, the study also cautions that external support needs to be carefully managed. In some cases, top-down approaches that didn’t fully engage local communities led to limited success or even failure. For example, in Zambia’s Kafue Flats, an intervention aimed at restoring wildlife populations ultimately failed partly because the new governance structures imposed by external actors were not accepted by the local community. This underscores the need for external agencies to work closely with local stakeholders and respect existing social and governance systems.

Lambin and Jahel emphasize the need to maintain momentum over the long term. Some of the interventions they studied showed positive results initially, only to falter as external funding dried up or local interest waned. The researchers highlight the importance of building long-term resilience into these projects, ensuring that local communities can continue to manage and sustain the improvements without ongoing external support. In Namibia, for example, some community organizations for wildlife management, known as conservancies, are now generating enough profit to sustain their activity over time.

By providing general lessons drawn from past experiences in Africa, this study can help improve the design, management, and monitoring of projects aimed at reversing land degradation and adoption of sustainable land use practices.

“It is possible to turn the tide on environmental decline,” Lambin said. “The key lies in creating long-term interventions that are locally driven [and] integrate poverty-related concerns, supported by strong governance structures and based on coalitions of actors.”

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Journal

Sustainability Science

Article Title

Reversing degradation of social-ecological systems: explaining the outcomes of interventions in Africa

Article Publication Date

30-Oct-2024

UK

Northern slammed as 'unreliable' as bosses admit they use FAX MACHINES

9800 BAUD!

Paul Britton
Wed 30 October 2024 

-Credit: (Image: Reach Publishing Services Limited)


Under-fire rail operator Northern was today accused of showing 'disregard to the travelling public' over its recent level of performance - as bosses admitted fax machines are still being used to communicate with staff.

Northern's chief operating officer, Matt Rice, said the 'tools' used to get messaging and information out to its train crews rely on fax machines.


The mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, said in response the north 'needs better than an unreliable, fax-driven railway in 2024'.

READ MORE: "You are frightened about coming out": The neighbours 'trapped' in their homes on a pitch black estate

The remarkable exchanges played out after Northern bosses were summoned to attend an emergency meeting of the Rail North Committee, which advises the board of Transport for the North on rail services, infrastructure improvements and all matters relating rail franchises and contract management.

Mr Burnham, who said 155 Northern trains were cancelled across Greater Manchester and the north on Wednesday morning, last week called Northern a 'part-time rail service' over its levels of recent cancellations.

The operator has been told to draw up a new improvement plan -Credit:IYA

Northern was issued with a 'breach notice' for unacceptable levels of performance in July 2024, the meeting heard. The 'contractual breach performance level' on cancellations by an operator is 7 per cent of services. But in Northern's case, from April 28 to July 20, levels of cancellations topped 10 per cent.

The notice required Northern to develop a formal action plan to drive-up its services, which was due to be presented to rail authorities this week. But after the meeting, Mr Burnham, who chairs the committee, told Northern to 'go back and interrogate every aspect of that plan' and draw up a new one.

Mr Burnham asked how it could 'possibly be the case in 2024' that fax machines were still being used.

"People will ask after decades of privatisation, where has the money gone?" he said.

"Where has the money gone in the rail industry given that we are still using 1980s technology to communicate. The north needs better better than an unreliable, fax-driven railway in 2024."

COO Mr Rice said: "It is our challenge to get rid of them - it's in our plans to get rid of them. The tools we use to get messaging and information to our crew rely on faxes, amazingly. We will get there before we are forced to because fax technology, in telecoms terms, turns off."

Andy Burnham -Credit:Getty Images

"People will say, how come we have had three decades of privatisation when money was being poured into the railway and you are still communicating by fax machines in 2024?" added the mayor.

Mr Rice responded: "I think it's a very fair question. Our job is to get rid of them. Our job is to unleash the full potential of emerging technology."

But Mr Burnham said it showed to him that Northern's modernisation plan, like its training plan, was moving 'nowhere near fast enough'. He said: "You could get rid of this stuff tomorrow and put in place IT to support means to communicate differently and I don't understand why you are not doing that - hence we get the late cancellations on a Friday evening.

"If you had speeded up the process, surely we should be able to get earlier notice to the public. So it just looks like a disregard to the travelling public. The railway industry will get round to it when it gets round to it - when the faxes arrive. That's how it will come over."

Managing director Tricia Williams said Northern wouldn't be able to get rid of the fax machines 'tomorrow' without agreement from trade unions - a claim queried by councillors on the committee.

She said: "We have to look at these issues with the depth and complexity they have and the historical issues that we absolutely are going to address. It isn't as simple as turning them off tomorrow because at the moment we have an agreement to use the processes that we have and in order to change that, we do have to change the agreement."

Both Northern bosses apologised for the recent levels of performance, admitting the 'service is not where we want it to be'. They said they were 'acutely aware' of the impact on commuters and pointed to 'historic and complex issues'.

There's a long-standing issue of Sundays not being in the working week in the region. As a result, Northern has been cancelling services in advance ahead of each Sunday. Northern also doesn't have a Rest Day Working (RDW) agreement in place, where train crew can volunteer to work their rest days.

Manchester Victoria -Credit:Adam Vaughan

Levels of staff sickness are also said to be 'significantly higher than pre-Covid levels' and some trains are being cancelled because of double the normal levels of outstanding training for train crew.

Northern, however, was also blasted for issuing 'do not travel' notices on Sundays without having replacement buses in place.

Mr Burnham proposed to make representations to the Government and the Treasury to get a rest day working agreement in place and get a plan for Sundays in place. He said it was of 'critical importance' in the run up to Christmas.

He said the patience of the public was 'wearing very thin or has gone altogether' - a fact he said has meant more people are opting to drive rather than try to take a train.

"In short, we need a new plan from you, and it needs to be much better than what we have seen so far," he told Northern.

"We do ask you to go back and interrogate every aspect of that plan and make sure that what you return to us is the very best that you can do for people who have struggled with an under-performing Northern railway for quite a series amount of time."

A further meeting will be held on November.