Yikes! I bought two 40-pound bags of sunflower seeds last week, and each was $30 — on sale — $10 more than last year's price. My reaction to the cost was similar to how I feel when I go food shopping. Talk about sticker shock.
I don't know how that's going to affect you, but for those like me, who use at least 200 pounds a year at several feeders, it's going to lead to menu alterations.
The skyrocketing cost is not limited to the much-desired sunflower seeds; even the lowly wild-bird mix prices are rising.
Customers at Wild Birds Unlimited in Olympia are noticing the difference, and their questions have prompted the business to create a handout offering reasons for the cost increases (a 20-pound bag of black-oil sunflower at WBU is $18.99), according to sales associate Kathy Boston.
The increase is the result of several variables, including:
• Birdseed such as sunflower, safflower and millet are sold on the commodity markets just like corn and soybeans and are just as vulnerable to real and perceived factors that drive that market.
• Prices often fluctuate depending on good or bad harvests. There has been major crop damage in various regions around the world.
• Higher fuel prices have driven up the cost of shipping.
• The anti-trans-fat trend means that more foods are cooked in sunflower oil (example: Frito Lay potato chips) because the seeds are rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids.
• Because of the demand for biofuels, more acres of corn and other grains are being planted, squeezing out thousands of acres previously used for sunflowers.
All of this while birdwatchers' demand for birdseed is increasing.
Those hardest hit by these large increases will be older people on fixed incomes, people whose lives are enhanced by the world of birds at nearby feeders.
If you're looking for alternatives to seed feed, forget bread crumbs. It's not nutritional and will not supply the high-energy calories the birds need to stay warm.
Suet (high-energy animal fat) may be a cheaper alternative, depending on what happens to the suet prices.
Cheaper seeds usually mean mixtures, and much of that goes on the ground. Changing seed types also may mean a shift in species; sunflower seeds draw the greatest variety of birds to your feeder, in part because of its oil content, in part because the thin shells are easy to crack.
And there's no help from the Internet on this issue. I found a 50-pound bag for $23.67 but the shipping cost was $33.45.
So for birders, this is the season of our indecision on avian menus. A diet may be in the offing. It won't hurt the birds, but it might lessen our joy.
On the bookshelf
For the kids, consider Jim Arnosky's "Wild Tracks" ($15, Sterling, ages 4-8), a guide to nature's footprints with fold-out life-size prints of many animals. It's an excellent way for children to compare their feet or hands with the prints, and animal prints in relationship to other animals. The written information is in short blocks.
Susan Mitchell's "Kersplatypus" ($17, Sylvan Dell, ages 4-8) is an excellent introduction to Australia's platypus. One young one is lost; the other creatures try to help it find its niche — land, tree, water, sea — and in the process teach readers about animals' adaptations. The book comes with helpful information, pictures and activities in the back.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Binding kids' hands on airliner possibly assault, judge says
A judge said Friday enough evidence exists to move forward with charges for a man accused of binding the hands of a teenage girl and attempting to do the same to her sister during a Southwest Airlines flight.
The attorney for 29-year-old Ezra Wallace called the incident on a San Diego-to-Denver flight Aug. 1 distressing but said it was "horseplay," pointing to the lack of screaming from the girls.
Wallace faces two counts of assault.
Wallace is free on $5,000 bail. U.S. Magistrate Judge Kristen Mix on Friday outlined several conditions for his release, including ordering Wallace to refrain from alcohol and submit to breath tests and urinalysis.
In a written statement, Wallace said he had been drinking and "never harmed anybody or had any bad intentions."
Wallace and the two sisters, ages 9 and 16, were seated in the same row on the flight. Officials said Wallace did not know the girls or their brother, 10, who was seated behind them. The siblings were traveling without a parent.
In a preliminary hearing, FBI special agent Joel Nishida said Wallace tried to take pictures of the younger sister seated in the aisle seat but she covered her face. The girl was identified only as F.G.
During the flight, the older sister said Wallace took out some strips of white athletic tape from his backpack and used a figure eight pattern to tie her hands together with the tape.
When she asked him what he was doing, "he gave out a creepy laugh," Nishida testified.
The younger sister managed to free her sister, tearing the tape off using her teeth. Afterward, Wallace allegedly tried to tape the younger sister's hands to those of her older sibling. A flight attendant who saw what was happening then moved the two girls to a different row with their brother.
During cross examination by defense attorney Brian Leedy, Nishida acknowledged that there was no commotion, other passengers did not react, and that the flight attendant who moved the girls only said that he felt what they were doing was not appropriate.
Nishida said the investigation was prompted by an e-mail from the girls' mother three days after the flight, not a report from the airline.
Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Ashley Rogers said flight attendants are trained to spot threatening situations but added that passengers also need to alert them.
"The incident, while distressing, could also be defined as horseplay and the remedy taken on the plane treated it exactly as that," Leedy told the judge, arguing the charges should be dropped.
Nishida said Wallace told him he had half a pint of vodka, including two shots just before boarding the plane.
In a written statement read in court by Nishida, Wallace said he has a playful nature and that he vaguely remembers taping the girl's hands, adding that it was "all in good fun."
Investigators have said the two-month lag between the incident and the filing charges this week was because of "investigative work."
Wallace's next hearing is scheduled for Friday.
The attorney for 29-year-old Ezra Wallace called the incident on a San Diego-to-Denver flight Aug. 1 distressing but said it was "horseplay," pointing to the lack of screaming from the girls.
Wallace faces two counts of assault.
Wallace is free on $5,000 bail. U.S. Magistrate Judge Kristen Mix on Friday outlined several conditions for his release, including ordering Wallace to refrain from alcohol and submit to breath tests and urinalysis.
In a written statement, Wallace said he had been drinking and "never harmed anybody or had any bad intentions."
Wallace and the two sisters, ages 9 and 16, were seated in the same row on the flight. Officials said Wallace did not know the girls or their brother, 10, who was seated behind them. The siblings were traveling without a parent.
In a preliminary hearing, FBI special agent Joel Nishida said Wallace tried to take pictures of the younger sister seated in the aisle seat but she covered her face. The girl was identified only as F.G.
During the flight, the older sister said Wallace took out some strips of white athletic tape from his backpack and used a figure eight pattern to tie her hands together with the tape.
When she asked him what he was doing, "he gave out a creepy laugh," Nishida testified.
The younger sister managed to free her sister, tearing the tape off using her teeth. Afterward, Wallace allegedly tried to tape the younger sister's hands to those of her older sibling. A flight attendant who saw what was happening then moved the two girls to a different row with their brother.
During cross examination by defense attorney Brian Leedy, Nishida acknowledged that there was no commotion, other passengers did not react, and that the flight attendant who moved the girls only said that he felt what they were doing was not appropriate.
Nishida said the investigation was prompted by an e-mail from the girls' mother three days after the flight, not a report from the airline.
Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Ashley Rogers said flight attendants are trained to spot threatening situations but added that passengers also need to alert them.
"The incident, while distressing, could also be defined as horseplay and the remedy taken on the plane treated it exactly as that," Leedy told the judge, arguing the charges should be dropped.
Nishida said Wallace told him he had half a pint of vodka, including two shots just before boarding the plane.
In a written statement read in court by Nishida, Wallace said he has a playful nature and that he vaguely remembers taping the girl's hands, adding that it was "all in good fun."
Investigators have said the two-month lag between the incident and the filing charges this week was because of "investigative work."
Wallace's next hearing is scheduled for Friday.
Stone Takes Control
By Lesley O'Toole
On Monday, Oliver Stone's hotly anticipated George Bush biopic, W, starring Josh Brolin as the beleaguered President and Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, premiered to a Los Angeles audience. The celebrity-heavy, predictably partisan gathering (Jodie Foster, Barbra Streisand, Al Pacino) was billed quite particularly as a "special screening" by Lionsgate, distributor of the Oscar-winning Crash and producer of the Emmy-winning Mad Men. Verdicts at the (not a premiere) party were reportedly positive across the board. Domestic media - provincial newspapers, web sites and/or college newspapers - also made quietly appreciative noises when shown the film the next day.
But then it all began to unravel. "The film is a mess," said The Los Angeles Times; Variety branded it "unable to achieve any aims higher than as a sort of engaging pop-history pageant and amateur, if not inapt, psychological evaluation" while The Hollywood Reporter damned it with the faint praise, "it's a gutsy movie but not necessarily a good one". Ouch. At least they acknowledged that there was little of the proselytising they'd expected from Stone, famed still as the liberal beatnik who propagated wild conspiracy theories in 1991's JFK but gave Nixon a sympathetic ride in 1995.
Years ago Stone might have been angrier about his critics who seem unwilling to acknowledge his highly unconventional Hollywood feat: a film filmed, edited and released in less than a six-month span for about $30m (18m), less than the average major studio marketing budget per film. "I am never surprised. I've been humbled by this business for years. I got more money to make Nixon and JFK but that was in the mid-90s and here we are in 2008 and I'm getting quite considerably less money to make my third political movie. These are the rules of the game and I accept. But this is also my third political film where I have complete freedom. This is my vision, with my collaborators. I don't have a committee going, 'Oh well, you've got to change this'. Keeping my freedom was really crucial for me. No one interfered. That's very rare, that's the nature of this business. Political visions are tampered with. It was very hard to get this through and I'm proud of it."
Stone launched into W with something of a vengeance after his previous passion project, Pinkville - about My Lai, the 1968 Vietnam massacre and its subsequent cover-up and court martial, which was due to star Bruce Willis - fell apart at United Artists (then run by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner). "They endured like superheroes, to fight to get the truth out," asserts Stone of the military personnel who agitated to apportion blame where it was due. It is a theme which apparently resonates with the new, softer, Stone whose third wife, Chong, and their 12-year-old daughter, Tara, were frequent visitors to the set. One of his sons from his second marriage, a smiley handsome teen, is the production's videographer and a family vibe prevails.
He insists that W has an audience despite the hostile barrage of "who cares?" blogs which have appeared as footnotes to some of the film's sneering reviews. "I do think people like him, especially in this part of the country, real bible-belt country. Bush is seen as a guy who's got the common touch. He garbles his words, he talks like one of them. He's not the brightest bulb on the block and people like that. They didn't like Gore, they didn't like Kerry. Bush has the touch. We've met. He's a great salesman."
Before our meeting this week, I called in to see the director at work on set last July. Stone was darting about his tiny Oval Office set resplendent in white plastic booties over his shoes, laughing, playful and defying his age (62, the same as Bush). "Yesterday was fun, today is hard work," he exhorts all on set during a protracted day shooting a cabinet meeting, which produced the now-infamous "axis of evil" soundbite. Two reviews at least have cited the scene as straight out of Saturday Night Live, the long-of-tooth American sketch comedy programme itself reinvigorated this season by the scorching return of ex-staffer Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. Yet no one has credited Oliver Stone as the maverick he actually is. I ask later if he always has this much fun on set. "All the time. I had a lot of fun on Natural Born Killers. I was laughing the whole time. I loved U-Turn. I laughed a lot on that."
Critics aside, what can British audiences expect of W? "Hopefully an entertaining interpretation of Bush done in a way that is original and fresh. People don't know that much about the guy. He is a Wizard of Oz. He's manufactured, he's pulling the curtain back. And we are being honest to what we have read. We read a lot and we feel that these things happened. We don't know the exact dialogue. We're taking 10 different interpretations of what happened. And at the end of the day our dialogue [by old Stone cohort and collaborator Stanley Weiser (Wall Street)] is better. We've made it better, sharpened the arguments."
But Stone is receiving few props Stateside for his tireless pursuit of veracity, attracting instead criticism for focusing - as he did on 2006's World Trade Center, his biggest hit in years - on the human rather than political spectrum. It seems he cannot win, having been castigated too for taking money from China [the film's other backers are American, French, German and Indian] when virtually none was forthcoming from his own country. The commercial success of World Trade Center, Stone insists, "didn't help me that much. I had as much of a fight on Bush as I would have had without that."
He is sanguine about his operating now in a sort of vacuum of mainstream Hollywood approbation. "Look, I hate to see 14 producers on a film [as listed on W]. I once saw a European film with 26. But unfortunately the studio desire to take a risk has diminished severely in the last 10 years; 10 years ago you could still get these kinds of pictures through. Now it's an independent world, another world."
W screens at the London Film Festival 23 October and opens 7 November
On Monday, Oliver Stone's hotly anticipated George Bush biopic, W, starring Josh Brolin as the beleaguered President and Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, premiered to a Los Angeles audience. The celebrity-heavy, predictably partisan gathering (Jodie Foster, Barbra Streisand, Al Pacino) was billed quite particularly as a "special screening" by Lionsgate, distributor of the Oscar-winning Crash and producer of the Emmy-winning Mad Men. Verdicts at the (not a premiere) party were reportedly positive across the board. Domestic media - provincial newspapers, web sites and/or college newspapers - also made quietly appreciative noises when shown the film the next day.
But then it all began to unravel. "The film is a mess," said The Los Angeles Times; Variety branded it "unable to achieve any aims higher than as a sort of engaging pop-history pageant and amateur, if not inapt, psychological evaluation" while The Hollywood Reporter damned it with the faint praise, "it's a gutsy movie but not necessarily a good one". Ouch. At least they acknowledged that there was little of the proselytising they'd expected from Stone, famed still as the liberal beatnik who propagated wild conspiracy theories in 1991's JFK but gave Nixon a sympathetic ride in 1995.
Years ago Stone might have been angrier about his critics who seem unwilling to acknowledge his highly unconventional Hollywood feat: a film filmed, edited and released in less than a six-month span for about $30m (18m), less than the average major studio marketing budget per film. "I am never surprised. I've been humbled by this business for years. I got more money to make Nixon and JFK but that was in the mid-90s and here we are in 2008 and I'm getting quite considerably less money to make my third political movie. These are the rules of the game and I accept. But this is also my third political film where I have complete freedom. This is my vision, with my collaborators. I don't have a committee going, 'Oh well, you've got to change this'. Keeping my freedom was really crucial for me. No one interfered. That's very rare, that's the nature of this business. Political visions are tampered with. It was very hard to get this through and I'm proud of it."
Stone launched into W with something of a vengeance after his previous passion project, Pinkville - about My Lai, the 1968 Vietnam massacre and its subsequent cover-up and court martial, which was due to star Bruce Willis - fell apart at United Artists (then run by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner). "They endured like superheroes, to fight to get the truth out," asserts Stone of the military personnel who agitated to apportion blame where it was due. It is a theme which apparently resonates with the new, softer, Stone whose third wife, Chong, and their 12-year-old daughter, Tara, were frequent visitors to the set. One of his sons from his second marriage, a smiley handsome teen, is the production's videographer and a family vibe prevails.
He insists that W has an audience despite the hostile barrage of "who cares?" blogs which have appeared as footnotes to some of the film's sneering reviews. "I do think people like him, especially in this part of the country, real bible-belt country. Bush is seen as a guy who's got the common touch. He garbles his words, he talks like one of them. He's not the brightest bulb on the block and people like that. They didn't like Gore, they didn't like Kerry. Bush has the touch. We've met. He's a great salesman."
Before our meeting this week, I called in to see the director at work on set last July. Stone was darting about his tiny Oval Office set resplendent in white plastic booties over his shoes, laughing, playful and defying his age (62, the same as Bush). "Yesterday was fun, today is hard work," he exhorts all on set during a protracted day shooting a cabinet meeting, which produced the now-infamous "axis of evil" soundbite. Two reviews at least have cited the scene as straight out of Saturday Night Live, the long-of-tooth American sketch comedy programme itself reinvigorated this season by the scorching return of ex-staffer Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. Yet no one has credited Oliver Stone as the maverick he actually is. I ask later if he always has this much fun on set. "All the time. I had a lot of fun on Natural Born Killers. I was laughing the whole time. I loved U-Turn. I laughed a lot on that."
Critics aside, what can British audiences expect of W? "Hopefully an entertaining interpretation of Bush done in a way that is original and fresh. People don't know that much about the guy. He is a Wizard of Oz. He's manufactured, he's pulling the curtain back. And we are being honest to what we have read. We read a lot and we feel that these things happened. We don't know the exact dialogue. We're taking 10 different interpretations of what happened. And at the end of the day our dialogue [by old Stone cohort and collaborator Stanley Weiser (Wall Street)] is better. We've made it better, sharpened the arguments."
But Stone is receiving few props Stateside for his tireless pursuit of veracity, attracting instead criticism for focusing - as he did on 2006's World Trade Center, his biggest hit in years - on the human rather than political spectrum. It seems he cannot win, having been castigated too for taking money from China [the film's other backers are American, French, German and Indian] when virtually none was forthcoming from his own country. The commercial success of World Trade Center, Stone insists, "didn't help me that much. I had as much of a fight on Bush as I would have had without that."
He is sanguine about his operating now in a sort of vacuum of mainstream Hollywood approbation. "Look, I hate to see 14 producers on a film [as listed on W]. I once saw a European film with 26. But unfortunately the studio desire to take a risk has diminished severely in the last 10 years; 10 years ago you could still get these kinds of pictures through. Now it's an independent world, another world."
W screens at the London Film Festival 23 October and opens 7 November
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Nature Notes: conkers, poplars, birches, plane, wild cherry, Gingko and willowherbs Derwent May
Conkers are falling in Paris, and the Lombardy poplars along the banks of the Seine are tinged with yellow. In the countryside outside Paris (which is not very far), the small silver birches beside the railway are bright yellow, but most of the woods are still quite green. Here in Britain, the changes of colour are also taking place very slowly. London plane trees are sprinkled with yellow leaves, and some hawthorn bushes with purple and pink. Wild cherry leaves are just starting to turn red. Wild cherry is a remarkable tree, with flowers like swags of snow weighing down the branches in spring for many weeks, and rich scarlet foliage lingering on the branches for just as long in autumn. Gingko trees are turning an ochreous yellow, and the fan-shaped leaves are now falling steadily. There are downy seeds floating in the air everywhere, detaching themselves from thistles and from all the common willowherbs — the rosebay willowherb, the broad-leaved and the great hairy.
Scientists explore new source of stem cells Using the testicular cells of adult men, researchers have grown muscle, nerve and other kinds of tissue.
By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Scientists have converted cells from human testes into stem cells that grew into muscle, nerve cells and other kinds of tissue, according to a study published Wednesday in the online edition of Nature.
The stem cells offer another potential alternative to embryonic stem cells for researchers who aim to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's by replacing damaged or malfunctioning cells with custom-grown replacements. Scientists have also derived flexible adult stem cells from skin, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood.
The new cells were created from sperm-making cells obtained from testicular biopsies of 22 men. They are theoretically superior to traditional embryonic stem cells because they can be obtained directly from male patients and used to grow replacement tissues that their bodies won't reject, Sabine Conrad of the University of Tuebingen in Germany and her colleagues wrote.
The cells also have an ethical advantage in that they do not require the destruction of human embryos.
Experiments in mice suggested that reproductive cells -- also known as germ cells -- were good candidates for making stem cells because they naturally express low levels of the "pluripotency" genes that make embryonic stem cells so versatile, said Renee Reijo Pera, director of the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Center at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study.
The German researchers obtained biopsies from men between the ages of 17 and 81. They extracted the individual testicular cells and grew them in laboratory dishes. After about three weeks, some of the cells formed colonies that resembled embryonic stem cells, the team reported.
They found that the so-called germline stem cells grew nearly as fast as embryonic stem cells and produced many of the specialized protein markers that are associated with embryonic stem cells.
Cells from eight of the patients were injected into mice, where they grew into jumbles of tissue that included cartilage, muscle, nerve cells and other building blocks of glands and internal organs, according to the study.
"This would be a great way to produce pluripotent stem cells," said Kathrin Plath, a researcher at the Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, who was not involved in the study.
But, she said, it remains to be seen whether the germline stem cells are able to form as many kinds of functional cells as embryonic stem cells.
Reijo Pera said germline stem cells do not have a completely blank slate like embryonic stem cells or the reprogrammed skin cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells.
"They have very clear signs of where they came from," she said.
Scientists have converted cells from human testes into stem cells that grew into muscle, nerve cells and other kinds of tissue, according to a study published Wednesday in the online edition of Nature.
The stem cells offer another potential alternative to embryonic stem cells for researchers who aim to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's by replacing damaged or malfunctioning cells with custom-grown replacements. Scientists have also derived flexible adult stem cells from skin, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood.
The new cells were created from sperm-making cells obtained from testicular biopsies of 22 men. They are theoretically superior to traditional embryonic stem cells because they can be obtained directly from male patients and used to grow replacement tissues that their bodies won't reject, Sabine Conrad of the University of Tuebingen in Germany and her colleagues wrote.
The cells also have an ethical advantage in that they do not require the destruction of human embryos.
Experiments in mice suggested that reproductive cells -- also known as germ cells -- were good candidates for making stem cells because they naturally express low levels of the "pluripotency" genes that make embryonic stem cells so versatile, said Renee Reijo Pera, director of the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Center at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study.
The German researchers obtained biopsies from men between the ages of 17 and 81. They extracted the individual testicular cells and grew them in laboratory dishes. After about three weeks, some of the cells formed colonies that resembled embryonic stem cells, the team reported.
They found that the so-called germline stem cells grew nearly as fast as embryonic stem cells and produced many of the specialized protein markers that are associated with embryonic stem cells.
Cells from eight of the patients were injected into mice, where they grew into jumbles of tissue that included cartilage, muscle, nerve cells and other building blocks of glands and internal organs, according to the study.
"This would be a great way to produce pluripotent stem cells," said Kathrin Plath, a researcher at the Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, who was not involved in the study.
But, she said, it remains to be seen whether the germline stem cells are able to form as many kinds of functional cells as embryonic stem cells.
Reijo Pera said germline stem cells do not have a completely blank slate like embryonic stem cells or the reprogrammed skin cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells.
"They have very clear signs of where they came from," she said.
The Nature Conservancy and Enfold Systems to Announce the Release of ConserveOnline to The Open Source Community at the Plone Conference 2008 in Wash
WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct 08, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- ConserveOnline, a free, public resource for the conservation community, enhances the effectiveness of global conservation efforts by fostering active collaboration among people working on common problems, and by promoting the free and open sharing of conservation information and knowledge. The Nature Conservancy announced plans to release the source code for ConserveOnline as open source under the terms of the GNU GPL license. Enfold Systems, Inc., the world's premier provider of Plone based content management systems ("CMS"), teamed with The Nature Conservancy to make real the vision of ConserveOnline. This informative and collaborative tool began as an internal resource for scientists at The Nature Conservancy in 2000. Now it is much, much more.
The Conservancy soon realized that simply sharing information internally was not sufficient to meet the organization's conservation goals. So in 2001, ConserveOnline became a means for sharing conservation information and experience with othersin the field and the general public. The first public version used commercial software, but this became prohibitively expensive and too inflexible for the changing needs of the conservation community, so they moved ConserveOnline to the open source CMS tool, Plone in 2004. They utilized an unmodified installation of Plone until 2006, when they received a grant from Oracle Corporation to redesign ConserveOnline from the ground up, which was completed in April, 2008.
ConserveOnline Benefits TNC and the Conservation Community
Conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy realized that in order to reach their goals they needed to be much better at sharing relevant and useful information, both within their organizations and with the broader conservation community. The Conservancy and others joined together to create the Conservation Commons ( www.conservationcommons.org) and to promote a set of principles for promoting free and open access to conservation information. ConserveOnline supports this crucial transformation in the way conservation organizations think about how they work.
ConserveOnline now has thousands of visitors from around the world each week, more than 6,000 registered users worldwide, and hundreds of those users have created workspaces on the site so they can be more effective at communicating about what they do and how well they are doing it.David Williams, GIS Program Manager, African Wildlife Foundation says, "The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) is using two workspaces on ConserveOnline to support its conservation programs and share data collection protocols, training materials, maps, and GIS data with AWF staff and partners. The versatility of the site streamlines the workload of staff by making resources accessible from a single location with variable levels of access suited to different users."
The ease of usingConserveOnline means conservation staff in the field can find and share information quickly,so they can spend less time online and more time solving real conservation problems. The ability to find useful information online also means that more and more conservation scientists and practitioners are seeing the value in making their own data and expertise available to others, which is helping to shift the culture of conservation to one that is more open, transparent, and collaborative."ConserveOnline allows me to get out a lot of information to a wide audience.Not only is this convenient, but it also makes our conservation process more transparent.An added benefit is that I get more feedback from scientists and lay people alike. I think this strengthens the science we are doing on the Zumwalt Prairie," comments Rob Taylor, TNC ecologist at the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, Oregon.
The Nature Conservancy had plans to use the tool to give back to the community of open source since inception. Having benefited from license free open source software, Plone CMS, The Nature Conservancy wanted all to benefit from the wonderful results of the project.
The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org. For more information contact Blythe Thomas, Associate Director, Media Relations, bthomas@tnc.org, (703) 841-8782 (703) 841-1283 (Fax).
Enfold Systems, Inc., the premier provider of open source content management systems, enables organizations to reuse existing infrastructure and manage information using open source software. Enfold delivers consulting services, hosting solutions and software products based on the Plone Content Management System ( www.plone.org), tailored to meet the needs of business, government and non-profit organizations. For more information, go to http://www.enfoldsystems.com or contact Enfold at 713-942-2377 x155 or info@enfoldsystems.com.
The Conservancy soon realized that simply sharing information internally was not sufficient to meet the organization's conservation goals. So in 2001, ConserveOnline became a means for sharing conservation information and experience with othersin the field and the general public. The first public version used commercial software, but this became prohibitively expensive and too inflexible for the changing needs of the conservation community, so they moved ConserveOnline to the open source CMS tool, Plone in 2004. They utilized an unmodified installation of Plone until 2006, when they received a grant from Oracle Corporation to redesign ConserveOnline from the ground up, which was completed in April, 2008.
ConserveOnline Benefits TNC and the Conservation Community
Conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy realized that in order to reach their goals they needed to be much better at sharing relevant and useful information, both within their organizations and with the broader conservation community. The Conservancy and others joined together to create the Conservation Commons ( www.conservationcommons.org) and to promote a set of principles for promoting free and open access to conservation information. ConserveOnline supports this crucial transformation in the way conservation organizations think about how they work.
ConserveOnline now has thousands of visitors from around the world each week, more than 6,000 registered users worldwide, and hundreds of those users have created workspaces on the site so they can be more effective at communicating about what they do and how well they are doing it.David Williams, GIS Program Manager, African Wildlife Foundation says, "The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) is using two workspaces on ConserveOnline to support its conservation programs and share data collection protocols, training materials, maps, and GIS data with AWF staff and partners. The versatility of the site streamlines the workload of staff by making resources accessible from a single location with variable levels of access suited to different users."
The ease of usingConserveOnline means conservation staff in the field can find and share information quickly,so they can spend less time online and more time solving real conservation problems. The ability to find useful information online also means that more and more conservation scientists and practitioners are seeing the value in making their own data and expertise available to others, which is helping to shift the culture of conservation to one that is more open, transparent, and collaborative."ConserveOnline allows me to get out a lot of information to a wide audience.Not only is this convenient, but it also makes our conservation process more transparent.An added benefit is that I get more feedback from scientists and lay people alike. I think this strengthens the science we are doing on the Zumwalt Prairie," comments Rob Taylor, TNC ecologist at the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, Oregon.
The Nature Conservancy had plans to use the tool to give back to the community of open source since inception. Having benefited from license free open source software, Plone CMS, The Nature Conservancy wanted all to benefit from the wonderful results of the project.
The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org. For more information contact Blythe Thomas, Associate Director, Media Relations, bthomas@tnc.org, (703) 841-8782 (703) 841-1283 (Fax).
Enfold Systems, Inc., the premier provider of open source content management systems, enables organizations to reuse existing infrastructure and manage information using open source software. Enfold delivers consulting services, hosting solutions and software products based on the Plone Content Management System ( www.plone.org), tailored to meet the needs of business, government and non-profit organizations. For more information, go to http://www.enfoldsystems.com or contact Enfold at 713-942-2377 x155 or info@enfoldsystems.com.
Economics seen bolstering case to protect nature
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Worsening damage to nature is jolting the world into doing more to protect animals and plants and new economic arguments will bolster the case for action, the head of a global conservation network said.
"We are really in trouble," Julia Marton-Lefevre, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told Reuters on Wednesday after an IUCN "Red List" this week showed that a quarter of all mammals were threatened with extinction.
"The amount of loss we have been able to measure ... is really pretty frightening," she said during an Oct 5-14 IUCN congress, held once every four years, during which 8,000 delegates are looking for better ways to safeguard the planet.
The IUCN groups governments, conservation organizations and scientists.
"People really get it that we have less water, that the water we have is not usable, that we have fewer places to breathe. People are noticing that the environment we have been taking for granted all of a sudden is not really there or there in a smaller way," Marton-Lefevre said.
She said the Barcelona congress showed conservation was "no longer a sideshow." The meeting is drawing government ministers, leaders of businesses such as oil group Shell and miner Rio Tinto, and indigenous peoples from the Amazon.
The mood was "there's enough conviction now that there is a problem and we do have some solutions so let's get on with it," she said.
But economic arguments about the essential role of biodiversity -- for uses such as food, pharmaceuticals or building materials -- had not yet sunk in fully
"Maybe the economic message hasn't yet been made clear to people. Once they start counting, I think they'll see it pretty clearly," she said.
A report submitted to a U.N. biodiversity conference in May said mankind was causing 50 billion euros ($68 billion) of damage to the planet's land areas every year, with factors including pollution and deforestation.
High food prices highlighted the effect of loss of biodiversity, it said. The cumulative loss could amount to at least 7 percent of annual consumption by 2050, it said.
That meant conservation was a huge long-term challenge even if financial turmoil was now overshadowing threats to nature.
Marton-Lefevre said conservation was increasingly trying to "join the dots. It's not just the one species that you are in love with that the world is losing, but 'what does this mean?'.
She said the IUCN could help to offer solutions. "We have the instruments to protect some parts of the environment, protected areas or better species protection."
Some species have been brought back from the brink of extinction, for instance with captive breeding.
BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Worsening damage to nature is jolting the world into doing more to protect animals and plants and new economic arguments will bolster the case for action, the head of a global conservation network said.
"We are really in trouble," Julia Marton-Lefevre, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told Reuters on Wednesday after an IUCN "Red List" this week showed that a quarter of all mammals were threatened with extinction.
"The amount of loss we have been able to measure ... is really pretty frightening," she said during an Oct 5-14 IUCN congress, held once every four years, during which 8,000 delegates are looking for better ways to safeguard the planet.
The IUCN groups governments, conservation organizations and scientists.
"People really get it that we have less water, that the water we have is not usable, that we have fewer places to breathe. People are noticing that the environment we have been taking for granted all of a sudden is not really there or there in a smaller way," Marton-Lefevre said.
She said the Barcelona congress showed conservation was "no longer a sideshow." The meeting is drawing government ministers, leaders of businesses such as oil group Shell and miner Rio Tinto, and indigenous peoples from the Amazon.
The mood was "there's enough conviction now that there is a problem and we do have some solutions so let's get on with it," she said.
But economic arguments about the essential role of biodiversity -- for uses such as food, pharmaceuticals or building materials -- had not yet sunk in fully
"Maybe the economic message hasn't yet been made clear to people. Once they start counting, I think they'll see it pretty clearly," she said.
A report submitted to a U.N. biodiversity conference in May said mankind was causing 50 billion euros ($68 billion) of damage to the planet's land areas every year, with factors including pollution and deforestation.
High food prices highlighted the effect of loss of biodiversity, it said. The cumulative loss could amount to at least 7 percent of annual consumption by 2050, it said.
That meant conservation was a huge long-term challenge even if financial turmoil was now overshadowing threats to nature.
Marton-Lefevre said conservation was increasingly trying to "join the dots. It's not just the one species that you are in love with that the world is losing, but 'what does this mean?'.
She said the IUCN could help to offer solutions. "We have the instruments to protect some parts of the environment, protected areas or better species protection."
Some species have been brought back from the brink of extinction, for instance with captive breeding.
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