Charlie J. Gardner- PhD Biodiversity Management
- Fellow at University of Kent
Charlie J. Gardner
- PhD Biodiversity Management
- Fellow at University of Kent
About
122
Publications
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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (122)
We face interconnected planetary emergencies threatening our climate and ecosystems. Charlie J. Gardner and Claire F.R. Wordley argue that scientists should join civil disobedience movements to fight these unprecedented crises.
Thousands of universities have made climate emergency declarations; however the higher education sector is not rising to the collective challenge with the urgency commensurate with scientific warnings. Universities are promoting an increased focus on sustainability through their research, teaching and their own institutional footprints. However, we...
Our current economic and political structures have an increasingly devastating impact on the Earth's climate and ecosystems: we are facing a biospheric emergency, with catastrophic consequences for both humans and the natural world on which we depend. Life scientists-including biologists, medical scientists, psychologists and public health experts-...
With biodiversity loss escalating globally, a step change is needed in our capacity to accurately monitor species populations across ecosystems. Robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) offer technological solutions that may substantially advance terrestrial biodiversity monitoring, but this potential is yet to be considered systematically. We used a m...
Climate change is driving the rapid reorganisation of the world's biota as species shift their ranges to track suitable conditions, but habitat fragmentation and other barriers hinder this adaptive response for species with limited dispersal ability. Active translocation into newly suitable areas has been suggested as a strategy to conserve species...
The world's understanding of the climate and ecological crises rests on science. However, scientists' conventional methods of engagement, such as producing ever more data and findings, writing papers and giving advice to governments, have not been sufficiently effective at persuading politicians to act on the climate and ecological emergency. To da...
Despite thousands of higher education institutions (HEIs) having issued Climate Emergency declarations, most academics continue to operate according to ‘business-as-usual’. However, such passivity increases the risk of climate impacts so severe as to threaten the persistence of organized society, and thus HEIs themselves. This paper explores why a...
Although first biogeographic analyses of Madagascar's amphibian fauna were provided by Blommers-Schlösser and Blanc (1993), these could only provide first hints at possible patterns due to incomplete taxonomic and distributional knowledge at the time. Since this pioneering work, the combination of increased field exploration, integrative taxonomy,...
We are facing an emergency that encompasses the entire biosphere, with devastating consequences for both humans and the natural world on which we depend. As the climate and ecological crises accelerate, scientists are coming to terms with failings inherent in the modes of action we have used to engage society about their ongoing and future effects....
Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot, yet its wildlife is under immense threat from habitat loss and other anthropogenic pressures. To tackle this, Madagascar has implemented new environmental legislation, including rapid expansion of the protected area network. Many new protected areas permit sustainable extraction of natural resources by local co...
Tropical cyclones can cause severe destruction of coral reefs with ecological consequences for reef fish communities. Ocean warming is predicted to shorten the return interval for strong tropical cyclones. Understanding the consequences of cyclone impacts on coral reefs is critical to inform local-scale management to support reef resilience and the...
Earth faces a climate emergency which renders conservation goals largely obsolete. Current conservation actions are inadequate because they (i) underplay biodiversity's role in maintaining human civilisation, which contributes to its marginalisation, and (ii) rely on false assumptions of how to catalyse transformative change. We suggest a paradigm...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global recession and mass unemployment. Through reductions in trade and international tourism, the pandemic has particularly affected rural economies of tropical low- and middle-income countries where biodiversity is concentrated. As this adversity is exacerbating poverty in these regions, it is important to exami...
1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need
to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence-based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis.
2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we
are failing to prepare our students to make an...
1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence‐based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis.
2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...
The health of the natural environment has never been a greater concern, but attention to biodiversity loss is being eclipsed by the climate crisis. We argue that conservationists must seize the agenda to put biodiversity at the heart of climate policy. Gardner and colleagues argue that efforts to conserve biodiversity should capitalise on current m...
The practice and science of conservation have become increasingly interdisciplinary, and it is widely acknowledged that conservation training in higher education institutions should embrace interdisciplinarity in order to prepare students to address real-world conservation problems. However, there is little information on the extent to which conser...
While the participatory management of small scale fisheries has been widely promoted, we have limited understanding of the factors influencing its effectiveness. Here, we highlight lessons learnt from the implementation of Madagascar's first locally managed marine area (LMMA), drawing on our insights and experiences as staff of a comanaging nongove...
The conservation of biodiversity—and the vital ecosystem services it generates—is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces, yet the field faces drastic funding cuts as society realigns its priorities in the face of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Here, we argue that diverting attention from conservation would, however, increase the risk of further glob...
Intact forests provide diverse and irreplaceable ecosystem services that are critical to human well-being, such as carbon storage to mitigate climate change. However, the ecosystem functions that underpin these services are highly dependent on the woody vegetation-animal interactions occurring within forests. While vertebrate defaunation is of grow...
Madagascar possesses a unique avifauna characterized by high endemism rates at species and higher taxonomic levels, but little is known about the behaviour, diets and interspecific interactions of many species. We present a number of opportunistic observations of Malagasy birds collected during 201 2-201 5, including a foraging association between...
Cambridge Core - Natural Resource Management, Agriculture, Horticulture and forestry - Species Conservation - edited by Jamieson A. Copsey
en Impact statement: Conservation planners must use systematic decision‐making tools and evidence to guide their decisions. https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13124
Protected areas (PAs) are our principal conservation strategy and are evolving rapidly, but we know little about the real-world management and governance of new forms. We review the evolution of Madagascar's PA system from 2003 to 2016 based on our experience as practitioners involved. During this period PA coverage quadrupled and the network of st...
The documentation of scorpions requires limited specimen sampling.
Museums of Natural History holding the specimens considered during the present study.
Endemic species and subspecies of scorpions described since the 1990s.
The taxa in the new Bernieridae endemic family and the number of birds killed which are documented in the Noe4D database.
Description of endemic species and subspecies of birds, mammals, and scorpions over time, and number of specimens of endemic birds and mammals. Specimens and taxa are based on Noe4D (upper portion of graphs) and GBIF (lower portion). Overall, the grand majority of specimens consists of killed specimens, with the non-killed specimens gaining momentu...
Background to the work
For centuries taxonomy has relied on dead animal specimens, a practice that persists today despite the emergence of innovative biodiversity assessment methods. Taxonomists and conservationists are engaged in vigorous discussions over the necessity of killing animals for specimen sampling, but quantitative data on taxonomic tr...
The documentation of scorpions requires limited specimen sampling.
(PDF)
Description of endemic species and subspecies of birds, mammals, and scorpions over time, and number of specimens of endemic birds and mammals.
Specimens and taxa are based on Noe4D (upper portion of graphs) and GBIF (lower portion). Overall, the grand majority of specimens consists of killed specimens, with the non-killed specimens gaining momentu...
The taxa in the new Bernieridae endemic family and the number of birds killed which are documented in the Noe4D database.
(The MZFAA took place from April 1929 to May 1931).
(PDF)
Museums of Natural History holding the specimens considered during the present study.
(PDF)
Endemic species and subspecies of scorpions described since the 1990s.
(PDF)
Madagascar, among the world’s poorest countries, depends heavily on small-scale fisheries for food security and income. Many of its fisheries have transitioned from subsistence- to market-oriented in recent decades, driven by the emergence of new export markets. In this chapter, we consider the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Sc...
The Malagasy carnivorans (Eupleridae) comprise seven genera and up to ten species, depending on the authority, and, within the past decades, two new taxa have been described. The family is divided into two subfamilies, the Galidiinae, mongoose-like animals, and the Euplerinae, with diverse body forms. To verify the taxonomic status of Galidiinae sp...
Although the importance of regulating and provisioning services provided by mangroves is widely recognised, our understanding of their role in the maintenance of terrestrial biodiversity is patchy globally and largely lacking for many regions, including conservation priorities such as Madagascar. We carried out the first multi-site bird inventory o...
While the guide draws on the expertise of the region's ornithologists in a way that few others ever do, the authors have wisely avoided trying to stuff too much information from the larger volume into it. Nevertheless, they do offer a useful and comprehensive text for each species that is well thought out and covers only the key elements of identif...
Human migration may negatively impact biodiversity and is expected to increase in future, yet the phenomenon remains poorly understood by conservation managers. We conducted a mixed-methods investigation of a contemporary migration of traditional fishers in western Madagascar, a country which has been expanding its protected area system through the...
Multiple-use protected areas, in which sustainable levels of extractive livelihood activities are permitted, play an increasingly important role in the global protected area estate, and are expected to rise in prevalence. However, we know little about their effectiveness at conserving biodiversity. We surveyed bird and reptile communities in three...
Ethical conducts are gaining importance in times of increased globalization and research efforts. This paper presents a code of ethical conduct for researchers who plan to publish their studies with the journal Madagascar Conservation & Development. This paper will be subject to continuous adaptations and discussions.
Abstract Despite an increasing recognition of the ecosystem services provided by mangroves, we know little about their role in maintaining terrestrial biodiversity, including primates. Madagascar’s lemurs are a top global conservation priority, with 94 % of species threatened with extinction, but records of their occurrence in mangroves are scarce....
Recent studies have underlined the importance of climatic variables in determining tree height and biomass in tropical forests. Nonetheless, the effects of climate on tropical forest carbon stocks remain uncertain. In particular, the application of process‐based dynamic global vegetation models has led to contrasting conclusions regarding the poten...
The day gecko genus Phelsuma provides an ideal group in which to investigate the behavioural adaptations that permit survival in urban ecosystems, because it spans the spectrum of degradation tolerance from obligate forest specialists to human commensals. We opportunistically recorded foraging observations of Phelsuma modesta leiogaster in a house...
Context Integrated conservation decision-making frameworks that help to design or adjust practices that are cognisant of environmental change and adaptation are urgently needed.
Objective We demonstrate how a landscape vulnerability framework combining sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and exposure to climate change framed along two main axes of con...
The species-level diversity of Madagascar's lemurs has increased hugely over the last two decades, growing from 32 species in 1994 to 102 species in 2014. This growth is primarily due to the application of molecular phylogenetic analyses and the phylogenetic species concept to known populations, and few previously unknown lemur populations have bee...
There are insufficient resources available to manage the world's existing protected area portfolio effectively, so the most important sites should be prioritised in investment decision-making. Sophisticated conservation planning and assessment tools developed to identify locations for new protected areas can provide an evidence base for such priori...
Southern Madagascar’s Spiny Forest is one of the most important and threatened biological regions in the world; a unique and spectacular living treasure. Home to an other-worldly vegetation and hundreds of animal and plant species that occur nowhere else, it is little known both in Madagascar and the world at large.
Produced in collaboration with...
Protected areas are our principal conservation strategy, but require surveillance and monitoring for effective management. Many are threatened by shifting cultivation, a practice that is difficult to detect accurately with satellite imagery and is generally carried out clandestinely in isolated areas. Since 2010, oblique aerial photography has been...
Protected areas are usually conceived and managed as static entities, although this approach is increasingly viewed as unrealistic given climate change and ecosystem dynamics. The ways in which people use land and/or natural resources within and around protected areas can also shift and evolve temporally but this remains an under-acknowledged chall...
The interactions between primates and their snake predators are of interest because snakes have influenced the evolution of primate visual systems and predation has driven the evolution of primate behaviour, including group living. However, there are few accounts of primate–snake interactions in the wild. We report an incident from Northwest Madaga...
The creation and management of protected areas is our principal approach to conserving biodiversity worldwide. Management and governance models for these diverse institutions have become more pluralistic in recent decades, moving away from the traditional exclusionary protected area model that has proliferated historically. Indeed, most new protect...
For a scientific journal to make a tangible contribution to conservation, it must make efforts to overcome the ‘researcher-practitioner divide’ – an increasingly-recognised phenomenon that limits the utility of science to the real-world practice of conserving biodiversity. The divide manifests itself in numerous ways: conservation practitioners do...
Since the 1980s Madagascar has experienced increasing international attention promoting conservation and development, attracted by its biodiversity hotspot status. The island has consequently been a testing ground for new approaches to environmental governance including integrated conservation and development projects, community-based natural resou...
Ensuring the sustainability of bushmeat consumption
is critical for both biodiversity conservation and poverty
alleviation in tropical developing countries, yet we know little
about the role of hunting and bushmeat consumption in the
daily lives of rural communities.We provide the first detailed,
qualitative examination of bushmeat hunting activiti...
The Near Threatened Henst's goshawk Accipiter henstii is endemic to Madagascar and is widely distributed in the east, west and north of the country, but has been recorded only rarely from the subarid south and southwest where its occurrence remains unconfirmed across large areas. We present an observation of a breeding pair from Ranofoty in the Fih...
Understanding the spatial distribution of any endangered species threatened by anthropogenic
drivers is important if effective management is to be employed. Here we present the results of
a comprehensive range survey of the Madagascar Spider Tortoise, Pyxis arachnoides, with resulting
species’ spatial area of occupancy data applied to a GIS databas...
We recommend that the following priority actions be included in a Proposed Action
Plan for the Spider Tortoise (Pyxis arachnoides). 1) Eliminate the illegal harvest and commerce of
Spider Tortoises by increasing the awareness, motivation, and capacity of local authorities and law
enforcement agencies, lobbying the government, and monitoring interna...
Local and co-management approaches are increasingly adopted in marine conservation to increase compliance with rules, which is essential for effective management. Here, we evaluate an innovative approach to increasing compliance with community laws restricting access to permanently closed marine reserves within a locally managed marine area in sout...
From April 2009 to November 2010, a social marketing campaign was designed and implemented in
southwest Madagascar to encourage fishers to give up destructive fishing methods and to improve the
awareness and enforcement of local laws (dina). The campaign, which targeted local leaders and fishers,
was designed using results from formal and informal...
Here we present the first bird species list for Ambondrolava (23°15’41” S, 43°37’42” E), a mangrove and freshwater wetland complex in dry southwest Madagascar. Sixty-nine species from 36 families were recorded, of which 14 species are endemic to Madagascar and 13 are endemic to the Madagascar region. Two globally threatened species were recorded: C...
Questions
Questions (4)
Poor peer-review hinders scientific progress, but appears common. Professionalising the provision of this service (i..e. paying reviewers) would help ensure quality and compensate overstretched researchers for their time, so what is preventing it?
While aerial surveillance is widely used to monitor wildlife, monitoring of deforestation is usually carried out by remote sensing of satellite images. WWF in Madagascar have been using aerial photography to monitor deforestation in protected areas in real time, but I have not been able to find any literature on this method from other countries - does anybody know of any programmes that use aerial photography for this purpose?
Drylands can have extremely rich floras (e.g. Cape floristic province); has aridity itself contributed to high speciation rates? If so, please provide references.
It seems intuitive that degradation (e.g. logging) will cause greater changes to microclimates and microhabitats in humid forest than in dry forests, because there is naturally more light penetration in intact dry forests. Is there any empirical evidence that dry forest species are therefore less sensitive to degradation?
