Conservation Letters最新文献

Snakes in Africa are responsible for over 20,000 deaths annually, their indiscriminate killing. As a result, snakes are vulnerable to human population increases even at low intensities. Thus, the predicted doubling of Africa's population by 2050 is likely to pose a disproportionate threat to snakes compared to other taxa. Here we quantify the current and future overlap of snake distributions and human population density under three scenarios of population growth. We find that by 2050, on average, 71% of snake ranges of conservation concern will overlap with areas occupied by ten or more people per km², a 22% increase from 2020. In addition, the number of Least Concern species with most of their range within areas with high human population density will more than double, likely increasing the number of threatened species over the next decades. Our results call for immediate policy action targeting people's perceptions and fears of snakes, and incorporating snakes directly into development and conservation plans to reduce the impact of future urban expansions across Africa.

Areas beyond national jurisdiction, or the high seas, are vital to life on Earth. However, the conservation of these areas, for example, through area-based management tools (ABMTs), is challenging, particularly when accounting for global change. Using decision science, integrated population models, and a Critically Endangered seabird (Kuaka; Pelecanoides whenuahouensis) as a case study, we evaluated potential ABMTs in the high seas under global change and different governance structures, while accounting for uncertainty and imperfect compliance. Our study highlighted that global change in these areas will likely cause population declines of ∼60% by 2050. However, decisive conservation action could cost-effectively address predicted declines, particularly when implemented as soon as possible and under the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty. We illustrate how decision science can transparently navigate a complex seascape of management decisions and we advocate for its wider integration in the management of the largest sections of our planet, the high seas.

Reeves's pheasant feathers are used to make headgears for the Chinese opera—Xiqu; however, this posed a considerable threat to the bird's population before it was banned from hunting/trade. It is unclear whether Xiqu-troupes currently use feathers from wild or captive breeding; therefore, we investigated their source and scale of feather utilization. Through interviews, we clarified the current status of feather-use by state-run troupes. We conducted a cluster analysis and established a “random forest” model using stable isotopes as variables to distinguish sources of feathers from Xiqu-troupes. Annual demand for feathers in China was estimated as 1159.4 pairs. Isotope analysis revealed that feathers used by Xiqu-troupes are likely derived from wild sources. We suggest strengthening the supervision of acquisition of Reeves's pheasant feathers and harvesting feathers through captive breeding. Stable isotope analysis can be an effective method for identifying the source of tail feathers, which will support law enforcement efforts.

The pelagic ocean is Earth's largest habitat, constituting 99% of the global biosphere by volume, directly or indirectly supporting most marine life, and supplying the majority of fish consumed by humans (Game et al., 2009; Pauly et al., 2002). However, the world's pelagic fauna is globally declining largely as a result of unsustainable fishing (Pauly & Zeller, 2016). Industrial fishing has reduced the populations of tunas and their relatives by 60% and of oceanic sharks and rays by 71% over the past half century (Juan-Jordá et al., 2011; Pacoureau et al., 2021). Declines in pelagic wildlife weaken ecosystem functioning, drive biodiversity loss, and undermine food security and economic stability for many of the world's people.

Remote regions of the ocean that remain less impacted by humans are refuges for mobile and heavily targeted species. These regions harbor wildlife assemblages with higher diversity, greater abundance, larger size, and increased biomass, and can yield valuable insights into ecological processes (Campbell et al., 2020; Juhel et al., 2019; Thompson & Meeuwig, 2022). Remote regions offer a glimpse of what the ocean was like prior to large-scale anthropogenic impact, a source from which the rest of the ocean can be regenerated, and a benchmark for marine protected areas (MPAs) and fisheries management. However, with human impacts now extending across the global ocean (Halpern et al., 2008; Tickler et al., 2018), remote areas are increasingly threatened. Urgent attention is required to ensure that remote regions avoid mirroring the degradation seen in areas more proximate to humans.

Our knowledge of the pelagic ocean remains limited relative to shallow coastal habitats, making prioritizing conservation efforts difficult. This is especially the case in remote regions where scientific information is even more scarce. We do know, however, that pelagic species associate strongly with bathymetric features such as seamounts, undersea canyons, and oceanic islands (Bouchet, 2015; Morato et al., 2010; Thompson et al., 2021). Both physical and biological drivers make these features important locations for foraging, reproduction, navigation, and other essential functions of pelagic wildlife (Garrigue et al., 2015; Maguire et al., 2023; Rogers, 2018). Seamounts are particularly important to large pelagic animals and often hold relatively high densities of threatened and commercially important species such as sharks, tunas, and billfishes, some of which are generally highly mobile but show high residency at these features (Morato et al., 2008; Wright et al., 2021). However, the high economic value and conservative life histories of these species mean fishing can quickly decimate seamount co

Variation in the legal status and management of wolves (Canis lupus) across EU Member States provides a good opportunity to test the effectiveness of different practices to reduce livestock losses. This opportunity for testing is particularly useful for lethal interventions, as they are among the most controversial actions within the large carnivore management toolbox. We aimed to test a conservation compromise adopted in Slovakia, based on a public wolf-hunting scheme and annual hunting quotas between 2014 and 2019, and partially justified to reduce livestock losses. We assessed whether this hunting scheme influenced livestock depredation levels (at the district level). Wolves in the area fed mainly on wild ungulates (98.9% of consumed biomass). While domestic sheep comprised only 0.5% of the diet, they were dominant among the reported livestock killed by wolves (91.1%). Using two different approaches, we did not observe a relationship between the number of killed wolves and livestock losses. Alternatively, a negative relationship between wild prey biomass and livestock losses was found. Since 2021, public wolf hunting has not been conducted in Slovakia, and there is no merit in the previous justification for this conservation compromise to reduce livestock losses.

World forests face many threats, including wildfires, with tremendous ecological, social, and economic implications. Mediterranean ecosystems have evolved in the presence of fire, but changes to fire regimes associated with other global changes pose new challenges to postfire community regeneration. Forest regeneration largely depends on plant adaptations to survive wildfires or on the recolonization of burnt areas through seed dispersal. However, the value of the service provided by wild animals to postfire forest regeneration remains unevaluated. Here, we estimate the economic value of the biotic seed dispersal service in postfire restoration in Portugal. We combine budgeted costs of governmental Emergency Stabilisation Reports with network analysis that estimates the dependency of the Portuguese flora on biotic seed dispersal and on alternative fire regeneration strategies. Replacing the services provided by seed dispersers during postfire regeneration of Portuguese forests would cost 23,061,621€/year, highlighting the need for integrative policies that promote resilient forests.

Negative landscape-scale fragmentation effects are often inferred from negative patch-scale edge effects. I tested this cross-scale extrapolation using two evaluations. First, I searched for studies that estimated the direction of both a patch-scale edge effect and a landscape-scale fragmentation effect. The directions were concordant and discordant in 55% and 45% of cases, respectively. Second, I extracted from the literature a sample of landscape-scale fragmentation effects on individual species. Then, for each species I searched for studies from which I could calculate the slope of its patch-scale edge effect. Species showing negative patch-scale edge effects were nearly equally likely to show negative or positive landscape-scale fragmentation effects, and likewise for species showing positive patch-scale edge effects. The results mean that the efficacy of policies related to habitat fragmentation cannot be inferred from observed patch-scale edge effects. Such policies require landscape-scale evidence, comparing species' responses in landscapes with different levels of fragmentation.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) envisions harmonious coexistence with nature. Realizing this vision depends on effectively monitoring progress toward the GBF's goals and targets. However, the GBF's current monitoring framework (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022) has fundamental gaps. Of its 27 goals and targets, only nine have a complete set of headline indicators, while most goals either have no indicators to track their achievement or have at least one indicator that is only conceptual.

Of particular concern is the lack of indicators to track human attitudes toward species, biomes, and biodiversity more broadly. Monitoring human attitudes and behavior is critical to achieve several key GBF targets. For example, Targets 4 and 6 aim to resolve human–wildlife conflict and manage invasive species, respectively (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022). These threat processes are inherently linked to human dimensions, so any monitoring focused solely on ecological measurement—and ignoring human behaviors and attitudes—will be at best incomplete. In the context of human–wildlife conflict, large-scale assessments have predicted conflict zones for species across continental scales using data on species ranges as well as human population densities, assuming an overlap in species range and human population leads to increased conflict risk. This assumption may hold at global scales, but conservation policy often unfolds at national-local scales, where highly heterogenous human behaviors and attitudes are the key factor influencing conflict risk. For instance, conflicts do not always correlate with physical damage or loss, with some societies and cultures being more tolerant to the presence of substantial damage and others retaining a high level of conflict even when species cause only negligible loss. Ultimately, our ability to understand and predict human-mediated threats such as human–wildlife conflict is contingent upon capturing this heterogeneity in behaviors and attitudes.

The same is true for threats such as biological invasion. In this context, our ability to successfully conserve species will depend not only on our ability to detect and map threats such as biological invasions but also on understanding public attitudes toward these threats. This approach of integrating social indicators into ecological indicators offers unprecedented insight and conservation potential. For instance, social indicators may reveal an increased interest in people purchasing invasive tropical plants for their garden, which could be used as an early-warning signal to assess and forecast the ecological risk of the impact. Under high risk, we should mobilize to promote behavioral change and awareness of impacts to mitigate risks. This approach shifts conservation from reactive to proactive, halting declines in their tracks. Such approaches are already being researched with online digital data (Jari

Biological invasions represent one of the major threats to the world's biodiversity. National and international efforts are taken to address the complexity and dynamic of invasions in legislation. However, based on the Polish experience of implementing the European Union's regulation on invasive alien species (IAS), we suggest that an unclear and disorganized process of law implementation results in the regulations being counterproductive. We describe how a well-planned policy can become a burden impeding effective research and, consequently, scientific feedback to improve the policy. The results of our study suggest that there is a large scale of scientists' noncompliance with new legal requirements. For many researchers, the implementation of the new IAS regulation was changing the rules in the middle of the game. Researchers strictly following the new regulations must wait for the relevant permits and may risk the successful completion of their projects. Conversely, researchers who prioritize project completion may be forced to continue their research violating the law. We argue that this example of implementing the new IAS regulation illustrates the need to include some intermediate solutions providing more flexibility and time for researchers to adjust to policy change, thus minimizing the negative impacts of the new legislature on scientific progress.