Financing threatened species management: the costs of single species programmes and the budget constraint

In New Zealand total annual funding allows 15 percent of the 2,400 threatened species to be targeted for management. Although management costs are crucial to a conservation organisation's ability to achieve its goals, estimates of costs are not usually included in applications for funding or the preparation of recovery plans. Cost is also not generally a factor in priority ranking systems and cost-effectiveness analysis is rarely conducted. Using the results of analysis of 11 single species programmes for 2003-2012, this paper investigates the costs of management. It also considers the impact of the budget constraint on outcomes, cost-effectiveness, and investment.threatened species, management, cost, budget constraint, Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Herman L. Midlo: Social Ally in Louisiana Religious Civil Rights

The study of social allies in the field of American Civil Rights and Liberties History is largely an underappreciated aspect of this historical era. This work argues that social allies and their stories are worthwhile histories that are beneficial to the study of American Civil Rights and Liberties using Louisiana lawyer Herman Lazard Midlo as a case study. Midlo worked as a Louisiana lawyer from the 1930s to 1960s and fought tirelessly for the religious liberties of the Jehovah’s Witness community in the state. His story shows how beneficial and consequential the actions of social allies have had and can have on the protection and expansion of civil rights and religious liberties

The costs of single species programes and the budget constraint

Despite the scarcity of funding for species conservation programs, estimation of the cost of threatened species programs occurs in only a few countries. This paper examines the reasons for the lack of species program cost estimates and the likely impacts of this on conservation management. We report methodology used to estimate cost for eleven New Zealand species programs and their estimated costs over a ten year period. Differences between species in the costs of the programs and the breakdown of the costs are highlighted. The estimated costs are compared with expected levels of expenditure on each species to illustrate the existence of a budget constraint for threatened species. The likely effects of cost of species conservation exceeding expenditures on species conservation are examined. Annual cost data is used together with information on rate of conservation progress to estimate time and total cost for each species to reach ‘Not Threatened’ status

An efficiency framework for valence processing systems inspired by soft cross-wiring

Recent experiments suggest that subsecond dopamine delivery to human striatum encodes a combination of reward prediction errors and counterfactual errors thus composing the actual with the possible into one neurochemical signal. Here, we present a model where the counterfactual part of these striatal dopamine fluctuations originates in another valuation system that shadows the dopamine system by acting as its near-antipode in terms of spike-rate encoding yet co-releases dopamine alongside its own native neurotransmitter. We show that such a hypothesis engenders important representational consequences where valence processing appears subject to the efficient encoding considerations common to the visual and auditory systems. This new perspective opens up important computational consequences for understanding how value-predicting information should integrate with sensory processing streams