Camera trapping for conservation

Camera traps use a motion sensor to capture images of passing animals, representing verifiable and non-invasive records of the presence of a given species at a specified place and time. These simple records provide fundamental data on biodiversity that have proven invaluable to conservation. Thanks to the improved (better, smaller, and less expensive) camera technology and the concurrent development of analytical approaches, camera trapping science has grown steadily in the last 15 years and advanced our knowledge of elusive and rare fauna across the planet. Here we review the use and potential of camera trapping in conservation science. We start with an introduction to the importance and challenges of studying reclusive wildlife and discuss the technical aspects of camera traps that make them so efficient and widely used for this purpose. We then review the variety of ways camera trapping has contributed to conservation, first presenting the wildlife metrics camera traps can document and then surveying how these have been applied to conservation through studies of habitat preference, distribution models, threat assessments, monitoring, and evaluations of conservation interventions. We also present case studies showing how camera trapping can effectively contribute to link ecological monitoring to conservation, including how data and images can be used to engage the public and policymakers with conservation issues, and how this work is now being scaled up through citizen science and networks of standardized data collection coupled with cyber-infrastructures for automatized analyses. We conclude by reviewing possible technological improvements of camera traps and how they would aid conservation in the future.

Enhancing School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model

The U.S. Secret Service has a long-standing tradition of conducting threat assessments as part of its mandate to protect the President of the United States and other elected officials. Building on this experience, the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) is dedicated to expanding the field of violence prevention by closely examining the targeted violence that affects communities across the United States, including targeted school violence. This chapter outlines NTAC’s recommendations for implementing behavioral threat assessment teams in K–12 schools, as outlined in Enhancing School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model: An Operational Guide for Preventing Targeted School Violence (2018).

The Role of Psychological Assessment in Countering Violent Extremism

The following chapter provides an overview of approaches and tactics commonly used in programs developed to counter radicalization and violent extremism, with a particular emphasis on the role of risk/threat assessments used within existing programs. The purpose of this chapter is to understand to what extent existing radicalization prevention, deradicalization, and disengagement programs are using some form of individual-level risk assessment for terrorism or other forms of violence, or if any psychological assessments or interventions are used. The results indicate that the overwhelming majority of current programs do not explicitly include individual risk assessments. This is a critical oversight, one which hampers the potential efficacy of disengagement efforts.

Distributed Architecture to Enhance Systems Protection against Unauthorized Activity via USB Devices

Cyberattacks exploiting Universal Serial Bus (USB) interfaces may have a high impact on individual and corporate systems. The BadUSB is an attack where a USB device’s firmware is spoofed and, once mounted, allows attackers to execute a set of malicious actions in a target system. The countermeasures against this type of attack can be grouped into two strategies: phyiscal blocking of USB ports and software blocking. This paper proposes a distributed architecture that uses software blocking to enhance system protection against BadUSB attacks. This architecture is composed of multiple agents and external databases, and it is designed for personal or corporate computers using Microsoft Windows Operating System. When a USB device is connected, the agent inspects the device, provides filtered information about its functionality and presents a threat assessment to the user, based on all previous user choices stored in external databases. By providing valuable information to the user, and also threat assessments from multiple users, the proposed distributed architecture improves system protection.

Quantifying sublethal Florida manatee-watercraft interactions by examining scars on manatee carcasses

A leading human-related threat to the Florida manatee Trichechus manatus latirostris is collisions with watercraft, which account for 20-25% of reported mortalities. Quantitative threat assessments do not include information on all known manatee-watercraft interactions. These interactions often result in sublethal wounding, usually leaving multiple fresh external wounds in a variety of patterns. These wounds then resolve into well-healed scars. We characterized and quantified watercraft-related scar patterns (1 pattern = 1 strike event) on 2935 nonperinatal carcasses (>150 cm total length) that were recovered from 2007 through 2016 to compare the number of patterns by life stage, sex, and population region and across years. We used generalized linear mixed models to examine the effects of several factors on the probability carcasses having scars and on the number of scar patterns per carcass. The models indicated that approximately 96% of adults, approximately 70% of subadults, and approximately 34% of calves had watercraft-related scars. The raw data showed that 1 in 4 adults had been hit 10 or more times; 5 adult carcasses bore evidence of 40 or more strikes. On average, adult females had more scar patterns than did adult males. Manatees on Florida’s west coast had more scar patterns than did those on the east coast, while carcasses from the less populated Everglades had significantly fewer scar patterns than did those from the rest of the state. These results improve our understanding of the extent of sublethal injury of the Florida manatee caused by boat strikes.

Assessing Terrorism Threats to New Zealand: The role of the Combined Threat Assessment Group

This article has been produced by the Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG). It provides in detail, and publicly for the first time, a genuinely informed explanation for the origins and function of CTAG. It covers the nature and challenge of threat assessment, the methodology applied as well various iterations of the threat assessments that are undertaken. This leads on to an explanation of how New Zealand’s National Terrorism Threat Level is set. Overall, this article provides an informative and well-rounded explanation of the components that comprise the National Terrorism Threat Level and makes for essential reading for wider public service, academic, and security conscious public and private institutions across the country.