Merry Christmas card with amazing species!

Speaking of creative productions regarding conservation, there are actually quite a lot of creative conservation programs and websites if you look close enough. One that I particularly like to share with you is the ARKive programme. ARKive programme is designed to build a database of endangered species to provide information for both adults and kids (although kids might need their parents to introduce it to them first) to learn more about these species and hence benefit the great purpose of conservation. The website is beautifully designed and well catalogued. You can search the animals that you want to learn more about or you can simply click 'inspire me' underneath the search bar if you want to randomly know something about an endangered animal. You can explore the wildlife of different species, religions or natural habitats. It also has special pictures designed for public holidays, whoo hoo! Since it's the festive season, let's enjoy some of the pictures shall we?

Thanksgiving day (of course, turkeys) 

And Hanukkah day (the website is not only for Christian you see and it's rather art-y, innit) 

What? this is good enough? You shall check out the christmas edition! The best of year! 

This year, Arkive blogs invited plants and animals from both terrestrial and marine system to play the "A visit from St. Nicholas" story. So amazing! Yet because of the copyright issue, i shall not copy all the photos here but I will give you the link to their blog. 

Also Happy New Year with some my own photos! Print your own special Christmas cards from my website if you like it! 

Conservation from a lens of anthropology

When mentioning conservation, what is the first scientific word occur in your mind, ecological monitoring, biodiversity modelling, or genetic evolution? Conservation is a biology-oriented research direction which focus on the conservation of animal species. Mascia et al (2003) proved that conservation and social science are interrelated.

Anthropology focuses on the relationship between human and species, targeting more on human in conservation. Goldman (2003) evaluated the situation of community-based conservation in Tanzania, he promoted to engage local people. Homewood (2012) assessed the economic status of pastoralists in east Africa and questioned the situation that wildlife revenues (e.g. from tourism) is not shared with these citizens by its government. Woodhouse (2012) examined the role of religion in conservation practice of Tibetan people and showed positive association between the two. These researchers all point new directions for conservation to integrate more broad knowledge and be more practical.

Not only these researchers give new thoughts to academic research, they also update research methodologies. Questionnaires and interviews are useful tools in anthropology. Yet in sensitive topics related to crime, what interviewees respond is not always turned out to be true. Nuno and John (2014) reviewed survey tools for asking questions about poaching, both advantages and disadvantages and suggested specific questionnaire techniques. Some of these methods basically use dice, beans and other tools to represent the answer to the questions. 

People in conservation: conservationists in developing countries

Wildlife species are extensively studied by researchers.  Yet another aspect of the conservation research, conservationists, are less studied, although understanding of conservationists might promote conservation research. Sandbrook is a political ecologist who interested in the behaviour, e.g. diet and travel cost of conservationists. His paper found that conservationists have a more sceptical than supportive attitude to the adoption of market instruments in research (Sandbrook et al., 2013). Knight (2013) raised a theory of hope in conservation, stated that both self-empowered hope lead to success of conservation for individuals. And for the whole conservation mission,  hope would be the young generation.

Conservation is based on science and fieldwork, and is often connected with exploration and adventure. In the developed world, it is a well-treated and reputed work and admired by the public. There are many great conservationist in the world, for example, George Schaller, Sir David Attenborough and Jane Goodall who starts their career when they are young. Yet there is a research gap in understanding the living status of conservationists in developing counties, such as China.  And I briefly use two case studies, to identify the main differences of conservationists in China. The contents in this blog is exclusively coming from informal interview with them and followed-up discussions.

Conservation in China is less paid, but more importantly less reputed by society. Dr. Yang is a staff working in an International NGO China branch. He normally spent most of the year on his fieldwork in Sichuan on forest management. Ten years ago, he graduated from a forestry degree in University and spent six year in the Sichuan highland on a Endemic bird. "Those years are good time because I was young and the social peer pressure is less important. Today the old friends and classmates of mine earned good job in the city, owning cars and properties, got married and had children. Sometimes I feel some pressure." He added, "Yet this does not mean that I am not happy, I am satisfied with my job, I love the time I spent in the wild and I feel good about the impact of my job." Yang gets limited salary from this piece of work. Recently he also trades the local collected Chinese medicine plants with people in the cities, which might bring in some extra income for both him and local people.

But the similarity of doing conservation in both developing country and developed country is that, people who chose conservation-related job is trying to combine their hobbies together with their jobs. Dr. Liu work on a big cat research program in a Chinese local nature conservation agency. The income of this agency is relatively higher than its competitors, much higher than the average salary line in Beijing. Liu is from a top university in China, according to him his classmate in university time has already become the new middle-class in China after a few years' work in finance, government and academia. "It is all about passion." Said Dr. Liu, he is a nature lover and climbing expert, he was the team leader of a climbing team and has been to Africa and Antarctic for climbing. He spent eight months in the wild but not this year, as he suffers injury on his back from long time fieldwork on the highland. "It is normal for people in my field to suffer some physical problems, it is unavoidable." Last year he had his son and he decided to spend more time in Beijing. His wife sometimes feel not happy about his work, but is very supportive. She said:" It is pointless to talk about value or impact of his job. It is good enough for someone to find what he really wants to do."

These are stories of contemporary of young generation conservationists today in China. I include my thoughts into the content and listed a different image of conservationists in China. There are many downsides of this job, but everyone is satisfied as long as they love the job nature. But if the society does not appreciate this job enough and there is not enough support from the policy and market side to this field, how far can these young generation conservationists go? However, at least for today, they are a group of fun people, enjoying what they are doing and hoping to make a difference.