We have built the UW Center for Conservation Biology into a global player that is now on the cusp of becoming one of the most effective conservation monitoring entities in the world. Demands for our services have soared, both nationally and internationally. As we look ahead, we have put together a five-year plan that positions the CCB to more effectively meet these demands, while globally advancing several critical conservation initiatives in ways never before possible.
We have identified the following specific objectives to help us fully achieve these goals:
- Equipment upgrades to increase capacity to accommodate the rapidly growing demands for our wildlife monitoring and forensics programs by wildlife authorities and Non-Government Organizations around the world.
- Strategically add a few key personnel to our wildlife monitoring program, increasing our capacity to deploy teams more quickly and to train scientists at home and abroad.
- Ensure our ability to uncover major strategies used by crime syndicates in the burgeoning illegal ivory trade. This will also facilitate transferring control of policing these crimes back to African nations where it belongs. Specifically, we aim to continue our collaboration with Interpol, analyzing the origins of all major ivory seizures over the next 5 years. Our Center has thus far underwritten the majority of costs for these analyses in an effort to keep the investigations moving forward. Poor countries are happy to participate but find it difficult to pay for the analyses; some countries may even use cost as a vehicle to thwart such analyses; many wealthy nations still consider wildlife crime too low priority to justify paying for the analyses. Keeping these analyses moving as expeditiously as possible is the most certain way to advance the fight to contain wildlife crime syndicates driving the illegal ivory trade, thereby returning stability back to some of the most biodiverse countries in Africa.
- Maintain research and development efforts to advance our noninvasive conservation methods. These include:
- Validate methods to extract immunoglobulins, as well as DNA markers of the Major Histocompatability Complex from scat, providing immediate and long-term measures of disease pressures facing wildlife.
- Validate techniques to measure Persistent Organic Pollutants such as PCB, PBDE, Dioxins, and DDE excreted in scat.
- Integrate field sampling techniques with Resource Selection Models used to determine natural and anthropogenic factors that attract or repel wildlife to particular areas. Use these findings to design Mark Recapture methods that better capitalize on the uniquely high “capture” efficiency of detection dogs, providing more accurate, cost-effective estimates of population size over large landscapes.
- Increase throughput for scent matching large numbers of samples down to the individual, reducing costs of our services to vital programs with lean budgets.
- Apply our forensics methods to track the origins of products such as selected timber species and tiger parts in the illegal wildlife trade.
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We greatly appreciate your support.