Illegal wildlife trade can threaten biodiversity and economic development. Criminal enterprises may add wildlife products to their list of illicit goods by using established trade routes, networks, and individuals. On the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, killing of sea turtles and removal of their eggs is commonplace. However, beyond conservation NGOs reporting evidence of illegal take, little is known about this activity. Through semi-structured interviews with law enforcement, community members, NGOs, and illegal harvesters, alongside anecdotal information and observations, we aimed to understand the motivations for illegal take. To cross-reference these findings, we assessed sensitivities surrounding illegal harvesting by asking the general public sensitive questions using the randomized response technique; a method used to elicit sensitive information whilst insuring the anonymity of respondents. We included a questionnaire to establish if differences in demographics affected the probability respondents would admit to a turtle-related crime. Our findings identified a rare example of illegal extraction of a wildlife product driven by motivations that were not exclusively livelihood based. We found the majority of illegal take was undertaken by relatively few individuals, dependent on narcotics. The most cited reason for illegal take was that turtle eggs could be used to procure drugs. Law enforcement was under resourced, and informants reported that prosecutions were rare. Local people preferred to purchase rather than harvest eggs suggesting the trade is supply-driven. Those interviewed did not generally regard the subject of illegal harvest as sensitive. Low education levels, high unemployment rates, and marginalization of certain groups may increase susceptibility to narcotics. Although substance misuse and addiction appear to drive illegal trade, associated poverty and marginalization may explain why drug dependency is so prevalent in Caribbean Costa Rica. Increased work opportunities and drug rehabilitation programs may assist in reducing illegal take of turtle eggs on nesting beaches.
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SE@K at NSCE Summer Meeting
Several members of SE@K attended the NSCE summer meeting 26th-28th June in Swansea.
Diana Cole gave a presentation on “Bayesian Identifiability in Ecological Models”
Byron Morgan gave a talk entitled “Bucking the trend”
Fabian Ketwaroo talked about “Modelling roost count data”
Milly Jones talked about “Bayesian multi-species hierarchical distance sampling: Density estimation of
vertebrate species in Betampona Madagascar”. Her talk was runner-up in the student presentation competition.
Thomas Cheale’s talk was on “A General Framework for Balancing Privacy and Variance in Randomised
Response Methods”
Alex Diana talked about “Modelling DNA-based survey data”
Ioannis Rotous’ talk was on “Bayesian nonparametric models for batch-mark data”
They also enjoyed the sights in Swansea and the Welsh countryside
STEM for Britain 2023
Alex presented his work on modelling metabarcoding data at the 2023 STEM for Britain Competition
His poster described the novel modelling framework, introduced in the corresponding paper, and showed results from a data set on ingested DNA from a survey in China.
Spring term 2023 SE@K Thursday lunches
Spring term starts with the second half of Python training by Lena :-). Plan for the term in terms of sessions (and cake) below!
- 19th of January Session : Python training II – Lena; Cake : Lena & Daniel
- 26th of January Session : Daniel’s grant; Cake : Diana
- 2nd of February Session : HMM paper – Diana; Cake : Eleni
- 9th of February Session : HMM paper – Daniel; Cake : Oscar
- 16th of February Session : HMM paper – Takis (guest lecture); Cake : Alex
- 23rd of February Session : Variable selection/Hypothesis testing – Alex; Cake : James
- 2nd of March Session : HMM – Fred (guest lecture); Cake : Fabian
- 9th of March Session : Parameter redundancy – Daniel’s take; Cake : Tommy
- 16th of March Session Swedish register data – Bruno&Eleni ; Cake : Milly
- 23th of March Session : Swedish register data – Bruno&Eleni; Cake : Daniel
- 30th of March Session : Spatio-temporal models – Oscar; Cake : Diana
- 6th of April Session : eDNA data – Alex; Cake : Eleni
Se@k weekly lunches
The SE@K group are meeting weekly for research lunch and socialising 🙂
Autumn term
First week was about introductions and a tasty lunch at Dolce Vita!
Second week was about staff talking about their research interests, with Diana talking to the group about parameter redundancy.
Third, fourth & fifth week were about research students talking about their research, with Tommy using randomised response techniques to estimate the proportion of people in the group who like/liked their supervisor (!), Milly talking about distance sampling, Ioannis talking about Bayesian non-parametrics and ABC and Lena talking about predator-prey models!
The term went on with learning about Gaussian processes from Alex, about PDEs from Eduard and about Python from Lena!
Welcome to new PhD student Milly Jones
Welcome to new PhD student Milly Jones who is supervised by Diana Cole and Eleni Matechou.
She is working with data collected by Madagascar Fauna and Flora Group (MFG), investigating the biodiversity in Madagascar. She will develop multi-species temporal models for the distance data collected.
Picture shows Milly at the board explaining her PhD project to the SE@K group during our Thursday lunch time meetings.
Eleni attended invited workshop on network models for ecological data
The workshop, in Montpellier, France, was organised by Matt Silk and Olivier Gimenez and was attended by around 12 experts in statistical models for ecological data and in network modelling.
rGAI: An R package for fitting the generalized abundance index to seasonal count data
Emily Dennis, Calliste Fagard-Jenkin and Byron Morgan have created an R package for fitting the generalized abundance index to seasonal count data. The work has been published in Ecology and Evolution in the paper “rGAI: An R package for fitting the generalized abundance index to seasonal count data”.
The paper can be found at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.9200
The R package is available at: https://github.com/calliste-fagard-jenkin/rGAI
Statistical Ecology Conference
Members of SE@K group attended ISEC from 27th June to 1st July. Some went to South Africa to attend in person others attended virtually.
Eleni, Alex and Ioannis gave a half day workshop on Modelling environmental DNA data.
Eleni presented work on Capture recapture models with heterogeneous temporary.
Alex gave a talk on A unifying modelling framework for metabarcoding data.
Rachel talked on Model selection for integrated population models: selecting age structure with multiple data types.
James’ presentation was on Accounting for varying spatial scales in the production of UK butterfly abundance estimates.
Diana talked about Bayesian Identifiability in Ecological Models.
Fay presented work on Assessing the success of reintroductions whilst accounting for multispecies populations.
Bryon talked about Fitting dynamic occupancy models to very large occurrence data sets using hidden Markov models.
Obituaries for Philip North
Philip North, 21st May, 1949 – 4th June, 2021
It is our sad duty to let you know of the death of Philip North, who died on the 4th June 2021, aged 72. Philip made a huge contribution to the development of the EURING Analytical Meetings, acting as editor of the first five proceedings.
He obtained his PhD on Statistical methods in ornithology from the University of Kent in 1979. This involved the development of novel analyses of various BTO datasets, in particular devising a method of cluster analysis to determine bird territories and enhancing various aspects of survival estimation. His influential 1978 paper in Biometrics used a variety of methods, including logistic regression and point process modelling, to investigate the effects of weather on the survival of grey herons. In addition, through his enthusiasm and research highly productive links were established between the Universities of Kent and St Andrews and with the Centre d’Ecologie Fontionnelle & Evolutive, CNRS Montpellier, which, together with the BTO are continued by the current members of the Statistical Ecology at Kent research group.
Philip was an expert ornithologist and a keen birder. For example, we recall that he was one of a small number of observers who recorded the first sighting of a pallid swift in Britain and Ireland Thus he was well placed to understand both the statistical and ecological aspects of avian ecology. This combination of ornithology and statistical modeling made him an ideal contributor to the EURING Analytical Conferences, as did his role as secretary of the Mathematical Ecology Group of the British Region of the Biometric Society and the British Ecological Society.
Innovative discussions and published proceedings became key features of these EURING meetings. The first two were held in Wageningen in 1986 and at Sempach in 1989 and Philip edited the resulting proceedings single-handed, as well as jointly editing the proceedings of the meetings held in Montpellier (1992), Patuxent (1994) and Norwich (1997; see https://euring.org/meetings/analytical-meetings/analytical-meeting-proceedings ) . This was an important and sustained contribution, which appreciably advanced the theory and application of relevant aspects of statistical ecology, with wide application to both theoretical and applied problems. It also showed how data gathered by the bird ringing/banding schemes coordinated through EURING could be collected and analyzed in ways that enhanced their ecological value. It is particularly noticeable how the content of the conference papers evolved over Philip’s period as editor. The first meeting focused on the use of individual datasets to estimate specific parameters, mainly survival. By the 1997 meeting there was greater interest in model selection and applied studies, with the first signs of the developments in data integration that would follow over the next 20 years.
Philip’s wife Monica died in 2008. They are survived by their children, Robin, Geoffrey and Melissa to whom we extend our deep condolences.
An obituary has recently appeared in JRSSA https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12767
Byron Morgan and Stephen Baillie