查看更多>>摘要：As we retreated to our dwellings in the "anthropause" of spring 2020, were the wildlife sightings in previously crowded spaces a reclamation of habitat, or a mere increase in detection? We leverage an increase in balcony birdwatching, a million eBird entries, and difference-in-difference techniques to test if urban avian species richness rose during India's COVID-19 lockdown. Controlling for effort, birdwatchers in the 20 most populous cities observed a 16% increase in the number of species during lockdown. While human activity stopped overnight, and noise and visual pollution decreased soon after, increased species diversity was observed 1-2 weeks later; evidence that gradual population recovery, not better detection, underlay our results. We find atrisk, and rare, species among those reclaiming cities, implying that reducing human disturbance in urban areas can protect threatened species. Increased species diversity likely derives from a reduction in noise and air pollution associated with the lockdown, implying that urban planners should consider conservation co-benefits of urban policies when designing sustainable cities.
Hyman, Amanda A.Le Bouille, DianeZhu, GengpingArmsworth, Paul R....
8页
查看更多>>摘要：When seeking to make land conservation decisions, should managers favor actions that will make immediate differences or those promising long-term gains? The choice depends on how individuals weight benefits and costs experienced at different future times, something temporal discount rates can be used to represent. Despite the ubiquity of inter-temporal tradeoffs in conservation decision-making, little is known about time preferences of relevant practitioners. Taking land protection decisions as an example, we use responses from experimentalchoice surveys to show practitioners at environmental NGOs display high variability in how they evaluate environmental benefits and costs through time. Participants had a median discount rate of 11.9%, significantly higher than values traditionally used in environmental policy. Moreover, discount rates ranged from 74% to negative values. When asked to compare financial amounts at two future times, practitioners used discount rates that were not significantly different. When asked about an environmental attribute (protected land), they used discount rates that declined through time. We applied such rates to a spatial prioritization model to illustrate how differences we observed in discounting could influence conservation priorities today. We used species persistence in the central and southern Appalachian Mountains as our benefit stemming from protecting land. Through this illustrative application, we show that differences in how practitioners value the future change today's protection priorities, with as little as 43% overlap in counties with the highest conservation return on investment. As the conservation community re-envisions protection goals, how we weight environmental benefits and costs through time will help determine paths forward.
查看更多>>摘要：The cycle of livestock depredation and retaliatory killing constitutes a major threat to large carnivores worldwide and imposes considerable hardships on human communities. Mitigation efforts are often undertaken with little knowledge of ecological underpinnings and patterns of depredation, limiting conservationists' ability to develop, prioritize, and evaluate solutions. Carnivore detection and depredation data from interviews in affected communities may help address this gap, but such data are often prone to false-positive uncertainty. To address these challenges in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan we collected snow leopard, lynx, wolf, and bear detection and depredation reports from local communities via semi-structured interviews. We used a novel hierarchical multispecies multi-state occupancy model that accounted for potential false-positives to investigate carnivore site use and depredation concurrently with respondents' apparent vulnerability to that risk. Estimated false-positive probabilities were small, but failure to account for them overstated site use probabilities and depredation risk for all species. Although individual vulnerability was low, depredation was nonetheless commonplace. Carnivore site use was driven by clear habitat associations, but we did not identify any clearly important large-scale spatial correlates of depredation risk despite considerable spatial variation in that risk. Respondents who sheltered livestock in household corrals reinforced with wire mesh were less likely to report snow leopard depredations. Reducing depredation and retaliation at adequately large scales in the Pamirs will likely require a portfolio of species-specific strategies, including widespread proactive corral improvements. Our approach expanded inference on the often-cryptic processes surrounding human-carnivore conflict even though structured wildlife data were scarce.
查看更多>>摘要：Promoting human-wildlife coexistence is one of the most complex and pressing global conservation challenges faced today, particularly for large carnivore species. Effective conservation of large carnivores rests on interventions fostering coexistence in human-dominated landscapes, across the large ranges on which they depend. However, there is a paucity of research evaluating such interventions, and impact on the social determinants of behavioural outcomes. To bridge this evidence gap, we evaluate the impact of Warrior Watch, a grassroots intervention established in 2010 that draws on the traditional social structures and roles of Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya to mitigate human-lion conflict peacefully. Using a novel approach blending elements of theory-based methods and traditional impact evaluations, and tailored to local resources and capacities, we evaluate the impact of Warrior Watch on a) attitudes towards lions and b) killing intentions as a proxy for tolerance. We show that warriors in the intervention site reported significantly more positive attitudes towards lions and were significantly less likely to indicate intentions to kill lions than their counterparts in the comparison conservancy. Furthermore, respondents in the intervention site were significantly more likely to report positive changes in their attitudes and tolerance towards lions since the inception of Warrior Watch, and to attribute these changes to the intervention. Our study demonstrates how evaluations tailored to local capacities and resource-limited situations can produce robust insights to support the adaptive management of interventions and increase the evidence-base to guide conservation practice.
Holness, Stephen D.Harris, Linda R.Chalmers, RussellDe Vos, Deidre...
11页
查看更多>>摘要：To support sustainable growth of ocean-based economies, many countries are engaging in marine spatial planning (MSP) processes, which require robust decision-support tools. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) is commonly used in decision-making to guide spatially efficient protected area expansion. Here we contend that SCP can also be used to streamline MSP negotiations by developing a coherent, integrated portfolio of sites for multiple sectors that depend on biodiversity being maintained in a good state, as a counterpoint to spatial priorities for those commercial and industrial activities that have negative environmental impacts. We demonstrate this in Algoa Bay, South Africa, given the social-ecological complexity of the bay, and its central location in the first national MSP process. In anticipation of this national process, a civil-society-led Community of Practice was established with a core team to lead stakeholder engagement, data acquisition and management, and SCP analyses. More than 500 stakeholders participated in the project and many contributed spatial data or engaged in expert-based participatory mapping. Spatial products were supplemented with existing, published datasets. Altogether, conservation targets were set for 115 biodiversity features and 22 nature-based activities, with the cost layer built from data on 10 commercial and industrial activities, cumulative pressures (n = 31) on ecosystems, and planning-unit area. All targets were met in 15% of the study area, of which only a third (4%) was outside of marine protected areas, demonstrating that it is possible to align multi-sector priorities for intact biodiversity. This approach can be widely applied in MSP to support sustainable ocean economies.
Lello-Smith, AnnaRodewald, Amanda D.Ramos, Victor HugoRosenberg, Kenneth, V...
27页
查看更多>>摘要：Forest restoration has become a central strategy to conserve biodiversity, especially in the global tropics, but many priority regions are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic stressors. Of particular concern is the growing frequency of fire in humid tropical systems due to agricultural expansion and regional drying. Yet little is known about how fire affects recovery of tropical biodiversity in restored lands, including forest-dependent and threatened species. Here we provide the first assessment of the impacts of burning within naturally regenerating cattle pastures on pasture use by Neotropical forest birds. Working within 1-11-year-old regenerating pastures in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, we asked how occupancy rates of forest-dependent and threatened bird species differ between repeatedly burned and unburned pasture. To better understand the effect of fire on pasture use, we examined how species' opportunistic use of regenerating pastures is a function of vegetation succession at local scales. We found that 70 forest-dependent and 19 threatened species used unburned pastures, but fire reduced or eliminated pasture use for 56% of forest-dependent and 53% of threatened species. Local vegetation succession explained the likelihood of colonizing pastures for nearly half of forest species that used regenerating pastures. Species closely associated with closed-canopy vegetation were most likely to be partially or fully excluded from burned pasture, suggesting that fire excluded certain species by impeding forest regrowth. Our results clearly demonstrate that burning undermines the high value of regenerating pastures for forest-dependent and threatened species and highlight the critical importance of preventing human-caused fires in restored tropical landscapes.
查看更多>>摘要：Captive breeding to safeguard against extirpation in the wild is a practice for many animal groups. Animals in captivity experience reduced contact with natural substrates and other animals, and consume atypical diets that may alter naturally occurring microbial associations. Amphibian skin microbiomes are vital for amphibian health, protecting them from pathogens and aiding in development, immune system training, and fecundity. Thus, understanding how changes associated with captivity influence microbial communities and the health of captive-reared amphibians is an important consideration in captive breeding and reintroduction programs. Overarching patterns of amphibian microbial diversity in captivity have not been previously explored. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis of skin microbes from captive-managed and wild individuals of 18 salamander and frog species from temperate and tropical biomes. We found that microbial composition of captive and wild amphibians differed for all species. However, while the overall captivity effect on amphibian skin richness was significant, the direction of the captivity effect on diversity metrics and antifungal function differed depending on the host species. One species exhibiting a large skin microbiome shift in captivity is the variable harlequin frog, Atelopus varius. A soft-release of A. varius to outdoor mesocosms "restored" the microbiome through time, and frogs also increased antifungal function of their skin microbiome with time in mesocosms. Rewilding the microbiome may influence resistance to diseases such as chytridiomycosis. Indeed, evaluating the outcome of individual species is necessary until we have a cohesive approach to mediate shifts of amphibian skin microbes that result from captivity.
NSTL
Elsevier