Local | PANORAMA

Ecosystem services for the city

The environmental services provided by nature are important for people's development and quality of life.

Urban nature reserves are the ideal space. Both for the recreation and health of the inhabitants living near them, as well as for the provision of environmental services. The reserve allows the conservation of drinking water, temperature regulation and air purification.

Every day, society recognizes Urban Natural Areas for their high sustainable value. The creation of urban natural reserves aims to protect different species of native plants and animals native to a given region, as well as to protect forests and lagoons, among other areas.

Since their recognition does not yet have national scope, financing is the most difficult thing to obtain to maintain this type of reserve. In general, municipalities are in charge of developing them through local ordinances. But for this to happen, it is necessary to sensitize decision-makers, which is why the university includes communication and awareness-raising activities.

Local

National

Generation of information

The threat of human action on ecosystems and their fauna and flora has become the main focus of research and information generation.

The Faculty of Biological Sciences works with integrated information management to ensure that the information generated is accurate, reliable and available at any time and to any public.

This information is used for decision making at the territorial level.

The School of Biological Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires has an innovative program that involves students in the participation of natural spaces where they promote their abilities and where they have complete interaction with nature.
The generation of information is a commitment that students assume as it is part of their curricular plan, which allows them to generate continuous and quality information.

Previously, environmental problems were not linked to information management, which led to gaps in the planning process.

Based on what conservation should be, the Urban Nature Reserve proposal has a management based on academic information by the students who are part of the community.

Entirety

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Follow-up with Graduates

Testimonio Miguel

Fundación Karla Wheelock

Palabras de Jane Goodall

Fundación Karla Wheelock

The program includes working with the graduates who become "fellows" of the program and help subsequent participants.

Continuous training of graduates so that they can in turn teach the younger ones.

Linking up with groups that already have performed previous work, such as the boy scouts.

Children learn a lot from their peers, sometimes much more than they learn from their teachers.

Follow-up with graduates gives these young people the opportunity to continue contributing to the nurturing of nature and sustainable development.

Implementation

Documentation and dissemination of results

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National

Prizes for the Winners

Equipo ganador en La Antártida

Fundación Karla Wheelock

Mi cumbre, mi decisión

Fundación Karla Wheelock

While all participants entered a training program, the winners won an extraordinary trip to Antarctica, for which they also had to prepare their minds and bodies.

On that trip, they also learned about the scientists who monitor the climate station and the site. There they saw how everything is interconnected and that their local projects had an impact on climate at the local level.

1) Funding: each expedition required financial resources that were managed by companies that sponsored the program.

2) Agreements with scientists or administrators of the Natural Protected Areas. The sites visited are not open to the public, so visiting them involved a process to obtain the appropriate permits.

It was very expensive to take them to Antarctica and it was only possible to take very few teams. That is why we started to give prizes to more teams, taking them to other natural protected areas, closed to mass visitation, where more children could have a learning experience and a larger number of children would be selected as winners.

Implementation

Documentation and dissemination of results

Local

Global

Training Program

Grupo de Líderes

Fundación Karla Wheelock

Niños en talleres

Fundación Karla Wheelock

The transformation of meaningful learning comes precisely when the elements of knowledge and contact with nature converge for the participants, including 4 key values: 1) Building character, 2) Order, 3) Respect and 4) Unity or Solidarity.

Each activity, each expedition brings with it the strengthening of the participants' learning, with sensory and emotional exercises.

In the case of the Karla Wheelock Foundation, it was she who developed all the programs, planned the logistics of each trip, created the agreements and sought funding. In order to do so, she was also in an ongoing learning process where every day she had to become even more professional.

The process gave rise to a learning model, where the children learned, the trainers learned from the children, the parents learned from their children, the school learned from its students and the program learned with each expedition in order to improve its performance.

Documentation and dissemination of results

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Call for Action

¿Qué es un proyecto Ambiental?

Fundación Karla Wheelock

Launch a call to public schools in Mexico City for five children and one student to propose an environmental project for their schools.

Agreements with the Ministry of Education that would allow the issuance of a call for action in public schools.

1. Both children and teachers were not clear about what it means to undertake an environmental project, so this had to be taken into consideration.

2. The work to keep the government involved is complex because it must be managed with each governmental change and that becomes a very tiring endeavour, so we are now looking to create a legal initiative where children must prepare an environmental project in their schools in order to graduate.

Documentation and dissemination of results

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Community visits and education

Aim at human interference information, and timely organize management and protection personnel to carry out community visits, special inspections, etc. For the people involved we can provide verbal warnings, legal warnings and education, and registration for the record in accordance with the "Regulations on the Management of Nature Reserves".

According to the identified information, the follow-up work was carried out in time, and major management areas and major management crowd were established, with long-term timeliness, we can introduce projects to the community and increase the income of the community.

Combining with years of data can be representative and referential. When launching a warning education, we should pay attention to methods and ways to reduce conflicts of interest, and to improve awareness of resource protection.

Data recovery and identification

The Administration Bureau arranges the office workers to identify, classify and input data according to the staff, human activity information, and animal resource information. The office workers distinguish the photos of the human activities, and determine the specific information of the personnel (community personnel or not ).

1. Recycle and appraise camera data timely in accordance with the plan.

2. Maintain equipment regularly.

3. The identification of the camera data must be unified.

4. Carry out follow-up work immediately for discovered human activities.

5. Corresponding reward and punishment mechanisms.

1. Number the camera´s data cards uniformly to avoid data confusion.

2. Replace the malfunction cameras timely.

3. Arrange fixed staff to identify the data.

Monitoring

Documentation and dissemination of results

Local

Subnational

Camera layout and data collection

Combined with the geographic feature of the reserve, seasonal characteristics, community distribution, and the key natural resources, field workers set up monitoring sites on the main roads and ravine mouths in the area, and use the “two bright and one dark” method for camera deployment, that is, the two cameras consider the lens orientation, distance, and quality of images to ensure that clear pictures or videos of the front of the entrant are taken without leaving dead spots in the blind zone, and the third camera focuses on the safety of the first two cameras, placed in a high covert and not easy to be found location, and the visual field must include the first two infrared cameras to prevent malicious damage to the monitoring equipment, otherwise, the data will be lost.

The first one is that the camera installer is proficient in infrared camera layout skills, the second is that the camera placement site can be selected properly, the third is that the work plan is combined with the actual situation, and the fourth is the corresponding reward and punishment mechanism.

First, the parameters, the orientation, and the height of the camera must be correct to reduce the number of invalid photos. Second, the camera must be located at an appropriately concealed area to reduce the camera loss rate.

Implementation

Local

Subnational

Setting up a partnership for the cartographic study

Bathymetry Reserve

Réserve Marine

The University of Perpignan is a long-standing partner of the Reserve, and a number of academics are members of the Reserve's Scientific Council and are regularly involved in numerous monitoring projects. They took part in the drafting of the latest 2015-2019 management plan, helping to define the manager's expectations and responses to the various problems encountered. The proximity of the site makes the Reserve a veritable open-air laboratory for these researchers. The University of Perpignan had already mapped the Reserve's rocky substrates in 3D to an accuracy of 30 cm (see PJ). This mapping enabled us to gain a better understanding of the area and adapt the means used to obtain results of such precision. Thanks to this knowledge of the terrain, our mastery of this technical equipment and the expectations of the Gestionnaie through precise specifications, we were able to obtain an appropriate and fair price for this monitoring project.

It was important to identify the partners capable of meeting the manager's expectations. The numerous monitoring projects carried out in this field have enabled us to adapt the objectives and fill in the gaps left by previous studies. The partners' knowledge of the field helped us to carry out this study. Last but not least, the mastery of the various tools used during the study enabled the monitoring to be carried out in an optimal manner.

A large number of upstream exchanges were necessary to carry out this monitoring. New technologies have made it possible to fill in the gaps identified in previous studies. Thanks to these new resources, it was necessary to identify the right partners from the outset. This preparation enabled us to target expectations and thus reduce the cost of monitoring.

Monitoring

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