dotWild: A Blog for the Wonks Among Us

January 20, 2011

The Defenders blog was created in April 2010 as a way to quickly share information with our supporters about the rapidly unfolding Gulf oil disaster. Then, in September, we expanded the focus of the blog to encompass the full breadth of our work, from specific imperiled species to issues like climate change and renewable energy that have a major impact on those species and the environment as a whole.

Although Defenders is renowned for our commitment to always using the latest and most reliable scientific findings to determine our courses of action, we’ve kept the scientific discussions on this blog at a fairly high level so the information will be useful and relevant to as wide a swath of our members and the general public as possible. However, we have always recognized that we also have a smaller audience of people who are highly interested in the deep dive on these issues, people who want to know about the latest academic studies and see the raw data that fuels our work. So we decided to give those folks their own place to go to find that level of information.

Introducing dotWild

dotWild (experts.defendersblog.org) is the blog of scientists and policy experts at Defenders of Wildlife. Here you’ll find posts by everyone from our senior staff members who are working to develop long-term, strategic policies for the organization to experts in our regional offices who are out working with key environmental stakeholders in the field every day. Here are a few recent entries, to give you a sense of what we’re covering at dotWild:

New Report Highlights the Importance of Private Lands to Biodiversity Conservation (Judy Boshoven, Manager, Living Lands Program)
Endangered Species on the Bus? (Trisha White, Director, Habitat & Highways Program)
Administration to Launch Climate Adaptation Guidance (Noah Matson, Vice President, Climate Change and Natural Resources Adaptation)
A Community on Ecosystem Services (Sara Vickerman, Senior Director for Biodiversity Partnerships)
Exploring EPA’s RePower America Data on Renewable Energy (Timothy Male, Vice President for Conservation)

That’s some serious science! The articles are data-intensive and include links to academic studies and reports as well as to websites and blogs for other organizations and government agencies involved in these issues. They also include detailed charts and interactive visualizations that provide readers with the ability to further explore the data for themselves.

“Welcome to the blog of our scientists and policy experts who work for us across the United States, Mexico and the world to help save and restore Earth’s biodiversity… We hope this content informs and inspires you.” – Timothy Male, Vice President for Conservation Policy, Defenders of Wildlife

A Blog For Generalists and Specialists

Visitors to dotWild can subscribe to the blog as a whole using the links in the Stay Informed section of the right-hand column or choose to follow only those feeds for specific categories or authors. Simply click on the category or author link and you’ll get taken to a page with all the current posts for that topic/person as well as an RSS link for adding the feed to your preferred reader.