Bird tolerance to humans in open tropical ecosystems

AbstractAnimal tolerance towards humans can be a key factor facilitating wildlife–human coexistence, yet traits predicting its direction and magnitude across tropical animals are poorly known. Using 10,249 observations for 842 bird species inhabiting open tropical ecosystems in Africa, South America, and Australia, we find that avian tolerance towards humans was lower (i.e., escape distance was longer) in rural rather than urban populations and in populations exposed to lower human disturbance (measured as human footprint index). In addition, larger species and species with larger clutches and enhanced flight ability are less tolerant to human approaches and escape distances increase when birds were approached during the wet season compared to the dry season and from longer starting distances. Identification of key factors affecting animal tolerance towards humans across large spatial and taxonomic scales may help us to better understand and predict the patterns of species distributions in the Anthropocene.</jats:p

Aligning evidence generation and use across health, development, and environment

© 2019 The Authors Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) and serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible results chains, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified rubric. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice, streamlining efforts to apply multi-objective approaches and/or synthesize evidence in multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams. These recommendations advance the necessary process of reconciling existing evidence standards in health, development, and environment, and initiate a common basis for integrated evidence generation and use in research, practice, and policy design

Transforming tertiary institutions for mass higher education through distance and open learning approaches in Africa: a telescopic view

The recent global occurrences are in one way or another affecting many individuals, institutions and even governmental structures, particularly in the developing countries of the world. Those who are hard hit within the premise of our article, include the Universities on the continent of Africa, where their hitherto status quo as "ivory towers" is being challenged by private competitors while this situation has been aggravated by the fast dwindling financial support from their varying governments. In addition, the process of democratization of education has inevitably led to the explosive demands by the citizens of the different African countries for open admission into the tertiary institutions as full time students but the universities have no absorptive capacity to meet the demands due to some perennial factors. Against this background, this article therefore, analyses the current spate of "transformation process" which is going on in most of the Southern African Universities. This is done using the telescopic view to assess the rationale, with a view to synthesizing the positive dividends which may accrue from the adoption of distance and open learning approaches in order to achieve greater accessibility and the massification of educational products. This is especially pertinent during this era of technology driven educational innovation, so as to make universities' programmes not only accessible but also relevant to the needs and aspirations of the teeming African population. (South African Journal of Higher Education: 2003 17 (3):13-25