Strong empirical evidence supports recovery of reef fish populations with fishery closures. In countries where full exclusion of people from fishing may be perceived as inequitable, fishing gear restrictions on non-selective and destructive gears may offer socially relevant management alternatives to build recovery of fish biomass. Even so, very few studies have statistically compared the responses of tropical reef fisheries to alternative management strategies. Here we test for the effects of fishery closures and fishing gear restrictions on tropical reef fish biomass, at the community and family level, at 1,396 underwater surveys conducted at 617 unique sites across a spatial hierarchy within 22 global marine ecoregions representing five realms. We compare total biomass across local fish assemblages, and among 20 reef fish families inside marine protected areas (MPAs) with different fishing restrictions: no-take, hook and line fishing only, several fishing gears allowed, to sites open to all fishing gears. We include a further category representing remote sites where fishing pressure is low. As expected, full fishery closures, often referred to as ‘no-take’ zones, most benefit community and family level fish biomass in comparison with restrictions on fishing gears and openly fished sites. We further find that although biomass responses to fishery closures are highly variable across families, some fishery targets (e.g., Carcharhinidae, and Lutjanidae) respond positively to multiple restrictions on fishing gears (i.e., where gears other than hook and line fishing are not permitted). Remoteness also imparts a positive influence on the response of community level fish biomass and many fish families. Our findings provide strong support for the role of fishing restrictions in building recovery of fish biomass, and indicate important interactions among fishing gear types on removal of fish biomass among a range of reef fish families.

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Island populations are vulnerable to introduced pathogens, as evidenced by extinction or population decline of several endemic Hawaiian birds caused by the malaria parasite, Plasmodium relictum (order Haemosporida). We analyzed blood samples from 363 birds caught near Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for the presence of haemosporidian infections. We characterized parasite lineages by determining nucleotide variation of the parasite's mitochondrial cyt b gene. Fifty-nine individuals were infected, and we identified 7 lineages of haemosporidian parasites. Fifty individuals were infected by 6 Haemoproteus sp. lineages, including a newly characterized lineage of Haem. (Parahaemoproteus) sp. CUH01. Nine individuals carried the P. relictum lineage GRW4, including 5 endemic Cuban Grassquits (Tiaris canorus) and 1 migratory Cape May Warbler (Setophaga tigrina). A sequence of the merozoite surface protein gene from one Cuban Grassquit infected with GRW4 matched that of the Hawaiian haplotype Pr9. Our results indicate that resident and migratory Cuban birds are infected with a malaria lineage that has severely affected populations of several endemic Hawaiian birds. We suggest GRW4 may be associated with the lack of several bird species on Cuba that are ubiquitous elsewhere in the West Indies. From the standpoint of avian conservation in the Caribbean Basin, it will be important to determine the distribution of haemosporidian parasites, especially P. relictum GRW4, in Cuba as well as the pathogenicity of this lineage in species that occur and are absent from Cuba.

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“Threatened species programs need a social license to justify public funding” (Zander et al. 2014). Or do they? There is growing acceptance within conservation science that community support for and engagement in ecosystem management programs is likely to lead to better conservation outcomes (Marvier & Wong 2012). However, the language used to characterize relations between conservation and the community is important, and use of the term social license may not always be a useful way to describe this relationship. Since the mid-1990s, the term social license has been widely used in the mining sector to describe implicit acceptance and approval of a mining operation by the community in which it operates (Lacey & Lamont 2014). Other industries such as forestry, aquaculture, and agriculture have begun using the term in a similar way (Edwards & Trafford 2016; Ford & Williams 2016; Moffat et al. 2016). Now social license is beginning to appear in conservation discourse (e.g., Garnett et al., 2015; Oakes et al., 2015). At the same time, the use of social license in other sectors has been criticized (e.g., Owen & Kemp, 2013) because it frames relationships with communities as more singular, binary, and tangible than is feasible or desirable (Parsons & Moffat 2014). The use of social license in conservation needs critical evaluation, particularly given the broad contextual differences between conservation and industries such as mining.

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In the western Amazon basin, recent intensification of river level cycles has increased flooding during the wet seasons and decreased precipitation during the dry season. Greater than normal floods occurred in 2009 and in all years from 2011–2015 during high water seasons, and a drought occurred during the 2010 low water season. During these years, we surveyed populations of terrestrial, arboreal and aquatic wildlife in a seasonally flooded Amazonian forest to study the consequences of intensification of climatic fluctuations to wildlife populations and in turn resource use by traditional people. Intensive floods and droughts have recently resulted in shifts in fish and terrestrial mammal populations in flooded forests, a major landscape in western Amazonia that make up 99,780 km² of the Loreto region in Peru. The intensive floods caused terrestrial mammal populations to decrease by 95% with ungulates, terrestrial rodents and terrestrial edentates having increased mortality because they were forced onto small patches of land during peak flood pulses, and drowning during the historically high floods of 2012 and 2015. In contrast, fish increased and benefited from longer access to inundated forests, resulting in healthy populations of waterfowl, dolphins, otters and caimans. Arboreal species, including, macaws, game birds, primates, felids and other arboreal mammals had stable populations and were not affected directly by high floods. The drought of 2010 had the opposite consequences with decreases in fish, waterfowl and dolphin populations, and stable populations of terrestrial and arboreal species. Ungulates and large rodents are important wildmeat species for local people and their dramatic decline has shifted resource use of people living in the flooded forests with less reliance on hunting and greater use of fish.

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Harnessing the economic potential of the oceans is key to combating poverty, enhancing food security, and strengthening economies. But the concomitant risk of intensified resource extraction to migratory species is worrying given that these species contribute to important ecological processes, often underpin alternatively livelihoods, and many are already threatened. We thus sought to quantify the potential conflict between key economic activities (five fisheries and hydrocarbon exploitation) and sea turtle migration corridors in a region with rapid economic development: Southern and East Africa. From 20 loggerhead and 14 leatherback tracks, we used movement-based kernel density estimation to identify three migration corridors for each of the two species. We overlaid these corridors on maps of the distribution and intensity of economic activities, quantified the extent of overlap and threat posed by each activity on each species, and compared the effects. These results were compared to annual bycatch rates in the respective fisheries. Both species’ corridors overlap most with longlining, but the effect is worse for leatherbacks: bycatch rates are substantial (ca. 1500 per annum) relative to the regional population size (<100 females nesting per annum), likely slowing the population growth rate. Artisanal fisheries are of greater concern for loggerheads, but the population appears to be withstanding the high bycatch rates because it is increasing exponentially. The hydrocarbon industry currently has a moderately low impact, but exploitation in key areas (e.g., Southern Mozambique) has the potential to undermine more than 50 years of conservation efforts, affecting >80% of the loggerhead population, 33% of the (critically endangered) leatherback population, and their nesting beaches. We support establishing blue economies, but oceans need to be carefully zoned and responsibly managed in both space and time to achieve economic (resource extraction), ecological (conservation, maintain processes) and social (maintain alternative livelihood opportunities, combat poverty) objectives.

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Recently, the European Commission adopted a new strategy to halt the loss of biodiversity. Member states are expected to favour a more effective collection and redistribution of European Union (EU) funds under the current Multiannual Financial Framework for 2014–2020. Because of the large spatial variation in the distribution of biodiversity and conservation needs at the continental scale, EU instruments should ensure that countries with higher biodiversity values get more funds and resources for the conservation of this biodiversity than other countries. We assess the association between conservation investments and biodiversity values across the member states, accounting for a variety of conservation investment indicators, taxonomic groups (including groups of plants, vertebrates and invertebrates) and biodiversity value indicators. In general, we have found good overall associations between conservation investments and biodiversity variables. However, some mismatches were found in countries receiving more (or less) investments than expected based on their biodiversity values. We also found that the extensive use of birds as unique indicators of conservation effectiveness may be misleading. These results can provide insight to policymakers to aid future decisions regarding funding allocation, allowing a better redistribution of EU funds.

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Finding sustainable ways to increase the amount of private land protected for biodiversity is a challenge for many conservation organizations. In a number of countries, organizations use ‘revolving fund’ programs, whereby land is purchased, and then on-sold to conservation-minded owners with a condition to enter into a conservation covenant or easement. The proceeds from sale are then used to purchase, protect and on-sell additional properties, incrementally increasing the amount of protected private land. As the effectiveness of this approach relies upon selecting the right properties, we sought to explore the factors currently considered by practitioners and how these are integrated into decision-making. We conducted exploratory, semi-structured interviews with managers from each of the five major revolving funds in Australia. Responses suggest that whilst conservation factors are important, financial and social factors are also highly influential, with a major determinant being whether the property can be on-sold within a reasonable timeframe, and at a price that replenishes the fund. To facilitate the on-sale process, often selected properties include the potential for the construction of a dwelling. Practitioners are faced with clear trade-offs between conservation, financial, amenity and other factors in selecting properties; and three main potential risks: difficulty recovering the costs of acquisition, protection, and resale; difficulty on-selling the property; and difficulty meeting conservation goals. Our findings suggest that the complexity of these decisions may be limiting revolving fund effectiveness. We draw from participant responses to identify potential strategies to mitigate the risks identified, and suggest that managers could benefit from a shared learning and adaptive approach to property selection given the commonalities between programs. Understanding how practitioners are dealing with complex decisions in the implementation of revolving funds helps to identify future research to improve the performance of this conservation tool.

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The establishment of protected areas is a critical strategy for conserving biodiversity. Key policy directives like the Aichi targets seek to expand protected areas to 17% of the earth's land surface, with calls by some conservation biologists for much more. However, in places such as the USA, Germany and Australia, attempts to increase protected areas are meeting strong resistance from communities, industry groups, and governments. Here we provide case studies of such resistance and suggest four ways to tackle this problem: (1) Broaden the case for protected areas beyond just nature conservation, to include the economic, human health, and other benefits, and translate these into a persuasive business case for protected areas. (2) Better communicate the conservation values of protected areas. This should include highlighting how many species, communities, and ecosystems have been conserved by protected areas and also the counterfactual – what would have been lost without protected area establishment. (3) Consider zoning of activities to ensure the maintenance of effective management. And, (4) Remind citizens to think about conservation when they vote, including holding politicians accountable for their environmental promises. Without tackling resistance to expanding the protected estate, it will be impossible to reach conservation targets and this will undermine attempts to stem the global extinction crisis.

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An overarching challenge of natural resource management and biodiversity conservation is that relationships between human and nature are difficult to integrate into tools that can effectively guide decision-making. Social-ecological vulnerability offers a valuable framework for identifying and understanding important social-ecological linkages, and the implications of dependencies and other feedback loops in the system. Unfortunately its implementation at local scales has hitherto been limited, due at least in part to the lack of operational tools for spatial representation of social-ecological vulnerability. Here, we develop a method and demonstrate its utility for mapping social-ecological vulnerability using information on human-nature dependencies and ecosystem services at local scales within the context of the small-scale fishery of Moorea, French Polynesia. Our approach produced a spatial analysis that reveals social-ecological vulnerability hotspots that highlight focal areas for management intervention. The results can also inform decisions about where biodiversity conservation strategies are likely to be more effective, and how social impacts from policy decisions can be minimized. This study provides a new perspective on human-nature linkages that can inform efforts to manage for sustainability at local scales. Our approach delivers insights that are distinct from those provided by the emphasis on a single vulnerability component (e.g., exposure), and demonstrates the feasibility and value of operationalizing the social-ecological vulnerability framework for policy, planning and participatory management decisions.

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Since its inception, conservation biology has inspired thousands of students, spurred the creation of new initiatives, organizations and agencies, and informed conservation efforts worldwide. Nevertheless, global biodiversity loss is accelerating (Butchart et al. 2010), and our field needs to change to keep pace with mounting challenges. Conservation would benefit if scientists more enthusiastically pushed the institutional boundaries of our field through their efforts to expand their own and others’ career options and professional opportunities. We discuss several key areas of expansion, a critical subset of a longer list of comprehensive solutions. We aim to spark productive conversation and self-reflection to galvanize individual and institutional change in our field.

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Assessments of risk to biodiversity often rely on spatial distributions of species and ecosystems. Range size metrics used extensively in these assessments, such as Area of Occupancy (AOO), are sensitive to measurement scale, prompting proposals to measure them at finer scales, or a variery of different scales based on the shape of the distribution or ecological characteristics of the biota. Despite its dominant role in Red List assessments for decades, appropriate spatial scales of AOO for predicting risks of species extinction or ecosystem collapse remain untested and contentious. There are no quantitative evaluations of the scale-sensitivity of AOO as a predictor of risks, the relationship between optimal AOO scale and threat scale, or the effect of grid uncertainty. Here we present new empirical evidence that AOO is a good predictor of risk and performs optimally when measured with grid cells 0.1–1 times the area of the largest plausible threat event. Contrary to previous assertions, finer scale estimates resulted in lower predictive performance; the optimal scale depends on the spatial scales of threats more than the shape or size of biotic distributions. Although we show appreciable potential for grid measurement errors, current IUCN guidelines for estimating AOO neutralize geometric uncertainty and incorporate effective scaling procedures for assessing risks posed by landscape-scale threats to species and ecosystems.

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Establishing protected areas is the primary goal and tool for preventing irreversible biodiversity loss. However, the effectiveness of protected areas that target specific species has been questioned for some time, because targeting key species for conservation may impair the integral regional pool of species diversity and phylogenetic and functional diversity are seldom considered. We first assessed the efficacy of protected areas in China for the conservation of phylogenetic diversity using the ranges and phylogenies of 2279 terrestrial vertebrates. We found a strong positive correlation between phylogenetic and taxonomic diversity, and only 12.1%–43.8% of the priority areas are currently covered by protected areas. However, the patterns and coverage of phylogenetic diversity were affected when weighted by species richness. These results indicate that overall in China, protected areas targeting high species richness protected total phylogenetic diversity well, but failed to do so in some regions with more unique and/or threatened communities. For instance, the coastal areas of Eastern China where there are severely threatened avian communities were less protected. Our results suggest that the distributions of the currently protected areas still have room for improvement although most of the areas protect both taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity.

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Although significant resources are being spent researching and fostering the relationship between forests and livelihoods to promote mutually beneficial outcomes, critical gaps in our understanding persist. A core reason for such gaps is that researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers lack the structured space to interact and collaborate, which is essential for effective, interdisciplinary research, practice, and evaluation. Thus, scientific findings, policy recommendations, and measured outcomes have not always been synthesized into deep, systemic understanding; learning from practice and implementation does not easily find its way into scientific analyses­­; and science often fails to influence policy. Communities of practice (CofPs) are dynamic sociocultural systems that bring people together to share and create knowledge around a common topic of interest. CofPs offer participants a space and structure suited to developing new, systemic approaches to multi-dimensional problems around a common theme. Uniquely informed by a systems thinking perspective, and drawing from the scientific and grey literatures and in-depth interviews with representatives of established CofPs in the natural resource management and development domain, we argue that a well-designed and adequately-funded CofP can facilitate interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral relationships and knowledge exchange. Well-designed CofPs integrate a set of core features and processes in order to enhance individual, collective, and domain outcomes; they set out an initial but evolving purpose, encourage diverse leadership, and promote the development of collective identity development. Funding facilitates ideal, effective communication strategies (e.g. face-to-face engagement). This essay is, therefore, a call to colleagues across sectors and disciplines to take advantage of CofPs to advance the domain of forests and livelihoods.

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Ecosystem function and resilience are compromised when habitats become fragmented due to land-use change. This has led to national and international conservation strategies aimed at restoring habitat extent and improving functional connectivity (i.e. maintaining dispersal processes). However, biodiversity responses to landscape-scale habitat creation and the relative importance of spatial and temporal scales is poorly understood, and there is disagreement over which conservation strategies should be prioritised. Addressing these knowledge gaps has been challenging because (1) there can be a significant time lag between habitat creation and biodiversity responses, and (2) many taxa respond to landscape characteristics over large spatial scales. These conditions can be difficult to replicate in a controlled setting but can be simulated using ‘natural’ experiments. Here, we used 160 years of historic post-agricultural woodland creation as a natural experiment to evaluate biodiversity responses to landscape-scale habitat creation. Specifically, we disentangle the direct and indirect relationships between bird abundance and diversity, ecological continuity, patch characteristics and landscape structure, and quantify the relative importance of local and landscape scales. Results suggest that ecological continuity has an indirect effect on total bird species richness through its direct effects on stand structure. However, for functional groups most closely associated with woodland habitats, ecological continuity had little influence. This was probably because woodlands were rapidly colonised by woodland generalists in < 10 years (the minimum patch age), but were on average too young (median 50 years) to be colonised by woodland specialists. Local, patch characteristics were relatively more important than landscape characteristics. We conclude that biodiversity responses to habitat creation are dependent on local and landscape-scale factors that interact across time and space. We also suggest that knowledge gained from studies of habitat fragmentation/loss should be used to inform habitat creation with caution, since the two are not necessarily reciprocal.

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Reducing the capture of small fish, discards, and by-catch is a primary concern of fisheries mangers that propose to maintain high yields, species diversity, and associated ecosystem functions. Modified fishing gear is one of the primary ways to reduce by-catch and capture of small fish. The outcomes of gear modification may depend on competition with other gears using similar fishing grounds and resources and the subsequent adoption or defection of fishers using modified gears. We evaluated the adoption, size, catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE), yield, and income responses among gears in a coral reef fishery where a 3-cm escape gap was introduced into traditional traps. The size of fish increased in the modified traps but the catch of smaller fish increased among the other competing gears. Additionally, there was no change in the overall CPUE, yields, or per area incomes but rather redistributions of yield benefits towards the competing gears. For example, estimated incomes of fishers that adopted the traps remained unchanged but increased for net and spear fishers. Fishers using escape-gap traps had a high proportion of income from larger fish, which may have led to a perception of benefits, high status, and no defections. The less polarizing neutral-win rather than a strong loss-win tradeoff outcome may explain the full adoption of escape-gap traps 3 years after their introduction. Trap fishers showed an interest in negotiating other management improvements, such as increased mesh sizes for nets, which could ultimately lead to catalyzing community-level decisions that would increase their own profits.

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Over half of globally threatened animal species have experienced rapid geographic range loss. Identifying the parts of species’ distributions most vulnerable to extinction would benefit conservation planning. However, previous studies give little consensus on whether ranges decline to the core or edge. Here we build on previous work by using empirical data to examine the position of recent local extinctions within species’ geographic ranges, addressing range position as a continuum and exploring the influence of environmental factors. We aggregated point locality data for 125 species of galliform birds across the Palearctic and Indo-Malaya into equal area half degree grid cells and used a multi-species dynamic Bayesian occupancy model to estimate the rates of local extinctions. Our model provides a novel approach to identify loss of populations from within species ranges. We investigated the relationship between extinction rates and distance from range edge, examining whether patterns were consistent across biogeographic realm and different categories of land-use. In the Palearctic, local extinctions occurred closer to the range edge in both unconverted and human-dominated landscapes. In Indo-Malaya, no pattern was found for unconverted landscapes but in human dominated landscapes extinctions tended to occur closer to the core than the edge. Our results suggest that local and regional factors over-ride any general spatial patterns of recent local extinction within species’ ranges and highlight the difficulty of predicting the parts of a species’ distribution most vulnerable to threat.

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The commercial captive breeding of wildlife is often seen as a potential conservation tool to relieve pressure off wild populations, but laundering of wild-sourced specimens as captive-bred can seriously undermine these and provide a false sense of sustainability. Indonesia has been at the centre of such controversy, therefore we examine Indonesia's captive breeding production plan (CBPP) for 2016. A number of the quotas were found to be based on inaccurate and unrealistic biological parameters, and included species with no reported breeding stock. For 38 species, the quota exceeded the number of animals that can be bred based on the biological parameters (range 100% - 540%) using the equations used in the CBPP. A lower reproductive output was calculated for 88 species using published biological parameters compared to the parameters used in the CBPP. The equations used in the production plan also did not appear to account for other factors involved in breeding the proposed large numbers of specimens. We recommend that the captive breeding production plan be adjusted by using realistic published biological parameters, and remove quotas for species for which captive breeding is unlikely or for which no breeding stock is available. The shortcomings in the current captive breeding production plan create loopholes where mammals, reptiles and amphibians from Indonesia declared as captive-bred may have been sourced from the wild.

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Wilderness areas are ecologically intact landscapes predominantly free of human uses, especially industrial scale activities, which result in significant biophysical disturbance. This definition does not exclude indigenous peoples and local communities who live in wilderness areas, depending on them for subsistence, and who have developed deep bio-cultural connections. Wilderness areas are important for biodiversity conservation, along with sustaining key ecological processes, and ecosystem services that underpin planetary life-support systems. Despite these widely recognized benefits and values they are insufficiently protected and are consequently being rapidly eroded. There are increasing calls for multilateral environmental agreements to make a greater and more systematic contribution to wilderness conservation before it is too late. We developed updated global maps of terrestrial wilderness and assessed wilderness coverage by the World Heritage Convention, one of the most important international conservation instruments. We found that one quarter of Natural and Mixed World Heritage Sites (WHS) contain wilderness, conserving a total of 545,307 km² (approximately 1.8% of the world's wilderness extent). Many WHS had excellent wilderness coverage such as the Okavango Delta in Botswana (11,914 km²) and the Central Suriname Nature Reserve in Suriname (16,029 km²). However, 22 (35%) of the world's terrestrial biorealms do not have any wilderness representation within WHS. As an efficient means of filling these gaps, we identify 840 protected areas > 500 km² in size which are predominantly wilderness (>50% of their area) and represent 18 of these 22 missing biorealms. These offer a starting point for assessing the potential for the designation of new WHS that could help increase wilderness representation on the World Heritage List. We also urge the World Heritage Convention to help ensure that the ecological integrity and Outstanding Universal Value of existing World Heritage Sites with wilderness values is preserved.

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Most species are imperfectly detected during biological surveys, creating uncertainty around their abundance or presence at a given location. Decision-makers managing threatened or pest species are regularly faced with this uncertainty, and there are a growing number of examples of managers dealing with imperfect detection. Wildlife diseases have the potential to drive species to extinction, and as such managing species with disease is an important part of conservation. Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) is one such disease that led to the listing of the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) as endangered. Here we report on the successful use of a state-of-the-art removal modelling approach undertaken in collaboration with practitioners to inform decision-making and facilitate a successful management outcome. We used a Bayesian catch-effort model to estimate population size during removal and monitoring of a diseased Tasmanian devil population. We found it was likely that the population had been successfully removed, even when accounting for a possible introduction of a devil to the site. We then analysed the costs and benefits of declaring the area disease-free prior to reintroduction and establishment of a healthy insurance population. The actions of management, in carrying out additional monitoring prior to this reintroduction, were conservative but prudent given uncertainty and the costs of mistakenly declaring the area disease-free.

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While marine protected areas (MPAs) can simultaneously contribute to biodiversity conservation and fisheries management, the global network is biased towards particular ecosystem types, as it was largely established in an ad hoc fashion. The optimization of trade-offs between biodiversity benefits and socio-economic values increases implementation success and minimizes enforcement costs in the long run, but is often neglected in marine spatial planning (MSP). Although the acquisition of spatially explicit socioeconomic data is often perceived as a costly/secondary step in MSP, it is critical to account for lost opportunities by people whose activities will be restricted, especially fishers. Here we present an easily-reproducible habitat-based approach to estimate the spatial distribution of opportunity cost to fishers in data poor regions, assuming that the most accessible areas have higher values and their designation as no-take zones represents increased loss of fishing opportunities. Our method requires only habitat and bathymetric maps, a list of target species, the location of ports, and the relative importance for each port and/or vessel/gear type. The potential distribution of fishing resources is estimated from bathymetric ranges and benthic habitat distribution, while the relative importance of the different resources is estimated for each port, considering total catches (kg), revenues and/or stakeholder perception. Finally, the model can combine different cost layers to produce a comprehensive cost layer, and also allows for the evaluation of tradeoffs. The development of FishCake was based on data from a contentious conservation-planning arena (Abrolhos Bank, Brazil) in which attempts to expand MPA coverage failed due to fishers’ resistance. The opportunity cost approach that we introduce herein allows for the incorporation of economic interests of different stakeholders and evaluation of tradeoffs among different stakeholder groups. The novel approach can be directly used to support conservation planning, in Abrolhos and elsewhere, and is expected to facilitate community consultation.

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Abundance estimates are essential for estimating the viability of populations and the risks posed by alternative management actions. An effort to estimate abundance via a repeated mark-recapture experiment may fail to recapture marked individuals. We present a framework for obtaining lower bounds on abundance in the absence of recaptures for both panmictic and spatially-structured populations. We applied this nil-recapture method to data from a 12-year survey of pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus) in the lower and middle Mississippi River; none of the 241 individuals marked were recaptured in the survey. After accounting for survival and movement, our model-averaged estimate of the total abundance of age 3+ pallid sturgeon in the study area had a 1%, 5%, or 25% chance of being less than 4,600, 7,000, or 15,000, respectively. If we assumed fish were distributed in proportion to survey catch-per-unit-effort, then the furthest downstream reach in the survey hosted at least 4.5-15 fish per river kilometer (rkm), whereas the remainder of the reaches in the lower and middle Mississippi River hosted at least 2.6-8.5 fish rkm⁻¹ for all model variations examined. The lower Mississippi River had an average density of at least 3.0-9.8 age-3+ pallid sturgeon rkm⁻¹. The choice of Bayesian prior was the largest source of uncertainty considered in this study, but did not alter the order of magnitude of lower bounds. Nil-recapture estimates of abundance are highly uncertain and require careful communication but can deliver insights from experiments that might otherwise be considered a failure.

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To contribute to the aspirations of recent international biodiversity conventions, protected areas (PAs) must be strategically located, and not simply established on economically marginal lands as they have in the past. With refined international commitments under the Convention of Biodiversity to target protected areas in places of ‘importance to biodiversity’, this may now be the case. Here we analyze location biases in PAs globally over both historic (pre-2004) and recent time periods. Discouragingly, we find that both old and new protected areas are not targeting places with high concentration of threatened vertebrate species. Instead, they appear to be established in locations that minimize conflict with agriculturally suitable lands. This entrenchment of past trends has significant implications for the contributions these protected areas are making to international commitments to conserve biodiversity. We discover that if protected area growth between 2004 and 2014 had strategically targeted unrepresented threatened vertebrates, it would have been possible to protect >30 times more species (3086 or 2553 potential vs 85 actual new species represented) for the same area or the same cost as the actual expansion that occurred. With the land available for conservation declining, nations must urgently focus new protection on places that provide for the conservation outcomes outlined in international treaties.

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Understanding the environmental contributors to population structure is of paramount importance for conservation in urbanized environments. We used spatially-explicit models to determine genetic population structure under current and future environmental conditions across a highly fragmented, human-dominated environment in Southern California to assess the effects of natural ecological variation and urbanization. We focused on seven common species with diverse habitat requirements, home range sizes, and dispersal abilities. We quantified the relative roles of potential barriers, including natural environmental characteristics and an anthropogenic barrier created by a major highway, in shaping genetic variation. The ability to predict genetic variation in our models varied between species: nine to 81% of intraspecific genetic variation was explained by environmental variables. Although an anthropogenically-induced barrier (here a major highway) severely restricts gene flow and movement at broad scales for some species, genetic variation seems to be primarily driven by natural environmental heterogeneity at a local level. Results show how assessing environmentally associated variation (EAV) for multiple species under current and future climate conditions can help to identify priority regions for maximizing population persistence under environmental change in urbanized regions.

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Growing resource demands by humans, invasive species, natural hazards, and a changing climate are creating broad-scale impacts and have created the need for broader-extent conservation activities that span ownerships and even political borders. Implementing regional-scale conservation brings great challenges, and learning how to overcome these challenges is essential for maintaining biodiversity (i.e., richness and evenness of biological communities) and ecosystem functions and services across scales and borders in the face of system change. We administered an online survey to examine factors potentially driving perspectives of protected area (PA) managers regarding coordination with neighboring PAs and other stakeholders (i.e., stakeholder coordination) for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services during the next decade within diverse regions across Europe. Although >70% of responding PA managers indicated that climate change and invasive species are relevant for their PAs, they gave <50% chance that these threats could be mitigated through stakeholder coordination. They did, however, give >60% chance that stakeholder coordination would take place with the aim to improve conservation outcomes. Consistent with the foundation upon which many European PAs was established, managers viewed maintaining or enhancing biodiversity as the most important (>70%) expected benefit. Other important benefits included maintaining or enhancing human resources and environmental education (range of Bayesian credibility intervals [CIs]: 57–93%). The main barriers to stakeholder coordination were the lack of human and economic resources (CI: 59–67% chance of hindering) followed by communication and inter-stakeholder differences in political structures and laws (range of CIs: 51–64% chance of hindering). European policies and strategies that address these hindering factors could be particularly effective means of enabling implementation of green infrastructure networks, with PAs serving as the nodes.

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There is global concern about tropical forest degradation, in part, because of the associated loss of biodiversity. Communities and indigenous people play a fundamental role in tropical forest management and they are often efficient at preventing forest degradation. However, monitoring changes in biodiversity due to degradation, especially at a scale appropriate to local tropical forest management, is marred with difficulties including the need for expert training, inconsistency across observers, and the lack of baseline or reference data. We used a new biodiversity remote sensing technology, the recording of soundscapes, to test whether the acoustic saturation of a soundscape decreases with increasing land use intensity by the communities that manage the tropical forests in Papua New Guinea. We found that land use zones where forest cover was fully retained had a significantly higher soundscape saturation during peak acoustic activity times, corresponding to the dawn and dusk chorus, compared with land use types with fragmented forest cover. We conclude that, in Papua New Guinea, the relatively simple measure of soundscape saturation may provide a cheap, objective, reproducible, and effective tool to monitor tropical forest deviation from intact state, particularly through detecting the presence of an intact dawn and dusk chorus.

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Establishing protected areas has long been an effective conservation strategy, and is often based on more readily surveyed species. The potential of any freshwater taxa to be a surrogate of other aquatic groups has not been fully explored. We compiled occurrence data on 72 species of freshwater fish, amphibians, mussels, and aquatic reptiles for the Great Plains, Wyoming. We used hierarchical Bayesian multi-species mixture models and MaxEnt models to describe species distributions, and program Zonation to identify conservation priority areas for each aquatic group. The landscape-scale factors that best characterized aquatic species distributions differed among groups. There was low agreement and congruence among taxa-specific conservation priorities (<20%), meaning that no surrogate priority areas would include or protect the best habitats of other aquatic taxa. We found that common, wide-ranging aquatic species were included in taxa-specific priority areas, but rare freshwater species were not included. Thus, the development of conservation priorities based on a single freshwater aquatic group would not protect all species in the other aquatic groups.

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Despite international waters covering over 60% of the world's oceans, our understanding of how fisheries in these regions shape ecosystem processes is surprisingly poor. Seabirds are known to forage at fishing vessels, with potential deleterious effects for their population, but the extent of overlap and behavior in relation to ships are poorly known. Using novel biologging devices, which can detect radar emissions to record the position of boats and seabirds, we measured the true extent of the overlap between seabirds and fishing vessels, and generated estimates of the intensity of fishing and distribution of vessels in international waters. During breeding, wandering albatrosses from the Crozet islands patrolled an area of more than 10 million square kilometers and as much as 79.5% of birds equipped with loggers detected vessels, at distances up to 2500 km from the colony, modifying their natural foraging behavior to attend boats. The extent of this overlap has widespread implications for bycatch risk in seabirds and reveals the areas of intense fishing throughout the ocean. We suggest that seabirds equipped with radar detectors are excellent monitors of the presence of vessels in the southern ocean, offering a new way to monitor fisheries. The method used opens new perspectives to monitor the presence of illegal fisheries and to better understand the impact of fisheries on seabirds.

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For conservation science to effectively inform management, research must focus on creating the scientific knowledge required to solve conservation problems. We report the outcomes of an exercise to identify research questions that, if answered, would increase the effectiveness of conservation and natural resource management practice and policy within Oceania's small island developing states. Respondents from academia, government, and nongovernment organizations across the region surveyed online proposed 270 questions, and subsequently identified 38 of these as high priority. High priority questions speak to the particular challenges of undertaking conservation within small island developing states, and the need for a research agenda that is responsive to the socio-cultural context of Oceania. Our comparison with research priorities identified globally and for other regions revealed broad thematic similarities but also highlighted important differences in specific issues that are relevant to particular conservation contexts. This emphasizes the importance of involving local practitioners in the identification of research priorities. We found that priorities were reasonably well aligned between sectoral groups. Only a few questions were widely considered to be already answered; this may indicate a smaller than expected knowledge-action gap. We hope that these questions can act to strengthen research collaborations between scientists and practitioners working to further conservation and natural resource management in this region.

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Conservation efforts to protect forested landscapes are challenged by climate projections that suggest significant restructuring of vegetation and disturbance regimes in the future. In this regard, paleoecological records that describe ecosystem responses to past variations in climate, fire and human activity offer critical information for assessing present landscape conditions and future landscape vulnerability. We illustrate this point drawing on eight sites in the northwest U.S., New Zealand, Patagonia, and central and southern Europe that have experienced different levels of climate and land-use change. These sites fall along a gradient of landscape conditions that range from near-pristine (i.e., where vegetation and disturbance have been significantly shaped by past climate and biophysical constraints) to highly altered (i.e., landscapes that have been intensely modified by past human activity). Position on this gradient has implications for understanding the role of natural and anthropogenic disturbance in shaping ecosystem dynamics and assessments of present biodiversity, including recognizing missing or overrepresented species. All the study sites reveal dramatic vegetation reorganization in the past as a result of postglacial climate variations. In nearly-pristine landscapes, like Yellowstone, climate has remained the primary driver of ecosystem change up to the present day. In Europe, natural vegetation-climate-fire linkages were broken ∼6000-8000 years ago with the onset of Neolithic farming, and in New Zealand, natural linkages were first lost ∼700 years ago with arrival of the Māori people. In the northwestern U.S. and Patagonia, greatest landscape alteration has occurred in the last 150 years with Euro-American settlement. Paleoecology is sometimes the best and only tool for evaluating the degree of this alteration and the extent to which landscapes retain natural components. Information on landscape-level history thus helps assess current ecological change, clarify management objectives, and define conservation strategies that seek to protect both “natural” and “cultural” elements.

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In July 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service announced a new policy interpretation for the Endangered Species Act. According to the Act, a species must be listed as threatened or endangered if it is determined to be threatened or endangered in a significant portion of its range. The 1973 law does not define “significant portion of its range,” leading to concerns that interpretations of “significant” by federal agencies and the courts could be inconsistent. The 2014 policy seeks to provide consistency by establishing that a portion of the range should be considered significant if the associated individuals’ “removal would cause the entire species to become endangered or threatened.” Here, we review quantitative techniques to assess whether a portion of a species’ range is significant according to the new guidance. Our assessments are based on the “3R” criteria – Redundancy (i.e., buffering from catastrophe), Resiliency (i.e., ability to withstand stochasticity), and Representation (i.e., ability to evolve) – that the Fish and Wildlife Service uses to determine if a species merits listing. We identify data needs for each quantitative technique and indicate which methods might be implemented given the data limitations typical of rare species. We also identify proxies that may be used with limited data. To assess potential data availability, we evaluate seven example species by assessing the data in their Species Status Assessments, which document all the information used during a listing decision. Our evaluation suggests that resiliency assessments will likely be most constrained by limited data. While we reviewed quantitative techniques for the US Endangered Species Act, other countries have legislation requiring identification of significant areas that could benefit from this research.

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Over the past decades, much research has focused on understanding the critical factors for marine extinctions with the aim of preventing further species losses in the oceans. Although conservation and management strategies are enabling several species and populations to recover, others remain at low abundance levels or experience further declines. To understand these discrepancies, we asked which intrinsic and extrinsic factors are critical for the recovery of marine mammals. Building on a published database on abundance trends of 137 marine mammal populations worldwide, we compiled data on 28 potential critical factors and used random forests and additive mixed models in our analytical approach. Our results highlight that a mix of life-history characteristics, ecological traits, phylogenetic relatedness, population size, geographic range, human impacts and management efforts were important in explaining why populations recover or not. Generally, species with lower age at maturity and intermediate habitat area were more likely to recover, which is consistent with life-history and ecological theory. Body size and ocean basin were also important, as well as trophic level, social interactions, the dominant habitat and habitat disturbance. Overall, our results highlight that not one or two, but a range of intrinsic and extrinsic factors are important for recovery, pointing to cumulative effects. This new line of research provides important information for improving conservation and management strategies particularly for those populations that have been unable to recover to date.

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Citizen scientists are increasingly engaged in gathering biodiversity information, but trade-offs are often required between public engagement goals and reliable data collection. We compare population estimates derived from the first four years (2011-2014) of a short-duration citizen science project (Big Butterfly Count, BBC), to those from long-running, standardized monitoring data collected by experienced observers (UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, UKBMS), for 18 widespread butterfly species. BBC data are gathered during an annual, three-week period, whereas UKBMS sampling takes place over six months each year. An initial comparison with UKBMS data restricted to the three-week BBC period revealed that species population changes were significantly correlated between the two sources. The short-duration sampling season renders BBC counts susceptible to bias caused by inter-annual phenological variation in the timing of species’ flight periods. BBC counts were found to be described well by measures for phenology and sampling effort. Annual estimates of species abundance and population trends predicted from models including BBC data and weather covariates as a proxy for phenology correlated significantly with those derived from UKBMS data. In validating the BBC counts, we show, for the first time, that citizen science data, obtained using a simple sampling protocol, can produce comparable estimates of insect species abundance to standardized monitoring data. Although caution is urged in extrapolating from this UK study of a small number of common, conspicuous insects, we demonstrate that mass-participation citizen science can simultaneously contribute to public engagement and biodiversity monitoring. Mass-participation citizen science is not an adequate replacement for standardised biodiversity monitoring but may have a role in extending and complementing it (e.g. by sampling different land-use types), as well as serving to reconnect an increasingly urban human population with nature.

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Glyphosate has become the most commonly used herbicide worldwide, with a reputation of being environmentally benign, non-toxic and safe to wildlife and humans. However, studies have indicated its toxicity has been underestimated, and that its persistence in the environment is greater than once thought. Its actions as a neurotoxin and endocrine disruptor indicate its potential to act in similar ways to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as the organochlorine (OC) chemicals dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and dioxin. Exposure to glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides for both wildlife and people is likely to be chronic and at sub-lethal levels, with multiple and ongoing exposure events in both urban and agricultural landscapes. Despite this, little research attention has been given to the impact of glyphosate on wildlife populations, and existing studies appear in the agricultural, toxicology and water chemistry literature that may have limited visibility among wildlife biologists. There is a strong case for the recognition of glyphosate as an ‘emerging organic contaminant’ and significant potential exists for collaborative research between ecologists, toxicologists and chemists to quantify the impact of glyphosate on wildlife and to evaluate the role of biosentinel species in a preemptive move to mitigate downstream impacts on people. Success will depend on the development of new and novel non-destructive sampling and analysis methodologies as ex post facto identification of toxins at lethal levels has limited utility. Concentrating on the chemistry and toxicity of glyphosate, we have examined the published literature to evaluate the extent to which glyphosate based herbicides can cause toxic effects in wildlife and people and the implications of chronic exposure. We then explore the idea of using birds as bioindicators of glyphosate toxicity. We hope this may encourage future research into the uptake and impact of organophosphate chemicals in target species, particularly traditional indicator species such as birds.

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The high demand for conservation-based work is creating a need for conservation-focused training of current and future graduate students. While many graduates with tertiary degrees in biology are finding careers outside of academia, many programs and mentors continue to prepare students to follow in the footsteps of their professors. Unfortunately, information regarding how to appropriately prepare for today's job market and find success in conservation careers is limited in detail and scope. This problem is further complicated by the differing needs of conservation positions distributed among diverse employers in both economically advanced and developing regions across the globe. To help young scientists identify the tools needed for conservation positions worldwide, we review the current global conservation job market and identify skills required for success in academic, governmental, nonprofit, and private positions. We found that positions in nonprofit organizations are the most abundant, while academic jobs consisted of only 10% of today's job market. The most common skills required across sectors were a strong disciplinary background, followed by analytical and technical skills. Academic postings differed the most from the other postings, emphasizing teaching as a top skill. Non-academic jobs emphasized the need for excellent written and oral communication, as well as project management experience. Furthermore, we found distinct differences across job locations, with postings of developing economies emphasizing language and interpersonal skills, while advanced economic countries positions focused on publication history and technical skills. Our results were corroborated through interviews with current conservation professionals. Finally, we provide a sample list of recommended conservation based training programs. Using the results of this study, young scientists will be better able to tailor their training to maximize success in today's conservation-based job market. Similarly, institutions can apply this information to create educational programs that produce graduates primed for long-term success.

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Bayesian network analyses can integrate complex relationships to examine a range of hypotheses and identify areas that lack associated empirical studies, to prioritise future research. We examined complex relationships in host and pathogen biology to examine disease-driven decline by the amphibian chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a pathogen that is reducing amphibian biodiversity globally. We constructed a Bayesian network consisting of a range of behavioural, genetic, physiological, and environmental variables that influence disease, and used them to predict host population trends (the variable ‘Population trend’ which could be declining or stable). The behaviour of the nodes (the way in which the variables probabilistically responded to changes in states of the parents, which are the nodes or variables that directly influenced them in the graphical model) in our model was consistent with published results, suggesting that the construction of our model reflected the complex relationships characteristic of host-pathogen interactions. We varied the impacts of specific variables in the model, to reveal factors with the most influence on host population trend. Changes to climatic conditions alone did not strongly influence the probability of population decline, suggesting that epidemics in this system do not occur solely because of climate, but instead interacted with other factors such as the capacity of the frog immune system to suppress disease. The effect of the adaptive immune system and disease reservoirs were important to the population trend, but there was little empirical information available for model construction: we suggest research in these areas will aid understanding of chytridiomycosis-induced declines. We include the input of our full model as a base that can be used to understand other systems, and we demonstrate that such analyses are useful tools for reviewing existing literature and identifying links poorly supported by evidence, and for understanding complexities in emerging infectious disease systems.

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The proliferation of linear infrastructure such as roads and rail is a major global driver of cumulative biodiversity loss. Creative interventions to minimise the impacts of this infrastructure whilst still allowing development to meet human population growth and resource consumption demands are urgently required. One strategy for reducing habitat loss associated with development is to encourage linear infrastructure providers and users to share infrastructure networks. Here we quantify the reductions in biodiversity impact and capital cost under linear infrastructure sharing and demonstrate this approach with a case study in South Australia. By evaluating proposed mine-port links we show that shared development of linear infrastructure could reduce overall biodiversity impacts by up to 75%. We found that such reductions are likely to be limited if the dominant mining companies restrict access to infrastructure, a situation likely to occur without policy to promote sharing of infrastructure. Our research helps illuminate the circumstances under which infrastructure sharing can minimise the biodiversity impacts of development.

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Human—wildlife conflict is a major conservation challenge, and compensation for wildlife damage is a widely used economic tool to mitigate this conflict. The effectiveness of this management tool is widely debated. The relative importance of factors associated with compensation success is unclear and little is known about global geographic or taxonomic differences in the application of compensation programs. We carried out a review of the compensation scholarship to examine geographic and taxonomic gaps, analyze patterns of positive and negative comments related to compensation, and assess the relative magnitude of global compensation payments. We analyzed 288 publications referencing wildlife compensation and identified 138 unique compensation programs. These publications reported US$222 million after adjusting for inflation spent on compensation in 50 countries since 1980. Europe was the continent with the most papers and the most reported funding, and wolves and bears were the most frequently compensated target of conflict. Authors of the publications we reviewed made twice as many negative comments compared to positive comments regarding compensation. Three quarters of the negative comments related to program administration. Conversely, three quarters of the positive comments related to program outcomes. The three most common suggestions to improve compensation programs included requiring claimants to employ damage prevention practices, such as improving livestock husbandry or fencing in crops in order to receive compensation (n = 25, 15%); modifying ex post compensation schemes to some form of outcome-based performance payment (n = 21, 12%); and altering programs to make compensation payments more quickly (n = 14, 8%). We suggest that further understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of compensation as a conflict mitigation tool will require more systematic evaluation of the factors driving these opinions, and that differentiating process and outcomes and understanding linkages between them will result in more fruitful analyses and ultimately more effective conflict mitigation.

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There has been little evaluation of anecdotal sightings as a means to confirm new incursions of invasive species. This paper explores the potential for equivocal information communicated by the media to account for patterns of anecdotal reports. In 2001 it was widely reported that red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) had been deliberately released in the island state of Tasmania (Australia), although this claim was later revealed to be baseless. Regardless, by 2013 a total of 3153 anecdotal fox sightings had been reported by members of the public and this implied the wide distribution of foxes. Between 2001–2003 a monthly media index (MMI) for fox-related stories was significantly linked to 15 equivocal claims (Monthly Claims) of physical evidence used to support the existence of a putative fox population (P = 0.001). Fluctuations in monthly anecdotal fox sightings were modelled by MMI, Monthly Claims and Year far more convincingly than biophysical factors describing seasonal changes in fox abundance and photoperiod (P < 0.0001). An annual index of fox media from 2001–2010 was also strongly associated with the yearly tally of anecdotal sightings (P = 0.018). The odds-ratio of sightings ranked as reliable by the fox program in any year decreased exponentially at rate 0.00643 as the total number of sightings increased (P < 0.0001) and was indicative of an observer-expectancy bias. Our results suggest that anecdotal sightings are highly susceptible to cognitive biases and when used to qualify species presence can contribute to flawed risk assessments. Data of known quality and precision are required to reliably confirm a unique invasive species incursion.

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The evaluation of ecosystem quality is important for land management and land-use planning. Evaluation is unavoidably subjective, and robust metrics must be based on consensus and the structured use of observations. This paper presents a means of building and testing metrics based on expert evaluation data, using a transparent and repeatable process.

We gather quantitative evaluation data from a defined expert group, about the quality of synthetic (fictional) grassy woodland sites. We use these data to train a model (an ensemble of thirty bagged regression trees) capable of predicting the perceived quality of similar synthetic woodlands using a set of thirteen site variables as inputs. These variables can be measured at any site, and the model implemented in a spreadsheet as a metric of woodland quality.

We demonstrate that the model produces evaluations that are similar to those provided by experts. We also investigated the number of experts required to produce a stable metric, and showed that our use of 44 experts was sufficient.

To test the metric's performance in the real world, we applied it to thirteen woodland conservation reserves on the periphery of Melbourne, Australia, and asked the managers of these sites to independently evaluate their quality. We assessed metric performance by quantifying its ability to match the mean evaluation of the managers for each site, and comparing this with the ability of each manager in turn to match the mean of the remaining evaluators. The metric performed relatively well. Given it brings the benefits of consensus and repeatability, which no human evaluator can demonstrate, we suggest that the metric is a valuable tool for making evaluations in the real-world context where accountability is required. The basic approaches of development and testing that we demonstrate are applicable to any ecosystem.

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Aggregations forming for breeding are a critical ecological process for many species, yet these aggregations are also inherently vulnerable to exploitation. Documenting the decline of exploited populations that form breeding aggregations is becoming increasingly common, but studies tend to focus upon catch rate, often overlooking reductions in geographic range. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that catch rate and occupancy of exploited fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) decline in synchrony over time. We used the Spanish mackerel (Scomberomorus commerson) spawning aggregation fishery in the Great Barrier Reef as a case study. Data were compiled from historical newspaper archives, fisher knowledge and contemporary fishery logbooks to reconstruct catch rates and exploitation trends from the inception of the fishery. Our fine-scale analysis of catch and effort data spanned a 103-year period (1911–2013) and revealed a spatial expansion of fishing effort, with effort shifting offshore at a rate of 9.4 nm decade^-1, and 2.9 newly targeted FSA reported decade^-1. Spatial expansion masked the sequential exploitation, commercial extinction, and loss of 70% of exploited FSAs. After standardizing for improvements in technological innovations, average catch rates declined by 70% between 1934 and 2011 (from 119.4 to 35.3 fish vessel^-1 trip^-1). Spanish mackerel did not exhibit a significant relationship between mean catch rate and occupancy of exploited FSAs. Our study reveals a special kind of shifting spatial baselines, where a contraction in exploited FSAs occurred undetected. Knowing the temporal and spatial explicit information of FSAs can be relevant for the conservation and management of FSA species.

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Many objectives motivate ecological restoration including improving vegetation condition, increasing the range and abundance of threatened species, and improving aggregate measures of biodiversity such as richness and diversity. While ecological models have been used to examine the outcomes of ecological restoration, there are few attempts to develop models to account for multiple, potentially competing objectives. We develop the first predictive model that integrates a vegetation-focused state-and-transition model with species distribution models for birds. We demonstrate how this integrated model can be used to identify effective restoration options for vegetation and bird species under a constrained budget. For example, using a typical agricultural land management scenario from south-eastern Australia, we demonstrate how the optimal management actions for promoting the occurrence of the Brown Treecreeper, an iconic threatened species, may be suboptimal for meeting vegetation condition objectives. This highlights that any ‘preferred’ management decision depends on the value assigned to the different objectives. An exploration of sensitivity to value weightings highlighted that ‘no management’ or ‘weed control’ were most likely to be the best management options to meet multiple objectives in the scenario we explored. We thus illustrate an approach to using the model outputs to explore trade-offs between bird and vegetation objectives. Our approach to exploring management outcomes and trade-offs using integrated modelling and structured decision support approaches has wide application for conservation management problems in which trade-offs exist between competing objectives.

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Vertebrate animals can be injured or threatened with injury through human activities, thus warranting their ‘rescue’. Details of wildlife Rescue, Rehabilitation, Release, and associated Research (our 4 R's) are often recorded in large databases, resulting in a wealth of information. This information has huge research potential and can contribute to our understanding of animal biology, anthropogenic impacts on wildlife, and species conservation. However, such databases have been little used, few studies have evaluated factors influencing success of rehabilitation and/or release, recommended actions to conserve threatened species have rarely arisen, and direct benefits for species conservation are yet to be demonstrated. We therefore recommend additional research based on rescue, rehabilitation and release of animals, broader in scope than previously carried out, which would also maintain support from the general human community.

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Ex situ conservation tools, such as captive breeding for reintroduction, are considered last resort to help recover threatened or endangered species. However, they may also provide alternative strategies where reducing threats directly is difficult or ineffective. Headstarting, or captive rearing of eggs or neonate animals and subsequent release into the wild, has been controversial for decades. A major criticism is that headstarting is a symptomatic treatment of conservation problems (halfway technology), however, it may provide a mechanism to address multiple threats, particularly in close proximity of population centres. Here we conduct Population Viability Analyses (PVA) to assess the risk of extinction of Australia's most widespread freshwater turtle, Chelodina longicollis, to increasing adult road mortality and reduced recruitment through nest predation from introduced foxes. We also model a range of management scenarios to test the effectiveness of headstarting, fox management, and measures that reduce adult road mortality. We show that headstarting should be a primary tool for managing freshwater turtles under threats that affect multiple life history stages. Headstarting from harvest populations were the only scenarios that eliminated all risks of extinction, while also maintaining population growth. Small increments in adult mortality have greatest effect on population growth and extinction risk, however, where threats simultaneously affect other life history stages (e.g.. recruitment), eliminating harvest pressures on adult females alone will not eliminate the risk of population extinction. In our models, one harvest population could supply enough hatchlings to supplement 25 other similar sized populations at an annual rate to maintain population growth and eliminate the risk of population extinction. We advocate the creation of harvest populations for managing freshwater turtles facing significant threats to multiple life history stages.

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Human activities are important drivers of marine ecosystem functioning. However, separating the synergistic effects of fishing and environmental variability on the prey base of non-target predators is difficult, often because prey availability estimates on appropriate scales are lacking. Understanding how prey abundance at different spatial scales links to population change can help integrate the needs of non-target predators into fisheries management by defining ecologically-relevant areas for spatial protection. We investigated the local population response (number of breeders) of the bank cormorant Phalacrocorax neglectus, a range-restricted endangered seabird, to the availability of its prey, the heavily-fished west coast rock lobster Jasus lalandii. Using Bayesian state-space modeled cormorant counts at three colonies, 22 years of fisheries-independent data on local lobster abundance and generalized additive modeling, we determined the spatial-scale pertinent to these relationships in areas of differing lobster availability. Cormorant numbers responded positively to lobster availability in the intermediate and high abundance regions, but not where regime shifts and fishing pressure have depleted lobster stocks. The relationships were strongest at 20–30 km, greater than the cormorants’ foraging range when breeding, and may have been influence by prey availability for non-breeding birds, prey switching or prey ecology. Our results highlight the importance of considering the scale of ecological relationships in marine spatial planning and suggest that designing spatial protection around focal species can benefit marine predators across their full life cycle. We propose the precautionary implementation of small-scale marine protected areas, followed by robust assessment and adaptive-management, to confirm population-level benefits for the cormorants, their prey and the wider ecosystem, without negative impacts on local fisheries.

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The Burmese roofed turtle (Batagur trivittata) is one of the world's most endangered turtles. Only one wild population remains in Myanmar. Based on field observations, wild breeders are thought to number around a dozen. Combined in-situ and ex-situ conservation efforts for the species have raised >700 captive turtles over a decade predominantly from wild collected eggs. In one of the most comprehensive studies bridging genomic methodologies with active in-situ and ex-situ conservation efforts, we obtained ∼1500 unlinked genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from ∼40% of the turtles’ remaining global population. We found that individuals fall into five distinct genetic clusters, four of which represent full-sib families. We inferred a low effective population size (≤10) but did not detect signs of severe inbreeding, possibly because the population bottleneck has only happened recently. Based on genetic diversity, we identified two groups of 30 individuals from the captive pool that were subsequently reintroduced, leading to an increase in breeding success in the wild. Another 25 individuals, selected via the same criteria, were transferred to Singapore Zoo as an assurance colony. Our study demonstrates that the research-to-application gap in conservation can be bridged by successful agency-academic collaboration and through rigorous application of sound genomic methodologies.

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This paper describes and analyses applied practices creating numerical equivalence between sites of development impact and proposed conservation offset sites in the new conservation technology of biodiversity offsetting. Application of biodiversity offsetting metrics in development impact and mitigation assessments is considered to standardize biodiversity conservation outcomes, sometimes termed ‘biodiversity yield’ by consultants conducting these calculations. The youth of biodiversity offsetting in application, however, means that little is known about how biodiversity valuations and offset contracts between development and offset sites are agreed in practice, or the long-term implications for conservation outcomes. We respond to the first of these gaps in particular by demonstrating how sites were made commensurable and biodiversity gains or yields were calculated and negotiated for a specific offset contract in a government-led pilot study into biodiversity offsets in England. Observations over 24 months were based on repeat site visits, 50 transcribed semi-structured interviews subjected to textual analysis using a qualitative data analysis computer software programme, and review of biodiversity offsetting calculation spreadsheets and planning documents. The technical calculations made and negotiated in different iterations of a specific Biodiversity Impact Assessment using the biodiversity offsetting metric developed by the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs constitute a particular focus of the paper. We highlight three main findings. First, biodiversity offsetting metrics are being amended in creative ways as users adapt inputs to metric calculations to balance and negotiate conflicting requirements. Second, the practice of making different habitats equivalent to each other through the application of biodiversity offsetting metrics is giving rise to commensuration outcomes that may be questionable in terms of projected conservation outcomes. Third, the pressure of creating value for money in compensation strategies for conservation can diminish conservation ‘yields’ in the competitive search for less expensive mitigation options.

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More than 80% of recent major armed conflicts have taken place in biodiversity hotspots, including the Tropical Andes which is home to the world's highest concentrations of bird, mammal, and amphibian species, and more than ten percent of all vascular plant species (Mittermeier et al. 2004; Hanson et al. 2009). Armed conflicts not only seriously impact social and political systems, but also have important ramifications for biodiversity, from the time preparations for conflict start through to the post-conflict period (Machlis & Hanson 2008). Tropical forests have been identified as particularly vulnerable during the post-conflict period, when areas made inaccessible during hostilities become open to development (McNeely 2003).

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Designing connected landscapes is among the most widespread strategies for achieving biodiversity conservation targets. The challenge lies in simultaneously satisfying the connectivity needs of multiple species at multiple spatial scales under uncertain climate and land-use change. To evaluate the contribution of remnant habitat fragments to the connectivity of regional habitat networks, we developed a method to integrate uncertainty in climate and land-use change projections with the latest developments in network-connectivity research and spatial, multipurpose conservation prioritization. We used land-use change simulations to explore robustness of species’ habitat networks to alternative development scenarios. We applied our method to 14 vertebrate focal species of periurban Montreal, Canada. Accounting for connectivity in spatial prioritization strongly modified conservation priorities and the modified priorities were robust to uncertain climate change. Setting conservation priorities based on habitat quality and connectivity maintained a large proportion of the region's connectivity, despite anticipated habitat loss due to climate and land-use change. The application of connectivity criteria alongside habitat-quality criteria for protected-area design was efficient with respect to the amount of area that needs protection and did not necessarily amplify trade-offs among conservation criteria. Our approach and results are being applied in and around Montreal and are well suited to the design of ecological networks and green infrastructure for the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in other regions, in particular regions around large cities, where connectivity is critically low.

Conservation success is contingent on assessing social and environmental factors so that cost-effective implementation of strategies and actions can be placed in a broad social–ecological context. Until now, the focus has been on how to include spatially explicit social data in conservation planning, whereas the value of different kinds of social data has received limited attention. In a regional systematic conservation planning case study in Australia, we examined the spatial concurrence of a range of spatially explicit social values and land-use preferences collected using a public participation geographic information system and biological data. We used Zonation to integrate the social data with the biological data in a series of spatial-prioritization scenarios to determine the effect of the different types of social data on spatial prioritization compared with biological data alone. The type of social data (i.e., conservation opportunities or constraints) significantly affected spatial prioritization outcomes. The integration of social values and land-use preferences under different scenarios was highly variable and generated spatial prioritizations 1.2–51% different from those based on biological data alone. The inclusion of conservation-compatible values and preferences added relatively few new areas to conservation priorities, whereas including noncompatible economic values and development preferences as costs significantly changed conservation priority areas (48.2% and 47.4%, respectively). Based on our results, a multifaceted conservation prioritization approach that combines spatially explicit social data with biological data can help conservation planners identify the type of social data to collect for more effective and feasible conservation actions.

Conservation fences are an increasingly common management action, particularly for species threatened by invasive predators. However, unlike many conservation actions, fence networks are expanding in an unsystematic manner, generally as a reaction to local funding opportunities or threats. We conducted a gap analysis of Australia's large predator-exclusion fence network by examining translocation of Australian mammals relative to their extinction risk. To address gaps identified in species representation, we devised a systematic prioritization method for expanding the conservation fence network that explicitly incorporated population viability analysis and minimized expected species’ extinctions. The approach was applied to New South Wales, Australia, where the state government intends to expand the existing conservation fence network. Existing protection of species in fenced areas was highly uneven; 67% of predator-sensitive species were unrepresented in the fence network. Our systematic prioritization yielded substantial efficiencies in that it reduced expected number of species extinctions up to 17 times more effectively than ad hoc approaches. The outcome illustrates the importance of governance in coordinating management action when multiple projects have similar objectives and rely on systematic methods rather than expanding networks opportunistically.

Although the public desire for healthy environments is clear-cut, the science and management of ecosystem health has not been as simple. Ecological systems can be dynamic and can shift abruptly from one ecosystem state to another. Such unpredictable shifts result when ecological thresholds are crossed; that is, small cumulative increases in an environmental stressor drive a much greater change than could be predicted from linear effects, suggesting an unforeseen tipping point is crossed. In coastal waters, broad-scale seagrass loss often occurs as a sudden event associated with human-driven nutrient enrichment (eutrophication). We tested whether the response of seagrass ecosystems to coastal nutrient enrichment is subject to a threshold effect. We exposed seagrass plots to different levels of nutrient enrichment (dissolved inorganic nitrogen) for 10 months and measured net production. Seagrass response exhibited a threshold pattern when nutrient enrichment exceeded moderate levels: there was an abrupt and large shift from positive to negative net leaf production (from approximately 0.04 leaf production to 0.02 leaf loss per day). Epiphyte load also increased as nutrient enrichment increased, which may have driven the shift in leaf production. Inadvertently crossing such thresholds, as can occur through ineffective management of land-derived inputs such as wastewater and stormwater runoff along urbanized coasts, may account for the widely observed sudden loss of seagrass meadows. Identification of tipping points may improve not only adaptive-management monitoring that seeks to avoid threshold effects, but also restoration approaches in systems that have crossed them.

Government agencies faced with politically controversial decisions often discount or ignore scientific information, whether from agency staff or nongovernmental scientists. Recent developments in scientific integrity (the ability to perform, use, communicate, and publish science free from censorship or political interference) in Canada, Australia, and the United States demonstrate a similar trajectory. A perceived increase in scientific-integrity abuses provokes concerted pressure by the scientific community, leading to efforts to improve scientific-integrity protections under a new administration. However, protections are often inconsistently applied and are at risk of reversal under administrations publicly hostile to evidence-based policy. We compared recent challenges to scientific integrity to determine what aspects of scientific input into conservation policy are most at risk of political distortion and what can be done to strengthen safeguards against such abuses. To ensure the integrity of outbound communications from government scientists to the public, we suggest governments strengthen scientific integrity policies, include scientists’ right to speak freely in collective-bargaining agreements, guarantee public access to scientific information, and strengthen agency culture supporting scientific integrity. To ensure the transparency and integrity with which information from nongovernmental scientists (e.g., submitted comments or formal policy reviews) informs the policy process, we suggest governments broaden the scope of independent reviews, ensure greater diversity of expert input and transparency regarding conflicts of interest, require a substantive response to input from agencies, and engage proactively with scientific societies. For their part, scientists and scientific societies have a responsibility to engage with the public to affirm that science is a crucial resource for developing evidence-based policy and regulations in the public interest.

Large, intact areas of tropical peatland are highly threatened at a global scale by the expansion of commercial agriculture and other forms of economic development. Conserving peatlands on a landscape scale, with their hydrology intact, is of international conservation importance to preserve their distinctive biodiversity and ecosystem services and maintain their resilience to future environmental change. We explored threats to and opportunities for conserving remaining intact tropical peatlands; thus, we excluded peatlands of Indonesia and Malaysia, where extensive deforestation, drainage, and conversion to plantations means conservation in this region can protect only small fragments of the original ecosystem. We focused on a case study, the Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin (PMFB) in Peru, which is among the largest known intact tropical peatland landscapes in the world and is representative of peatland vulnerability. Maintenance of the hydrological conditions critical for carbon storage and ecosystem function of peatlands is, in the PMFB, primarily threatened by expansion of commercial agriculture linked to new transport infrastructure that is facilitating access to remote areas. There remain opportunities in the PMFB and elsewhere to develop alternative, more sustainable land-use practices. Although some of the peatlands in the PMFB fall within existing legally protected areas, this protection does not include the most carbon-dense (domed pole forest) areas. New carbon-based conservation instruments (e.g., REDD+, Green Climate Fund), developing markets for sustainable peatland products, transferring land title to local communities, and expanding protected areas offer pathways to increased protection for intact tropical peatlands in Amazonia and elsewhere, such as those in New Guinea and Central Africa which remain, for the moment, broadly beyond the frontier of commercial development.

Increasing connectivity is an important strategy for facilitating species range shifts and maintaining biodiversity in the face of climate change. To date, however, few researchers have included future climate projections in efforts to prioritize areas for increasing connectivity. We identified key areas likely to facilitate climate-induced species’ movement across western North America. Using historical climate data sets and future climate projections, we mapped potential species’ movement routes that link current climate conditions to analogous climate conditions in the future (i.e., future climate analogs) with a novel moving-window analysis based on electrical circuit theory. In addition to tracing shifting climates, the approach accounted for landscape permeability and empirically derived species’ dispersal capabilities. We compared connectivity maps generated with our climate-change-informed approach with maps of connectivity based solely on the degree of human modification of the landscape. Including future climate projections in connectivity models substantially shifted and constrained priority areas for movement to a smaller proportion of the landscape than when climate projections were not considered. Potential movement, measured as current flow, decreased in all ecoregions when climate projections were included, particularly when dispersal was limited, which made climate analogs inaccessible. Many areas emerged as important for connectivity only when climate change was modeled in 2 time steps rather than in a single time step. Our results illustrate that movement routes needed to track changing climatic conditions may differ from those that connect present-day landscapes. Incorporating future climate projections into connectivity modeling is an important step toward facilitating successful species movement and population persistence in a changing climate.

Globally, deforestation continues, and although protected areas effectively protect forests, the majority of forests are not in protected areas. Thus, how effective are different management regimes to avoid deforestation in non-protected forests? We sought to assess the effectiveness of different national forest-management regimes to safeguard forests outside protected areas. We compared 2000–2014 deforestation rates across the temperate forests of 5 countries in the Himalaya (Bhutan, Nepal, China, India, and Myanmar) of which 13% are protected. We reviewed the literature to characterize forest management regimes in each country and conducted a quasi-experimental analysis to measure differences in deforestation of unprotected forests among countries and states in India. Countries varied in both overarching forest-management goals and specific tenure arrangements and policies for unprotected forests, from policies emphasizing economic development to those focused on forest conservation. Deforestation rates differed up to 1.4% between countries, even after accounting for local determinants of deforestation, such as human population density, market access, and topography. The highest deforestation rates were associated with forest policies aimed at maximizing profits and unstable tenure regimes. Deforestation in national forest-management regimes that emphasized conservation and community management were relatively low. In India results were consistent with the national-level results. We interpreted our results in the context of the broader literature on decentralized, community-based natural resource management, and our findings emphasize that the type and quality of community-based forestry programs and the degree to which they are oriented toward sustainable use rather than economic development are important for forest protection. Our cross-national results are consistent with results from site- and regional-scale studies that show forest-management regimes that ensure stable land tenure and integrate local-livelihood benefits with forest conservation result in the best forest outcomes.

Large carnivores are persecuted globally because they threaten human industries and livelihoods. How this conflict is managed has consequences for the conservation of large carnivores and biodiversity more broadly. Mitigating human–predator conflict should be evidence-based and accommodate people's values while protecting carnivores. Despite much research into human and large-carnivore coexistence strategies, there have been few attempts to document the success of conflict-mitigation strategies on a global scale. We conducted a meta-analysis of global research on conflict mitigation related to large carnivores and humans. We focused on conflicts that arise from the threat large carnivores pose to livestock. We first used structured and unstructured searching to identify replicated studies that used before–after or control–impact design to measure change in livestock loss as a result of implementing a management intervention. We then extracted relevant data from these studies to calculate an overall effect size for each intervention type. Research effort and focus varied among continents and aligned with the histories and cultures that shaped livestock production and attitudes toward carnivores. Livestock guardian animals most effectively reduced livestock losses. Lethal control was the second most effective control, although its success varied the most, and guardian animals and lethal control did not differ significantly. Financial incentives have promoted tolerance of large carnivores in some settings and reduced retaliatory killings. We suggest coexistence strategies be location-specific, incorporate cultural values and environmental conditions, and be designed such that return on financial investment can be evaluated. Improved monitoring of mitigation measures is urgently required to promote effective evidence-based policy.

Freshwater turtle populations are susceptible to declines following small increases in the mortality of adults, making it essential to identify and understand potential threats. Freshwater turtles ingest fish hooks associated with recreational angling, and this is likely a problem because hook ingestion is a source of additive mortality for sea turtles. We used a Bayesian-modeling framework, observed rates of hook ingestion by freshwater turtles, and mortality of sea turtles from hook ingestion to examine the probability that a freshwater turtle in a given population ingests a hook and subsequently dies from it. We used the results of these analyses and previously published life-history data to simulate the effects of hook ingestion on population growth for 3 species of freshwater turtle. In our simulation, the probability that an individual turtle ingests a hook and dies as a result was 1.2–11%. Our simulation results suggest that this rate of mortality from hook ingestion is sufficient to cause population declines. We believe we have identified fish-hook ingestion as a serious yet generally overlooked threat to the viability of freshwater turtle populations.

Understanding restoration effectiveness is often impaired by a lack of high-quality, long-term monitoring data and, to date, few researchers have used species’ trait information to gain insight into the processes that drive the reaction of fish communities to restoration. We examined fish-community responses with a highly resolved data set from 21 consecutive years of electrofishing (4 years prerestoration and 17 years postrestoration) at multiple restored and unrestored reaches from a river restoration project on the Lippe River, Germany. Fish abundance peaked in the third year after the restoration; abundance was 6 times higher than before the restoration. After 5–7 years, species richness and abundance stabilized at 2 and 3.5 times higher levels relative to the prerestoration level, respectively. However, interannual variability of species richness and abundance remained considerable, illustrating the challenge of reliably assessing restoration outcomes based on data from individual samplings, especially in the first years following restoration. Life-history and reproduction-related traits best explained differences in species’ responses to restoration. Opportunistic short-lived species with early female maturity and multiple spawning runs per year exhibited the strongest increase in abundance, which reflected their ability to rapidly colonize new habitats. These often small-bodied and fusiform fishes typically live in dynamic and ephemeral instream and floodplain areas that river-habitat restorations often aim to create, and in this case their increases in abundance indicated successful restoration. Our results suggest that a greater consideration of species’ traits may enhance the causal understanding of community processes and the coupling of restoration to functional ecology. Trait-based assessments of restoration outcomes would furthermore allow for easier transfer of knowledge across biogeographic borders than studies based on taxonomy.

Ecological restoration has become an important strategy to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems services. To restore 15% of degraded ecosystems as stipulated by the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi target 15, we developed a prioritization framework to identify potential priority sites for restoration in Mexico, a megadiverse country. We used the most current biological and environmental data on Mexico to assess areas of biological importance and restoration feasibility at national scale and engaged stakeholders and experts throughout the process. We integrated 8 criteria into 2 components (i.e., biological importance and restoration feasibility) in a spatial multicriteria analysis and generated 11 scenarios to test the effect of assigning different component weights. The priority restoration sites were distributed across all terrestrial ecosystems of Mexico; 64.1% were in degraded natural vegetation and 6% were in protected areas. Our results provide a spatial guide to where restoration could enhance the persistence of species of conservation concern and vulnerable ecosystems while maximizing the likelihood of restoration success. Such spatial prioritization is a first step in informing policy makers and restoration planners where to focus local and large-scale restoration efforts, which should additionally incorporate social and monetary cost–benefit considerations.

The need for robust evidence to support conservation actions has driven the adoption of systematic approaches to research synthesis in ecology. However, applying systematic review to complex or open questions remains challenging, and this task is becoming more difficult as the quantity of scientific literature increases. We drew on the science of linguistics for guidance as to why the process of identifying and sorting information during systematic review remains so labor intensive, and to provide potential solutions. Several linguistic properties of peer-reviewed corpora—including nonrandom selection of review topics, small-world properties of semantic networks, and spatiotemporal variation in word meaning—greatly increase the effort needed to complete the systematic review process. Conversely, the resolution of these semantic complexities is a common motivation for narrative reviews, but this process is rarely enacted with the rigor applied during linguistic analysis. Therefore, linguistics provides a unifying framework for understanding some key challenges of systematic review and highlights 2 useful directions for future research. First, in cases where semantic complexity generates barriers to synthesis, ecologists should consider drawing on existing methods—such as natural language processing or the construction of research thesauri and ontologies—that provide tools for mapping and resolving that complexity. These tools could help individual researchers classify research material in a more robust manner and provide valuable guidance for future researchers on that topic. Second, a linguistic perspective highlights that scientific writing is a rich resource worthy of detailed study, an observation that can sometimes be lost during the search for data during systematic review or meta-analysis. For example, mapping semantic networks can reveal redundancy and complementarity among scientific concepts, leading to new insights and research questions. Consequently, wider adoption of linguistic approaches may facilitate improved rigor and richness in research synthesis.

Conservation efforts are often motivated by the threat of global extinction. Yet if conservationists had more information suggesting that extirpation of individual species could lead to undesirable ecological effects, they might more frequently attempt to protect or restore such species across their ranges even if they were not globally endangered. Scientists have seldom measured or quantitatively predicted the functional consequences of species loss, even for large, extinction-prone species that theory suggests should be functionally unique. We measured the contribution of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to the dispersal of 3 large-fruited species in a disturbed tropical moist forest and predicted the extent to which alternative dispersers could compensate for elephants in their absence. We created an empirical probability model with data on frugivory and seed dispersal from Buxa Tiger Reserve, India. These data were used to estimate the proportion of seeds consumed by elephants and other frugivores that survive handling and density-dependent processes (Janzen-Connell effects and conspecific intradung competition) and germinate. Without compensation, the number of seeds dispersed and surviving density-dependent effects decreased 26% (Artocarpus chaplasha), 42% (Careya arborea), and 72% (Dillenia indica) when elephants were absent from the ecosystem. Compensatory fruit removal by other animals substantially ameliorated these losses. For instance, reductions in successful dispersal of D. indica were as low as 23% when gaur (Bos gaurus) persisted, but median dispersal distance still declined from 30% (C. arborea) to 90% (A. chaplasha) without elephants. Our results support the theory that the largest animal species in an ecosystem have nonredundant ecological functionality and that their extirpation is likely to lead to the deterioration of ecosystem processes such as seed dispersal. This effect is likely accentuated by the overall defaunation of many tropical systems.

The use of total area protected as the predominant indicator of progress in building protected area (PA) networks is receiving growing criticism. Documenting the full dynamics of PA networks, both in terms of the gains and losses in protection, provides a much more informative approach to tracking progress. To this end, documentation of PA downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) has increased. Studies of PADDD events generally fail to place these losses in the context of gains in protection; therefore, they omit important elements of PA network dynamics. To address this limitation, we used a spatially explicit approach to identify every parcel of land added to and excised from the Australian terrestrial PA network and PAs that had their level of protection changed over 17 years (1997–2014). By quantifying changes in the spatial configuration of the PA network with time-series data (spatial layers for nine separate time steps), ours is the first assessment of the dynamics (increases and decreases in area and level of protection) of a PA network and the first comprehensive assessment of PADDD in a developed country. We found that the Australian network was highly dynamic; there were 5233 changes in area or level of protection over 17 years. Against a background of enormous increases in area protected, we identified over 1500 PADDD events, which affected over one-third of the network, which were largely the result of widespread downgrading of protection. We believe our approach provides a mechanism for robust tracking of trends in the world's PAs through the use of data from the World Database on Protected Areas. However, this will require greater transparency and improved data standards in reporting changes to PAs.

We examine issues to consider when reframing conservation science and practice in the context of global change. New framings of the links between ecosystems and society are emerging that are changing peoples’ values and expectations of nature, resulting in plural perspectives on conservation. Reframing conservation for global change can thus be regarded as a stage in the evolving relationship between people and nature rather than some recent trend. New models of how conservation links with transformative adaptation include how decision contexts for conservation can be reframed and integrated with an adaptation pathways approach to create new options for global-change-ready conservation. New relationships for conservation science and governance include coproduction of knowledge that supports social learning. New processes for implementing adaptation for conservation outcomes include deliberate practices used to develop new strategies, shift world views, work with conflict, address power and intergenerational equity in decisions, and build consciousness and creativity that empower agents to act. We argue that reframing conservation for global change requires scientists and practitioners to implement approaches unconstrained by discipline and sectoral boundaries, geopolitical polarities, or technical problematization. We consider a stronger focus on inclusive creation of knowledge and the interaction of this knowledge with societal values and rules is likely to result in conservation science and practice that meets the challenges of a postnormal world.

The Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was a social breeder, and it has been suggested that the species experienced functional extinction, defined as a total reproductive failure, prior to its actual extinction in the early years of the 20th century. We applied a novel randomization test based on the relative times of the most recent egg- and skin-specimen sightings (i.e., recorded date of specimen collection) to test for functional extinction. For a total of 6 eggs and 27 skins, the observed significance level was 0.38, which indicated that the species did not become functionally extinct. Thus, proposals to reverse its rapid decline in the late 19th century could have been successful.

Environmental heterogeneity is increasingly being used to select conservation areas that will provide for future biodiversity under a variety of climate scenarios. This approach, termed conserving nature's stage (CNS), assumes environmental features respond to climate change more slowly than biological communities, but will CNS be effective if the stage were to change as rapidly as the climate? We tested the effectiveness of using CNS to select sites in salt marshes for conservation in coastal Georgia (U.S.A.), where environmental features will change rapidly as sea level rises. We calculated species diversity based on distributions of 7 bird species with a variety of niches in Georgia salt marshes. Environmental heterogeneity was assessed across six landscape gradients (e.g., elevation, salinity, and patch area). We used 2 approaches to select sites with high environmental heterogeneity: site complementarity (environmental diversity [ED]) and local environmental heterogeneity (environmental richness [ER]). Sites selected based on ER predicted present-day species diversity better than randomly selected sites (up to an 8.1% improvement), were resilient to areal loss from SLR (1.0% average areal loss by 2050 compared with 0.9% loss of randomly selected sites), and provided habitat to a threatened species (0.63 average occupancy compared with 0.6 average occupancy of randomly selected sites). Sites selected based on ED predicted species diversity no better or worse than random and were not resilient to SLR (2.9% average areal loss by 2050). Despite the discrepancy between the 2 approaches, CNS is a viable strategy for conservation site selection in salt marshes because the ER approach was successful. It has potential for application in other coastal areas where SLR will affect environmental features, but its performance may depend on the magnitude of geological changes caused by SLR. Our results indicate that conservation planners that had heretofore excluded low-lying coasts from CNS planning could include coastal ecosystems in regional conservation strategies.

Ecosystems worldwide have a long history of use and management by indigenous cultures. However, environmental degradation can reduce the availability of culturally important resources. Ecological restoration aims to repair damage to ecosystems caused by human activity, but it is unclear how often restoration projects incorporate the return of harvesting or traditional life patterns for indigenous communities. We examined the incorporation of cultural use of natural resources into ecological restoration in the context of a culturally important but protected New Zealand bird; among award-winning restoration projects in Australasia and worldwide; and in the peer-reviewed restoration ecology literature. Among New Zealand's culturally important bird species, differences in threat status and availability for hunting were large. These differences indicate the values of a colonizing culture can inhibit harvesting by indigenous people. In Australasia among award-winning ecological restoration projects, <17% involved human use of restored areas beyond aesthetic or recreational use, despite many projects encouraging community participation. Globally, restoration goals differed among regions. For example, in North America, projects were primarily conservation oriented, whereas in Asia and Africa projects frequently focused on restoring cultural harvesting. From 1995 to 2014, the restoration ecology literature contained few references to cultural values or use. We argue that restoration practitioners are missing a vital component for reassembling functional ecosystems. Inclusion of sustainably harvestable areas within restored landscapes may allow for the continuation of traditional practices that shaped ecosystems for millennia, and also aid project success by ensuring community support.

The concept of metacommunity (i.e., a set of local communities linked by dispersal) has gained great popularity among community ecologists. However, metacommunity research mostly addresses questions on spatial patterns of biodiversity at the regional scale, whereas conservation planning requires quantifying temporal variation in those metacommunities and the contributions that individual (local) sites make to regional dynamics. We propose that recent advances in diversity-partitioning methods may allow for a better understanding of metacommunity dynamics and the identification of keystone sites. We used time series of the 2 components of beta diversity (richness and replacement) and the contributions of local sites to these components to examine which sites controlled source-sink dynamics in a highly dynamic model system (an intermittent river). The relative importance of the richness and replacement components of beta diversity fluctuated over time, and sample aggregation led to underestimation of beta diversity by up to 35%. Our literature review revealed that research on intermittent rivers would benefit greatly from examination of beta-diversity components over time. Adequately appraising spatiotemporal variability in community composition and identifying sites that are pivotal for maintaining biodiversity at the landscape scale are key needs for conservation prioritization and planning. Thus, our framework may be used to guide conservation actions in highly dynamic ecosystems when time-series data describing biodiversity across sites connected by dispersal are available.

Scientists increasingly rely on protected areas to assist in biodiversity conservation, yet the efficacy of these areas is rarely systematically assessed, often because of underfunding. Still, adaptive management strategies to maximize conservation success often rely on understanding the temporal and spatial dynamism of populations therein. Examination of environmental DNA (eDNA) is a time and cost-effective way to monitor species’ distribution, and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) provides information on organismal abundance. To date, however, such techniques remain underused for population assessments in protected areas. We determined eDNA concentration of the critically endangered Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis) to describe its occurrence, range, and use of the Tian e-Zhou National Nature Reserve in Hubei, China, across seasons and hydrological depths. Despite the observation that total eDNA concentrations were highest in surface waters in summer, finless porpoise eDNA concentrations were significantly higher in deeper waters than in surface waters in summer. During the breeding season (spring), eDNA signals were site specific and restricted to the core area of the reserve. However, postbreeding eDNA concentrations were widespread across the reserve, encompassing sites previously thought to be unfrequented by the species. Our results suggest spatiotemporal idiosyncrasies in site, depth, and seasonal use of the reserve and a propensity for postbreeding population dispersal. With eDNA and qPCR we were able to assess an entire population's use of a protected area. Illuminating nuances in habitat use via eDNA could be valuable to set pragmatic conservation goals for this, and other, species.

Artificial lights at night cause high mortality of seabirds, one of the most endangered groups of birds globally. Fledglings of burrow-nesting seabirds, and to a lesser extent adults, are attracted to and then grounded (i.e., forced to land) by lights when they fly at night. We reviewed the current state of knowledge of seabird attraction to light to identify information gaps and propose measures to address the problem. Although species in families such as Alcidae and Anatidae can be grounded by artificial light, the most affected seabirds are petrels and shearwaters (Procellariiformes). At least 56 species of Procellariiformes, more than one-third of them (24) threatened, are subject to grounding by lights. Seabirds grounded by lights have been found worldwide, mainly on oceanic islands but also at some continental locations. Petrel breeding grounds confined to formerly uninhabited islands are particularly at risk from light pollution due to tourism and urban sprawl. Where it is impractical to ban external lights, rescue programs of grounded birds offer the most immediate and employed mitigation to reduce the rate of light-induced mortality and save thousands of birds every year. These programs also provide useful information for seabird management. However, these data are typically fragmentary, biased, and uncertain and can lead to inaccurate impact estimates and poor understanding of the phenomenon of seabird attraction to lights. We believe the most urgently needed actions to mitigate and understand light-induced mortality of seabirds are estimation of mortality and effects on populations; determination of threshold light levels and safe distances from light sources; documentation of the fate of rescued birds; improvement of rescue campaigns, particularly in terms of increasing recovery rates and level of care; and research on seabird-friendly lights to reduce attraction.

Habitat loss and fragmentation are causing widespread population declines, but identifying how and when to intervene remains challenging. Predicting where extirpations are likely to occur and implementing management actions before losses result may be more cost-effective than trying to reestablish lost populations. Early indicators of pressure on populations could be used to make such predictions. Previous work conducted in 2009 and 2010 identified that the presence of Eastern Yellow Robins (Eopsaltria australis) in 42 sites in a fragmented region of eastern Australia was unrelated to woodland extent within 500 m of a site, but the robins’ heterophil:lymphocyte (H:L) ratios (an indicator of chronic stress) were elevated at sites with low levels of surrounding woodland. We resurveyed these 42 sites in 2013 and 2014 for robin presence to determine whether the H:L ratios obtained in 2009 and 2010 predicted the locations of extirpations and whether the previous pattern in H:L ratios was an early sign that woodland extent would become an important predictor of occupancy. We also surveyed for robins at 43 additional sites to determine whether current occupancy could be better predicted by landscape context at a larger scale, relevant to dispersal movements. At the original 42 sites, H:L ratios and extirpations were not related, although only 4 extirpations were observed. Woodland extent within 500 m had become a strong predictor of occupancy. Taken together, these results provide mixed evidence as to whether patterns of individual condition can reveal habitat relationships that become evident as local shifts in occupancy occur but that are not revealed by a single snapshot of species distribution. Across all 85 sites, woodland extent at scales relevant to dispersal (5 km) was not related to occurrence. We recommend that conservation actions focus on regenerating areas of habitat large enough to support robin territories rather than increasing connectivity within the landscape.

A prevailing view in dryland systems is that mammals are constrained by the scarcity of fertile soils and primary productivity. An alternative view is that predation is a primary driver of mammal assemblages, especially in Australia, where 2 introduced mesopredators—feral cat (Felis catus) and red fox (Vulpes vulpes)—are responsible for severe declines of dryland mammals. We evaluated productivity and predation as drivers of native mammal assemblage structure in dryland Australia. We used new data from 90 sites to examine the divers of extant mammal species richness and reconstructed historic mammal assemblages to determine proportional loss of mammal species across broad habitat types (landform and vegetation communities). Predation was supported as a major driver of extant mammal richness, but its effect was strongly mediated by habitat. Areas that were rugged or had dense grass cover supported more mammal species than the more productive and topographically simple areas. Twelve species in the critical weight range (CWR) (35–5500 g) that is most vulnerable to mesopredator predation were extirpated from the continent's central region, and the severity of loss of species correlated negatively with ruggedness and positively with productivity. Based on previous studies, we expect that habitat mediates predation from red foxes and feral cats because it affects these species’ densities and foraging efficiency. Large areas of rugged terrain provided vital refuge for Australian dryland mammals, and we predict such areas will support the persistence of CWR species in the face of ongoing mammal declines elsewhere in Australia.

Prescribed fire is widely accepted as a conservation tool because fire is essential to the maintenance of native biodiversity in many terrestrial communities. Approaches to this land-management technique vary greatly among continents, and sharing knowledge internationally can inform application of prescribed fire worldwide. In North America, decisions about how and when to apply prescribed fire are typically based on the historical-fire-regime concept (HFRC), which holds that replicating the pattern of fires ignited by lightning or preindustrial humans best promotes native species in fire-prone regions. The HFRC rests on 3 assumptions: it is possible to infer historical fire regimes accurately; fire-suppressed communities are ecologically degraded; and reinstating historical fire regimes is the best course of action despite the global shift toward novel abiotic and biotic conditions. We examined the underpinnings of these assumptions by conducting a literature review on the use of historical fire regimes to inform the application of prescribed fire. We found that the practice of inferring historical fire regimes for entire regions or ecosystems often entails substantial uncertainty and can yield equivocal results; ecological outcomes of fire suppression are complex and may not equate to degradation, depending on the ecosystem and context; and habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and other modern factors can interact with fire to produce novel and in some cases negative ecological outcomes. It is therefore unlikely that all 3 assumptions will be fully upheld for any landscape in which prescribed fire is being applied. Although the HFRC is a valuable starting point, it should not be viewed as the sole basis for developing prescribed fire programs. Rather, fire prescriptions should also account for other specific, measurable ecological parameters on a case-by-case basis. To best achieve conservation goals, researchers should seek to understand contemporary fire–biota interactions across trophic levels, functional groups, spatial and temporal scales, and management contexts.

The intentional and unintentional movement of plants and animals by humans has transformed ecosystems and landscapes globally. Assessing when and how a species was introduced are central to managing these transformed landscapes, particularly in island environments. In the Gulf of Alaska, there is considerable interest in the history of mammal introductions and rehabilitating Gulf of Alaska island environments by eradicating mammals classified as invasive species. The Arctic ground squirrel (Urocitellus parryii) is of concern because it affects vegetation and seabirds on Gulf of Alaska islands. This animal is assumed to have been introduced by historic settlers; however, ground squirrel remains in the prehistoric archaeological record of Chirikof Island, Alaska, challenge this timeline and suggest they colonized the islands long ago. We used 3 lines of evidence to address this problem: direct radiocarbon dating of archaeological squirrel remains; evidence of prehistoric human use of squirrels; and ancient DNA analysis of dated squirrel remains. Chirikof squirrels dated to at least 2000 years ago, and cut marks on squirrel bones suggested prehistoric use by people. Ancient squirrels also shared a mitochondrial haplotype with modern Chirikof squirrels. These results suggest that squirrels have been on Chirikof longer than previously assumed and that the current population of squirrels is closely related to the ancient population. Thus, it appears ground squirrels are not a recent, human-mediated introduction and may have colonized the island via a natural dispersal event or an ancient human translocation.

Although hunting is a key component of subsistence strategies of many Amazonians, it is also one of the greatest threats to wildlife. Because indigenous reserves comprise over 20% of Amazonia, effective conservation often requires that conservation professionals work closely with indigenous groups to manage resource use. We used hunter-generated harvesting data in spatially explicit biodemographic models to assess the sustainability of subsistence hunting of indigenous Waiwai in Guyana. We collected data through a hunter self-monitoring program, systematic follows of hunters, and semistructured interviews. We used these data to predict future densities of 2 indicator species, spider monkeys (Ateles paniscus) and bearded sakis (Chiropotes sagulatus), under different scenarios of human population expansion and changing hunting technology. We used encounter rates from transect surveys and hunter catch-per-unit effort (CPUE) to validate model predictions. Paca (Cuniculus paca) (198 /year), Currosaw (Crax alector) (168), and spider monkey (117) were the most frequently harvested species. Predicted densities of spider monkeys were statistically indistinguishable from empirically derived transect data (Kolmogorov–Smirnov D = 0.67, p = 0.759) and CPUE (D = 0.32, p = 1.000), demonstrating the robustness of model predictions. Ateles paniscus and C. sagulatus were predicted to be extirpated from <13% of the Waiwai reserve in 20 years, even under the most intensive hunting scenarios. Our results suggest Waiwai hunting is currently sustainable, primarily due to their low population density and use of bow and arrow. Continual monitoring is necessary, however, particularly if human population increases are accompanied by a switch to shotgun-only hunting. We suggest that hunter self-monitoring and biodemographic modeling can be used effectively in a comanagement approach in which indigenous parabiologists continuously provide hunting data that is then used to update model parameters and validate model predictions.

During the last decade, many studies have focused on the detrimental effects of noise pollution on acoustic communication. Surprisingly, although it is known that noise exposure strongly influences health in humans, studies on wildlife remain scarce. In order to gain insight into the consequences of traffic noise exposure, we experimentally manipulated traffic noise exposure as well as the endocrine status of animals to investigate physiological and phenotypic consequences of noise pollution in an anuran species. We showed that noise exposure increased stress hormone level and induced an immunosuppressive effect. In addition, both traffic noise exposure and stress hormone application negatively impacted H. arborea vocal sac coloration. Moreover, our results suggest profound changes in sexual selection processes because the best quality males with initial attractive vocal sac coloration were the most impacted by noise. Hence, our study suggests that the recent increases in anthropogenic noise worldwide might affect a broader range of animal species than previously thought, because of alteration of visual signals and immunity. Generalizing these results to other taxa is crucial for the conservation of biodiversity in an increasingly noisy world.

Seafood mislabeling is common in both domestic and international markets. Studies on seafood fraud often report high rates of mislabeling (e.g., >70%), but these studies have been limited to a single sampling year, which means it is difficult to assess the impact of stricter governmental truth-in-labeling regulations. We used DNA barcoding to assess seafood labeling in 26 sushi restaurants in Los Angeles over 4 years. Seafood from 3 high-end grocery stores were also sampled (n = 16) in 2014. We ordered 9 common sushi fish from menus, preserved tissue samples in 95% ethanol, extracted the genomic DNA, amplified and sequenced a portion of the mtDNA COI gene, and identified the resulting sequence to known fish sequences from the National Center for Biotechnology Information nucleotide database. We compared DNA results with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) list of acceptable market names and retail names. We considered sushi-sample labels that were inconsistent with FDA names mislabeled. Sushi restaurants had a consistently high percentage of mislabeling (47%; 151 of 323) from 2012 to 2015, yet mislabeling was not homogenous across species. Halibut, red snapper, yellowfin tuna, and yellowtail had consistently high (<77%) occurrences of mislabeling on menus, whereas mislabeling of salmon and mackerel were typically low (>15%). All sampled sushi restaurants had at least one case of mislabeling. Mislabeling of sushi-grade fish from high-end grocery stores was also identified in red snapper, yellowfin tuna, and yellowtail, but at a slightly lower frequency (42%) than sushi restaurants. Despite increased regulatory measures and media attention, we found seafood mislabeling continues to be prevalent.

Ornamental horticulture has been identified as an important threat to plant biodiversity and is a major pathway for plant invasions worldwide. In this context, the family Cactaceae is particularly challenging because it is considered the fifth most threatened large taxonomic group in the world; several species are among the most widespread and damaging invasive species; and Cactaceae is one of the most popular horticultural plant groups. Based on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna and the 11 largest online auction sites selling cacti, we documented the international cactus trade. To provide an in-depth look at the dynamics of the industry, we surveyed the businesses involved in the cactus trade in South Africa (a hotspot of cactus trade and invasions). We purchased seeds of every available species and used DNA barcoding to identify species to the genus level. Although <20% of this trade involved threatened species and <3% involved known invasive species, many species were identified by a common name. However, only 0.02% of the globally traded cacti were collected from wild populations. Despite a large commercial network, all South African imports (of which 15% and 1.5% were of species listed as threatened and invasive, respectively) came from the same source. With DNA barcoding, we identified 24% of the species to genus level. Based on our results, we believe that if trade restrictions are placed on the small proportion of cacti that are invasive and there is no major increase in harvesting of native populations, then the commercial trade in cactus poses a negligible environmental threat. However, there are currently no effective methods for easily identifying which cacti are traded, and both the illicit harvesting of cacti from the wild and the informal trade in invasive taxa pose on-going conservation challenges.

The distribution of mobile species in dynamic systems can vary greatly over time and space. Estimating their population size and geographic range can be problematic and affect the accuracy of conservation assessments. Scarce data on mobile species and the resources they need can also limit the type of analytical approaches available to derive such estimates. We quantified change in availability and use of key ecological resources required for breeding for a critically endangered nomadic habitat specialist, the Swift Parrot (Lathamus discolor). We compared estimates of occupied habitat derived from dynamic presence-background (i.e., presence-only data) climatic models with estimates derived from dynamic occupancy models that included a direct measure of food availability. We then compared estimates that incorporate fine-resolution spatial data on the availability of key ecological resources (i.e., functional habitats) with more common approaches that focus on broader climatic suitability or vegetation cover (due to the absence of fine-resolution data). The occupancy models produced significantly (P < 0.001) smaller (up to an order of magnitude) and more spatially discrete estimates of the total occupied area than climate-based models. The spatial location and extent of the total area occupied with the occupancy models was highly variable between years (131 and 1498 km²). Estimates accounting for the area of functional habitats were significantly smaller (2–58% [SD 16]) than estimates based only on the total area occupied. An increase or decrease in the area of one functional habitat (foraging or nesting) did not necessarily correspond to an increase or decrease in the other. Thus, an increase in the extent of occupied area may not equate to improved habitat quality or function. We argue these patterns are typical for mobile resource specialists but often go unnoticed because of limited data over relevant spatial and temporal scales and lack of spatial data on the availability of key resources. Understanding changes in the relative availability of functional habitats is crucial to informing conservation planning and accurately assessing extinction risk for mobile resource specialists.

For conservation decision making, species’ geographic distributions are mapped using various approaches. Some such efforts have downscaled versions of coarse-resolution extent-of-occurrence maps to fine resolutions for conservation planning. We examined the quality of the extent-of-occurrence maps as range summaries and the utility of refining those maps into fine-resolution distributional hypotheses. Extent-of-occurrence maps tend to be overly simple, omit many known and well-documented populations, and likely frequently include many areas not holding populations. Refinement steps involve typological assumptions about habitat preferences and elevational ranges of species, which can introduce substantial error in estimates of species’ true areas of distribution. However, no model-evaluation steps are taken to assess the predictive ability of these models, so model inaccuracies are not noticed. Whereas range summaries derived by these methods may be useful in coarse-grained, global-extent studies, their continued use in on-the-ground conservation applications at fine spatial resolutions is not advisable in light of reliance on assumptions, lack of real spatial resolution, and lack of testing. In contrast, data-driven techniques that integrate primary data on biodiversity occurrence with remotely sensed data that summarize environmental dimensions (i.e., ecological niche modeling or species distribution modeling) offer data-driven solutions based on a minimum of assumptions that can be evaluated and validated quantitatively to offer a well-founded, widely accepted method for summarizing species’ distributional patterns for conservation applications.

Increasing habitat fragmentation and human population growth in Africa has resulted in an escalation in human–elephant conflict between small-scale farmers and free-ranging African elephants (Loxodonta Africana). In 2012 Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) implemented the national 10-year Conservation and Management Strategy for the Elephant in Kenya, which includes an action aimed at testing whether beehive fences can be used to mitigate human–elephant conflict. From 2012 to 2015, we field-tested the efficacy of beehive fences to protect 10 0.4-ha farms next to Tsavo East National Park from elephants. We hung a series of beehives every 10 m around the boundary of each farm plot. The hives were linked with strong wire. After an initial pilot test with 2 farms, the remaining 8 of 10 beehive fences also contained 2-dimensional dummy hives between real beehives to help reduce the cost of the fence. Each trial plot had a neighboring control plot of the same size within the same farm. Of the 131 beehives deployed 88% were occupied at least once during the 3.5-year trial. Two hundred and fifty-three elephants, predominantly 20–45 years old entered the community farming area, typically during the crop- ripening season. Eighty percent of the elephants that approached the trial farms were kept out of the areas protected by the beehive fences, and elephants that broke a fence were in smaller than average groups. Beehive fences not only kept large groups of elephants from invading the farmland plots but the farmers also benefited socially and financially from the sale of 228 kg of elephant-friendly honey. As news of the success of the trial spread, a further 12 farmers requested to join the project, bringing the number of beehive fence protected farms to 22 and beehives to 297. This demonstrates positive adoption of beehive fences as a community mitigation tool. Understanding the response of elephants to the beehive fences, the seasonality of crop raiding and fence breaking, and the willingness of the community to engage with the mitigation method will help contribute to future management strategies for this high human–elephant conflict hotspot and other similar areas in Kenya.

Human–wildlife conflicts are commonly addressed by excluding, relocating, or lethally controlling animals with the goal of preserving public health and safety, protecting property, or conserving other valued wildlife. However, declining wildlife populations, a lack of efficacy of control methods in achieving desired outcomes, and changes in how people value animals have triggered widespread acknowledgment of the need for ethical and evidence-based approaches to managing such conflicts. We explored international perspectives on and experiences with human–wildlife conflicts to develop principles for ethical wildlife control. A diverse panel of 20 experts convened at a 2-day workshop and developed the principles through a facilitated engagement process and discussion. They determined that efforts to control wildlife should begin wherever possible by altering the human practices that cause human–wildlife conflict and by developing a culture of coexistence; be justified by evidence that significant harms are being caused to people, property, livelihoods, ecosystems, and/or other animals; have measurable outcome-based objectives that are clear, achievable, monitored, and adaptive; predictably minimize animal welfare harms to the fewest number of animals; be informed by community values as well as scientific, technical, and practical information; be integrated into plans for systematic long-term management; and be based on the specifics of the situation rather than negative labels (pest, overabundant) applied to the target species. We recommend that these principles guide development of international, national, and local standards and control decisions and implementation.

Invasive rats are one of the world's most successful animal groups that cause native species extinctions and ecosystem change, particularly on islands. On large islands, rat eradication is often impossible and population control, defined as the local limitation of rat abundance, is now routinely performed on many of the world's islands as an alternative management tool. However, a synthesis of the motivations, techniques, costs, and outcomes of such rat-control projects is lacking. We reviewed the literature, searched relevant websites, and conducted a survey via a questionnaire to synthesize the available information on rat-control projects in island natural areas worldwide to improve rat management and native species conservation. Data were collected from 136 projects conducted over the last 40 years; most were located in Australasia (46%) and the tropical Pacific (25%) in forest ecosystems (65%) and coastal strands (22%). Most of the projects targeted Rattus rattus and most (82%) were aimed at protecting birds and endangered ecosystems. Poisoning (35%) and a combination of trapping and poisoning (42%) were the most common methods. Poisoning allows for treatment of larger areas, and poison projects generally last longer than trapping projects. Second-generation anticoagulants (mainly brodifacoum and bromadiolone) were used most often. The median annual cost for rat-control projects was US$17,262 or US$227/ha. Median project duration was 4 years. For 58% of the projects, rat population reduction was reported, and 51% of projects showed evidence of positive effects on biodiversity. Our data were from few countries, revealing the need to expand rat-control distribution especially in some biodiversity hotspots. Improvement in control methods is needed as is regular monitoring to assess short- and long-term effectiveness of rat-control.

The hope for creating widespread change in social values has endured among conservation professionals since early calls by Aldo Leopold for a “land ethic.” However, there has been little serious attention in conservation to the fields of investigation that address values, how they are formed, and how they change. We introduce a social–ecological systems conceptual approach in which values are seen not only as motivational goals people hold but also as ideas that are deeply embedded in society's material culture, collective behaviors, traditions, and institutions. Values define and bind groups, organizations, and societies; serve an adaptive role; and are typically stable across generations. When abrupt value changes occur, they are in response to substantial alterations in the social–ecological context. Such changes build on prior value structures and do not result in complete replacement. Given this understanding of values, we conclude that deliberate efforts to orchestrate value shifts for conservation are unlikely to be effective. Instead, there is an urgent need for research on values with a multilevel and dynamic view that can inform innovative conservation strategies for working within existing value structures. New directions facilitated by a systems approach will enhance understanding of the role values play in shaping conservation challenges and improve management of the human component of conservation.

The field of biodiversity conservation has recently been criticized as relying on a fixist view of the living world in which existing species constitute at the same time targets of conservation efforts and static states of reference, which is in apparent disagreement with evolutionary dynamics. We reviewed the prominent role of species as conservation units and the common benchmark approach to conservation that aims to use past biodiversity as a reference to conserve current biodiversity. We found that the species approach is justified by the discrepancy between the time scales of macroevolution and human influence and that biodiversity benchmarks are based on reference processes rather than fixed reference states. Overall, we argue that the ethical and theoretical frameworks underlying conservation research are based on macroevolutionary processes, such as extinction dynamics. Current species, phylogenetic, community, and functional conservation approaches constitute short-term responses to short-term human effects on these reference processes, and these approaches are consistent with evolutionary principles.

Scholars across all disciplines have long been interested in how knowledge moves within and beyond their community of peers. Rapid environmental changes and calls for sustainable management practices mean the best knowledge possible is needed to inform decisions, policies, and practices to protect biodiversity and sustainably manage vulnerable natural resources. Although the conservation literature on knowledge exchange (KE) and knowledge mobilization (KM) has grown in recent years, much of it is based on context-specific case studies. This presents a challenge for learning cumulative lessons from KE and KM research and thus effectively using knowledge in conservation and natural resources management. Although continued research on the gap between knowledge and action is valuable, overarching conceptual frameworks are now needed to enable summaries and comparisons across diverse KE-KM research. We propose a knowledge-action framework that provides a conceptual roadmap for future research and practice in KE/KM with the aim of synthesizing lessons learned from contextual case studies and guiding the development and testing of hypotheses in this domain. Our knowledge-action framework has 3 elements that occur at multiple levels and scales: knowledge production (e.g., academia and government), knowledge mediation (e.g., knowledge networks, actors, relational dimension, and contextual dimension), and knowledge-based action (e.g., instrumental, symbolic, and conceptual). The framework integrates concepts from the sociology of science in particular, and serves as a guide to further comprehensive understanding of knowledge exchange and mobilization in conservation and sustainable natural resource management.

A good understanding of social factors that lead to marine ecological change is important to developing sustainable global fisheries. We used balanced panel models and conducted cross-national time-series analyses (1970–2010) of 122 nations to examine how economic prosperity and population growth affected the sustainability of marine ecosystems. We used catches in economic exclusive zone (EEZ); mean trophic level of fishery landings (MTL); primary production required to sustain catches (expressed as percentage of local primary production [%PPR]); and an index of ecosystem overfishing (i.e., the loss in secondary production index [L index]) as indicators of ecological change in marine ecosystems. The EEZ catch, %PPR, and L index declined gradually after gross domestic product (GDP) per capita reached $15,000, $14,000, and $19,000, respectively, and MTL increased steadily once GDP per capita exceeded $20,000. These relationships suggest that economic growth and biodiversity conservation are compatible goals. However, increasing human populations would degrade marine ecosystems. Specifically, a doubling of human population caused an increase in the %PPR of 17.1% and in the L index of 0.0254 and a decline in the MTL of 0.176. A 1% increase in human population resulted in a 0.744% increase in EEZ catch. These results highlight the importance of considering social and economic factors in developing sustainable fisheries management policy.

A cap-and-trade system for managing whale harvests represents a potentially useful approach to resolve the current gridlock in international whale management. The establishment of whale permit markets, open to both whalers and conservationists, could reveal the strength of conservation demand, about which little is known. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult to predict the outcome of a hypothetical whale permit market. We developed a bioeconomic model to evaluate the influence of economic uncertainty about demand for whale conservation or harvest. We used simulations over a wide range of parameterizations of whaling and conservation demands to examine the potential ecological consequences of the establishment of a whale permit market in Norwegian waters under bounded (but substantial) economic uncertainty. Uncertainty variables were slope of whaling and conservation demand, participation level of conservationists and their willingness to pay for whale conservation, and functional forms of demand, including linear, quadratic, and log-linear forms. A whale-conservation market had the potential to yield a wide range of conservation and harvest outcomes, the most likely outcomes were those in which conservationists bought all whale permits.

Conservation of biodiversity, including birds, continues to challenge natural-area managers. Stated-preference methods (e.g., choice experiment [CE]) are increasingly used to provide data for valuation of natural ecosystems. We used a CE to calculate birders’ willingness to pay for different levels of bioecological attributes (threatened species, endemic species, and diversity) of birding sites with hypothetical entry fees. The CE was delivered at popular birding and avitourism sites in Australia and the United Kingdom. Latent-class modeling results revealed heterogeneous preferences among birders and correspondingly variable willingness to pay. Four clear groups were apparent: quantity-driven birders, special-birds seekers, confused respondents, and price-is-no-object birders. Quantity-driven birders were attracted to sites that deliver high levels of diversity and endemic species for which they were willing to pay $135 and $66 to visit, respectively, above what they were willing to pay to visit a site with low levels of diversity and few endemic and threatened species . Special-bird seekers valued threatened species and high levels of endemic species most (willingness to pay $45 and $46, respectively). Confused respondents’ preferences were difficult to determine, but they were the most sensitive to the hypothetical entry fees, unlike the price-is-no-object birders, who were not at all sensitive to cost. Our findings demonstrate that birders are amenable to paying for their preferred birding experience. These payments could provide an alternative source of funding in some avitourism sites on both public and private land. Such alternative revenue streams should be explored and given full consideration in increasingly competitive conservation-financing environments.

Understanding the social acceptability of biodiversity offsets is important to the design of offset policy. We used a discrete choice experiment to quantify preferences of Australians for a migratory shorebird offset in the context of an oil and gas development project. We surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1371 respondents on their preferences for current and prospective offset-policy characteristics via an online questionnaire to inform policy design of the social dimensions related to offset acceptability. The majority of respondents accepted offsetting as a means to allow economic development; the option to reject development (and an offset) was selected in 13% of possible offset scenarios. Substituting protection of a species affected by the development with protection of a more endangered species was a desirable policy characteristic, as was having the offset implemented by a third party or the government rather than the company responsible for the development. Direct offset activities (e.g., improving degraded habitat) were preferred over indirect activities (e.g., a research program), and respondents were strongly against locating the offset at a site other than where the impact occurred. Positive and negative characteristics of offsets could be traded off by changing the number of birds protected by the offset. Our results show that Australians are likely to support increased flexibility in biodiversity-offset policies, particularly when undesirable policy characteristics are compensated for.

High costs of land in agricultural regions warrant spatial prioritization approaches to conservation that explicitly consider land prices to produce protected-area networks that accomplish targets efficiently. However, land-use changes in such regions and delays between plan design and implementation may render optimized plans obsolete before implementation occurs. To measure the shelf life of cost-efficient conservation plans, we simulated a land-acquisition and restoration initiative aimed at conserving species at risk in Canada's farmlands. We accounted for observed changes in land-acquisition costs and in agricultural intensity based on censuses of agriculture taken from 1986 to 2011. For each year of data, we mapped costs and areas of conservation priority designated using Marxan. We compared plans to test for changes through time in the arrangement of high-priority sites and in the total cost of each plan. For acquisition costs, we measured the savings from accounting for prices during site selection. Land-acquisition costs and land-use intensity generally rose over time independent of inflation (24–78%), although rates of change were heterogeneous through space and decreased in some areas. Accounting for spatial variation in land price lowered the cost of conservation plans by 1.73–13.9%, decreased the range of costs by 19–82%, and created unique solutions from which to choose. Despite the rise in plan costs over time, the high conservation priority of particular areas remained consistent. Delaying conservation in these critical areas may compromise what optimized conservation plans can achieve. In the case of Canadian farmland, rapid conservation action is cost-effective, even with moderate levels of uncertainty in how to implement restoration goals.

Conservation easements are a standard technique for preventing habitat loss, particularly in agricultural regions with extensive cropland cultivation, yet little is known about their effectiveness. I developed a spatial econometric approach to propensity-score matching and used the approach to estimate the amount of habitat loss prevented by a grassland conservation easement program of the U.S. federal government. I used a spatial autoregressive probit model to predict tract enrollment in the easement program as of 2001 based on tract agricultural suitability, habitat quality, and spatial interactions among neighboring tracts. Using the predicted values from the model, I matched enrolled tracts with similar unenrolled tracts to form a treatment group and a control group. To measure the program's impact on subsequent grassland loss, I estimated cropland cultivation rates for both groups in 2014 with a second spatial probit model. Between 2001 and 2014, approximately 14.9% of control tracts were cultivated and 0.3% of treated tracts were cultivated. Therefore, approximately 14.6% of the protected land would have been cultivated in the absence of the program. My results demonstrate that conservation easements can significantly reduce habitat loss in agricultural regions; however, the enrollment of tracts with low cropland suitability may constrain the amount of habitat loss they prevent. My results also show that spatial econometric models can improve the validity of control groups and thereby strengthen causal inferences about program effectiveness in situations when spatial interactions influence conservation decisions.

Policies and research increasingly focus on the protection of ecosystem services (ESs) through priority-area conservation. Priority areas for ESs should be identified based on ES capacity and ES demand and account for the connections between areas of ES capacity and demand (flow) resulting in areas of unique demand–supply connections (flow zones). We tested ways to account for ES demand and flow zones to identify priority areas in the European Union. We mapped the capacity and demand of a global (carbon sequestration), a regional (flood regulation), and 3 local ESs (air quality, pollination, and urban leisure). We used Zonation software to identify priority areas for ESs based on 6 tests: with and without accounting for ES demand and 4 tests that accounted for the effect of ES flow zone. There was only 37.1% overlap between the 25% of priority areas that encompassed the most ESs with and without accounting for ES demand. The level of ESs maintained in the priority areas increased from 23.2% to 57.9% after accounting for ES demand, especially for ESs with a small flow zone. Accounting for flow zone had a small effect on the location of priority areas and level of ESs maintained but resulted in fewer flow zones without ES maintained relative to ignoring flow zones. Accounting for demand and flow zones enhanced representation and distribution of ESs with local to regional flow zones without large trade-offs relative to the global ES. We found that ignoring ES demand led to the identification of priority areas in remote regions where benefits from ES capacity to society were small. Incorporating ESs in conservation planning should therefore always account for ES demand to identify an effective priority network for ESs.

Growing threats to biodiversity and global alteration of habitats and species distributions make it increasingly necessary to consider evolutionary patterns in conservation decision making. Yet, there is no clear-cut guidance on how genetic features can be incorporated into conservation-planning processes, despite multiple molecular markers and several genetic metrics for each marker type to choose from. Genetic patterns differ between species, but the potential tradeoffs among genetic objectives for multiple species in conservation planning are currently understudied. We compared spatial conservation prioritizations derived from 2 metrics of genetic diversity (nucleotide and haplotype diversity) and 2 metrics of genetic isolation (private haplotypes and local genetic differentiation) in mitochondrial DNA of 5 marine species. We compared outcomes of conservation plans based only on habitat representation with plans based on genetic data and habitat representation. Fewer priority areas were selected for conservation plans based solely on habitat representation than on plans that included habitat and genetic data. All 4 genetic metrics selected approximately similar conservation-priority areas, which is likely a result of prioritizing genetic patterns across a genetically diverse array of species. Largely, our results suggest that multispecies genetic conservation objectives are vital to creating protected-area networks that appropriately preserve community-level evolutionary patterns.

One of the criteria used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to assess threat status is the rate of decline in abundance over 3 generations or 10 years, whichever is longer. The traditional method for calculating generation length (T) uses age-specific survival and fecundity, but these data are rarely available. Consequently, proxies that require less information are often used, which introduces potential biases. The IUCN recommends 2 proxies based on adult mortality rate, = α + 1/d, and reproductive life span, = α + z^*RL, where α is age at first reproduction, d is adult mortality rate, RL is reproductive life span, and z is a coefficient derived from data for comparable species. We used published life tables for 78 animal and plant populations to evaluate precision and bias of these proxies by comparing and with true generation length. Mean error rates in estimating T were 31% for and 20% for , but error rates for were 16% when we subtracted 1 year ( ), as suggested by theory; also provided largely unbiased estimates regardless of the true generation length. Performance of depends on compilation of detailed data for comparable species, but our results suggest taxonomy is not a reliable indicator of comparability. All 3 proxies depend heavily on a reliable estimate of age at first reproduction, as we illustrated with 2 test species. The relatively large mean errors for all proxies emphasized the importance of collecting the detailed life-history information necessary to calculate true generation length. Unfortunately, publication of such data is less common than it was decades ago. We identified generic patterns of age-specific change in vital rates that can be used to predict expected patterns of bias from applying .

Traditional means of assessing representativeness of conservation value in protected areas depend on measures of structural biodiversity. The effectiveness of priority conservation areas at representing critical natural capital (CNC) (i.e., an essential and renewable subset of natural capital) remains largely unknown. We analyzed the representativeness of CNC-conservation priority areas in national nature reserves (i.e., nature reserves under jurisdiction of the central government with large spatial distribution across the provinces) in China with a new biophysical-based composite indicator approach. With this approach, we integrated the net primary production of vegetation, topography, soil, and climate variables to map and rank terrestrial ecosystems capacities to generate CNC. National nature reserves accounted for 6.7% of CNC-conservation priority areas across China. Considerable gaps (35.2%) existed between overall (or potential) CNC representativeness nationally and CNC representation in national reserves, and there was significant spatial heterogeneity of representativeness in CNC-conservation priority areas at the regional and provincial levels. For example, the best and worst representations were, respectively, 13.0% and 1.6% regionally and 28.9% and 0.0% provincially. Policy in China is transitioning toward the goal of an ecologically sustainable civilization. We identified CNC-conservation priority areas and conservation gaps and thus contribute to the policy goals of optimization of the national nature reserve network and the demarcation of areas critical to improving the representativeness and conservation of highly functioning areas of natural capital. Moreover, our method for assessing representation of CNC can be easily adapted to other large-scale networks of conservation areas because few data are needed, and our model is relatively simple.

The causes of species rarity are of critical concern because of the high extinction risk associated with rarity. Studies examining individual rare species have limited generality, whereas trait-based approaches offer a means to identify functional causes of rarity that can be applied to communities with disparate species pools. Differences in functional traits between rare and common species may be indicative of the functional causes of species rarity and may therefore be useful in crafting species conservation strategies. However, there is a conspicuous lack of studies comparing the functional traits of rare species and co-occurring common species. We measured 18 important functional traits for 19 rare and 134 common understory plant species from North Carolina's Sandhills region and compared their trait distributions to determine whether there are significant functional differences that may explain species rarity. Flowering, fire, and tissue-chemistry traits differed significantly between rare and common, co-occurring species. Differences in specific traits suggest that fire suppression has driven rarity in this system and that changes to the timing and severity of prescribed fire may improve conservation success. Our method provides a useful tool to prioritize conservation efforts in other systems based on the likelihood that rare species are functionally capable of persisting.

Wildlife subsistence hunting is a major source of protein for tropical rural populations and a prominent conservation issue. The intrinsic rate of natural increase. (r_max) of populations is a key reproductive parameter in the most used assessments of hunting sustainability. However, researchers face severe difficulties in obtaining reproductive data in the wild, so these assessments often rely on classic reproductive rates calculated mostly from studies of captive animals conducted 30 years ago. The result is a flaw in almost 50% of studies, which hampers management decision making. We conducted a 15-year study in the Amazon in which we used reproductive data from the genitalia of 950 hunted female mammals. Genitalia were collected by local hunters. We examined tissue from these samples to estimate birthrates for wild populations of the 10 most hunted mammals. We compared our estimates with classic measures and considered the utility of the use of r_max in sustainability assessments. For woolly monkey (Lagothrix poeppigii) and tapir (Tapirus terrestris), wild birthrates were similar to those from captive populations, whereas birthrates for other ungulates and lowland-paca (Cuniculus paca) were significantly lower than previous estimates. Conversely, for capuchin monkeys (Sapajus macrocephalus), agoutis (Dasyprocta sp.), and coatis (Nasua nasua), our calculated reproductive rates greatly exceeded often-used values. Researchers could keep applying classic measures compatible with our estimates, but for other species previous estimates of r_max may not be appropriate. We suggest that data from local studies be used to set hunting quotas. Our maximum rates of population growth in the wild correlated with body weight, which suggests that our method is consistent and reliable. Integration of this method into community-based wildlife management and the training of local hunters to record pregnancies in hunted animals could efficiently generate useful information of life histories of wild species and thus improve management of natural resources.

Lawton et al. (1998) found, in a highly cited study, that the species richness of 8 taxa each responds differently to anthropogenic disturbance in Cameroon forests. Recent developments in conservation science suggest that net number of species is an insensitive measure of change and that understanding which species are affected by disturbance is more important. It is also recognized that all disturbance types are not equal in their effect on species and that grouping species according to function rather than taxonomy is more informative of responses of biodiversity to change. In a reanalysis of most of the original Cameroon data set (canopy and ground ants, termites, canopy beetles, nematodes, and butterflies), we focused on changes in species and functional composition rather than richness and used a more inclusive measure of forest disturbance based on 4 component drivers of change: years since disturbance, tree cover, soil compaction, and degree of tree removal. Effects of disturbance on compositional change were largely concordant between taxa. Contrary to Lawton et al.’s findings, species richness for most groups did not decline with disturbance level, providing support for the view that trends in species richness at local scales do not reflect the resilience of ecosystems to disturbance. Disturbance affected species composition more strongly than species richness for butterflies, canopy beetles, and litter ants. For these groups, disturbance caused species replacements rather than just species loss. Only termites showed effects of disturbance on species richness but not composition, indicating species loss without replacement. Although disturbance generally caused changes in composition, the strength of this relationship depended on the disturbance driver. Butterflies, litter ants, and nematodes were correlated with amount of tree cover, canopy beetles were most strongly correlated with time since disturbance, and termites were most strongly correlated with degree of soil disturbance. There were moderately divergent responses to disturbance between functional feeding groups. Disturbance was most strongly correlated with compositional differences of herbivores within beetles and nematodes and humus feeders within termites. Our results suggest that consideration of the impact of different forms of disturbance on species and functional composition, rather than on net numbers of species, is important when assessing the impacts of disturbance on biodiversity.

Reliable estimates of animal density are fundamental to understanding ecological processes and population dynamics. Furthermore, their accuracy is vital to conservation because wildlife authorities rely on estimates to make decisions. However, it is notoriously difficult to accurately estimate density for wide-ranging carnivores that occur at low densities. In recent years, significant progress has been made in density estimation of Asian carnivores, but the methods have not been widely adapted to African carnivores, such as lions (Panthera leo). Although abundance indices for lions may produce poor inferences, they continue to be used to estimate density and inform management and policy. We used sighting data from a 3-month survey and adapted a Bayesian spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) model to estimate spatial lion density in the Maasai Mara National Reserve and surrounding conservancies in Kenya. Our unstructured spatial capture-recapture sampling design incorporated search effort to explicitly estimate detection probability and density on a fine spatial scale, making our approach robust in the context of varying detection probabilities. Overall posterior mean lion density was estimated to be 17.08 (posterior SD 1.310) lions >1 year old/100 km², and the sex ratio was estimated at 2.2 females to 1 male. Our modeling framework and narrow posterior SD demonstrate that SECR methods can produce statistically rigorous and precise estimates of population parameters, and we argue that they should be favored over less reliable abundance indices. Furthermore, our approach is flexible enough to incorporate different data types, which enables robust population estimates over relatively short survey periods in a variety of systems. Trend analyses are essential to guide conservation decisions but are frequently based on surveys of differing reliability. We therefore call for a unified framework to assess lion numbers in key populations to improve management and policy decisions.