We have a ‘department’ of ICON Scientists presenting at the upcoming SCBO Conference in New Zealand! Go along to their talks, and tweet them so we at home can follow along!

Presenters

Matthew Selinske: Tues 4 July 1:30pm Symposium ‘Intergenerational stewardship for long-term conservation impact’

Future-proofing privately protected areas through intergenerational stewardship

Georgia Garrard: Tues 4 July 2:30 pm Symposium ‘Intergenerational stewardship for long-term conservation impact’

Intergenerational stewardship goes both ways: Do children influence the conservation attitudes of their parents?

Alex Kusmanoff: Wed 4 July 12pm Session ‘People and Conservation’ 

What to say and what not to say: When talking conservation, some frames speak louder than others

Jeremy Ringma: Wed 4 July 4.45pm Session ‘Wildlife Conservation’ 

Strategic planning of conservation fencing.

Abstracts

Matthew Selinske and Georgia Garrard are both presenting in the Symposium ‘Intergenerational stewardship for long-term conservation impact’

Intergenerational stewardship for long-term conservation impact

Intergenerational stewardship is the transmission of conservation values and knowledge from one generation to the next. Family and peer relationships, often guided by customary institutions, help synchronize stewardship values and impart knowledge to understand and manage biodiversity. The process is critical for the long-term conservation of biodiversity and sustainability, and has been observed in multiple contexts including indigenous land management, private land conservation, urban households and within organisations. Increasing uncertainty in social-ecological systems (population shifts to urban centers, climatic impacts on ecosystems, extinction of experience) may disrupt the maintenance and transmission of intergenerational stewardship. We examine the dynamics of intergenerational stewardship and the mechanisms by which programs can support both its maintenance and transmission. This symposium seeks to: 1) understand how stewardship values develop over time and are transferred to the next generation; 2) examine case studies of intergenerational stewardship across various contexts; and 3) identify mechanisms that support the transmission of stewardship values.

Matthew is presenting:

Future-proofing privately protected areas through intergenerational stewardship

Privately protected areas are increasingly used to secure conservation goals. Our research on covenant programs in south-east Australia finds that the security and conservation effectiveness of PPAs is impacted by the temporal dynamics of these systems including changing ecology, ownership, and capacity. Intergenerational stewardship may play an important role in the continuity and effectiveness of PPA management and protection. We argue that PPA organisations have an important role to play in facilitating intergenerational stewardship.

And Georgia is presenting:

Intergenerational stewardship goes both ways: Do children influence the conservation attitudes of their parents?

Intergenerational stewardship goes both ways: Do children influence the conservation attitudes of their parents. Extinction of experience is thought to be a major barrier to environmental stewardship, especially in cities. We found that primary school children who were immersed in a local native grassland as part of an environmental education program showed positive attitudes towards the grassland and developed a sense of care for it. Here, we explore whether these positive attitudes affected the attitudes and engagement of their parents.

Alex is presenting in the session ‘People and Conservation’:

What to say and what not to say: When talking conservation, some frames speak louder than others

How we frame conservation is crucial for building support. Different frames work better for different audiences, but triage is always bad.

Jeremy is presenting in the session ‘Wildlife Conservation’: 

Strategic planning of conservation fencing

In the past 20 years fencing has been increasingly used as a tool in conservation providing an expensive but highly secure mechanism for separating biodiversity from threatening agents. Throughout Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii, conservation fences are so numerous they can be thought of as part of a network. In these cases, systematic conservation planning can be used to prioritize new fencing projects using complementarity principles in a manner similar to protected area networks. We compare different approaches to prioritising conservation fencing based using examples from Australia and Hawaii. Approaches to fence network prioritization differ based on threat types and the need to translocate threatened species into fences versus protecting in situ biodiversity. In each case, systematic approaches improved species protection at rates many times greater than the current uncoordinated, ad-hoc approach to the allocation of new fencing projects.