Conservation Biology最新文献

For many large carnivores, minimizing the financial burden they impose on local people is critical to their conservation. Incentive-based programs that provide people with financial benefits for taking pro-conservation actions or achieving conservation goals are a promising tool for promoting human-carnivore coexistence. Although the number of incentive-based programs aimed at conserving large carnivores is growing, there has been little published research on the use of this approach. We reviewed the design, implementation, and results of a novel lion conservation incentive payment (CIP) program piloted in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Under the program, developed in collaboration with local stakeholders, villages earned direct payments based on the number of lions observed on their land each month. During the program's 3-year pilot period, villages earned more than double the value of livestock injured or killed by lions and used their earnings primarily to support education-related projects. A household survey conducted at the conclusion of the pilot indicated widespread awareness of and support for the CIP program. Lessons from this experience that may be valuable for the development of similar incentive-based conservation schemes in Tanzania and beyond include the importance of developing a practical and dynamic earnings framework, evaluating and adaptively managing program communications, supporting participating stakeholders to effectively deploy their CIP earnings, and identifying potential sources of sustainable funding.

Measuring public attitudes toward wildlife provides crucial insights into human relationships with nature and helps monitor progress toward Global Biodiversity Framework targets. Yet, conducting such assessments at a global scale presents challenges. Digital news and social media offer a rich record of public discourse, but extracting information about attitudes toward wildlife from these sources is not straightforward. Selecting effective search terms is complicated by differences between everyday names for taxa and their scientific or formal common names, and raw news and social media data are often cluttered with irrelevant content and syndicated articles. To address search term selection, we used a folk taxonomy approach that derives recognizable species groupings from shared common name endings. We identified syndicated articles by using cosine similarity on term frequency-inverse document frequency vectors. To filter out irrelevant content while minimizing the need for corpus-specific annotation and model training, we developed a 2-stage relevance filter that uses unsupervised learning to reveal common topics and an open-source zero-shot large language model (LLM) to assign topics to article titles and estimate relevance. We conducted sentiment, topic, and volume analyses on the resulting data. To illustrate our method, we examined news and X posts containing search terms for bats, pangolins, elephants, and gorillas from 2019 through 2021, a period that covers the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Up to 62% of articles containing bat search terms were unrelated to bats as wildlife, underscoring the importance of relevance filtering. News articles mentioning horseshoe bats, initially implicated in the outbreak, increased significantly in January 2020, with significant sentiment shifts in news and X posts mentioning horseshoe bats emerging later (October 2020). Our methods provide a practical application of modern, general-purpose natural language processing (NLP) tools, including LLMs, for analyzing public perceptions of biodiversity relative to current events or conservation outreach and marketing campaigns.

In the context of ambitious global biodiversity goals, the need to compensate for the impact of corporate activities is no longer restricted to direct impacts but extends to the entire value chain of corporations. This is challenging, considering the substantial uncertainties involved in measuring corporate value-chain biodiversity losses and gains, which render their comparison difficult. Corporations run the risk of taking inadequate action and making compensatory statements that are not supported by equivalent losses and gains, potentially exacerbating loss of biodiversity, instead of supporting its recovery, and exposing companies to operational, regulatory, market, reputational, and financial risks. We considered the sources of uncertainty that hinder the accuracy of corporate biodiversity impact measurements (limited data, complex value chains, assumptions in calculation methods and models, imperfect matching of metrics and reality, lack of counterfactuals). We also considered approaches that can be used to match loss and gain metrics: measureing both with a unique metric, conversing between metrics, and monetary valuation. We then devised a framework that represents the risk of making inappropriate statements depending on the level of uncertainty of measured value-chain biodiversity impacts to help corporations in making more credible claims.

There is a need to quantify the impact of habitat loss due to anthropogenic factors on different aspects of biodiversity, such as functional trait diversity represented by functional groups (FGs). We developed a metric to assess the weighted risk of loss of habitat for 33 FGs of mammals and 36 FGs of birds in Mexico based on potential distribution of species and percentage of distributions lost due to habitat loss according to the Mexican land use and vegetation map. We also determined species' functional redundancy by considering the number of species in each FG. Species were separated into FGs, and the mean risk to species within each FG was calculated for each ecoregion and corrected for the proportion of species per ecoregion relative to FG species richness nationwide. Most FGs for mammals and birds had a similar geographic pattern to their risk due to habitat loss. The highest risk was in the ecoregions in the Gulf of Mexico (GM) and central Mexico (CM). Some FGs were at highest risk in the Nearctic due to low redundancy. Mammalian FGs with the highest overall risk values were invertivorous semifossorial hunters; omnivorous ground browsers; and herbivorous semifossorial or semiaquatic ground browsers. Avian FGs with the highest overall risk values were frugivorous arboreal gleaners; invertivorous semiarboreal hunters; and carnivorous arboreal hunters. Each ecoregion was at risk of losing specific FGs and, thus, specific ecosystem functions. The ecoregions with highest overall ecosystem functional risk were in the GM and CM, which suggests these ecosystems and the services these groups sustain are very fragile. Our framework can be used at broader geographic scales and contributes to conservation planning by identifying protection priorities in ecoregions and nationwide based on FGs of mammals and birds, rather than on their species richness per se.

Understanding the impacts of different threats on species is key to successful conservation interventions and policies. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assesses threats to species, and the organization's Red List of Threatened Species is a key conservation tool. We quantified the degree to which threats in IUCN assessments for 3 vertebrate groups (birds, amphibians, and ray-finned fishes) were based on species-specific quantitative empirical data. To do this, for 2142 IUCN species assessments, all listed references were reviewed to determine whether they contained species-specific quantitative data linking a listed threat and the assessed species. Only 7.5% of listed threats across all taxa and categories were based on species-specific quantitative data. For species with at least one threat listed, only 12.5% of species had species-specific quantitative data underlying at least one threat. There were more data on threats for some taxa, and there was a trend toward having more information on threats that are generally considered less predictable, such as "invasive/problematic" species and climate change. Understanding how a lack of species-specific data may affect understanding of extinction processes is crucial for continued improvement of conservation outcomes.

Tracking has enabled rapid advances in knowledge of the movement behavior and habitat use of shorebirds and is thus making a growing contribution to their conservation. However, realizing the full potential that tracking holds for conservation involves understanding what has been performed on shorebirds to date and identifying regional and taxonomic knowledge gaps. To this end, we reviewed the literature on 195 species across 10 shorebird families. We determined the number of shorebird tracking studies published over time, types of tracking devices used, reporting rates for data archiving in online repositories, and coverage of the major flyways by the data collected. Using Movebank, we further identified tracked species that have not appeared in the literature. We included 351 peer-reviewed publications in the review. Tracking data were lacking for 50% of the species reviewed. Considerably more tracking studies were conducted in temperate regions and in flyways that include wealthy countries than in the tropics. Of the 351 publications, 26.9% reported data were archived in an online repository, although the annual rate increased over time. We identified 16 species whose conservation needs and a lack of data make them relevant priorities for future tracking. Improving data archiving practices and coordination around tag deployment to cover understudied regions is key to maximizing the utility of tracking for shorebird research and conservation.

Projects aimed at protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services often depend on the collaboration of multiple conservation organizations and other partners. These organizations typically have different conservation objectives, and whether organizations can agree on priorities for conservation action determines the scope for potential covariation in the organizations' return-on-investment (ROI) estimates. We decomposed the covariance of ROI levels into individual components to determine the relative contribution of spatial patterns in conservation benefits, cost, and threat to an agreement on conservation priorities. We applied our approach to land protection priorities in the contiguous United States when seeking to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. Use of ROI to prioritize projects, instead of considering only conservation benefit measures, improved the level of agreement, because of the introduction of cost and threat as shared covariates, and increased overall covariance. When one organization prioritized recreation and others did not, the covariance of recreation benefits with cost and threat introduced more complexity and negated much of the improvement in agreement that using ROI offered. Our results suggest that there is much scope for collaborative conservation approaches when conservation decisions are based on ROI, and our results could help identify potential partnerships where conservation priorities will be particularly well aligned.

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.