The UAEU- College of Science Biology Department international research team has devised a new conservation tool presentation in an article published in the international journal ‘Conservation Biology”.
This new conservation tool entitled, ‘SAMSE’ for “Sustainable Anthropogenic Mortality in Stochastic Environments” can determine sustainable limits to human-caused mortality on wildlife.
The lead author, Dr. Oliver Manlik, Assistant Professor of Molecular Ecology at the UAEU said, “We wanted to come up with a modeling tool that allows us to determine the maximum number of animals that can be removed from a population without causing a population decline and possible extinction.”
The eminent causes of high mortality rate for wild animals are due to a wide range of human activities. “There are already some population modeling tools available. However, for us it was important to devise a tool that also allows us to incorporate ‘stochastic’ factors - random chance events that affect wildlife populations, but which are often not accounted for in conventional approaches,” he said.
Professor. Khaled Amiri, Chairman of the Department of Biology at the UAEU said “The Department of Biology has made great strides in scientific research compared to previous years in the department’s history, represented in the quality and number of outstanding research.
I would like to thank the efforts of the department’s affiliates who raised the level of research.
Here, Prof. Khaled Amiri indicates that the role of the department head is to provide the vision and lead by examples in addition providing an appropriate and stimulating environment for scientific research and education, away from bureaucracy and narrow-vision administration.
The faculty members must trust that the department head is the support that can be
resorted to for moral and logistical support. The faculty members must also feel their
importance in building the building block of scientific research, and they must participate
in decision-making.
The head of the department should pay attention to changing the culture of scientific research and support them by carrying out basic research that has a great impact on the scientific community” he said.
The authors of the study have also specified a sustainable limit of wildlife mortality called, ‘SAMSE-limit’ – the maximum number of individuals that can be taken from a population without causing a population decline in a changing environment. “We wanted to come up with a modeling tool that allows us to determine the maximum number of animals that can be removed from a population without causing a population decline and possible extinction,” he said.
The influence of stochastic factors in population dynamics include environmental changes that can affect birth and death rates, stability and decline of a population. Prof. Bill Sherwin, Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales, Australia added, “Such unanticipated chance events are often ignored when assessing the impact of human-caused mortalities of wildlife, but our study shows that they are crucial for the conservation of wildlife.”
In a case study on bottlenose dolphins affected by fisheries bycatch in Pilbara, Western Australia where SAMSE has been applied, the result shows that the SAMSE-limit was much lower than the current bycatch rates of the Pilbara dolphins. Dr. Simon Allen of the University of Bristol, who has been studying the impact of fisheries bycatch on bottlenose dolphin population for years, stated that “The results show the current levels of fisheries bycatch are not sustainable, especially when we consider random chance events.”
“Together with Prof. Bob Lacy from the Species Conservation Toolkit Initiative in the U.S. we are working on creating an app that makes SAMSE easily accessible to researchers and wildlife managers worldwide,” Dr. Manlik concluded.
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