News & Events

News

[25.08.2011]

Surveying Orangutans with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle!

Lian Pin Koh is part of a team of researchers, led by Dr. Serge Wich of PanEco, University of Zurich, who have been awarded a National Geographic Society Waitt Grant. This funds will support the development of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system for monitoring Sumatran orangutan populations.

All great ape species are endangered due to rapid habitat loss and hunting. For effective conservation, it is essential to monitor their numbers on a regular basis. Typically, this involves costly ground surveys (~US$ 250,000 per cycle per species), which are beyond the operations budget of most local NGOs. Therefore, there is a need to develop more cost-effective monitoring methods. 

The NGS funding will allow us to adapt and further improve upon a UAV system to conduct aerial orangutan nest surveys in Sumatra. This small and portable aircraft, which has an on-board high-resolution digital camera, can be programmed to take photographs along GPS-guided route and alttitude defined by the user.

If successful, this new approach will effectively replace ground surveys of orangutan nests located in the forest canopy. And it will allow researchers to survey orangutan populations at negligible operational costs and at much higher frequency than currently possible. This method could also potentially be adapted for surveying other species, which would lead to a dramatic decrease in wildlife monitoring costs.

Further Information
National Geographic Society Waitt Grants

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[23.08.2011]

Massimiliano Schwarz received the PLANAT research award 2010 for his PhD thesis "Hydro-mechanical characterization of rooted hillslope failure: from field investigations to fiber bundle modeling" which was elaborated in the frame of the CCES project TRAMM.

PLANAT is an extraparlamentary commission dealing with natural hazards in Switzerland and works at strategic level to improve preparedness for natural hazards.

Congratulation to Massi for this recognition of his dedicated work!

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[04.04.2011]

Ebrahim Shahraeeni was the recipient of the best student poster award at the Interpore meeting that took place in Bordeaux.

The Procter and Gamble Student Award is meant to recognize outstanding student poster presentations at the annual InterPore conference.  Up to two awards will be made each year

http://interpore2011.u-bordeaux.fr/awards.html

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[15.03.2011]

Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation annual meeting in Tanzania

The annual meeting of the ATBC will take place in Arusha, Tanzania from 12-16 June 2011, and will be hosted together with the Africa Section of the Society for Conservation Biology (see http://www.atbc-scbafrica2011.org/). Jaboury Ghazoul is pleased to be on scientific selection committee of this conference.

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[08.02.2011]

New web-based tool developed! SpeciesExtinctionCalculator

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[10.01.2011]
Congratulations to Prof. Dani Or for the AGU Fellow award

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