Accessibility Statement Skip Navigation
  • Why PRWeb
  • How It Works
  • Who Uses It
  • Pricing
  • Login
  • GDPR
  • Create a Free Account
Return to PRWeb homepage
  • News
  • Resources
  • Contact
When typing in this field, a list of search results will appear and be automatically updated as you type.

Searching for your content...

No results found. Please change your search terms and try again.
  • News in Focus
      • Browse News Releases

      • All News Releases
      • Multimedia Gallery

      • All Multimedia
      • All Photos
      • All Videos
  • Business & Money
      • Auto & Transportation

      • Aerospace, Defense
      • Air Freight
      • Airlines & Aviation
      • Automotive
      • Maritime & Shipbuilding
      • Railroads and Intermodal Transportation
      • Supply Chain/Logistics
      • Transportation, Trucking & Railroad
      • Travel
      • Trucking and Road Transportation
      • View All Auto & Transportation

      • Business Technology

      • Blockchain
      • Broadcast Tech
      • Computer & Electronics
      • Computer Hardware
      • Computer Software
      • Data Analytics
      • Electronic Commerce
      • Electronic Components
      • Electronic Design Automation
      • Financial Technology
      • High Tech Security
      • Internet Technology
      • Nanotechnology
      • Networks
      • Peripherals
      • Semiconductors
      • View All Business Technology

      • Entertain­ment & Media

      • Advertising
      • Art
      • Books
      • Entertainment
      • Film and Motion Picture
      • Magazines
      • Music
      • Publishing & Information Services
      • Radio & Podcast
      • Television
      • View All Entertain­ment & Media

      • Financial Services & Investing

      • Accounting News & Issues
      • Acquisitions, Mergers and Takeovers
      • Banking & Financial Services
      • Bankruptcy
      • Bond & Stock Ratings
      • Conference Call Announcements
      • Contracts
      • Cryptocurrency
      • Dividends
      • Earnings
      • Earnings Forecasts & Projections
      • Financing Agreements
      • Insurance
      • Investments Opinions
      • Joint Ventures
      • Mutual Funds
      • Private Placement
      • Real Estate
      • Restructuring & Recapitalization
      • Sales Reports
      • Shareholder Activism
      • Shareholder Meetings
      • Stock Offering
      • Stock Split
      • Venture Capital
      • View All Financial Services & Investing

      • General Business

      • Awards
      • Commercial Real Estate
      • Corporate Expansion
      • Earnings
      • Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
      • Human Resource & Workforce Management
      • Licensing
      • New Products & Services
      • Obituaries
      • Outsourcing Businesses
      • Overseas Real Estate (non-US)
      • Personnel Announcements
      • Real Estate Transactions
      • Residential Real Estate
      • Small Business Services
      • Socially Responsible Investing
      • Surveys, Polls and Research
      • Trade Show News
      • View All General Business

  • Science & Tech
      • Consumer Technology

      • Artificial Intelligence
      • Blockchain
      • Cloud Computing/Internet of Things
      • Computer Electronics
      • Computer Hardware
      • Computer Software
      • Consumer Electronics
      • Cryptocurrency
      • Data Analytics
      • Electronic Commerce
      • Electronic Gaming
      • Financial Technology
      • Mobile Entertainment
      • Multimedia & Internet
      • Peripherals
      • Social Media
      • STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math)
      • Supply Chain/Logistics
      • Wireless Communications
      • View All Consumer Technology

      • Energy & Natural Resources

      • Alternative Energies
      • Chemical
      • Electrical Utilities
      • Gas
      • General Manufacturing
      • Mining
      • Mining & Metals
      • Oil & Energy
      • Oil and Gas Discoveries
      • Utilities
      • Water Utilities
      • View All Energy & Natural Resources

      • Environ­ment

      • Conservation & Recycling
      • Environmental Issues
      • Environmental Policy
      • Environmental Products & Services
      • Green Technology
      • Natural Disasters
      • View All Environ­ment

      • Heavy Industry & Manufacturing

      • Aerospace & Defense
      • Agriculture
      • Chemical
      • Construction & Building
      • General Manufacturing
      • HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning)
      • Machinery
      • Machine Tools, Metalworking and Metallurgy
      • Mining
      • Mining & Metals
      • Paper, Forest Products & Containers
      • Precious Metals
      • Textiles
      • Tobacco
      • View All Heavy Industry & Manufacturing

      • Telecomm­unications

      • Carriers and Services
      • Mobile Entertainment
      • Networks
      • Peripherals
      • Telecommunications Equipment
      • Telecommunications Industry
      • VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
      • Wireless Communications
      • View All Telecomm­unications

  • Lifestyle & Health
      • Consumer Products & Retail

      • Animals & Pets
      • Beers, Wines and Spirits
      • Beverages
      • Bridal Services
      • Cannabis
      • Cosmetics and Personal Care
      • Fashion
      • Food & Beverages
      • Furniture and Furnishings
      • Home Improvement
      • Household, Consumer & Cosmetics
      • Household Products
      • Jewelry
      • Non-Alcoholic Beverages
      • Office Products
      • Organic Food
      • Product Recalls
      • Restaurants
      • Retail
      • Supermarkets
      • Toys
      • View All Consumer Products & Retail

      • Entertain­ment & Media

      • Advertising
      • Art
      • Books
      • Entertainment
      • Film and Motion Picture
      • Magazines
      • Music
      • Publishing & Information Services
      • Radio & Podcast
      • Television
      • View All Entertain­ment & Media

      • Health

      • Biometrics
      • Biotechnology
      • Clinical Trials & Medical Discoveries
      • Dentistry
      • FDA Approval
      • Fitness/Wellness
      • Health Care & Hospitals
      • Health Insurance
      • Infection Control
      • International Medical Approval
      • Medical Equipment
      • Medical Pharmaceuticals
      • Mental Health
      • Pharmaceuticals
      • Supplementary Medicine
      • View All Health

      • Sports

      • General Sports
      • Outdoors, Camping & Hiking
      • Sporting Events
      • Sports Equipment & Accessories
      • View All Sports

      • Travel

      • Amusement Parks and Tourist Attractions
      • Gambling & Casinos
      • Hotels and Resorts
      • Leisure & Tourism
      • Outdoors, Camping & Hiking
      • Passenger Aviation
      • Travel Industry
      • View All Travel

  • Policy & Public Interest
      • Policy & Public Interest

      • Advocacy Group Opinion
      • Animal Welfare
      • Congressional & Presidential Campaigns
      • Corporate Social Responsibility
      • Domestic Policy
      • Economic News, Trends, Analysis
      • Education
      • Environmental
      • European Government
      • FDA Approval
      • Federal and State Legislation
      • Federal Executive Branch & Agency
      • Foreign Policy & International Affairs
      • Homeland Security
      • Labor & Union
      • Legal Issues
      • Natural Disasters
      • Not For Profit
      • Patent Law
      • Public Safety
      • Trade Policy
      • U.S. State Policy
      • View All Policy & Public Interest

  • People & Culture
      • People & Culture

      • Aboriginal, First Nations & Native American
      • African American
      • Asian American
      • Children
      • Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
      • Hispanic
      • Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual
      • Men's Interest
      • People with Disabilities
      • Religion
      • Senior Citizens
      • Veterans
      • Women
      • View All People & Culture

  • Hamburger menu
  • Cision PRWeb provides efficient communication tools to continuously engage with target audiences across multiple online channels
  • Create a Free Account
    • ALL CONTACT INFO
    • Contact Us


      11AM ET Sunday – 8PM ET Friday

  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR
  • News in Focus
    • Browse All News
    • Multimedia Gallery
  • Business & Money
    • Auto & Transportation
    • Business Technology
    • Entertain­ment & Media
    • Financial Services & Investing
    • General Business
  • Science & Tech
    • Consumer Technology
    • Energy & Natural Resources
    • Environ­ment
    • Heavy Industry & Manufacturing
    • Telecomm­unications
  • Lifestyle & Health
    • Consumer Products & Retail
    • Entertain­ment & Media
    • Health
    • Sports
    • Travel
  • Policy & Public Interest
  • People & Culture
    • People & Culture
  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR
  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR
  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR

UMD's SESYNC International Vulture Collaboration Addresses Vulture Poisoning in Southern Africa with Global Implications for Disease Control and Biodiversity Conservation

University of Maryland researchers across multiple colleges collaborated with other international leaders in wildlife conservation to produce an expert assessment and recommendations for vulture poisoning control efforts in Southern Africa in a new paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation. Vultures act as nature's most critical scavengers, working as ecosystem garbage disposals and disinfectors to maintain animal, environmental, and human health alike. Findings suggest that a more holistic and coordinated approach leveraging community engagement and pre-existing resources could maximize conservation impacts and control global disease spread.


News provided by

University Of Maryland

Jul 24, 2020, 13:00 ET

Share this article

Share toX

Share this article

Share toX

African vultures, credit: Edwin Remsberg
African vultures, credit: Edwin Remsberg

COLLEGE PARK, Md., July 24, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- University of Maryland (UMD) researchers across multiple colleges collaborated with other international leaders in wildlife conservation to produce an expert assessment and recommendations for vulture poisoning control efforts in Southern Africa. Vultures act as nature's most critical scavengers, working as ecosystem garbage disposals and disinfectors to maintain animal, environmental, and human health alike. With global vulture populations declining, diseases that have previously been under control can potentially reemerge as threats and contribute to the spread of global disease (a top-of-mind issue during the COVID-19 pandemic), while also negatively impacting overall biodiversity. To address rapidly declining African vulture populations, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC, funded by the National Science Foundation through UMD) has gathered an interdisciplinary and international group of scientists with the goal of saving Africa's vultures. Findings from their latest publication highlight the issue of illegal vulture poisonings in Southern Africa from a conservation and criminology perspective, recommending a more coordinated and holistic approach to regulation, education, and enforcement to engage local communities and maximize conservation efforts.

"This work is vital," says William Bowerman, chair of Environmental Science and Technology in the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources (AGNR) at UMD and a lead organizer for the SESYNC effort. "We could lose African vultures completely in just a few years. But we have faculty from across UMD and Cornell University, Birdlife International, the Peregrine Fund, Endangered Wildlife Trust, and many others working to solve this international problem collaboratively. We have issues of chemical poisoning, but also lead and other contaminants, habitat loss, poaching and vulture trade for belief and medicinal use, and other factors that contribute to why populations are declining so quickly and why we need so many different experts."

“Why should people care? Because it all relates to environmental health. And environmental health relates to environmental security. And global security is national security as the [COVID-19] pandemic has shown us. What starts someplace else impacts us here in the U.S. and in Maryland,” says Gore.

Post this

Focusing on vulture poisoning with this new paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation, the team at UMD includes faculty members in Environmental Science and Technology, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Anthropology, and a new faculty member in Geographical Sciences (College of Behavioral & Social Sciences, BSOS). Meredith Gore, currently with Michigan State University, is the lead author on this paper and will officially join UMD in August. "I call myself a conservation social scientist - humans are my species, and my habit is to collaborate," says Gore. "When I was invited to work on this SESYNC project, I had no previous exposure to vultures, but I do a lot of work in Africa, and the human factors in vulture conservation are very complex and dynamic. As a group of experts, we could really leverage our diversity to think about this problem in a different way."

While expert elicitation and "desk assessment" exercises like this paper are common practices in both criminology and conservation, these thought processes had never before been combined and applied in the context of African vulture poisoning to try to make recommendations and ultimately improve control and conservation efforts.

"The use of a criminology framework is relatively new for conservation," says Jen Shaffer, assistant professor in Anthropology, BSOS. "Conservation policies have long focused on identifying direct causes for species loss, culminating in the creation of protected areas for species, as well as policies with incentives and punishments. More recently, there have been efforts to assess and address indirect or underlying causes of species loss, such as poverty, food insecurity, and lack of access to necessary resources. In our research, we captured both direct and indirect causes of African vulture loss, but extended this work to identify a wider range of cultural and physical factors in the environment that promote poisoning. This allowed our group to identify specific tactics that would discourage people from participating in the crime of vulture poisoning."

"We formulated a range of strategies and tactics to prevent poisoning from occurring in the first place, along with limiting the impacts if a poisoning event occurred," adds Jennifer Mullinax, assistant professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR. "For example, we suggested an education campaign on the human health risks from the common poisons used, and a Wildlife Poisoning Response Planning and Training intervention. This effort is a great example of having a large stakeholder group, including local constituents, come up with simple to complex ideas that could be implemented by local agencies or non-profits to directly impact vulture poisoning."

The need for more coordinated education and training efforts was a key finding from the study, since according to Gore, many people, particularly locals, don't always see poisoning as a crime. Often, this is done to protect livestock from larger animals and predators, with the poison not even intended for vultures. However, intentional poisoning by poachers can also be a factor.

"Bringing vulture population declines from intentional poisoning to light in the scientific community raises a heightened awareness of poaching, not only from the targeted animals (such as elephants) that are killed, but the secondary impact on other species such as vultures, and how all that impacts the socio-ecological-economic health of many peoples and nations," says Reggie Harrell, professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR.

In addition to bringing awareness and recommendations to the scientific community, the information from this paper is already on the ground and in the hands of those who can use it, says Gore, being disseminated by Andre Botha, co-author and Vultures for Africa program manager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, also a major organizer of the SESYNC initiative. "A key finding from this work is that there are a lot of existing solutions on the ground, they just aren't being combined, coordinated, or used holistically to maximize the benefit. In addition to thinking about ways we can incentivize and enable compliance, for example by restricting access to chemicals being used illegally while still providing access to those who need them for legal reasons, we were able to help identify the places where resources could be implemented first and make recommendations on how to prioritize existing efforts."

Given the complicated nature of vulture poisonings in Africa, combining criminology with community engagement was paramount to this work, Gore adds. "Criminology uses situational crime prevention to prevent terrorist attacks on airplanes and riots in sports stadiums. We used those same situational crime techniques and applied them to vulture conservation. However, we added an additional dimension - engaging communities - based on participatory action research and conservation, which we know and do really well at land grant universities."

Gore and the team emphasize the importance of this information being adapted to local communities and used on the ground for real change. "At the end of the day, we're just experts," says Gore. "That's important, but we look at problems differently than local people do, so the work that we did needs to be interpreted on the ground in a local context."

Shaffer adds, "From an anthropological perspective, I think that our findings underscore how sustainable strategies to reduce and eliminate wildlife crime require local cultural context and community involvement. Our work also serves as a model of how the problem of African vulture poisoning can be addressed elsewhere on the African continent."

"This is a really serious problem," stresses Gore. "Vultures are ecosystem engineers, and as their population decreases, the second order impacts can harm ecosystems and people. It's urgent, dynamic, and also really complex. Why should people in Maryland care about what's happening in Southern Africa? Because it all relates to environmental health. And socio-environmental health relates to socio-environmental security. And global security is national security as the [COVID-19] pandemic has shown us. What starts someplace else impacts us here in the U.S. and in Maryland."

However, Gore and the team are inspired by the collaborative nature of the work, with all team members emphasizing the power of and role of collaborative team science in addressing these major global concerns. "I do think there is a role for scientists to play," says Gore. "We do have something to offer here, and we should be engaging on global issues the way we are through SESYNC."

Lars Olson, professor in Agricultural & Resource Economics, AGNR, adds, "This project is an excellent example of how interdisciplinary team science can produce collaborations that are greater than the sum of the parts and help address the conservation of endangered species subject to multiple threats."

The paper, entitled "A conservation criminology-based desk assessment of vulture poisoning in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area," is published in Global Ecology and Conservation.

SOURCE University Of Maryland

Related Links

umd.edu

Modal title

Contact PRWeb

  • 11AM ET Sunday – 8PM ET Friday
  • Contact Us

About PRWeb

  • About PRWeb
  • Partners
  • Partnership Programs
  • Editorial Guidelines
  • Resources

Why PRWeb

  • Why PRWeb
  • How It Works
  • Who Uses It
  • Pricing

Accounts

  • Create a Free Account
  • Log in
  • Contact Us

Do not sell or share my personal information:

  • Submit via [email protected] 
  • Call Privacy toll-free: 877-297-8921

Contact Cision

Products

About

My Services
  • All News Releases
  • Online Member Center
  • ProfNet
Cision Distribution Helpline
888-776-0942
  • Legal
  • Site Map
  • RSS
  • Cookie Settings
Copyright © 2025 Cision US Inc.