In this paper, we examine oceans outcomes from the 3^rd United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNSCD, or Rio+20) in relation to how ocean problems and solutions were defined and by whom. We highlight the extent to which problem and solution definitions were shared among participants, in relation to three specific issues on the agenda at Rio+20: conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, small-scale fisheries, and ocean acidification. We find that discussions about each of these issues reflect three challenges recognized as complicating oceans management: mismatches between ecological and governance scale, homogeneity among interest groups advocating for ocean conservation, and increased interest in both protection and exploitation of ocean resources. Overall, we found little evidence of constructive dialogue at Rio+20, where participants focused on advancing pre-defined positions, and we consider the implications of our analysis for ultimately addressing our three focal issues and for oceans management more generally.

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Using the article by Muradian et al. (this issue) as entry point, I develop a broader framework for the conditions needed to allow PES to emerge and function. It is argued that PES are designed as instruments with clear goals, and will function without markets, economic valuation, or commoditized services. As a highly adaptive management tool, PES are particularly suited for achieving equitable and flexible conservation outcomes. However, PES do require a payment culture and good organization from service users, a trustful negotiation climate, and well-defined land- or resource-tenure regimes for providers. These demanding preconditions may explain why PES implementation, while promising in many cases, has only spread slowly in low-income countries.

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Remnant forest fragments are critical to conserve biological diversity yet these are lost rapidly in areas under agricultural expansion. Conservation planning and policy require a deeper understanding of the psycho-social factors influencing landholders’ intentions towards conserving forest fragments. We surveyed 89 landholders in an agricultural frontier of the South American Gran Chaco and employed survey data to test three social psychological models: the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and two modified versions of it, one integrated to the Norm Activation Theory (TPB-NAT) and one including the effect of identity (TPB-NAT-Identity). The TPB was the most parsimonious model and explained a large variance of conservation intentions (41%). Social norms and attitudes had the largest direct influence on intentions across the three models, and identity had a significant role in shaping social norms and attitudes. Interventions aimed at building social capital within landholder networks provide the best hope for influencing pro-conservation norms.

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Corruption affects biodiversity conservation. Mechanisms that more effectively reform corruption and mitigate negative effects of corruption on conservation are needed, especially in biodiversity hotspots such as Madagascar. Local definitions of corrupt behavior, attitudes about reforms and motivations for noncompliance may generate deeper understanding about corruption, which in turn may advance the conservation community's thinking and invite new solutions. We conducted in-depth interviews with Malagasy residents living adjacent to the Makira/Masoala Conservation Area, querying perceptions about regional corruption, rules in use (i.e., social norms or rules in action), rule breaking and mechanisms for reform. Most participants framed noncompliance with conservation rules as a deficit/absence (e.g., lack of knowledge of rules), defined local corruption more as an omission of duty than a commission of crime, and discussed poverty, unfairness, and diverse rules in use related to corruption. Traditional framing of corruption singularly as a lack or absence of honesty and morality or as a normative phenomenon does not seem wholly accurate at reflecting, or for thinking about, the local context. Data herein allude such inaccuracy may be most noteworthy at the level of corruption reform. Rethinking corruption in conservation crime as a blend of dimensions may liberalize the suite of reform mechanisms available to conservationists.

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The commercial trade of propagated listed plants is a common but controversial ex situ conservation approach for rare plant species. We investigated the Internet trade of plants protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act to determine their availability for interstate (i.e., regulated) commerce. We identified 49 listed plant species that were available via the Internet, with less than 10% of vendors having obtained the required federal permit. The lack of permits among vendors suggests that sellers are unaware or ignore regulations. Illegal trade undermines both the permitting process and conservation efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure that commercial propagation aids the long-term survival of endangered species. Furthermore, in addition to supplying a demand for plant collections and landscaping, commercial trade could provide a source of plants for deliberate species introductions, including assisted colonization – a debated conservation strategy that involves moving species to new environments to mitigate for habitat loss and climate change. Given the potential costs and benefits associated with trade, the challenges suggest that a collaborative approach between agencies, nurseries, and plant collectors is needed to regulate the trade of endangered plants. In regulating commercial trade, policymakers and conservation biologists may want to consider potential risks and benefits of private efforts to recover species.

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Conservation policy requires reliable estimates of extinction rates that consider the interactions between population size (N) and habitat area. Current approaches to estimating extinction from the endemics-area relationship (EAR) estimate only the minimum number of species that can become extinct due to habitat loss (instantaneous extinction). EARs will therefore underestimate extinction if small populations and/or habitat area (SPHA) commit species to future extinction. We demonstrate this mathematically, by assuming species require a minimum population size of two individuals, and by randomly sampling habitat loss within stem-mapped forest plots. We then develop a general framework for incorporating SPHA effects into EARs that builds upon recent advances introducing N into estimates of extinction. By accounting for effects that modify N, our framework explains extinction debt and reduces the uncertainty associated with future estimates of extinction through carefully qualifying the spatial and temporal context of predictions.

Several studies suggest that protected areas conserve forests because deforestation rates are lower inside than outside protected area boundaries. Such benefits may be overestimated when deforestation rates within protected areas are contrasted with rates in lands where forest conversion is sanctioned. Here, we re-examine protected area performance by disentangling the effects of land use regulations surrounding the 110,000 km² protected area network in Sumatra, Indonesia.

We compared 1990–2000 deforestation rates across: (i) protected areas; (ii) unprotected areas sanctioned for conversion; and (iii) unprotected production areas where commercial logging is permitted but conversion is not. Deforestation rates were lower in protected areas than in conversion areas (Mean: -19.8%; 95%C.I.: -29.7%− -10.0%; P<0.001), but did not differ from production areas (Mean: -3.3%; 95%C.I.: -9.6%− 2.6%; P= 0.273).

The measured protection impact of Sumatran protected areas differs with land use regulations governing unprotected lands used for comparisons. If these regulations are not considered, protected areas will appear increasingly effective as larger unprotected forested areas are sanctioned for conversion and deforested. In the 1990s, production areas were as effective as protected areas at reducing deforestation. We discuss implications of these findings for carbon conservation.

Different monitoring approaches collect data that can measure progress toward achieving global environmental indicators. These indicators can: (1) Audit management actions; (2) Inform policy choices; and (3) Raise awareness among the public and policy makers. We present a generic, empirically based, framework of different environmental monitoring approaches, ranging from scientist-driven to those undertaken by local people. This framework is used to assess monitoring possibilities for the Convention on Biological Diversity “2020” indicators, and those of 11 other international environmental agreements. Of the 186 indicators in these 12 environmental agreements, 69 (37%) require monitoring by professional scientists, whereas 117 (63%) can involve community members as “citizen scientists.” Promoting “community-based” and “citizen science” approaches could significantly enrich monitoring progress within global environmental conventions. It would also link environmental monitoring to awareness raising and enhanced decision-making at all levels of resource management.

Science and conservation are often driven by different agendas, partly because many researchers are reluctant to tackle applied topics perceived to be less competitive for publishing or too impractical to study. Consequently, research often fails to contribute meaningfully to conservation outcomes. We use leopards Panthera pardus in South Africa to illustrate this mismatch between research and conservation priorities. A review of the scientific literature showed that leopard studies in South Africa focused disproportionately on basic research, particularly on leopard feeding ecology inside protected areas. Academics were responsible for most articles but avoided applied studies, even though they were published in higher impact journals and took less time to undertake. An assessment of active leopard projects further demonstrated that studies were clumped in areas of low conservation concern and most failed to publish their findings. Many projects were also funded by commercial volunteer programs with financial incentives for conducting research. We recommend that leopard researchers in South Africa and carnivore researchers more widely engage with practitioners to ensure the most pressing issues are addressed. Scientists must also situate their research in a broader conservation context and evaluate the outcomes of management decisions. Finally, continued funding and permissions for research should at a minimum be contingent on research outputs being published in the peer-reviewed literature.

As Brazil undergoes rapid economic growth, short-sighted political decisions can threaten biological diversity and ecosystem services. Recently, the Brazilian Congress proposed a law to allow the rearing of nonnative fish in aquaculture cages in any hydroelectric reservoir of the country. This initiative may “naturalize by decree” some of the worst invasive species in the world (e.g., carps and tilapias) as a means of developing inland aquaculture and economy. The spread of aquaculture facilities will create opportunities for fish invasions to occur throughout the country, with the risk of damaging native biodiversity, ecosystem services, and environmental quality on a continental scale. The proposal ignores ecological theory, historical and/or empirical data concerning fish invasion, including dispersal, establishment, propagule pressure, invasiveness and invasibility, and all the negative consequences that may follow the invasion and establishment of nonnative organisms. This situation inspires reflection about the future of tropical biodiversity worldwide, particularly because Brazil, like many other developing countries, possesses a remarkable diversity of fish and other freshwater organisms yet has taken some political measures that are in conflict with important conservation issues.

Effective conservation requires people to make choices about how they interact with the environment. Social characteristics influence the likelihood of establishing conservation actions with strong compliance (hereafter “feasibility”), but are rarely considered in conservation planning. Our study makes two contributions to understand feasibility. First, we explicitly test the associations between social characteristics and the presence and form of resource management. Second, we compare the ability of different types of data to elucidate feasibility. We use Ostrom's (2007) thinking on social–ecological systems and literature on resource management in Melanesia to create a context-specific framework to identify social characteristics that influence feasibility for conservation management. We then apply this framework and test for associations between the presence and form of management on one hand and social characteristics on the other, using data collected at different resolutions. We found that conservation feasibility was associated with characteristics of the governance system, users, and the social, economic, and political setting. Villages with different forms of management were more similar to each other socially than to villages without management. Social data collected at the resolution of households accounted for over double the variation in the form and presence of management compared to data at the resolution of villages. Our methods can be adapted to conservation planning initiatives in other socioeconomic settings.

REDD+ presents novel options for conservation in the tropics, yet it is unclear how biodiversity-focused organizations or actors should react to these carbon-focused opportunities. Here, we critically assess for the first time the expected outcomes of five contrasting scenarios of engagement between a biodiversity actor and REDD+. We discover that in the Berau regency, Indonesia, it is usually beneficial for a biodiversity actor to react in some way to REDD+, but the preferred reaction depends on whether a REDD+ project is already developing in the region, and the scale and type of conservation objectives. In general, from a strict biodiversity perspective, the most cost efficient reaction to the presence of REDD+ is to use biodiversity funds to protect areas neglected by REDD+. Our results demonstrate that if biodiversity actors fail to adapt the way they pursue conservation in the tropics, REDD+ opportunities could go largely untapped.

Scientists and conservationists increasingly rely on contributions by volunteers recruited from the wider public to work over large and ecologically meaningful spatial scales. Optimizing working in partnership with unpaid, volunteer citizen scientists and conservationists requires an understanding of the determinants of volunteer retention rates and how they are affected by management practices. To this effect, we present the novel use of the mark-recapture framework widely used in wildlife demography in order to quantify volunteer retention probabilities. We illustrate the versatility and power of the approach using a project that removed invasive American mink from 10,000 km² in Scotland in partnership with volunteer citizen conservationists recruited from local communities. Wide scale adoption of the mark-recapture framework to analyze volunteer management will give novel insights into how volunteers interact with the conservation projects they are involved in and provide evidence for their optimal management.

Over the past century, electricity power lines have been a conspicuous part of the European landscape. These structures are generally known to cause fatalities to birds. However, some bird species use electricity poles as nesting structures, song posts, or for perching. Other, but not-acknowledged, benefits probably include the marginal habitats around the base of pylons. We tested differences in breeding bird communities under pylons, under electricity high-voltage power lines, and in adjacent open fields. Birds were counted twice during the 2011 breeding season in a total of 91 study plots located in the intensive farmland of western Poland. Both species number and bird abundance were significantly higher under pylons and under power lines at control points than in open fields, especially where there were shrubs under the pylons. Pylons and power lines locally may play a positive role for the avian community in intensive farmland, especially if vegetation succession under pylons is allowed to develop to the shrub stage.

Metaphors are common in our ecological and conservation language. They help us understand complex issues and communicate them to different audiences. We propose two new metaphors: ecosystem leaks and ecosystem clogs that can help us understand the role of flows among ecosystems (inflows and outflows), the impacts of anthropogenic perturbations of these flows within and beyond ecosystem boundaries. They help us grasp the need for a broader outlook in restoration and conservation that goes beyond the ecosystem level. We define an ecosystem leak as any net loss of natural capital from any ecosystem with the potential of exerting a long-term transformative effect. As its name implies, an ecosystem clog is the opposite of a leak, and we define it as a total or partial obstruction in the flows of natural capital within an ecosystem, or between ecosystems. Leaks can create clogs, and vice versa, and they can occur in cyclic succession causing cascading effects that affect not just the natural capital of an ecosystem, but its social and cultural capital as well. We focus on anthropogenic leaks and clogs as these are the ones for which society does not invest adequate attention and efforts.

Invasive aquatic species introductions cause tremendous environmental and economic damage. Conservation and management efforts will benefit from rapid, inexpensive, and accurate on-site methods to detect harmful aquatic species to prevent their introduction and spread. Here, two technologies, environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling and Light Transmission Spectroscopy (LTS), were combined to address this need. Specifically, eDNA filtering and extraction methods were used to isolate DNA from: (1) lake water samples that were seeded with a microscopic fragment of five high-risk invasive species and (2) untreated samples from lakes infested with the invasive zebra mussel, Dreissena polymorpha, followed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. LTS was then used to detect size shifts resulting from hybridization of PCR products with nanobeads covered with species-specific oligonucleotide probes. The results demonstrate that coupling eDNA sampling with LTS species detection can provide a sensitive and real-time solution for screening real-world water samples for invasive species.

Around the world, oil and gas exploration and development are moving into areas previously undisturbed by industrial development. These activities and associated infrastructure can significantly impact wildlife populations and their habitat. Uncertainty in the location of oil and gas accumulations, however, makes it difficult to assess potential impacts to wildlife populations from future development. We present a modeling approach that takes this uncertainty into account by randomly sampling the locations of oil and gas accumulations across the landscape and building out simulated infrastructure. We evaluated four management alternatives outlined for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to demonstrate how this model can quantify the relative impacts to caribou (Rangifer tarandus) calving habitat and passerine nest survival. We were able to identify clear differences in impacts for wildlife under the four alternatives and highlighted the range of variability in how development might proceed under each scenario.

Designing reserve networks often requires a tradeoff between maximizing patch sizes to decrease local extinction rates and clustering patches to increase colonization rates. Here we use stochastic metapopulation models to evaluate how this tradeoff affects landscape-wide extinction risk for idealized terrestrial mammals with body sizes from 10 g to 100 kg. In simple two-patch networks, clustering patches decreases extinction risk only when inter-patch distances are within 0.5–1.25 times a species’ maximum observed dispersal distance. In an empirical landscape in which a fixed total area can be protected, this finding accurately predicts that, relative to a network that maximizes mean patch area, clustering patches most decreases extinction risk for intermediate-sized species. These results demonstrate that there is no globally optimal level of patch clustering that will best protect all species and highlight rules of thumb for reserve network design based on the interaction of species’ body size and landscape scale.

Large old trees are critical organisms and ecological structures in forests, woodlands, savannas, and agricultural and urban environments. They play many essential ecological roles ranging from the storage of large amounts of carbon to the provision of key habitats for wildlife. Some of these roles cannot be replaced by other structures. Large old trees are disproportionately vulnerable to loss in many ecosystems worldwide as a result of accelerated rates of mortality, impaired recruitment, or both. Drivers of loss, such as the combined impacts of fire and browsing by domestic or native herbivores, chemical spray drift in agricultural environments, and postdisturbance salvage logging, are often unique to large old trees but also represent ecosystem-specific threats. Here, we argue that new policies and practices are urgently needed to conserve existing large old trees and restore ecologically effective and viable populations of such trees by managing trees and forests on much longer time scales than is currently practiced, and by protecting places where they are most likely to develop. Without these steps, large old trees will vanish from many ecosystems, and associated biota and ecosystem functions will be severely diminished or lost.

With some of the highest biodiversity on the planet, the Mediterranean Biome is experiencing a conservation crisis driven by high human population density, development, and habitat fragmentation. While protected areas safeguard some critical habitat, economic realities require conservation efforts in human-dominated landscapes to maintain biodiversity in practice. As an essential component of food security for a growing human population, agricultural landscapes must play a key role in such efforts because they occupy large areas of land, are adjacent to critical habitat, and both depend on and provide ecosystem services. Winegrapes are a high-value specialty crop that can both benefit from and contribute to conservation, as producers and consumers increasingly value environmental stewardship. At the same time, potential expansion of cultivated areas, either to meet future wine demand or in response to climate change, means that decreasing the environmental impact of viticulture is critical for biodiversity conservation. We propose that vinecology—the integration of ecological and viticultural practices—can produce win-win solutions for wine production and nature conservation, where the goal is a diverse landscape that yields sustainable economic benefits, species and habitat protection, and long-term provision of a full range of ecosystem services.

Conservation agencies within the European Union promote the restoration of traditional land uses as a cost-effective way to preserve biodiversity outside reserves. Although the European Union pursues the integration of the environment into strategic decision-making, it also dictates sectoral policies that may damage farmland biodiversity. We illustrate this point by outlining the socioeconomic factors that allow the persistence of traditional free-ranging horse husbandry in Galicia, northwestern Spain. Free-ranging Galician mountain ponies provide ecological and socioeconomic services including the prevention of forest fires, the maintenance of heathlands and wolves, and the attenuation of wolf-human conflicts. This traditional livestock system may have persisted because it entails negligible costs for farmers. Wolf predation upon Galician mountain ponies does not threaten farmer's economies and seems to be tolerated better than attacks to more valuable stock. Recently, European Union's regulations on animal welfare, carcass management, or meat production put new economic and administrative burdens on farmers, make free-ranging horse rearing economically unsustainable, and incentivize its abandonment. The aim of the European Union to integrate environmental policies may be successful to preserve farmland biodiversity only through careful anticipation of the side effects of apparently unrelated regulations on the fragile equilibrium that sustain traditional land uses.

There is general acceptance that biodiversity management should be adapted to ecological scale but only recently has the precise role of scale in participatory biodiversity governance begun to be explored. We investigated stakeholder perceptions in three case studies of biodiversity management planning to understand the effect of framing a management response according to the ecological and social scale of the problem on (i) participatory processes and (ii) their social and ecological outcomes. Perceptions of success were highest in the case study where stakeholder involvement reflected the perceived ecological scale of the problem. Other factors contributing to successful outcomes were identified, including effective boundary spanning and mutual recognition of conservation conflicts. Failure to take the latter into account, and to align management responses with socioecological scale, may jeopardize long-term sustainability of biodiversity.

At the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio in June 2012, world leaders committed to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (the high seas). Our analysis of gaps in high seas management indicates that a paradigm shift to a more systematic approach will be needed to safeguard high seas biodiversity from mounting threats. Experience from terrestrial and coastal areas indicates that a systematic approach to conservation planning and management can help to maintain ecosystem health and productivity while enabling sustainable use. Our analysis further demonstrates that the current legal regime on the high seas is insufficient to realize these objectives: management institutions have neither an adequate mandate for integrated planning nor the ability to effectively coordinate across multiple management regimes. We identify key elements for future high seas management and posit that a two-pronged approach is most promising: the development of an improved global legal regime that incorporates systematic planning as well as the expansion of existing and new regional agreements and mandates. This combined approach is most likely to achieve the required ecosystem-based, integrated and science-based management that world leaders at Rio acknowledged should underpin ocean management.

Anthropogenic global warming is occurring more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere, and has already caused significant negative effects on sea ice-dependent species such as polar bears. Although observed effects have thus far been gradual, the large amount of annual variation in the climate system may cause habitat changes in individual years that exceed the long-term trend. Such years may be below critical thresholds necessary for feeding and result in unprecedented reductions in survival, reproduction, and abundance in some populations. Here, in anticipation of sudden negative population-level effects, we provide an overview of proactive conservation and management options. Preplanning, consultation, and coordination of management responses will be necessary to reduce the risks to human safety and other effects of catastrophic declines in habitat. Advance consideration of the costs, legality, logistical difficulties, likelihood of success, and invasiveness of potential responses will be critical to minimizing short-term negative effects while laying the groundwork for longer-term conservation objectives.

The benefit (or additionality) attributable to a conservation action is the difference between the outcomes of two scenarios: (1) the scenario with the conservation action, and (2) the alternative scenario, in which action did not occur. However, many conservation decisions are made using approaches that do not appropriately calculate this benefit. We review recent scientific literature and conservation policies to examine how conservation benefit is calculated in three situations: systematic reserve selection, investment in agri-environment schemes, and biodiversity offset trades. In the examples we considered, the approaches used to calculate conservation benefit often involved assumptions about the alternative scenario that were not explicit, demonstrably wrong or both. We suggest that assumptions about how conservation value changes over time in the alternative scenario can often be substantially refined, and that making these assumptions explicit by calculating directly the expected difference between the two scenarios is likely to improve the quality of conservation decision-making.

The hydrological connectivity of freshwater ecosystems in the Amazon basin makes them highly sensitive to a broad range of anthropogenic activities occurring in aquatic and terrestrial systems at local and distant locations. Amazon freshwater ecosystems are suffering escalating impacts caused by expansions in deforestation, pollution, construction of dams and waterways, and overharvesting of animal and plant species. The natural functions of these ecosystems are changing, and their capacity to provide historically important goods and services is declining. Existing management policies—including national water resources legislation, community-based natural resource management schemes, and the protected area network that now epitomizes the Amazon conservation paradigm—cannot adequately curb most impacts. Such management strategies are intended to conserve terrestrial ecosystems, have design and implementation deficiencies, or fail to account for the hydrologic connectivity of freshwater ecosystems. There is an urgent need to shift the Amazon conservation paradigm, broadening its current forest-centric focus to encompass the freshwater ecosystems that are vital components of the basin. This is possible by developing a river catchment-based conservation framework for the whole basin that protects both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

Twenty years after the world's nations agreed upon the Convention on Biodiversity, there is still a global decline in biodiversity. At present it seems unlikely that the Aichi Targets of halting biodiversity loss by 2020 will be met. Although the European Union is often seen as a pioneer in this regard, as its “Habitats Directive” represents one of the strongest legal tools in nature conservation, biodiversity continues to decline even in Europe. We outline four major problems in the current implementation of the directive. First, prioritization needs to be based upon comprehensive scientific knowledge. This requires a maximized number of red list assessments of European species and a regular adaptation of the annexes in order to focus on those sites with the highest conservation value. Second, strategic conservation plans need to be compiled for highly threatened species and adaptive management plans need to be implemented in each reserve. Third, an improved “on-ground” monitoring system is necessary, focusing on population trends of priority species and feeding back to management plans and red list assessments. Fourth, substantial financial resources have to be invested in the implementation as well as education in order to reach a societal consensus on the necessity for conservation.

In this commentary we critically discuss the suitability of payments for ecosystem services and the most important challenges they face. While such instruments can play a role in improving environmental governance, we argue that over-reliance on payments as win-win solutions might lead to ineffective outcomes, similar to earlier experience with integrated conservation and development projects. Our objective is to raise awareness, particularly among policy makers and practitioners, about the limitations of such instruments and to encourage a dialogue about the policy contexts in which they might be appropriate.

Carbon credits are a potential source of funding for restoration initiatives that contribute to achieving conservation targets in important biodiversity areas. Here we investigated whether fallowing sequesters carbon; a first step in assessing the viability of using carbon financing to promote restoration of threatened vegetation in agricultural landscapes. We used renosterveld, a critically endangered shrubland vegetation of the Cape Floristic Region, as a case study. Carbon stocks of soil and biomass in active fields, fallow fields and intact renosterveld were compared. The total carbon stocks measured in fallow fields (82 Mg C ha⁻¹) show that fallowing can sequester carbon lost in the conversion from intact renosterveld (84 Mg C ha⁻¹) to active fields (69 Mg C ha⁻¹) and that revenues of US$ 10 – 48 ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ from carbon credits could accrue. Our findings suggest that carbon financing could be used to incentivise ecological restoration in marginal agricultural landscapes.

Global efforts to protect forest biodiversity and ecosystem services rely heavily on protected areas. Although these areas primarily aim to prevent losses from deforestation and degradation, they can also contribute to restoration. Previous evaluations of protected area impacts focus on avoided deforestation and fires. In contrast, we focus on the additional regrowth induced by Costa Rica's renowned system of parks and reserves. We use a quasi-experimental empirical design to control for confounding baseline characteristics that affect both regrowth and the assignment of protection. Between 1960 and 1997, an estimated 13.5% of previously unforested lands inside protected areas reforested because they were afforded protection. The level of additional regrowth does not vary by the strictness of protection. As in previous studies of protected area impacts on avoided deforestation, estimators that do not account for nonrandom assignment of protection can overstate protected areas’ impacts on regrowth by nearly double.

We present a novel method for designing marine reserves that trades off three important attributes of a conservation plan: habitat condition, habitat representation, and socioeconomic costs. We calculated habitat condition in four ways, using different human impacts as a proxy for condition: all impacts; impacts that cannot be managed with a reserve; land-based impacts; and climate change impacts. We demonstrate our approach in California, where three important tradeoffs emerged. First, reserve systems that have a high chance of protecting good condition habitats cost fishers less than 3.1% of their income. Second, cost to fishers can be reduced by 1/2–2/3 by triaging less than 1/3 of habitats. Finally, increasing the probability of protecting good condition habitats from 50% to 99% costs fishers an additional 1.7% of their income, with roughly 0.3% added costs for each additional 10% confidence. Knowing exactly what the cost of these tradeoffs are informs discussion and potential compromise among stakeholders involved in protected area planning worldwide.

Globally, diadromous species are at risk from fragmentation by damming of rivers, and a host of other anthropogenic factors. On the United States Atlantic Coast, where diadromous fish populations have undergone dramatic declines, restoration programs based on fishway construction and hatcheries have sustained remnant populations, but large-scale restoration has not been achieved. We examine anadromous fish restoration programs on three large Atlantic Coast rivers, the Susquehanna, Connecticut, and Merrimack with multiple mainstem hydropower dams, most with relatively low generating capacity. Mean passage efficiencies through fishways on these rivers from the first dam to the spawning grounds for American shad are less than 3%. The result is that only small fractions of targeted fish species are able to complete migrations. It may be time to admit failure of fish passage and hatchery-based restoration programs and acknowledge that significant diadromous species restoration is not possible without dam removals. The approach being employed on the Penobscot River, where dams are being removed or provided the opportunity to increase power generation within a plan to provide increased access to habitat, offers a good model for restoration. Dammed Atlantic Coastal rivers offer a cautionary tale for developing nations intent on hydropower development, suggesting that lasting ecosystem-wide impacts cannot be compensated for through fish passage and hatchery technology.

Biodiversity offsetting is increasingly being used to reconcile the objectives of conservation and development. It is generally acknowledged that there are limits to the kinds of impacts on biodiversity that can or should be offset, yet there is a paucity of policy guidance as to what defines these limits and the relative difficulty of achieving a successful offset as such limits are approached. In order to improve the consistency and defensibility of development decisions involving offsets, and to improve offset design, we outline a general process for evaluating the relative offsetability of different impacts on biodiversity. This process culminates in a framework that establishes the burden of proof necessary to confirm the appropriateness and achievability of offsets, given varying levels of: conservation concern for affected biodiversity; residual impact magnitude; opportunity for suitable offsets; and feasibility of offset implementation in practice. Rankings for biodiversity conservation concern are drawn from existing conservation planning tools and approaches, including the IUCN Red List, Key Biodiversity Areas, and international bank environmental safeguard policies. We hope that the proposed process will stimulate much-needed scientific and policy debate to improve the integrity and accountability of both regulated and voluntary biodiversity offsetting.

As human population growth continues, so too does our waste, often with unintended consequences for wildlife. The estimated 640,000 tons of fishing gear lost, abandoned, or discarded annually exerts a large but uncertain impact on marine species. These “ghostnets” drift in the ocean and can fish unattended for decades (ghost fishing), killing huge numbers of commercially valuable or threatened species. We developed an integrated analysis combining physical models of oceanic drift with ecological data on marine turtle species distribution and vulnerability to make quantitative predictions of threat. Using data from beach cleanups and fisheries in northern Australia, we assessed this biodiversity threat in an area where high densities of ghostnets encounter globally threatened turtles. Entanglement risk is well-predicted by our model, as verified by independent strandings data. We identified a number of previously unknown high-risk areas. We are also able to recommend efficient locations for surveillance and interception of abandoned fishing gear. Our work points the way forward for understanding the global threat from marine debris and making predictions that can guide regulation, enforcement, and conservation action.

Which method should be used for estimating extinction risk? We present four separate estimates of extinction risk for the threatened pine lily (Lilium catesbaei Walter), based on two methods of estimating abundance (direct abundance counts and Jolly–Seber abundance estimates) and two methods of estimating extinction risk (direct simulation of the stochastic exponential growth (SEG) model, and the diffusion approximation). We compare the accuracy of these four combinations with a simulated data set where simulated-true population abundance and extinction risk is known. The Jolly–Seber method of abundance estimation in combination with direct estimation of extinction risk is the least biased combination of the four methods tested. We conclude that Jolly–Seber (or other mark-recapture) estimates should be used in combination with direct simulation of the SEG, when sampling error is expected. For the pine lily, we conclude that risk of extinction is low in the population studied.

Since the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, counting and mapping have come to dominate international debates around biodiversity protection. With the emergence of the Ecosystem Services concept, these counting and mapping efforts are increasingly imbued with an economic logic that argues that to save biodiversity, its goods and services must be given monetary value. This article offers a critical engagement with the Ecosystem Services discourse and the way it translates the diversity of nature into a single measure—a “currency”—to be included in systems of exchange. We argue that this conception of biodiversity is too narrow and potentially detrimental because it reduces biodiversity to a series of quantifiable fragmented parts that become liable to counting, mapping, and utilitarian use, and because it reduces social–natural relations to market transactions. Subsequently, we outline possibilities for conceiving and living with biodiversity that go beyond relations of counting, mapping, and commodification. It is important that biodiversity knowledge organizations, such as the recently sanctioned Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), take these into account. Conserving a diversity of life requires acknowledging a diversity of values, knowledge and framings of biodiversity, and fostering a diversity of social–natural relations.

Analysis of production and trade data from 176 countries reveals that patterns of wood product consumption and harvest differ significantly across income groups. Poorer countries’ consumption consists primarily of domestic fuelwood, yet between 1972 and 2009, low-income countries harvested >171 million hectares of forest products for export. High-income countries were the only group to act as net importers, suggesting that rich countries practice preservation within borders but appropriate resources from poorer countries to sustain consumption. Harvests in poorer countries do occur at relatively low harvest efficiencies, implying that losses may be attenuated via technological improvement. However, efficiency does not mitigate the effects of high consumption. Despite exceptionally high efficiencies, high-income countries are still responsible for just as much (or more) consumption-driven forest loss as any other group. These findings highlight the importance of reducing consumption and suggest that neither technocentric solutions nor national-level conservation policies are sufficient means to preserve global forests.

There is robust evidence that climate change will modify the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events. The consequences for terrestrial biota may be dramatic, but are yet to be elucidated. The well-established IUCN Red List does not, for example, include any explicit quantification of the current level of exposure to extreme climatic events in any species-based risk assessment. Using globally distributed data for cyclones and droughts as well as information on the distribution of 5,760 terrestrial mammals (species and subspecies) we: (1) define mammals with significant exposure as those with an overlap of at least 25% of their extant geographic range with areas that have been impacted by either cyclones or droughts; and (2) pinpoint those with ≥75% overlap as being at the highest exposure. Although a species’ risk of negative impacts from extreme climatic events depends not only on its exposure but also its intrinsic sensitivity and adaptive capacity, identifying taxa currently exposed can help to (1) reduce the uncertainty in identifying species least likely to be resilient to future impacts, and (2) complement extinction risk assessments and provide a more informed evaluation of current conservation status, to better guide management.

In efforts to protect the world's oceans, the Convention on Biological Diversity has moved the goal of establishing marine protected areas (MPAs) to cover 10% of the ocean from 2012 to 2020. This adjustment suggests that the rush to establish MPAs without proper resources does not resolve conservation problems. In fact, such actions may create a false sense of protection that camouflages degradation of marine ecosystems on regional scales. To exemplify this phenomenon, we reviewed MPA efficacy in the Gulf of California, Mexico, where some 23,300 km² have been decreed as MPAs. With the exception of Cabo Pulmo National Park, MPAs have not met conservation or sustainability goals. We examined MPA budgets and foundations’ investment in the region and found that funding for management is not the limiting factor in MPA efficacy, although funding for enforcement may be deficient. We conclude that MPAs have failed because of insufficient no-take zones, lack of enforcement, poor governance, and minimal community involvement. We need a new philosophy to implement MPAs to take advantage of the scientific knowledge and monetary investment that have been generated worldwide and ensure that they complement effective fisheries management outside their borders.

In parallel with economic and social changes, mutualism in human-vulture relations has virtually disappeared worldwide. Here, we describe the mutualistic relationship between humans and the globally threatened Egyptian vulture in Socotra, Yemen. By analyzing both the spatial distribution of vultures and the amount of human byproducts they consume, we show that human activities enable the maintenance of the densest population of this rare scavenger, whereas vultures provide a key regulating service by disposing of up to 22.4% of the organic waste annually produced in towns. Globalization is impacting the archipelago, and therefore policies that better integrate societal needs and biodiversity conservation are urgently needed. We propose a win-win solution that relies on the restructuring of the mutualism, shifting from regulating services toward cultural services. Our study highlights the necessity of reconciling trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and economic development in a framework of global change affecting Middle Eastern countries.

Implementation of no-take marine reserves is typically followed by monitoring to ensure that a reserve meets its intended goal, such as increasing the abundance of fished species. The factors affecting whether abundance will increase within a reserve are well characterized; however, those results are based on long-term equilibria of population models. Here we use age-structured models of a generic fish population to analyze the short-term transient response. We show that it may take decades for a fished population to reach postreserve equilibrium. In the meantime, short-term transient dynamics dominate. During the transient phase, population abundance could either remain unchanged, decrease, or exhibit single-generation oscillations, regardless of the eventual long-term result. Such transient dynamics are longer and more oscillatory for populations with heavier fishing, older ages at maturity, lower natural mortality rates, and lower larval connectivity. We provide metrics based on demographic data to describe the important characteristics of these postreserve transient dynamics.

The published literature leads the reader to expect polarization between conservation and development communities as to the relationship between biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation. A survey of over 1,000 conservation and development professionals does not, however, support this depiction. Indeed it reveals a surprising consensus of opinion that there is a positive link between biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation. Where there is some division, is over the direction of that link—conservation as a means to poverty alleviation, or poverty alleviation as a means to conservation—but again conservation and development organizations appear equally divided in their views. Extreme positions often dominate policy debates, hindering progress towards effective, integrated approaches. Our analysis indicates that this may be true of the conservation-poverty debate. Debate is needed not on whether conservation and poverty are linked and whose role it is to address each agenda but on how to develop conservation and development programmes that find integrated solutions to shared challenges. This could greatly inform the process of revising national biodiversity strategies that has recently been started by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and which potentially present a real opportunity for linking conservation and development in policy and practice.

The potential of human activities, including research, to alter parasite transmission ecology in wildlife is unknown. We examined gastrointestinal parasitism in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in Budongo Forest, Uganda. Trail use and time spent on the ground was recorded during 10 months of observations in four sites with differing human disturbance. Disturbance was quantified using transect plots (n= 320). Fecal (n= 435) samples were examined for helminth eggs, larvae, and for protozoan cysts. Individuals that spent more time on the ground had more infections and higher intensity infections. Prevalence of 13 parasite species was similar across sites, but percentage of multiple infections and infection intensity differed, as did ground use. Chimpanzees at the long-term research site spent more time on the ground or on human trails. We hypothesize that researcher presence and trail creation may influence ground use, and thereby parasite burden, by altering trade-offs between foraging and predation risk.

Climate change is an important threat to biodiversity globally, but there are major uncertainties associated with its magnitude and ecological consequences. Here, we investigate how three major classes of uncertainty, linguistic uncertainty, epistemic uncertainty (uncertainty about facts), and human decision uncertainty, have been accounted for in scientific literature about climate change. Some sources of uncertainty are poorly characterized and epistemic uncertainty is much more commonly treated than linguistic or human decision uncertainty. Furthermore, we show that linguistic and human decision uncertainties are relatively better treated in the literature on sociopolitics or economics than in natural sciences, which often overlook communication between stakeholders and socioeconomic consequences. As uncertainty can significantly influence implementation of conservation, we discuss uncertainties associated with some commonly proposed conservation adaptation actions to mitigate climate change. There may be major differences between strategies, with implications on how they should be viewed in conservation planning. We conclude that evaluating conservation strategies in terms of different types of uncertainty will facilitate communication between disciplines and stakeholders. While accounting for uncertainties in a quantitative manner is difficult and data demanding, even qualitative appreciation about the uncertainties inherent in conservation strategies can facilitate and improve decision making.

Despite years of effort from behavioral ecologists, animal behavior has not been fully integrated into the field of conservation biology. We propose a novel framework to join these fields through the use of demographic models. We present three strategies for incorporating behavior in demographic models, outline the costs of each strategy through decision analysis, and build on previous work in behavioral ecology and demography. We then provide practical recommendations for applying this framework to management programs. First, relevant behavioral mechanisms should be included in demographic models used for conservation decision making. Second, rapid behavioral assessment is a useful tool to approximate demographic parameters through regression of demographic phenomena on observations of related behaviors. Behaviorally estimated parameters may be included in population viability analysis for use in management. Finally, behavioral indices can be used as indicators of population trends. Rapid behavioral assessment holds promise as a cost-effective tool, but also represents a cost to model accuracy. We provide a framework for implementing rapid behavioral assessment through case studies of reproductive, foraging, and antipredator behaviors. We use a decision-theoretic approach to provide quantitative rules for identifying when metrics of animal behavior may be more meaningful than traditional population assessment.

Conservation successes can and do happen, however, the process by which society achieves them remains unclear. Using a novel culturomics approach, we analyse word usage within digitized texts to assess the chronological order in which scientists, the public, and policymakers engage in the conservation process for three prominent conservation issues: acid rain in North America, global DDT contamination, and the overexploitation of African elephants for ivory. Variation in the order and magnitude of sector responses among the three issues emphasizes that there are multiple pathways to conservation success and that science is just one component. Our study highlights that while scientists can initiate the process, policy change does not occur in the absence of public interest. We suggest that the fate of conservation action is not solely determined by the scientific soundness of the conservation plan, but rather requires the engagement of scientists, public, and policy makers alike.

We compare conservation outcomes between a protected area (PA) and four indigenous common-property regimes (CPRs) under differing degrees of market integration in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We first assess how market forces and common-pool resource institutions governing processes of forest conversion affect biodiversity and forest cover, and whether institutions mitigate the effect of market forces. We then analyze how biodiversity and forest cover differ between a PA, and communities with different market access. Finally, we link biodiversity and forest cover changes within communities to differences in land-use practices. While we show similar levels of forest cover and biodiversity between the PA and large CPRs with little access to local markets, institutions appear not to attenuate market effects on conservation outcomes in our case studies. We discuss results within a common-property theory context and highlight the importance of disentangling how market integration, common-pool resource institutions, and resource health interact over time.

This article describes the first application of systematic conservation planning for prioritizing REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) strategies and agricultural expansion. For a REDD+ program in Indonesian Borneo, we find that the most cost-effective way to reduce forest-based emissions by 25% is to better manage protected areas and logging concessions. A more ambitious emissions reduction target would require constraining agricultural expansion and logging, which incurs opportunity costs. We discover, however, that these impacts can be mitigated by relocating oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) agricultural leases to areas that store, on average, 130 tons less carbon per hectare and are 8% more productive for oil palm. This reduces the costs of meeting REDD+ targets, avoids conflict with agriculture, and has the unanticipated effect of minimizing impacts on logging. Our approach presents a transparent and defensible method for prioritizing REDD+ locations and strategies in a way that minimizes development trade-offs and promotes implementation success.

Debate over balancing agricultural production and biodiversity conservation has generated two opposing strategies: a “land sparing” approach involving large-scale nature reserves, versus a “land sharing” approach where agricultural areas support wildlife through fine-scale conservation. As a result of this debate, studies focus almost exclusively on species diversity and food production, while ignoring other critical ecosystem processes such as disease dynamics. Here we quantify how tropical avian malaria in an abundant sedentary bird species responds at fine spatial scales in a “land sharing” system. We find the proportion and configuration of countryside forest elements within a radius of 400 m, proximity to the nearest river, and habitat type explains malaria prevalence across the region. We simulate “land sparing” and “land sharing” land use strategies and model malaria prevalence to find that land sharing mitigates malaria prevalence more effectively. With these analyses, we gain a better understanding of how biodiversity, ecosystem services, agricultural yield, and human well-being intersect in complex ecosystems.

Overfishing of herbivorous fishes is one of the primary causes of Caribbean coral reef decline. In Belize, herbivorous fishes comprised 28% of the catch from 2005 to 2008. In 2009, the Belize Fisheries Department implemented a national ban on herbivorous fish harvesting to mitigate high-macroalgal cover on much of the Belize Barrier Reef. However, compliance with this approach has not been evaluated. We assessed the proportion of herbivorous fish in local markets by genetically identifying fish fillets sold in five major towns in Belize from 2009 to 2011. We found that 5–7% of 111 fillets were identified as herbivorous fish and 32–51% were mislabeled. A 5–7% proportion of parrotfish in local markets suggests some ongoing parrotfish harvesting. However, our results suggest that the ban has reduced herbivorous fish harvesting and has the potential to help facilitate the restoration of coral reef ecosystems.

The partial recovery of large birds of prey in lowland Britain has reignited conflicts with game managers and prompted a controversial U.K. government proposal to investigate ways of limiting losses to pheasant shooting operations. Yet best estimates are that buzzards are only a minor source of pheasant mortality–road traffic, for example, is far more important. Moreover, because there are often large numbers of nonbreeding buzzards, local control of breeding pairs may simply lead to their replacement by immigrant buzzards. Most significantly, consideration of the complexity of trophic interactions suggests that even if successful, lowering buzzard numbers may directly or indirectly increase the abundance of other medium-sized predators (such as foxes and corvids) which potentially have much greater impacts on pheasant numbers. To be effective, interventions need to be underpinned by far more rigorous understanding of the dynamics of ecosystems dominated by artificially reared, superabundant nonnative game species.