Conservation Letters最新文献

Marine megafauna populations face global decline from human impacts, making early detection of demographic tipping points essential for effective conservation. Traditional viability analyses rely on Capture-Mark-Recapture data, logistically impractical for highly mobile pelagic cetaceans. Stranding data provide an alternative to conventional monitoring. This study presents the first evidence of declining viability in the most abundant cetacean of the Northeast Atlantic Ocean, the common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) in the Bay of Biscay. Using a novel cross-sectional framework with stratified random sampling, we analyzed age-at-death data from 759 specimens collected between 1997 and 2019. Female longevity declined dramatically from 24 to 17 years, corresponding to a 2.4% reduction in population growth rate. This demographic decline highlights the Bay of Biscay as a demographic sink despite stable abundance estimates. Our findings demonstrate that stranding data can provide acute demographic signals for wide-ranging cetacean species, offering critical early warning indicators for proactive conservation management.

The conservation of Australia's extraordinary marine biodiversity has been prominently championed over the past three decades by successive Federal and State Governments, who have consistently portrayed the nation as a global leader in marine protection. Here, we question whether this reputation is justified. We highlight substantial—and in some cases catastrophic—declines in marine species and ecosystems, linked to failures in marine protected area placement and management, fisheries policy, climate change, and water quality regulation. We argue that Australia must strategically expand its network of marine protected areas, prioritizing regions critical for biodiversity and ensuring effective management. This must be complemented by robust policies that promote the sustainable production and consumption of seafood and address the urgent challenges posed by climate change and pollution. Only through such comprehensive and coordinated action can Australia genuinely claim a leadership role in global marine conservation.

Overlooking the diverse values associated with Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) undermines conservation efforts. To examine this underresearched association, we combined the NCP and plural valuation frameworks to investigate how values are associated with groups of people with shared NCP preferences, referred to as NCP preference clusters. We conducted 623 surveys with 362 farmers, 50 nature conservationists, 55 tour guides, and 156 tourists within the social–ecological system (SES) of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, comprising a national park as well as inhabited and cultivated areas. We identified five distinct clusters, each expressing varying degrees of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values. While each framework overlooks key dimensions of people–nature relationships, combining both frameworks better captures the multidimensionality of such relationships and provides pivotal insights for inclusive conservation. To recognize the distinct associations between NCP preferences and diverse values, diversifying place-based conservation approaches in SESs with (a) protected area(s), without compromising biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, is pivotal.

Owing to the high demand for animal parts for traditional medicines in Asia, the unsustainable wildlife trade remains a major threat to regional conservation efforts. We presented a video-based randomized controlled trial intervention to over 1000 Chinese residents with medicinal needs in a Mekong region seaport. Our results showed that two intervention messages, compared to control, significantly reduced the intention of consumers to use animal-based medicinal wine. Although structural equation models showed that both interventions directly influenced the capability, opportunity, and motivation (COM) not to purchase animal-based medicinal wine, their indirect effects through the COM variables varied across the two treatments. Notably, the health-risk message indirectly affected consumption intention by mediating both health-related and legal-related capabilities not to purchase animal-based medicinal wine, whereas this was not observed for the legal-risk message. Overall, our experiment provided insights into the effective design of campaigns to reduce intention to consume animal-based medicinal wine.

Other effective area–based conservation measures (OECMs) are anticipated to play an important role in progress towards global protection targets, with progress being judged on the basis of the areas reported to the World Database on Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (WD-OECM). Given concerns that OECMs may be designated inappropriately, in this study we asked what evidence has been provided to show that sites have been assessed against the criteria to be OECMs. We found <5% of the 6,482 sites in the dataset provide supporting information of any kind, and 2.2% of sites have features that conflict with the definition of an OECM. Although our results cannot determine if sites genuinely meet the criteria to be recognized as OECMs, they reveal a significant issue with the ability to verify whether sites should be in the WD-OECM. To increase the credibility of OECMs, we recommend sites be classed as unconfirmed until they can demonstrate they meet the relevant criteria.

Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) play a pivotal role in fostering coordinated actions among nations to mitigate biodiversity loss. However, language barriers hamper the participation of actors in policy negotiations and potentially also in the implementation of decisions made internationally. Using IUCN Red List species distribution data, we assessed the relative importance of languages for global biodiversity policy. We found that the most widely distributed species are associated with Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Malay, considering the official languages of countries. The pattern differs when examining most spoken languages, with English and French losing importance. Our findings suggest the languages adopted by major MEAs and other global policy fora do not properly cover those spoken where most biodiversity is distributed. We propose a four-tier priority system that can be used to select how MEAs and other fora prioritize key documents for translation into priority languages like Portuguese and Malay, which are currently largely ignored.

Intact and connected wilderness areas are vital for biodiversity conservation. The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) hosts some of the world's most unique ecosystems. Yet, increased economic development across the QTP raises concerns about the potential negative effects of increased human pressure on the stability of this unique biodiversity hotspot. In this study, we assessed the impacts of human activities on wilderness quality, habitat connectivity, and the effectiveness of protected areas across the QTP from 2000 to 2020. During this period, wilderness areas experienced a 41.08% reduction in large, intact patches, with a notable decline in quality, particularly in the eastern region of the QTP. Habitat connectivity decreased over time, and the cost of animal migration increased, with the most striking changes in areas with the highest initial wilderness quality. Economic growth and infrastructure development had strong negative impacts on the effectiveness of protected areas, with experimental protected areas declining faster than non-protected areas during periods of high infrastructure expansion. These emergent trend highlights the significant impact of increasing human pressure on animal migration and underscore the need for adaptive management and careful monitoring to ensure protected areas effectively prevent habitat fragmentation and support animal migration across global biodiversity hotspots.

Recent public and private policies seek to end deforestation by regulating the production and trade of forest-risk commodities. The design, implementation, and evaluation of these policies rely on metrics that are typically bounded in scope by either territories or supply chains, and therefore only provide a partial account of deforestation on the ground. We argue that metrics linking deforestation and forest degradation to commodity production need to consider two distinct questions: (1) How much of today's commodity production is associated with past deforestation? and (2) to what extent is today's deforestation driven by the prospects of producing a specific commodity in the future? This paper describes how metrics can respond to these questions by being classified according to their commodity or deforestation focus. We propose common terminology to facilitate the communication and use of these perspectives and metrics. We then make the case for combining perspectives through the monitoring and reporting of multiple metrics by governments, companies, and non-governmental organizations alike to both assess progress and drive more coordinated action to reduce deforestation.

Assessing connectivity among protected areas (PAs) is vital for conserving species movement in fragmented landscapes; yet, most studies consider only a few taxa and ignore interactions between protection levels. We combined a recently developed framework to identify ecological continuities with a multilayer spatial network approach to quantify connectivity among strict and non-strict PAs, and their synergies, across metropolitan France. This was carried out for 397 vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant species from the national PA plan at an ecologically relevant 1-km² resolution. Results emphasized that non-strict PAs largely contribute to protected habitat accessibility across taxa, though connectivity patterns varied between taxonomic groups. Importantly, we showed that non-strict protections can synergize with strict protections to substantially enhance the amount of accessible protected suitable habitats. Our findings highlight the need for coherent PA expansion, strategically improving connectivity. Synergistic PA planning and corridor designation, leveraging new conservation tools, should notably provide viable solutions.

The recent decision to downlist the wolf from a “strictly protected” to “protected” status in the Bern Convention and Habitats Directive marks a turning point for European conservation. While reflecting wolves' recovery, the shift has illuminated a conundrum within existing conservation frameworks: No species has ever been downlisted before, despite a remarkable wildlife comeback over recent decades. Moreover, the downlisting has been fiercely resisted and framed as a reversal of conservation progress. Yet evidence suggests that wolves can thrive under more flexible management regimes, and that pragmatism from all sides is needed to foster ecologically sound and socially sustainable coexistence. We argue that the rigidity of current frameworks is undermining social legitimacy and the development of adaptive management strategies suitable for recovering wildlife in anthropogenic landscapes. European conservation policy and debates needs to evolve beyond the emergency modality toward addressing the distributive and procedural challenges of coexistence, including effective cost redistribution, transboundary management approaches, and inclusive articulation of visions for coexistence in different places. The policy shift for wolves should not be treated as a crisis, but as a call to reconfigure European conservation to accommodate success and recovery, and its sociopolitical complexities.