WCS Annual Report 2012 - Wildlife Conservation Society

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wildlife conservation society Annual Report 2012
/ WCS Leadership in the Media
During the past year, the WCS Communications Department
initiated a successful new push to more aggressively
develop and place opinion and blog pieces in both the
print and online media to promote the work of WCS at
home and abroad. Those efforts have resulted in dozens
of high-value op-ed placements in venues that include:
• The New York Times
• New York Daily News
• Christian Science Monitor
• USA Today
• National Geographic
• Crain’s New York Business
• CNN.com
In one six-month period, separate pieces by WCS Conservationists
Liz Bennett and Justina Ray appeared on
the op-ed page of The New York Times – the most soughtafter
and competitive opinion space in the world. Through
these and other placements, WCS has been able to show
its leadership, drive policy, and raise new funds on a wide
variety of institutional priorities – from the urgent need
for greater local enforcement to combat the illegal wildlife
trade, to the global threats to sharks from the shark fin
trade, to the opportunities for positive environmental
action in the newly democratic nation of Myanmar.
At the same time WCS leaders have found their voices
in a variety of electronic media, blogging online for outlets
both local and national, including The Huffington Post,
The Guardian Environment Blog, Yale Environment 360,
The New York Times’ “Scientists at Work” column, the
Queens Ledger and Patch.com. With more conservationminded
readers getting their information from non-traditional
sources, blogs and other digital media will play a
greater role in the dissemination of WCS’s wide-ranging
conservation efforts in the years to come.
exercise was applied in their draft recovery
strategy. She worked closely with EC scientific
staff to respond to industry feedback and to
proposals for improving the sections on caribou
habitat and distribution objectives. She also
advised several conservation groups on their
public comments to the draft strategy.
The completed strategy provides a framework
for managing cumulative disturbance over 2.4
million-square kilometers of Canada – an area
close to the size of India and representing nearly
one quarter of the country. Additionally, it puts
forward a novel approach to managing critical
habitat for a wide-ranging species that has lost
significant ground to an expanding human footprint
over the last 100 years and is threatened
by intensifying natural resource development
interests in the north.
Narrowing the Hunt for Ebola
In 2011, an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic
fever near Kampala, Uganda took the life of a
12-year-old girl. In response, conservationists
with PREDICT, part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic
Threats program, embarked on a study
of 14 previous human Ebola outbreaks and the
responses of wildlife teams collecting animal
samples. The report, published this year and
led by WCS epidemiologist Sarah Olson, found
that collecting samples from animal carcasses
during outbreaks was a more effective detection
method than samples from live animals.
PREDICT is a consortium of WCS and the
University of California at Davis, in partnership
with Ecohealth Alliance, Metabiota, and
the Smithsonian Institution. With the support
of USAID, the Emerging Pandemic Threats
program is protecting and improving global
health, making it possible to pre-emptively identify
novel pathogens in wildlife that could pose
pandemic threats to humans.
The Ebola study was designed to develop a
set of animal sampling recommendations to
maximize the effectiveness of outbreak response
efforts with limited resources. Because
the initial human infections have an animal
origin, early detection of Ebola in animal
populations near a human outbreak is crucial
for learning more about this highly lethal virus.
PREDICT wildlife veterinarians were sent to
victims’ villages to screen wildlife as a source
of the virus.
Olson and her colleagues found that carcass
sampling yielded a 50 percent chance of finding
the virus or antibodies against it, compared
to less than six percent with free-ranging live
animals. Response efforts to outbreaks of Ebola
hemorrhagic fever in Africa can now benefit
from a sampling strategy that focuses on the
carcasses of gorillas, chimpanzees, and other
species susceptible to the virus, according to
wildlife health experts participating in the
study, which was published in an online issue of
Emerging Health Threats.
Leading the Way on Science
Education
In September, the Association of Zoos and
Aquariums (AZA) awarded its top honor for
educational programming to the Wildlife Conservation
Society for the Online Teacher Academy.
This innovative program helps educators
discover and develop new teaching methods
while inspiring student learning and conservation
action. The AZA award recognizes outstanding
achievement in educational program