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The community is invited to a launch event for an extension of the TOKA Hotline from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Carabao Brewing in Hagåtña.
The event will feature live local music, a promotional video premier, and a chance to meet conservation officers.
Officials will also unveil an extension of the community conservation initiative by the Guam Department of Agriculture and the University of Guam Sea Grant community.
The TOKA hotline was launched in 2019 as a community conservation initiative, which allows members of the community who notice potential hunting and fishing violations and forest fires to notify conservation officials.
New model for infectious disease could better predict future pandemics New model for infectious disease could better predict future pandemics
Share Increased human-animal interactions lead to the emergence and spread of zoonotic pathogens, which cause about 75% of infectious diseases affecting human health. In this photograph, wild zebras graze alongside a pastoralist and cows in Kenya. Credit: James Hassell/Smithsonian
In the midst of a devastating global pandemic of wildlife origin and with future spillovers imminent as humans continue to come into closer contact with wildlife, infectious-disease models that consider the full ecological and anthropological contexts of disease transmission are critical to the health of all life. Existing models are limited in their ability to predict disease emergence, since they rarely consider the dynamics of the hosts and ecosystems from which pandemics emerge.
An owl not seen in over a century makes a brief return then vanishes again
by Romina Castagnino on 13 May 2021
Researchers have confirmed the first sighting of a rare owl last seen in Borneo nearly 130 years ago.
The rediscovery of the Bornean Rajah scops-owl (Otus brookii brookii) came during a chance encounter on May 4, 2016, seven years into a long-term research project on Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia.
The researchers say the history of speciation in the region could justify naming the Bornean Rajah scops-owl as its own species, distinct from the Sumatran subspecies, O. b. solokensis.
The Bornean bird is under pressure from deforestation and climate change, which threaten to shrink its habitat and drive it further upslope.
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By 05/05/2021
A new study that used satellite imagery to monitor the movements of cows and tule elk in the Point Reyes National Seashore could help the park manage grazing conflicts and monitor the spread of Johne’s disease.
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, collected satellite images along with GPS collar data and in-person observations from 2010 to 2017 to track the animals. They found that cattle were the primary drivers of the elks choice of habitat, and that the elk avoided cattle and tended to stick to their own grazing areas on and off ranchland.
Still, the study’s lead author, Lacey Hughey, a former U.C. Santa Barbara researcher who now works for the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, said that won’t necessarily always be true. “That can always change as you get major climate change, or more cattle, or a lot more elk,” she said.
Maui Is No Longer Safe For Hawaii s Endangered Birds, Biologists Say - Honolulu Civil Beat
New refuges are sought as scientists battle disease-carrying mosquitoes in the face of a changing climate. Reading time: 9 minutes.
Mosquitoes have eliminated the last safe place for endangered forest birds on Maui, and the only solution may require releasing millions more mosquitoes.
Climate change has made once-uninhabitable higher altitudes now amenable to mosquitoes that infect the kiwikiu, or Maui parrotbill, with avian malaria at greater rates. Transmission of the disease has driven the bird population down to around 150, a number that places them at the edge of extinction, scientists said.