An Important Message
From Robin Jones, CBI Executive Director
We are all in this together!
During these politically challenging times, we have put much thought into how to carry on with our work to protect the values we hold dear. In some ways, we are in a relative position of privilege, in that the work we do every day continues to help safeguard our planet. Below are three ways you can participate in our mission.
CBI Associates Program
BECOME A CBI ASSOCIATE
The CBI Associates program aims to partner with researchers and scientists working in the conservation science fields to expand our impact. The program has been designed to enable researchers and scientists that are not in CBI’s employ to leverage the CBI brand and institutional infrastructure to obtain and manage grant-funded projects within an established and reputable non-profit organization.
This program may be of particular interest to Federal employees that have recently lost jobs in these fields, particularly if they have ongoing research or planning projects funded with soft money, or a track record of successful proposal development. If you, or someone you know, were impacted by the recent Federal government cuts, you can learn more about the CBI Associates program here.
Help Preserve Environmental Data
BECOME A DATA BASIN VOLUNTEER
According to a New York Times analysis published on February 2, 2025, “more than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down … as federal agencies rush to heed President Trump’s orders.” Already, missing data related to “climate” and “resilience” have been reported. CBI’s Data Basin platform is well suited to host this type of spatially explicit data and it is free to use. If you have a background in GIS and willing to volunteer your time toward collecting and uploading data to Data Basin to help preserve important natural resource data, please contact us at info@consbio.org and we will be in touch about ways you can contribute.
Make a Donation
Of course, financial support is always welcome, even more so in a time when organizations like CBI face uncertainty about the availability of government funding. Any contribution you are able to make is much appreciated and will help ensure that CBI continues to do its important work under these particularly difficult circumstances.
Where Have All the Porkies Gone, and Can We Get Them Back?
Porcupines have been disappearing from western forests for years, and CBI is exploring if we can get them back in the Southern Sierra Nevada to also help the Pacific fisher.
Concerns have been mounting in recent decades over an apparent decline in the distribution and abundance of the North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) throughout the western US. This decline is especially evident, and troubling, in the southern Sierra Nevada of California, where CBI has been leading the effort to recover the endangered distinct population of fishers (Pekania pennanti). Porcupines were once a favorite, if not the favorite, food of fishers, but they are completely missing from the fisher diet in recent decades. In addition, porcupines are “ecosystem engineers” whose gnawing on tree bark creates multi-forked treetops, platforms, and cavities used by fishers and numerous other wildlife species, from nesting raptors to flying squirrels to martens.
CBI is currently exploring with partners options for returning porcupines to southern Sierra Nevada forests to benefit the ecosystem and to help recover endangered fishers. Once common in Sierran mixed conifer forests, “quill pigs” were routinely shot and poisoned as pests during much of the Twentieth Century, because their food habits damaged trees and reduced their timber value. This persecution has largely ceased, but population declines have continued to the point that they seem to be completely absent from fisher habitat.
Returning porcupines to the southern Sierra Nevada will not be easy. Reasons for their disappearance are complex and not fully understood; their reproductive rates are extremely low (a mother can birth only one porcupette per year); and there is an inherent conundrum in that fisher predation on porcupines could hinder efforts to re-establish a population. Nevertheless, we believe the effort is worth a try. The first step is establishing a working group of porcupine and forest ecology experts to review all aspects of the problem and to develop a reintroduction feasibility study. We are in the very early stages of contacting interested experts and will be pursuing funding opportunities for a feasibility study.
The Global Wildfire Collective
A NEW CONSERVATION BIOLOGY INSTITUTE INITIATIVE
Altered fire regimes are leading to profound ecological transformations, posing serious threats to biodiversity and driving large-scale species extinctions. Wildfires are also disrupting essential ecological services proportionately that humans depend upon (e.g. clean air and water, soil stability and fertility, carbon storage). As the wildfire crisis accelerates, there is an urgent need for trans-disciplinary, trans-sector, and globally coordinated research to understand the causes and consequences of changing wildfire patterns, and how these scale across space and time. Yet, wildfire has traditionally been studied in institutional and disciplinary silos without accounting for the critical interconnections among human and ecological systems, and all the components within.
To break down these silos and promote cross-discipline, global collaboration, CBI has launched the Global Wildfire Collective (GWC). The GWC is an interdisciplinary research and capacity-building group whose work cuts across topics, sectors and actors that drive and are subject to the impacts of wildfire. The GWC is committed to establishing and proliferating wildfire resilience and recovery strategies that produce multiple co-benefits to maximize well-being in ecological and social systems.
You can read more about the initiative, our activities and our charter members here.
ATTEND OUR INAUGURAL WILDFIRE SCIENCE & ECOLOGY WEBINAR
When
March 20, 2025, 2:00pm-3:30pm Pacific Time
Title
Ecological & Human Causes and Impacts of Three Extreme Wildfire Events
This event will kick off the Global Wildfire Collective’s wildfire science and ecology webinar series. CBI’s Dr. Alexandra Syphard will moderate a discussion between international scientists that have studied the ecological and human causes and impacts of these three extreme wildfire events as well as the opportunities and challenges in recovery from these extreme events:
- Australia: Black Summer bushfires (2019-2020)
- Dr. Owen Price, Associate Professor and Director in Bushfire Risk Management, University of Wollongong, Australia
- Chile: Valparaíso wildfires (2024)
- Dr. Mauro González, Professor, Instituto de Conservación Biodiversidad, Universidad Austral de Chile
- United States: Los Angeles wildfires (2025)
- Dr. Jon Keeley, USGS / UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, US
- Ecology and post-fire recovery:
- Dr. Stijn Erik R. Hantson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Universidad del Rosario, Colombia
- Wildfire recovery and social vulnerability:
- Dr. Susan L. Cutter, Director, Hazards Vulnerability & Resilience Institute, University of South Carolina, US
New CBI Team Member
WELCOMING DAN WASSEL TO OUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS
We are happy to announce that Dan Wassel has joined the Conservation Biology Institute board of directors as our Treasurer. Dan brings over two decades of experience as a financial leader and CFO across multiple industries including technology, financial services and hospitality. With a proven track record in financial strategy, Dan ensures fiscal discipline and transparency in all aspects of the organization’s operations. Having led multiple organizations through high growth stages and multiple exits, Dan is committed to supporting CBI’s mission of protecting natural treasures for future generations.