(Credit: Yathin S. Krishnappa / Wikimedia)

Powerful Tool to Fight Wildlife Crime Unveiled
(Phys.org)
A free high-tech tool to combat the wildlife poaching crisis was offered to grassroots rangers by a consortium of conservation organizations at the World Conservation Congress. SMART, the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, is designed to help park and community rangers fight illegal wildlife trade by identifying poaching hotspots, improving rapid response measures and calculating the impact of anti-poaching efforts in order to maximize results. MORE

Banff Sets Live Traps, Hoping to Avoid Bunny Population Explosion
(Calgary Herald)
A spate of recent rabbit sightings in Banff, Alberta, has led Parks Canada to set live traps in a bid to avoid any chance of a population boom as seen in neighboring Canmore over the past decade. Officials say they believe the rabbits in Banff are escaped pets, not feral rabbits that have made the 25-kilometer journey from Canmore where that municipality is fighting to get rid of an estimated 2,000 rabbits. MORE

Salazar, Ashe Announce More Than $29 Million to Expand Refuge System, Conserve Wetlands
(Department of the Interior)
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe announced that the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission has approved the investment of nearly $11 million in revenue from the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund to add an estimated 10,640 wetland acres to seven units of the National Wildlife Refuge System. The commission also approved $18.4 million in federal funding to conserve more than 95,000 acres of wetlands and associated habitat. MORE

Canadian Bear Biologist Shares Techniques for Managing Grizzly-Human Conflicts
(Billings Gazette)
As grizzly bear populations continue to rise in the greater Yellowstone region and in other habitat areas, bear managers are sharing information about what works — and what doesn’t — in their ongoing efforts to keep both bears and people safe. In Alberta, Canada, those efforts include using specially trained dogs to haze bears, adapting old shipping containers for use as bear-proof storage sheds and even airdropping stockpiled roadkill to the high country as a spring food source for grizzlies. MORE

A Crop Dividend: Restored Bird Habitat in New Jersey
(The New York Times – blog)
Farmers and wildlife advocates don’t often see eye to eye; each can look at a field and see widely divergent possibilities. Yet by encouraging farmers to plant fields of flowers, an innovative program in New Jersey is helping to finance the rehabilitation of wildlife areas for endangered species of birds. The crop is sunflowers, and sales of sunflower seeds, bagged and sold as birdseed by the New Jersey Audubon Society, have financed the conversion of a 70-acre tract of state-owned land into a grassland habitat. MORE

New Monkey Species Identified in Democratic Republic of Congo
(The Guardian)
A new species of monkey has been identified in Africa, only the second time such a discovery has been made on the continent in 28 years. The identification of the monkey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is significant, as identification of mammals new to science is rare. Lesula (Cercopithecus lomamiensis) has a naked face and a mane of long blond hairs, and is described by the researchers who identified it as shy and quiet. MORE

Suburban Lions Present a Conundrum in Africa
(The New York Times)
The vision of lion prides roaming endless African savannas, unaffected by people, is a romanticized image that survives in just a few very large protected areas. Lions play important roles in ecosystems and bring in millions of dollars from safari tourism, but they are hard to live with and potentially very dangerous.  The African lion is listed as a threatened species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Only 20,000 to 40,000 wild lions remain. MORE

Bolivian Park Declared One of Most Diverse Places on Earth
(MSNBC)
Madidi National Park, in northwest Bolivia, may be the most biologically diverse place on Earth, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.  A list of species living there was released this week in a presentation at the World Conservation Congress in Jeju, South Korea. The report follows the release of the 100 most threatened species, some of which live in Madidi National Park. According to a WCS release, a full 11 percent of the world’s bird species live in the park. MORE

Protected Areas for Wildlife Expand to Size of Russia
(Reuters via Chicago Tribune)
Protected areas for wildlife have expanded worldwide to cover a land area the size of Russia in the past two decades, but far more parks and reserves are needed to meet a 2020 target, a study showed. The sharp growth, as governments expanded existing areas and declared new ones, was needed to help slow a loss of animal and plant species and to conserve eco-systems which serve vital functions such as purifying water and storing greenhouse gases, it said. MORE