Protecting a taxon with a bad reputation
The world has changed tremendously in the last few months and bats are in the spotlights. It is still difficult to assess how people’s views on bats will change on the long-term, but a decrease in appreciation and increase in persecution is currently clearly notable. Bat conservationists around the world have started with putting additional effort into outreach activities as so to inform people about how to live wisely with bats, that bats are not the ones to blame (really!)and …
Sitting with grief in a world of wounds
In conservation, often a choice has to be made for the lesser of two evils. How can conservationists cope with such situations of seemingly inevitable loss? Here, we share a personal contribution from Dr Chelsea Batavia, in which she takes us along in the background story of her recent publication The moral residue of conservation, addressing exactly this issue.
Moral Philosophy: Chelsea Batavia
Sometimes the most we can do to honour other lives is bear witness to their loss — to experience some form of grief
Chelsea Batavia earned her B.A. in 2007 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with a major in Theology and a minor in Music. She completed both her M.S. (2015) and her Ph.D. (2019) in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, where she continues to work as a post-doctoral researcher. Her research draws on a mixture of social scientific and philosophical methods, and her interests concentrate generally on ethics in environmental management and conservation. …
The role of individual researchers
For this exploration, we are experimenting with a different format: a personal contribution about a relevant and (somewhat) controversial topic in conservation. This exploration is a personal account of the role that climate change plays in the daily life of researcher Dr Yann Gager. Yann explains to us what individual researchers can (and should?) do to help the fight against climate change.
Wildlife Research: Yann Gager
As individuals, we have an important part to play by pressuring governments and companies as well as setting an example for those around us.
Yann Gager finished his PhD research on the evolution of social foraging in bats in 2016, within the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Organismal Biology, the University of Konstanz, the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (Radolfzell) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (research station of Gamboa, Panama) and is since January 2018 a research assistant for a company of molecular diagnostic (Leipzig, Germany). His research interests focus on evolutionary ecology, covering the fields of molecular genetics to behavioural and population ecology. …
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