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This project examines the decision of an ejido (communal land where members have development and land use rights, but not ownership) in the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve (EVBR) to sell their development rights to a Mexican conservation group, and the complex socioecological and economic consequences that have since unfolded. Located in the state of Baja California Sur (BCS) in Mexico on the coast of a critical Pacific gray whale breeding ground called Laguna San Ignacio, Ejido Luis Echeverría Álvarez (ELEA) has faced multiple attempts by Mitsubishi to purchase their land development rights to expand their massive sea salt production facilities in BCS. Despite pressure from such a wealthy, powerful multinational company, in 2005 ELEA became the first ejido in the EVBR to sell their usufruct rights instead to a cohort of conservation groups who maintain the land and associated lagoon as a Pacific gray whale conservation area while also providing economic development funds and ecotourism opportunities to the local community. This attempt at conservation through development added to the complex interplay between whaling protections and the fishing industry that historically served as ELEA’s central economic industry. In the aftermath of this partial economic transition, my research will focus on the tensions between whale conservation and the fishing industry of ELEA, the social ecology and conservation advocacy of the surrounding area, and the rise of the whale-watching ecotourism industry in BCS. Through ethnographic research in ELEA, I seek to understand the socioecological and economic impact of this conservation development deal on the multi-species community of ELEA while problematizing the conservation sector’s promotion of green capitalism.

Robotic challenges like the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) or the DARPA Challenges are an established and important way to drive scientific progress. They make research comparable on a well-defined benchmark with equal test conditions for all participants. However, such challenge events occur only occasionally, are limited to a small number of contestants, and the test conditions are very difficult to replicate after the main event. We present a new physical benchmark challenge for robotic picking: the ACRV Picking Benchmark (APB). Designed to be reproducible, it consists of a set of 42 common objects, a widely available shelf, and exact guidelines for object arrangement using stencils. A well-defined evaluation protocol enables the comparison of complete robotic systems -- including perception and manipulation -- instead of sub-systems only. Our paper also describes and reports results achieved by an open baseline system based on a Baxter robot.