General

In this 3-year project, we aim understand how societies, landscapes, ecosystems and Protected Areas have responded to climate change and societal use, to better understand how they may respond in the future. To do this, we will focus on the temporality, spatiality & complexity of interactions and interdependencies of social-ecological systems in north-western Tanzania over the last 300 years. Local livelihoods range from intensive agriculture to livestock herding & hunting-and-gathering, coupled with employment in tourism, conservation, or mineral extraction. Pressures from global climate change, rapid population growth, competing land use (including wildlife conservation), and new 'governmental' regimes pose major threats to livelihoods, their sustainability & resilience to future socio-ecological shocks. We will use a cross-disciplinary approach integrating archaeological, environmental, archival, modern land use & remote sensing data, with collaborative modelling of future land use & land cover change scenarios, to identify past and possible future drivers of change & sources of resilience; generate guidelines for land use planning; build research capacities in Sweden (post-doctoral position) & Tanzania (collaborating researcher) in sustainability studies; strengthen community awareness of and engagement in these issues. Hosted by Uppsala University, the team will involve experienced & junior researchers from Sweden, Tanzania & the UK.

General

The Alto Purs region of Peru, comprised of the Alto Purs National Park, the adjacent Purs Communal Reserve (a buffer zone of titled indigenous lands), and two protected reserves for isolated indigenous communities, harbors world-class levels of mammal and bird diversity (194 and 510 species, respectively) and globally endangered and threatened species: the black spider monkey (Ateles chamek), giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), jaguar (Panthera onca), and the arapaima (Arapaima gigas), among the worlds largest freshwater fish that has been extirpated from all but the most remote parts of Amazonia. This project will support conservation efforts in Alto Purs by strengthening the La Novia Conservation Alliance between Perus park service, local indigenous communities, and non-indigenous townspeople, and protect threatened species by promoting income alternatives to unsustainable and illegal resource extraction. Activities include: community training and fieldwork to increase the population of the Yellow-spotted river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis), assessing populations of the giant river otter and arapaima fish to inform future management strategies, training and equipping community vigilance committees to more effectively respond to illegal resource extraction by outsiders, implementing the regions first community lake management plan, and providing support for a new research station and eco-tourism.

General

The goal of this three-year project is to increase knowledge of elephant populations in southern Myanmar, generating evidence on which to base an elephant landscape management plan, and the tools for local stakeholders to implement the plan. Project objectives include: 1) establish routine monitoring of key elephant sub-populations and threats; 2) improve human-elephant conflict (HEC) management and reduce HEC events to under 5 annually; 3) mitigate the threat of poaching; and 4) with stakeholders draft and implement an elephant landscape management plan. Activities include: 1) collaring 10 elephants to support land-use planning and HEC management, and provide real-time early warnings to villages; 2) establish, train and support Community Elephant Guards to respond to and document HEC and poaching threats; 3) work with local communities to create information networks and build on anti-poaching messages of previous campaigns; and 4) analyze monitoring data, consult with stakeholders, and draft an elephant landscape management plan. This project will contribute to the survival and increase the population and habitat of wild Asian elephants in Myanmar.