Conservation Letters最新文献

Unsustainable wildlife trade is a major driver of global biodiversity loss. Effective wildlife trade governance is critical for conservation and requires international cooperation and coordination to regulate an industry valued at hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Yet, due to increasing polarization over consumptive wildlife use, certain countries have become disenfranchised by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the primary mechanism for regulating international wildlife trade. Tensions within CITES are rising over the elephant ivory and rhino horn trade, where polarization has pushed ten Southern African Development Community countries to suggest an outright withdrawal from CITES. The denunciation of CITES by such a large and ecologically significant bloc would substantially weaken the integrity, credibility, and stature of the Convention. There is a contemporary precedent to reference: Japan left the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 2019 due to polarization over commercial whaling. Here, we examine the common threads between these two cases: changing organizational ethos, polarization amongst members, influence of non-state actors, and loss of decidability for dissenting nations. Taking critical lessons from Japan's IWC withdrawal, we propose various options for structural reforms in CITES to restore decidability, enable equitability, and implement inclusive decision-making.

The conservation of crop genetic diversity by farmers has been well studied, but little has been documented for farmed fish. Here, we show how indigenous farmers conserve the genetic diversity of a farmed fish species—the common carp (Cyprinus carpio), locally known as paddy field carp (PF-carp)—within the paddy ecosystem. The PF-carp have been cocultured with rice in paddy fields (i.e., rice-fish coculture) by multiethnic farmers for thousands of years in southwestern China. Although converging to a similar morphological shape as an adaptation to the paddy ecosystem, PF-carp have diverged into diverse phenotypes, displaying high genetic diversity and a distinct genetic structure pattern. Farmers from different ethnic groups showed distinct preferences for fish, resulting in phenotypic diversity and genetic variation. A large number of multiethnic farmers participated in fish propagation, thereby maintaining a high level of genetic diversity in PF-carp. Our results highlight the critical role of indigenous farmers in preserving local genetic diversity and mitigating genetic degradation.

Massive infrastructure development impacts ecologically important, culturally iconic, and economically vital populations of megaherbivores in East Africa. The seven member countries of the East African Community (EAC) have multiple hypercomplex road, rail, and port projects planned that will cross essential habitats for elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus populations, all but one of which range from threatened to critically endangered in global extinction risk status. Within the EAC, concerns have been raised about effective and efficient development mitigation and shared biodiversity conservation governance. Scalable solutions have been demonstrated in some EAC countries, but there is a vital need for regional policy. The acute challenge of megaherbivore conservation amid mega-infrastructure development in East Africa can best be addressed with the fulfillment of an EAC wildlife sector coordinating unit.

Adaptive management (AM) remains underused in conservation, partly because optimization-based approaches require real-world problems to be substantially simplified. We present an approach to AM based in management strategy evaluation, a method used largely in fisheries. Managers define objectives and nominate alternative adaptive strategies, whose future performance is simulated by integrating ecological, learning and decision processes. We applied this approach to conservation of hihi (Notiomystis cincta) across Aotearoa-New Zealand. For multiple extant and prospective hihi populations, we jointly simulated demographic trends, monitoring, estimation, and decisions including translocations and supplementary feeding. Results confirmed that food supplementation assisted recovery, but was more intensive and expensive. Over 20 years, actively pursuing learning, for example by removing food from populations, provided little benefit. Recovery group members supported continuing current management or increasing priority on existing populations before reintroducing new populations. Our simulation-based approach can complement formal optimization-based approaches and improve AM uptake, particularly for programs involving many complex and coordinated decisions.

Environmental stewardship is often invoked as a net social good and an approach for achieving equitable and sustainable conservation outcomes, but it is rarely defined explicitly in management settings, and conflicting definitions have proliferated. This lack of consensus can influence conservation outcomes in several ways. Conflict can arise between stakeholders with different definitions of stewardship; managers may not proactively identify important stakeholders whose stewardship orientation does not include public advocacy; and stakeholders whose sense of stewardship does not include in-depth knowledge of a particular ecosystem may advocate for ineffective or counterproductive actions. Developing strategies for identifying the implicit, unspoken definitions of environmental stewardship held by resource users, managers, and scientists can help with navigating these challenges. Here, we develop a method to elicit the unstated stewardship orientations of a group of stakeholders in a shared conservation setting. Using thought experiments and a Policy Delphi process, we find that even within our relatively homogeneous test group of recreational fisheries managers and scientists, individuals differed in their understanding of stewardship. We encourage conservation organizations with a mission of stewardship, or ones that interface with environmental stewards, to adopt an approach like this one to identify potential sources of conflict, inequity, and ineffective action before they arise.

Derham, T. T., F. Mathews, and C. N. Johnson. 2025. “Rewilding and Indigenous Community-Led Land Care.” Conservation Letters 18, no. 1: e13090. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13090

Acknowledgments were included in the original submission but were missing from the final manuscript. Acknowledgments should read as follows:

The authors would like to thank A. Sculthorpe and R. Swain for comments on the manuscript, and A. Sculthorpe and the Warru Recovery Team Steering Committee of Traditional Owners for permission to relate the stories of their peoples.

We apologize for this error.

Wildlife trade is a key threat to global biodiversity, involving thousands of species and millions of individuals. Global research and policy attention on international wildlife trade has increased in recent years and is represented in key global policy frameworks (e.g., Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework). Yet the dominant focus of research and discussion is on illegal wildlife trade and the use of CITES in managing trade for a subset of species, despite the fact that the majority of species in trade are legal and fall outside the remits of CITES. Furthermore, there is no global mechanism to record what species are traded; current systems only capture subsets of species and regions, with no consistent standards. This hampers our understanding of global trade patterns and limits any understanding of the wider sustainability of international wildlife trade. There is an urgent need to develop and implement policies that capture the full scope of international trade, tools that embed comprehensive and reproducible sustainability assessments, and funding that reflects the telecoupled nature of trade and the inherent wealth imbalance between exporting and importing nations. The adoption of these more holistic approaches is critical for a sustainable future for species in trade and the livelihoods reliant on them.

The conversion of natural habitats to impervious surfaces in cities affects biotic and abiotic attributes of urban ecosystems. However, detailed information on the gradual influence of impervious surfaces on reproductive output is lacking. Using 5 years of nestbox-breeding great tit and blue tit data collected across various habitat types within and outside a Central–Eastern European capital city, we quantified the impact of impervious surfaces on avian reproductive success. Impervious surfaces strongly and negatively covaried with the number of fledged young in both species: a 0%–50% increase in impervious surface within 100 m of the nest was associated with 3.56 fewer fledged offspring in great tits (95% CI: −4.85, −2.27) and 2.91 fewer fledged offspring in blue tits (95% CI: −4.26, −1.56), thus halving the reproductive output of two widespread urban species. These results provide benchmark values of avian productivity for ecologists and urban policy makers, and for the management of urban areas.

Reducing human–wildlife conflict is critical for global biodiversity conservation and supporting livelihoods in landscapes where people and wildlife co-occur. Interventions intended to reduce conflicts and their negative outcomes are diverse and widespread, yet there is often a dearth of empirical evidence regarding effectiveness, particularly at appropriate spatiotemporal scales. We investigate an underappreciated question relevant to large carnivore–livestock systems globally regarding spillover effects of anti-conflict interventions: Do fortified livestock enclosures modify carnivore predation on livestock for neighbors who lack such interventions? We use ca. 25,000 monthly reports from agropastoralists in an East African landscape critical for large carnivore conservation. Results from Bayesian multilevel statistical models demonstrate robust effects of fortified livestock enclosures in reducing reported predation not only in target households, but also in neighboring households that lack such fortification—a beneficial spillover effect. Results provide empirical evidence for policy and practice regarding tools to reduce large carnivore conflicts while pointing to the important role of complex-systems processes in determining coexistence outcomes.

Global conservation targets aim to expand protected areas and maintain species’ genetic diversity. Whether protected areas capture genetic diversity is unclear. We examined this question using a global sample of nuclear population-level microsatellite data comprising genotypes from 2513 sites, 134,183 individuals, and 176 mammal and marine fish species. The genetic diversity and differentiation of samples inside and outside protected areas were similar, with some evidence for higher diversity in protected areas for small-bodied mammals. Mammal populations, particularly large species, tended to be more genetically diverse when near multiple protected areas, regardless of whether samples were collected in or outside protected areas. Older marine protected areas tended to capture more genetically diverse fish populations. However, limited data availability in many regions hinders the systematic incorporation of genetic diversity into protected area design. Focusing on minimizing population decline and maintaining connectivity between protected areas remain essential proxies for maintaining genetic diversity.