George Holmes

Graphical abstract on a paper on designing user-centred technologies to address the illegal wildlife trade. The image depicts four visual parts of the study, 1. the geographic location where the research was conducted, in Indonesia, 2. Some of the methods, including a needs assessment where members of conservation law enforcement ranked the effectiveness of features that would assist them in their jobs together with a correct species identification, such as the IUCN or protection status, the 3. part shows a prototype of an app on a mobile phone screen, which is the use case we are considering. It shows a picture of a bird taken in a wildlife marketplace followed by the percentage accuracy that the artificial intelligence model has assigned the classification of the image. The 4. section discusses some implications of the study, i.e. that technology results wouldn't be admissible in court (i.e. this species was correctly identified by a tool and not a person) and that bird trade is socially acceptable, which compromises the efficacy of enforcement.

One of my PhD chapters: 'Designing user-centered technologies to address the illegal wildlife trade' is OUT NOW in the @society4conbio.bsky.social journal Conservation Science and Practice! Please check out the graphical abstract and give it a read: conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Fieldwork can be a unique opportunity, but it can also be a very significant challenge to well-being. My colleagues have developed this interactive reflection tool to help manage well-being whilst on fieldwork, preparing to fieldwork, and when you get back
inclusivefieldwork.leeds.ac.uk/wellbeing/

Photo shows the yellow myxcomycete, Fuligo septica, on deadwood

Are you an ecologist? Do you collect biodiversity data for your role in a charity, research, a government body, or a specialist organisation?

Read on for a thread that might interest you… 🧵 [1/6]

#biodiversity #forests #darkextinction #ecology #research

go to POLLEN, load up on radical ideas around coexistence. Then go to ECCB and Pathways, release the ideas and cause absolute havoc?

They go to the same place as pens, tupperware lids, and exactly one sock from each pair.

Tea towel with embroidered sentence

when leaving comments on an early draft of Dr @sicilyfiennes.bsky.social amazing thesis, I described a sentence in it as “so good it should be embroidered on a tea towel”. As a end-of-PhD present, they gifted me this amazing tea towel, with that sentence embroidered on it! Best academic gift ever!

The Drain of Scientific Publishing The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and ...

Profits from scientific publishing are eye-watering, costing us billions. In ‘The Drain of Scientific Publishing’ (arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820), (building on ‘The Strain of Scientific Publishing’ doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00327) we show how it is harmful – and unnecessary.

@extinctionleeds.bsky.social is an interdisciplinary doctoral training programme focusing on topics relating to extinction and its meanings, histories and legacies.

Watch the whole🎬👉 media.leverhulme.ac.uk/video/extinc...
@katatrepsis.bsky.social @universityofleeds.bsky.social

Fancy coming to POLLEN in Barcelona and joining our panel on "Political Ecologies of Restoration: Reintroduction, Assisted
Migration, and Rewilding"? Then submit an abstract via the link below!

pollenpoliticalecology.network/pollen-2026/...

A curious thing I share about #okapi is their long history with the U.S., esp. New York: @amnh.org, Bronx Zoo, @wcs.org. Deals w Belgian Congo, Lang's Congo trip, Gilman's philanthropy, #Warhol & Anne Eisner Putnam's art, & Madison Square Gdns where Mr G, the only circus okapi, died. Book out today

Naming It Is Not Enough: An Orienting Map for Understanding Conservation's Entanglement With Power Power is frequently acknowledged in conservation as a limiting factor, something to be cited, problematized, or managed, less frequently is it engaged with as a lived, situated, and multidimensional ....

this paper in @consletters.bsky.social is a superb primer on what power means in conservation - a big job to summarise centuries of social theory and decades of conservation social science research into a few thousand words!
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Fancy coming to POLLEN in Barcelona and joining our panel on "Political Ecologies of Restoration: Reintroduction, Assisted
Migration, and Rewilding"? Then submit an abstract via the link below!

pollenpoliticalecology.network/pollen-2026/...

thanks- the first draft mentioned infant Ibex goats being "kid-napped", but the reviewer didn't like it. It's my mission to put dad jokes and puns into all my papers.

🚨 We are looking for 3 new colleagues to join the GreenFrontier team as Postdoctoral Researchers!

Deadline for applications: 25 Nov 2025

Each of the 3 openings will involve extended ethnographic fieldwork + plenty of opportunities to consolidate research & leadership skills!

Please share widely!

(warning. This paper contains dad-jokes)

This started off life as a @naturalengland.bsky.social / DEFRA England Species Reintroduction Taskforce blogpost. By the way, the amazing Gabriel Rowland has just started a PhD exploring the social and ecological aspects of illicit and unregulated translocations

Who Let the Frogs out? Illicit and Unregulated Species Translocations Click on the article title to read more.

Short piece in @consletters.bsky.social exploring social, cultural, political and ecological apsects of illicit and unregulated species translocations - what others (not me, due to homophone errors) might call guerilla rewilding. conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The bison in Kent can be seen by some as a species 're'-introduction, because bonasus and priscus are so genetically and phenotypically close, or a taxon substitution, because they perform the same ecological function, or an introduction of another species altogether, just because it is cool.

We assume that bonasus are a forest species, because that's were the remnant populations were - but they may have preferred grasslands, and only live in forests because they are the last refuge from human pressures. So the forest bison may not be truly at home in forests in Kent or anywhere else

The Kent bison are European forest bison (bison bonasus). No bonasus remains have been found in Britain, but plenty of extinct Steppe Bison (Bison Priscus) remains have been dug up. How different these species were - genetically, phenotypically, ecologically, is contested.

Two men standing in front of a mural of a bison in forest

A fun visit to the University of Kent, to discuss species reintroductions. Here's me in front of the campus mural of a European Bison. There's a small herd of them living just three miles from this mural, but it is not a simple story of a 're' introduction.

Yes. I'm presuming it was a careful choice not to quote her exact words in the letter, so I'm not going to post them here. I believe some news outlets reported those words, so you can find them elsewhere. But they were pretty mild and a MILLION miles away from anything dangerous or prejudiced.

Letter of Support for Professor Farhana Sultana As scholars within and beyond academia, we write in solidarity with academic freedom of expression with our colleague, Dr. Farhana Sultana, an internationally recognized scholar and tenured Full Profe...

This is an important petition on academic freedom, for a professor at Syracuse, NY, USA, who has been indefinitely suspended for a very mildly sarcastic four-word social media post relating to US politics.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Title page of a collection of animal stories by Henry Williamson: TARKA THE OTTER, SALAR THE SALMON, THE EPIC OF BROCK THE BADGER, CHAKCHEK THE PEREGRINE.

Today I am mostly thinking about the popular inter-war literary genre 'animal stories written by fascists'. Join me.

Wetland Times

new virtual exhibition on wetlands, exploring how people interact with their wetlands, their rhythms, dynamic changes, and flows of many kinds. www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/...

This paper - on what habituation does and should mean - is a must-read for anyone working on wildlife conservation, human-wildlife interactions/conflict/coexistence, translocations, in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences.

Stakeholder consensus suggests strategies to promote sustainability in an artisanal fishery with high rates of poaching and marine mammal bycatch Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

The original paper is this one, in @peopleandnature.bsky.social
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

I've long thought of our research as artworks 😉. But now it is actually true - our research on Caspian seal conservation has been integrated into an artwork in Berlin, on ecological degradation and human-nature interactions. w/ @phoca-sapiens.bsky.social.
www.studio1-0-6.com/carried-by-t...

Another productive meeting of the Defra/ @naturalengland.bsky.social Species Reintroduction Taskforce, this time at Wild Ennerdale, Cumbria. Classic Taskforce behaviour, crouching in a forest looking at a successfully translocated Hairy Wood Ant colony.