I am pleased to write an update on the activities and conservation initiatives that I have been working on after attending Conservation Strategy Fund’s 2012 course, Economic Tools for Conservation, in Stanford, CA.

February was a month of non-stop travel for me. Having just started working with CSF I got shipped off on a whirlwind tour of Micronesia and Bali. Not a bad start I suppose!

Conservation Strategy Fund has been training conservationists, natural resource managers, and policy-makers in the language of economics for nearly 15 years. Hear first-hand what our course participants and instructors have to say about why CSF's training programs are effective and make a big difference for conservation.

CSF recently released the HydroCalculator Version 3.0 with two major advances. First, the tool interactively enables the user to pinpoint the exact location of the hydro project on a map, which can show satellite imagery and terrain. Second, a global map of land-cover types, with corresponding carbon densities, has been linked to the tool so that it automatically calculates net carbon emissions. Advanced users can override the land-cover selection and choose up to four different types of land-covers flooded by the dam, and their respective shares of the area inundated. We have added dozens of land-cover types – all of those included in the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center dataset.

Knowledge of economic tools in conservation shouldn't just exist on an individual level. In order to make an even bigger impact on nature, CSF is taking its training to the institutional level this month with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Bolivia. WCS was selected by CSF for our first ever In-House Training, funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Andes-Amazon Initiative (AAI). WCS saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, global conservation, education and the management of the world's largest system of urban wildlife parks.