Conservation Biology最新文献

Wildlife trafficking poses a critical threat to global biodiversity, contributes to organized crime, and has disproportionate impacts on underserved and Indigenous communities. Although international legal instruments, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, and institutional collaborations, such as the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime, aim to combat wildlife trafficking, social equity remains insufficiently addressed in global responses. In 2022, a proposed additional protocol to the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime sought to explicitly incorporate wildlife trafficking as a serious transnational crime. I examined the conservation implications of such a legal expansion, highlighting the potential for enhanced cross-border cooperation and the risk of exacerbating existing socioenvironmental inequalities. I argue that without explicit safeguards, enforcement mechanisms may marginalize local communities and limit access to culturally significant wildlife resources. To address this, I recommend integrating human rights, social justice, and inclusive development into the proposed protocol's design and implementation. Doing so will help align equitable and locally grounded goals with biodiversity protection and conservation outcomes.

Insectivorous, Afro-Palearctic migrant birds provide cross-border ecosystem services, but many are declining rapidly. The complex life cycle of migrant birds makes their conservation difficult, but understanding where they spend time during the breeding season can help indicate where those actions will be most effective. We used the spotted flycatcher (Muscicapa striata), a declining, Afro-Palearctic, migratory insectivore and habitat generalist, as a model to examine how river density and land-cover change were associated with loss and colonization during the breeding season of 2 × 2-km national atlas survey areas from 1990 to 2010. Greater river density was associated with a lower probability of loss (odds ratio [OR] 0.8) between survey periods and a higher probability of colonization (OR 1.25). Loss was associated with increases in urban land cover (OR 1.17), and, unexpectedly, colonization was negatively associated with increases in woodland (OR 0.91) and standing freshwater (OR 0.94). Our results suggest that habitat creation is unlikely to provide sufficient benefits for some insectivorous birds within the time needed for population recovery. Thus, efforts should focus on the protection and improvement of established habitats. River density was strongly associated with the persistence of the spotted flycatcher, and this finding highlights that understanding the benefits of freshwater habitat for terrestrial species should be a priority for conservation management.

Habitat fragmentation negatively affects many native migratory fish populations. However, this fragmentation can also prevent the spread and establishment of invasive species. We modified the dendritic connectivity index (DCI), a commonly used freshwater connectivity metric, to account for multiple invasive dispersal pathways in estimates of invasive species connectivity. We considered dispersal from source populations in the outlet by limiting the diadromous form of the DCI to consider dispersal paths from the outlet to uninvaded segments. We additionally considered dispersal from already established populations by modifying the potamodromous DCI to consider dispersal paths from invaded segments to uninvaded ones. We applied this method to the case of the Grand River watershed in Ontario, Canada. We focused on the round goby (Neogobius melanostomus), a pervasive invasive species in the region with established populations in our studied watershed. We found that invasive connectivity was closely linked to native species' connectivity. In single barrier removal simulations, gains in native connectivity were in most cases nearly completely matched by gains in invasive connectivity. When multiple barrier removals were considered, invasive connectivity further constrained restorative actions. Specifically, connectivity restoration through barrier removals that did not consider invasive dispersal increased the risk of these populations spreading at all levels of barrier removal. Even when both native and invasive priorities were considered, increases in invasive connectivity could not be avoided because round goby populations are established in mainstem regions. We found that accounting for this dispersal risk from established populations, in addition to dispersal from the outlet, was essential to fully consider the risk of further spread to the watershed's tributaries. In addition, we identified areas where native connectivity was high relative to invasive connectivity, which could inform selective habitat restoration. Taken together, we demonstrated the importance of considering invasive connectivity from multiple sources when undertaking connectivity restoration.

Conservation, monitoring, and research networks, or collections of ecological research sites unified under a common mission of data collection or a research mission, are essential infrastructure for understanding large landscapes. However, most networks developed opportunistically over decades rather than through systematic design, creating potential limitations in the ability to address conservation challenges across entire regions. We developed a framework to evaluate how well an existing research network represents the environmental conditions its members study and devised an approach to rank sites of priority for strategic expansion. Our approach measures performance through environmental representativeness, geographic coverage, and adequacy for scientific inference and thus optimizes limited monitoring resources to maximize scientific impact. We demonstrated this approach with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges Network (EFRN), a 79-site network across the United States that grew opportunistically over a century. At the national scale, the network effectively captured high-biomass forests important for carbon cycle research; 82% of forest biomass was in well-represented areas. Some areas in Texas, Florida, the Rocky Mountains, and the West Coast had no relevant EFRN sites, which limits the ability to make regional inferences. A fundamental challenge for the EFRN was that sites improving regional extent coverage sometimes provided minimal national benefits, which can create conflicts between local and global priorities. Adding the highest-ranked candidate site provided a relevant site for 17% of currently poorly represented 1-km pixel cells nationally, but regional and national site rankings varied considerably due to nested spatial inference. This framework provides quantitative tools for strategic infrastructure decision-making, ensures that limited monitoring resources maximize conservation impact, and can be applied broadly to address the widespread challenge of optimizing conservation and monitoring networks worldwide.

In the western United States, conservation practitioners are increasingly working with private landowners to restore habitat for North American beavers (Castor canadensis) and to use nonlethal mitigation techniques when beavers damage crops and infrastructure. Effective communication is critical for promoting coexistence, yet on-the-ground conservation messaging seldom links to behavior change theories. We conducted 23 semistructured interviews with practitioners to examine the approaches they used to communicate with private landowners about beaver coexistence in Oregon (USA). Although we did not set out to interview practitioners about their messages targeting capability, opportunity, and motivation (elements of the COM-B model of behavior), we used the COM-B model to synthesize the primary dimensions of practitioners' complex, real-world communication about human-wildlife coexistence. We found that practitioners used multiple communication channels to listen for and respond to landowners' capability, opportunity, and motivation. They tailored messages to affirm and enhance knowledge and skills, identify and address site-specific and social contexts, and align beaver impacts with landowner goals. Our findings suggest the COM-B model can go beyond guiding audience analysis and behavioral intervention design to help practitioners tailor real-time communication with landowners about coexistence behavior. The model, based on our use of COM-B to analyze existing communication, could be used to provide practitioners with techniques for making sense of their existing communication efforts, for identifying gaps, and for dynamically tailoring their communication.

Despite the crucial role of human impacts on biodiversity loss, many assessments of this loss focus on single metrics, such as species richness, and overlook the multidimensional effects of human activities. Because of its importance to ecosystem functioning, we investigated the functional diversity of medium- and large-sized mammal assemblages in protected and unprotected mountain forests in the Hengduan Mountains of southwest China. We hypothesized that anthropogenic pressures outside protected areas (PAs) favor generalist species and lead to functionally homogenized assemblages compared with assemblages inside PAs. Using generalized dissimilarity models, we also examined the key drivers shaping patterns of functional β diversity in these landscapes. Outside PAs, functional richness was markedly lower, trait space was significantly more homogeneous, and nestedness β diversity was more prevalent (57.6%) than inside PAs, clear indications of functional homogenization. Anthropogenic variables consistently outweighed environmental gradients and spatial distance in explaining variation in functional β diversity. Our results demonstrate that anthropogenic pressure affects trait composition in ways that species counts alone do not fully capture, emphasizing the importance of conservation strategies that protect both functional integrity and taxonomic diversity.

Human–elephant conflict (HEC) frequently results in human and elephant mortality, posing major social justice and conservation concerns across Asia and Africa. Although a variety of interventions have been introduced to mitigate HEC, rigorous evaluations of how they affect mortality are practically nonexistent. Using a 20-year dataset from Sonitpur district in Assam, India, we examined whether organized guarding and short-distance drives—which are used to manage HEC in several countries globally—led to a reduction in human and elephant mortality from conflict as intended. We controlled for changes in land use and economic development, spillover effects, and nonrandom selection of villages for intervention. Results on whether organized guarding provided protection against human death due to HEC were inconclusive. Contrary to expectations, the intervention was associated with an approximate 2.0–2.9 times increase in elephant mortality. Disaggregation based on cause of mortality suggested that elephants may be more likely to be killed accidentally in villages where organized guarding occurs. Data on crop damage by elephants were not available, and it is possible that antidepredation squads present a trade-off that fosters greater crop protection at the expense of occasional elephant mortality. Our results highlight the indispensability of rigorous evaluations for finding solutions to human–wildlife conflict.

Groundwaters sustain diverse surface ecosystems and are populated by metazoan species, mostly invertebrates, that provide fundamental ecological functions and are often of prominent conservation value due to narrow endemism and high phylogenetic rarity. Taking advantage of an open-access, Europe-wide, and expert-curated dataset (EGCop) that includes thousands of occurrence records of obligate groundwater-dwelling copepods, we assessed the taxonomic diversity of these groundwater crustaceans in European protected areas. We calculated species richness and beta diversity of copepods in 10 × 10-km cells of the European Biogeographical Regions map. We used statistical matching to select a set of protected and unprotected cells that were comparable in terms of climatic conditions, groundwater habitat diversity, topographic heterogeneity, and glacial history. We compared species richness and beta diversity with protection level and environmental covariates through generalized linear models (GLMs), gradient boosting models (GBMs), and generalized dissimilarity models (GDMs). We also fitted these ecological models with the prematching datasets to analyze diversity patterns regardless of protection level. Species richness was primarily explained by average temperature (bio_10) and precipitation (bio_18) of the warmest quarter in GLMs. Extent of highly productive fissured aquifers had a relatively high percent importance score (up to 30%) in GBMs, which was similar to the score for climatic predictors. Coverage by protected areas contributed practically nothing to species richness in both GLMs and GBMs. Similarly, between-site taxonomic dissimilarity was not consistently higher in protected than in unprotected areas and was only partially explained by environmental variables and geographic distance in GDMs. Of the 517 analyzed species, 205 occurred only in unprotected cells. Our results highlight the need to advance research on groundwater ecosystems and implement targeted conservation actions, including revising protected area boundaries to better encompass karst regions and subterranean biodiversity.

Polarization between groups can undermine durable conservation outcomes. Activating group identities (i.e., an individual's sense of self derived from membership in a group) can exacerbate differences, especially when people hold inaccurate perceptions of their peers and rivals. In conservation contexts, the dynamism of identity and its varying influence on attitudes and outcomes is underexplored. We conducted 2 randomly controlled experiments among residents of U.S. states with wolves (n = 2296) to investigate these dynamics in a conservation context. Results from Study 1 showed group identity activation (political identity, specifically) and inaccurate metaperceptions distorted attitudes toward gray wolves (Canis lupus) and deepened differences between people. Results from Study 2 showed a simple in-group metaperception correction attenuated this effect by reducing assumptions of polarization and limiting the effects of identity fusion. These results demonstrate the opportunity for conservation policy makers and practitioners to avoid activating identities assumed to be associated with conflict and instead counter false narratives that exaggerate division. Correcting inaccurate metaperceptions and designing identity-informed communication strategies may help bolster support for conservation goals and reduce avoidable conflict.