Conservation Letters最新文献

Environmental practitioners often develop communications and behavior change interventions that conceptualize individuals as consumers or as other limited, standalone personae. This view neglects the role of conservation audiences as social beings with complex social relationships and networks, potentially resulting in lost opportunities to increase the effectiveness of conservation interventions. We offer a reframing of individuals as members of social networks who can influence others through their many different societal roles. This framing may help individuals recognize their potential to affect large-scale societal structures and empower them to contribute to systemic changes. In practice, conservation organizations might increase the impact and reach of their behavioral interventions by targeting social referents (individuals or groups who people reference for accepted and desired behaviors) and leveraging interpersonal relationships. This includes encouraging individuals to make use of their networks to discuss issues such as biodiversity loss with a variety of acquaintances to normalize them as a topic of conversation. We argue that organizations can leverage the power of social networks to amplify change and promote the message that people change the world through their social ties, thereby inspiring audiences to further engage in conservation behaviors.

Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) are a cornerstone of 21st-century area-based conservation targets. In tropical KBAs, biodiversity is potentially at high risk from climate change, because most species reside within or beneath the canopy, where small increases in temperature can lead to novel climate regimes. We quantify novelty in temperature regimes by modeling hourly temperatures below the forest canopy across tropical KBAs between 1990 and 2019. We find that up to 60% of KBAs with tropical forests have recently transitioned to novel temperature regimes. Nevertheless, 40% of KBAs are providing refuge from novelty, 65% of which are not protected. By conducting the first pan-tropical analyses of changes in below-canopy temperature conditions in KBAs, we identify KBAs that are acting as climate refugia and should be considered for expansion of the conservation network in response to the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework target to conserve 30% of land area by 2030.

For centuries, humans have intentionally moved species around the world, and such actions have rarely been laudable from conservation perspectives. The notion that introduced populations of cold-adapted species hold conservation value despite their non-native status remains controversial. Many such populations exist as a legacy of humans moving wildlife to novel environments with little true consideration of species conservation. Herein, we identify cases in which individuals from inadvertent climate refugia (ICR) are returned to formerly occupied ranges or used to augment declining native populations. While conservation benefits have been infrequently realized, the global distribution of ICR offers a potentially untapped resource. Lessening biodiversity loss under increasing climate challenges will likely require assisted migration of many species and necessitate novel valuation of extant introduced populations—such as those within ICR. While ecological costs of translocated species are widely known, we highlight how species moved generations ago to ICR offer a reservoir for reintroductions and a buffer against rapidly changing climates.

Collaborative conservation interventions based on engagement with local communities are increasingly common, especially for large carnivores that negatively impact people's livelihoods and well-being. However, evaluating the effectiveness of large-scale community-based conservation interventions is rarely done, making it problematic to assess or justify their impact. In our study focused on snow leopards (Panthera uncia) in five countries, we show that bespoke and well-implemented community-based and conflict management intervention efforts can lead to more sustainable conservation outcomes. Collaborative interventions, spread over about 88,000 km² of snow leopard habitat, reduced livestock depredation and disease and associated economic costs. Additionally, they generated conservation-linked livelihoods and enhanced community decision-making, leading to more positive behavioral intent toward snow leopards and improved communities’ cooperation, economic security, and confidence. Our results provide lessons learned and recommendations for practitioners and governments to alleviate conflicts and foster coexistence with snow leopards and large carnivores more broadly. These include prioritizing locally led tailored solutions based on the PARTNERS principles, recognizing local community rights in conservation decision-making, and recognizing the role of social norms in ensuring accountability.

Promoting resilience is highly relevant to preserving biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. For coral reefs, parrotfish protection emerged as a mainstream action for reversing the degradation experienced by these systems. The rationale is that restoring their populations will increase grazing activity and reinforce control of fast-growing macroalgae, facilitating coral cover recovery. A lack of a link between parrotfish trends and macroalgae and coral cover trends at a large scale has, however, often been the case. Suggesting more complex underlying dynamics that should be reexamined. In this review, we discuss how lumping parrotfish species as if they were functionally redundant may obscure trends. And how a lack of appreciation of other functions around the parrotfish paradigm, specifically bioerosion, may have unforeseen and potentially adverse effects on degraded reefs. We show that bioerosion responded more directly and quickly to spatial and temporal changes in parrotfish assemblages than macroalgae consumption, arguably due to the varying vulnerability among Caribbean parrotfishes to fisheries and habitat loss. For highly degraded reefs, positive changes in parrotfish populations could hence compromise the remaining coral skeleton structures and the reef framework, further accentuating reef degradation, where increases in macroalgae consumption could not necessarily compensate for higher rates of bioerosion.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are a cornerstone of marine conservation efforts, with the potential to protect biodiversity and provide socioeconomic benefits. We quantified the effect of MPAs on fishing outcomes, economic activities, and material living standards in 24 coastal villages of Tanzania over two decades. We accessed original data from a study conducted in 2003 that found no effect of MPAs 3–8 years after their creation. Eighteen years later, we replicated the survey and used a Before-After Control-Intervention design to quantify the effect of MPAs. We found that villages near MPAs experienced a 50% higher improvement in living standards compared to those further from MPAs. This benefit is not related to higher fishing outcomes but to a diversification of economic sectors. Our findings highlight a decoupling between fish catches and economic benefits, revealing that socio-economic outcomes can be observed for MPAs whose ecosystems’ productivity has declined.

A focus of sea turtle management has been reducing bycatch in commercial fisheries, but sustainable harvest for consumption is also an important objective in many nations. Identifying how much different fisheries contribute to turtle mortality could help focus limited management resources. We estimated national scale turtle catches for two fisheries in the Solomon Islands: a small-scale reef fishery where turtles are caught for food and sale, and an offshore longline fishery where turtles are bycatch. The footprint of the longline fishery spanned the entire exclusive economic zone of the Solomon Islands and was 67 times bigger than the footprint of the small-scale fishery. The median catch summed across both fisheries was ∼12,000 turtles in 2018, with 85%–97% of that catch in the small-scale fishery. We suggest that turtle management in the Solomon Islands, a nation with globally significant turtle breeding populations, should focus on sustainable management of small-scale coastal fisheries.

To fulfill their conservation potential and provide safeguards for biodiversity, marine protected areas (MPAs) need coordinated research and monitoring for informed management through effective evaluation of ecosystem dynamics. However, coordination is challenging, often due to knowledge gaps caused by inadequate access to data and resources, compounded by insufficient communication between scientists and managers. We propose to use the world's largest MPA in the Ross Sea, Antarctica as a model system to create a comprehensive framework for an interdisciplinary network supporting research and monitoring that could be implemented in other remote large-scale international MPAs. Our proposed framework has three key components: (i) policy engagement, including delineation of policy needs and ecosystem metrics to assess MPA effectiveness; (ii) community partner engagement to elevate diverse voices, build trust, and share resources; and (iii) integrated science comprising three themes. These themes are: advancement of data science and cyberinfrastructure to facilitate data synthesis and sharing; biophysical modeling towards understanding ecosystem changes and uncertainties; and execution of observational and process studies to address uncertainties and evaluate ecosystem metrics. This proposed framework can improve MPA implementation by generating policy-relevant science through this coordinated network, which can in turn improve MPA effectiveness in the Ross Sea and beyond.

Wild birds have experienced unprecedented, near-global mass mortalities since 2021, driven by outbreaks of high-pathogenicity avian influenza virus (HPAIV) H5N1 lineage 2.3.4.4b. Managing this panzootic requires identification of transmission pathways. We investigated potential HPAIV transmission via kleptoparasitism (food theft) by examining the distribution, behaviors, and movements of two globally widespread and commonly kleptoparasitic seabird families: Fregatidae (frigatebirds) and Stercorariidae (skuas). These kleptoparasites force other seabirds (targets) to regurgitate food, which the kleptoparasite then ingests, potentially facilitating direct transfer of viral particles from target to kleptoparasite. Scavenging and predation probably contribute further to viral spread. Although frigatebirds use kleptoparasitism on a year-round basis, skuas more commonly do so outside of the breeding season. Both frequently forage, disperse, or migrate across oceans and hemispheres. Dense aggregations of kleptoparasitic and target seabirds at breeding and/or roosting sites may facilitate the spread of HPAIV. In addition, the migration of these species could also facilitate broadscale geographic spread of HPAIV. Surveillance of kleptoparasites for HPAIVs could aid in early detection and may be important for seabird conservation.