Everything you wanted to know about wildland forest fires but were afraid to ask

Regrowth after a high-severity forest fire. The past three decades of science that has found fires, including large high-severity fires, are an ecologically essential part of forest ecosystems and create highly biodiverse wildlife habitat.

A team of fire ecologists released a report this week titled “Everything You Wanted To Know About Wildland Fires” summarizing the state of knowledge about forest fires on public lands. This report comes just days after the US Congress passed the Wildfire Suppression Funding and Forest Management Activities Act as part of the federal omnibus … Read more

New Study Will Help Giraffe Conservation

A group of Masai Giraffes in the Tarangire Ecosystem.

How do you reverse a population decline and save an endangered species? This is the central question in conservation biology and it is the core of my scientific work. A population of animals like giraffes is almost always made up of smaller groups of animals that we call subpopulations. The animals in the subpopulations are … Read more

How many species of Giraffe are there?

Some people might be confused by the media announcing that there are “now” four species of giraffes, followed shortly thereafter by the IUCN press release that there is one species of giraffe (with nine subspecies) now considered to be Vulnerable to Extinction on the Red List.  The IUCN currently recognizes one species of giraffe with … Read more

Drought Disrupts Wildebeest Migration

Picture of Wildebeest and her newborn calf in Tarangire National Park.

In Summary: Drought has left wildebeests and zebras of the Tarangire Ecosystem in northern Tanzania without food or water on their calving grounds, disrupting their normal migration and forcing them to give birth near the Tarangire River. Tanzania is experiencing a drought after the short rainy season failed to deliver much-needed rainfall during recent months. … Read more

Big Data for Big Animals: Part 3

Wild Nature Institute Giraffe Research Uses Big Data Tools Part 3: Velocity, Volume, and Variety in Tall Data for Giraffe Conservation Giraffes are big animals, so scientists have turned to big data solutions for giraffe conservation.  Researchers from the Wild Nature Institute are conducting one of the largest-scale big mammal studies ever undertaken by studying … Read more

Big Data for Big Animals: Part 2

Randomly selected giraffe torso detection results. Note that even giraffes which are small in the image or giraffes which are partly occluded by bushes, are found successfully.

Giraffe are the tallest animal on earth, so naturally scientists have turned to big data solutions for giraffe conservation.  Researchers from the Wild Nature Institute are conducting one of the biggest large mammal studies ever undertaken by studying births, deaths, and movements of more than 2,000 giraffe across a 4,000 square kilometer landscape in the … Read more