Really fun to see our work on the cover of @ConservationSP yesterday: conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.c…

Overall, we argue that the satellite record and local ecological knowledge should be treated as unique sources of data, each with specific and systematic merits and flaws, rather than as a "check" for one another. We provide an example of how they might be quantitatively combined

We show that in clear-cut areas, people's perceptions and the satellite record generally agree, no surprise However, in areas with high rates of selective cutting of trees, branches, and roots, they differed, with the satellite data showing gains where people reported losses

My co-conspirator Haji Hamad and I spent ~8mo asking hundreds of people in Pemba, Tanzania about how they thought their local mangrove forests had changed over the past year and compared this to satellite-observed change in 20m pixels identified as mangrove over the same time.

Paper out today in @ConservationSP looking at how local community and remotely sensed observations of forest change can systematically align and deviate with different forms of forest change. doi.org/10.1111/csp2.13247

Our finding: We repurpose epidemiological models to show that the shape of spread is largely determined by just two parameters: 1) The rate of social learning (spread from person to person) 2) The rate of independent learning (probability any actor adopts in any time)

The problem: The uptake of conservation initiatives can take a variety of nonlinear shapes. This makes it difficult to tell if a project is on-track and to make decisions accordingly

✨Research out today in @OneEarth_CP✨ We show that epidemiological models can accurately infer the mechanism of adoption of conservation initiatives and forecast the trajectory of uptake within populations 👉doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.202…

Working with Dr Adam Sykulski of @ImperialMaths, we aim to pair cutting-edge spatiotemporal outlier detection methods developed for used in economics, with emerging remote-sensing methods capable of detecting changes in forest cover at the scale of individual trees.

Super excited to receive funding from @TurnerKirkTrust to look at how increasing weather variability is affecting encroachment into Nepal's community forests

Really excited to participate in the panel on 'Scaling-up Community-Driven Conservation Through Local and Indigenous Land Tenure' at @WorldBank #landconf2024. Amazing job by everyone: @carlosvirtual @pilesofsquid @JustiNowakowski @sebcos & Sushma Shrestha. @IC_CEP

Among other things, we found that people who think local mangrove loss is from within their community support conservation. But those blaming outsiders prefer more harvesting.

We visited communities with varying levels of mangrove loss in recent years, levels of mangrove theft from outsiders, and levels of community-based conservation.

We set out to test this process in the 'real world', by conducting a participatory mapping activity with 430 people in 43 communities...this took me and H. Hamad nearly a year to complete

As people observe natural resource loss and impacts like sea level rise, should we expect them to engage more with conservation? Or maybe less? We investigate this in Pemba, TZ, showing that it depends on who's causing forest loss. Just out today 🚨 conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.c…

Additionally, we show a process by which out-group learning and cultural group selection promote both the enforcement of harvest limits and the setting of those limits (MAH in this figure) at or below the optimal level (MSY in this figure).

Among other insights, this paper shows how weak boundaries (access rights) can limit effective internal governance by creating a moving target for the optimal limit on in-group harvests, leading to abandonment of their enforcement