My esteemed friend at IRDA, Tok Muharam, used our picture from a recent trip to Kong Kong Laut fishing village, a village working on creating an economy for sustainable eco tourism in their mangroves, and floating fishing farms. We are on the right. Very interesting work going on at IRDA in mangrove management and fisheriesContinue reading “Mangrove tourism advertisement Iskandar Regional Development Agency (IRDA)”
Author Archives: redmangroveconservation
Oyster fisheries collapse in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay: When Ideology, not science, guides policy
The politics behind the collapse of the oyster fishery in Apalachicola Bay are impossible to ignore. Especially given Tea Party Governor Rick Scott’s appeal to the federal government (Small Business Association or SBA) for emergency funds to bail out the communities with economies devastated by the collapse. Rick Scott has repeated the following mantra againContinue reading “Oyster fisheries collapse in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay: When Ideology, not science, guides policy”
Sea Turtle Nesting Habits & Socioeconomic Indicators in R (part II)
Last time I looked at correlations between actual nest building and socioeconomic variables like population in South Florida’s coastal counties, and per capita income. This time I am looking for relationships between emergence of the same three sea turtle species (loggerhead, green, and leatherbacks noted in their latin names in the code). Emergence means comingContinue reading “Sea Turtle Nesting Habits & Socioeconomic Indicators in R (part II)”
Scenario Planning and Sea Level Rise
Today I sat in on a webinar offered by the National Parks Service on scenario planning for climate change, adaptation, and sea level rise. Coincidentally, the class that I TA for Professor Larry Susskind at MIT just had a lecture/discussion on scenario planning. I want to write a quick and easy piece reflecting on theseContinue reading “Scenario Planning and Sea Level Rise”
Sea Turtle Nesting Habits in R
I pulled together a small and simple data set to have a look at turtle nesting on South Florida’s beaches, and to see if it had any relationships to some easy-to-find socioeconomic data. I looked at nesting habits for greens, loggerheads, and leatherbacks to see if you could create linear regressions with population by county,Continue reading “Sea Turtle Nesting Habits in R”
Biodiversity in a restored salt marsh: managed versus unmanaged habitats
Introduction An ecological restoration is an iterative process where a degraded ecosystem is brought back to its previous, healthier state (Walters 1997; Stankey 2005). It is a multi step, non-linear process that I simplified into the following diagram: The purpose behind a restoration is to restore ecological services that a previously productive ecosystem delivered toContinue reading “Biodiversity in a restored salt marsh: managed versus unmanaged habitats”
Reef Communities in the Dynamite-Cyanide Era: Field notes from Indonesia
I am authoring several blog entries on my summer 2013 field work in villages that depend on coral reefs in Indonesia. This one covers local reef management, destructive fishing, and how we can look at successful villages and try to copy their success in neighboring villages. This work was funded by the MIT Carroll WilsonContinue reading “Reef Communities in the Dynamite-Cyanide Era: Field notes from Indonesia”
Coastal planning for resilience: Indonesian coral reefs and community-based management
Coral reef ecosystems the world over are faced with mounting crisis. The causes range from pollution, rising ocean temperatures, to overfishing. Indonesia, home to 20% of the world’s coral reefs, 75% of the world’s existing corals, 54,700 km of coastline, 6.1 million square kilometers of EEZ, has major incentive to engage in planning for coastalContinue reading “Coastal planning for resilience: Indonesian coral reefs and community-based management”
Publication in community-based coral reef management
An article I wrote while at Oxford was published recently in the Journal of Human Welfare. It uses three cases as comparisons to test the theory of political ecology. Here is a link to the journal and a PDF of my article: http://hwc.gtc.ox.ac.uk/index.php/archives.html The World Bank and other donors have realized the benefits of allowingContinue reading “Publication in community-based coral reef management”
Fiji’s slums: Environmental risk and opportunities for resilience
Over MIT’s extended winter break, I received a grant to travel to Fiji to research the informal sector, or slums, in and around Suva. The United Nations Estimates that by 2030, 69% of Fiji’s population will live in the informal/slum housing, compared to 35% in 1970 (UN 2004). Senior officials that I interviewed in the MinistryContinue reading “Fiji’s slums: Environmental risk and opportunities for resilience”
Dr. Kelly Heber Dunning 