Wildlife Conservation Society

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild places. The WCS Fiji Program works with a range of partners to enable Fijian communities to better manage their natural resources. The program places particular emphasis on improving coastal management in the ecologically connected, highly biodiverse Vatu-i-Ra Seascape. This award supports the WCS-Fiji program to disseminate the results of key studies on the effectiveness of conservation interventions, implement coastal and ecosystem-based management plans in three provinces, and improve enabling conditions for biodiversity conservation and sustainable fisheries management.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild places. WCS’s Global Marine Program works to safeguard eleven globally significant seascapes containing the world’s most threatened marine biodiversity. The purpose of this award is to monitor the effectiveness of conservation interventions in four priority geographies, including Indonesia, Melanesia, Western Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean. WCS and partners have established a set of core indicators and practices for measuring the health of coastal and marine ecosystems, the pressures on them, the social and ecological responses to conservation interventions, and the benefits to coastal communities provided by healthy and productive ecosystems. With this support WCS and partners are conducting triennial social and ecological monitoring, and evaluating the impact of coastal and marine interventions to meet fisheries and biodiversity goals.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild landscapes and seascapes. WCS plays a critical coordination and knowledge-production role in the Foundation’s efforts to Identify the key barriers to scaling intact forest conservation and test innovative pathways for overcoming or removing these barriers. The intended outcomes of the award include: synthesizing the best available science to inform the experimentation and exploration portfolio, documenting experiences and lessons learned across a portfolio of grants, and convening grantees and other relevant partners in late 2017 for a mid-term workshop and again in late 2018 for an international symposium on intact forests. Finally, WCS is organizing technical input for a broader strategy for global intact forests conservation based on the experimentation and exploration phase.

Wildlife Conservation Society hosted a meeting that convened 20 key experts on intact forests with a wide range of views, expertise, and institutional positions. The meeting participants created a document that included: a suggested vision and mission for the initiative, a strategic roadmap of priorities for two major programs of work, and governance structure options.

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is an international conservation organization that works to save wildlife and wild places. WCS’s marine program is working with fisher communities, and government and non-governmental partners to strengthen fisheries management within two protected coastal areas in Cuba – Delta del Cauto Wildlife Refuge and Alejandro Humboldt National Park. These areas host important marine biodiversity, mangrove and seagrass habitats, and have received little management assistance to date. At both sites WCS employs a participatory approach to assess the ecological and social systems connecting the protected areas and fishing grounds and to identify mechanisms to improve management. This project further demonstrates the potential for community-based fisheries management approaches to support the national effort to incorporate cooperatives within Cuba’s state-controlled fishing sector.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild landscapes and seascapes. WCS is working in partnership with several organizations to implement the Global Sharks and Rays Initiative’s (GSRI). The intended outcomes of the award are 1) effective coordination of the partnership and 2) support for policies and effective conservation management in key regions.

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is an international conservation organization that works to save wildlife and wild places. WCS’s Global Marine Program works to safeguard eleven globally significant seascapes containing the world’s most threatened marine biodiversity. This award supports applied research on the sustainable use of coral reef fisheries. The work builds on previous social and ecological research that has led to several critical findings: 1) fisheries production is influenced by good management more so than by climate disturbances, 2) unsustainable fishing is associated with changes in fish and reef communities that influence reef health and resilience, and 3) the identification of three climate refugia areas in the Western Indian Ocean: the Kenya-Tanzania border, the Tanzania-Mozambique border, and Northwest Madagascar. Building on these findings, WCS is undertaking a three-year course of work, targeting the three climate refugia areas, to assess the social and ecological processes that affect the sustainable use of reef fisheries. Research findings will be integrated into the conservation and management programs of WCS and its research partners. This research directly benefits WCS’s site-based fisheries management projects by providing the data and analyses required to conduct science-based decision-making, as well as WCS’s regional monitoring efforts.

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is an international conservation organization that works to save wildlife and wild places. WCS’s marine program in Madagascar partners with communities in three seascapes, Toliara in the southwest, Nosy Be in the northwest, and Antongil Bay in the northeast, to develop and implement sustainable strategies to reduce threats to coastal wildlife and habitat. This project builds upon the national legal framework for community-led management, to mitigate over-exploitation of fisheries, sustain marine and coastal ecosystems, and improve poor living standards of coastal communities. WCS is working with communities to improve enforcement activities, monitor interventions, and diversify income and livelihoods. While national policies support local fisheries management, capacity in Madagascar remains concentrated within conservation NGOs. This work includes focused training in fisheries management for local government partners and post-graduate scientists.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild landscapes and seascapes. The project is engaging government, communities, and key companies to implement strategies to create incentives for conservation action at multiple scales. The intended outcome of the award is reduced pressure from agro-industrial expansion on high biodiversity forest landscapes in Cambodia and Lao PDR.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild landscapes and seascapes. The project is engaging a potentially influential network of conservation champions within government, the media, and high-wealth individuals to encourage greater political commitment at the highest levels of government to combat wildlife trafficking in Vietnam. WCS is also working in partnership with government agencies to execute a more effective wildlife trafficking prevention program. The intended outcome of the project is the disruption of major trafficking networks, which will reduce illegal trade in wildlife in the Lower Mekong and globally.

Wildlife Conservation Society is a global organization with a long history of science-based work in the Andes targeting the conservation and sustainable use of waters, wetlands, and basins, especially in terms of impacts presented by infrastructure development. This project completes system design and training for regional, science-based management of valuable fisheries in Loreto. As a result, fisheries policies and management are becoming more economically and environmental sustainable and gaining the potential to influence watershed and infrastructure planning in Loreto and management systems across the Peruvian Amazon.

WCS will address two key challenges to combating trade of the protected shark and ray species in Indonesia. Activities will include work with the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries to review early experiences implementing new regulations that ban all hunting and trade of manta rays within Indonesia and identifying key weaknesses limiting its effectiveness; and support MMAF in undertaking test cases against the major shark and ray traders.

The Wildlife Conservation Society aims to improve fisheries management in the Sunda-Banda Seascape of Indonesia. The project will: (1) strengthen governance and build models of sustainable management of marine protected area (MPA) and Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) networks across two provinces in eastern Indonesia; (2) support innovative management strategies for more than 20 nearshore fisheries; and (3) build the policy, regulatory and economic environments at regional and national levels necessary to support local management efforts.

The Wildlife Conservation Society works globally to reduce the rates of wildlife and natural habitat loss and sustain the ecosystem services critical for local people. It has worked quietly and effectively in Ecuador for nearly two decades. This project is directed at strengthening local governance, and incorporating climate-smart conservation strategies into provincial land-use and development plans, and generating an environmental, social, and governance baseline for the Alto Napo Basin watershed.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild landscapes and seascapes. The purpose of the grant is to plan a global initiative to conserve the world’s sharks and rays. Grant funds will support efforts to design and develop a multi-tiered, collaborative, global strategy that, over the next ten years, aims to secure the future of these vulnerable fishes.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, founded in 1895, has the clear mission to save wildlife and wild places across the globe. With a commitment to protect 25 percent of the world’s biodiversity, they address four of the biggest issues facing wildlife and wild places: climate change; natural resource exploitation; the connection between wildlife health and human health; and the sustainable development of human livelihoods. This grant will support efforts to improve the ability of local fishing communities in western Madagascar to effectively participate in local fisheries management, and to strengthen the governance frameworks that enable them to do so.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is dedicated to preserving the Earth’s wildlife and wild landscapes and seascapes. The purpose of the grant is to create a “dashboard” of marine indicators for monitoring the state of coastal and marine ecosystems, pressures on them, the effectiveness of conservation responses, and the benefits to coastal communities provided by a healthy and productive ecosystem. It will be deployed in priorities seascapes with an initial emphasis on the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Madagascar.

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is a US based NGO whose mission is to save wildlife and wild places around the globe. WCS will quantify the economic value of ecosystem services provided by the Southern Highlands in Tanzania and Nyungwe forest and Rugezi Marsh in Rwanda. Project staff will then demonstrate the costs and benefits of managing biodiversity and natural capital within the context of agricultural and hydropower activities at these sites.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) works in the Fiji's he Vatu-i-Ra Seascape to conserve marine biodiversity and sustain fisheries productivity. The seascape encompasses 7,500 square miles of forests, mangroves, seagrass beds, reefs, deep channels, and seamounts. It is one of the Pacific’s last great wild places. Fisheries are a major source of food and income to these communities. However, growing pressures on the seascape from unsustainable fishing to logging and expanding agricultural activities combine to threaten its forests, rivers, and reefs as well as the vital connections between them and the services they provide to human and wildlife communities. The grant will support expanding and strengthening local level management; developing provincial level coastal management plans; and strengthening the scientific understanding of the effectiveness of these and other management interventions. The goal is to strengthen resilience of this coastal marine ecosystem to the effects of climate change and other pressures and improve the quality and abundance of marine resources for Fiji’s people and economy.

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Global Marine Program works to safeguard eleven globally significant seascapes containing the world’s most threatened marine biodiversity. The grant will support activities to address key issues that currently limit adoption of locally appropriate strategies for sustaining coral reefs in the presence of climate change. WCS will refine the scale and predictive power of its current global climate stress model, broadening the applicability of the model beyond the Western Indian Ocean. The model will inform better adaptation decisions to avoid worsening environmental conditions and exacerbating poverty. The results of these models will be incorporated into national and local marine spatial planning processes.

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is a global organization with a long history of science-based biodiversity conservation work in the Andes, where it directs significant attention to the role of indigenous peoples in management and sustainable use of watersheds and forests. The grant will strengthen the capacity of Tacana and Lecos Apolo Indigenous Peoples to address pressing threats associated with development policies and projects, and to craft and widely disseminate a strong narrative that expands appreciation by a broader society of the benefits that accrue from Indigenous land management.

Wildlife Conservation Society is a global organization with a long history of science-based work in the Andes targeting the conservation and sustainable use of waters, wetlands, and basins, especially in terms of impacts presented by infrastructure development. This project will develop and support implementation of a policy framework for managing valuable fisheries in the Peruvian Amazon by analyzing all fisheries data in Loreto Department and quantifying catches by location. It will also establish a wetlands classification scheme, and develop models of impacts of infrastructure on aquatic ecosystems at the large basin scale.

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Arctic Beringia Program works to advance wildlife conservation amid a rapidly changing climate and expanding energy development in Arctic Beringia. Wildlife Conservation Society will conduct an assessment of the most critical needs and opportunities for conservation in Arctic Beringia. This grant will produce an assessment of key opportunities and strategies for conserving Arctic Beringia, and include case studies based on programmatic activities in the region to demonstrate how an approach functions in practice.

The Wildlife Conservation Society will develop knowledge and tools to strengthen environmental governance in Cambodia and Laos and encourage government and private sector actors involved in agro-industrial development to shift policies and practices in ways that reduce pressures on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Agro-industrial plantations are expanding rapidly in Cambodia and Laos. Much of this development has degraded natural resources and ecosystems upon which local people have depended, and caused local people to be denied access to, or displaced from, areas over which they historically have exercised rights. The rapid growth of agro-industrial concessions threatens to undo many past conservation successes and is becoming a defining issue for conservation in the region. WCS will investigate the patterns of investment in this sector, including documenting the companies developing the agro-industry sector (from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and China), and their joint venture partners in Cambodia and Laos.

To update the 2005 report, Myanmar: Investment Opportunities in Biodiversity Conservation.

To enhance conservation of three key landscapes in the Albertine Rift countries of Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda (over three years).

To support community-based natural resource management and sustainable livelihood initiatives in Madagascar's MaMaBay ecosystems (over three years).

To support REBIOMA, a global network of biodiversity data for reef to ridge conservation planning, monitoring and management (over three years).

To conserve wetlands and strengthening biodiversity conservation capacity in Cuba (over three years).

To build consensus on key recommendations for addressing climate change adaptation for conservation in the Albertine Rift region.

To test the ability of new remote sensing tools to map and monitor disturbances caused by illegal logging within protected areas in Northeast Madagascar.

To support an ecosystem-based management approach to Fiji's Vatu-i-Ra Seascape (over two years).

To implement a range of spatial, technical and temporal adaptation tools across the spectrum of predicted climate impacts on the west coast of Madagascar (over three years).

To adapt conservation planning to climate change and to build management and research capacity in a regional system of protected areas in the Central-Western Colombian Andes (over three years).

To support and strengthen the global conservation program.

To build and implement tools for socially appropriate and scientifically sound adaptation to climate change at coral reef sites in the Coral Triangle, Western Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean (over three years).

To establish a long-term climate and ecological monitoring network across the protected areas of the Albertine Rift region (over three years).

To support sustainable biodiversity conservation of the capstones of the Annamite Mountains in Cambodia and Laos (over three years).

In support of efforts to strengthen a protected area network in Burma's northern forest complex (over three years).

To secure and conserve priority landscapes in the Albertine Rift region (over three years).

To consolidate indigenous participation for conservation in the Greater Madidi landscape of Bolivia and Peru (over three years).

To enhance biodiversity conservation, ecosystem health and human livelihoods in the protected areas of the Greater Limpopo Trans-frontier Conservation Area and the agro-pastoral systems that surround them.

To expand scientific research for conservation decision making in Madagascar using the REBIOMA database (over three years).

In support of the consolidation of an integrated strategy for conservation and sustainable natural resource use in Madagascar's Antongil Bay Landscape (over three years).

In support of research on coral reef vulnerability and resilience to climate change in order to guide the establishment of marine protected areas in Madagascar (over three years).

In support of conservation of Ciénaga de Zapata wetlands and building capacity for management of Cuba's protected areas system (over three years).

In support of an assessment of the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Albertine Rift region (over two years).

In support of building scientific capacity for implementing a regional system of protected areas in central Colombia (over three years).

To support biodiversity conservation in the Annamite Mountains in Lao PDR and Cambodia through management planning, biodiversity surveys and monitoring (over three years).

In support of regional collaboration and NGO capacity building in the Albertine Rift region (over three years).

In support of planning, capacity building and coordination for landscape-level conservation across four nations of the Albertine Rift (over three years).

In support of strengthening community natural resource management in the Greater Madidi Landscape, Bolivia and Peru (over three years).

In support of biodiversity surveys and capacity building in the Cameroon-Nigeria border region (over two years).

For technical exchange and applied research in support of the management of Cuba’s Zapata Swamp National Park and watershed (over three years).

To consolidate scientific research for conservation decision making in Madagascar using the REBIOMA database, in collaboration with Princeton University (over three years).

In support of an integrated strategy for conservation and sustainable natural resource use in Antongil Bay, Madagascar (over three years).

To support future conservation leaders in Papua New Guinea by providing technical training in biological research (over three years).

For a collaborative effort to develop a global conservation agenda.

To establish a regional protected area system in the Cauca Valley of the Colombian Andes with a supporting biodiversity conservation program (over three years).

For environmental education activities around forest protected areas within the Albertine Rift countries of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In support of biodiversity conservation in the Annamite Mountains in Lao and Cambodia (over three years).

In support of biodiversity conservation in the Madidi region of Bolivia.

To support forest conservation in protected areas within the Albertine Rift countries of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (over three years).

For a field-based analysis of alternative strategies to reduce hunting and wildlife trade in tropical forests (over two years).

To support capacity building for biodiversity conservation in Nigeria and Cameroon (over four years).

To support international conservation activities.

To support a learning portfolio on locally managed marine conservation areas (over three years).

To strengthen regional capacity to manage conservation programs in central Africa (over three years).

To support a field training program in conservation biology in Papua New Guinea (over three years).

To strengthen the capacity of the Tanzania National Parks Authority (over four years).

To develop the Foundations of Success program.

To re-establish conservation programs in areas of the Albertine Rift Mountains affected by war and refugee movements (over three years).

To support an integrated conservation program in Laos and Myanmar (over three years).

To support a Northern Andes training and research program (over three years).

To study the effects of helicopter logging on forests and wildlife in Sarawak, Malaysia.

To support biodiversity assessments and capacity building for conservation professionals in Tanzania (over four years).

To support the Central Africa program focussed on forest inventory, community forest management, and to train young scientists (over four years).

To support local participation in biodiversity surveys in southeast Tibet.

To develop the professional capacity of local NGOs and the Department of Environment and Conservation in Papua New Guinea (over three years).

To support integrated programs of conservation research, training, wildlife management, and community education in Laos and Myanmar (over three years).

To support an integrated program of conservation, professional training, wildlife management, and research in Sabah and Sarawak (over three years).

To support an integrated conservation leadership program in the northern Tropical Andes to provide training and field research support for NGOs, students, and staffs of government agencies that monitor natural resources (over five years).

To support a workshop in Indonesia of international and Indonesian researchers and institutions to build collaborative action on conservation and development policy.

To support an African forest symposium.

To support a program conducted by five conservation and scientific organizations to foster long-term conservation of Papua New Guinea's biological diversity (over three years).

To support an integrated program of conservation education, training, institutional development, and wildlife management in the far eastern Himalayan region of southwestern China and northern Laos (over three years).

To support a conference on conservation of biological diversity in Papua New Guinea.

To support research and training in wildlife conservation in Malaysian Borneo (over three years).

To establish regional conservation programs in the Neotropics, the Central African forest biome, Mesoamerica and the Caribbean Basin, and Southeast Asia (over three years).