Peer-reviewed publications

Gear restrictions are an important management tool in small-scale tropical fisheries, improving sustainability and building resilience to climate change. Yet to identify the management challenges and complete footprint of individual gears, a broader systems approach is required that integrates ecological, economic and social sciences. Here we apply this approach to artisanal fish fences, intensively used across three oceans, to identify a previously underrecognized gear requiring urgent management attention. A longitudinal case study shows increased effort matched with large declines in catch success and corresponding reef fish abundance. We find fish fences to disrupt vital ecological connectivity, exploit &rt 500 species with high juvenile removal, and directly damage seagrass ecosystems with cascading impacts on connected coral reefs and mangroves. As semi-permanent structures in otherwise open-access fisheries, they create social conflict by assuming unofficial and unregulated property rights, while their unique high-investment-low-effort nature removes traditional economic and social barriers to overfishing.

Free-flowing rivers (FFRs) support diverse, complex and dynamic ecosystems globally, providing important societal and economic services. Infrastructure development threatens the ecosystem processes, biodiversity and services that these rivers support. Here we assess the connectivity status of 12 million kilometres of rivers globally and identify those that remain free-flowing in their entire length. Only 37 percent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing over their entire length and 23 percent flow uninterrupted to the ocean. Very long FFRs are largely restricted to remote regions of the Arctic and of the Amazon and Congo basins. In densely populated areas only few very long rivers remain free-flowing, such as the Irrawaddy and Salween. Dams and reservoirs and their up- and downstream propagation of fragmentation and flow regulation are the leading contributors to the loss of river connectivity. By applying a new method to quantify riverine connectivity and map FFRs, we provide a foundation for concerted global and national strategies to maintain or restore them.

Community-based natural resource management programs can recover wildlife and deliver tangible benefits such as financial gains to local communities. Less-tangible impacts like changes in attitudes towards wildlife are not as well-understood, yet in the long-term, positive attitudes may be an important determinant of sustainability in such programs. We investigated the connection between actual and perceived benefits of a community-based conservation program in Namibia and residents' attitudes towards wildlife. We administered a questionnaire with a specific focus on attitudes to >400 community members across 18 communal conservancies that generated either (i) high benefits from tourism, (ii) high benefits from hunting, or (iii) low/no benefits. We used an empirical modelling approach that isolated the impact of conservancy-level benefits, while controlling for a variety of factors that can also influence attitudes towards wildlife. Using an information theoretic and model-averaging approach, we show that all else equal, respondents living in conservancies generating high benefits from hunting had more favourable attitudes towards wildlife than those living in conservancies generating low benefits (as expected), but also as compared to those living in conservancies generating high benefits from tourism. A variety of individual-level characteristics, such as the costs and benefits (both tangible and intangible) that respondents have personally experienced from wildlife, as well as demographic factors, were also important in conditioning attitudes. Our results demonstrate that community-based conservation programs can positively impact attitudes towards wildlife, but that this is conditioned by the type and magnitude of benefits and costs that individuals experience from wildlife, all of which should be assessed in order to most effectively support such programs.

As conservation shifts to meet the challenges of our globalized world, approaches for planning and evaluating interventions must evolve to account for the increasing complexity of conservation problems and the dynamic, multiscalar relationships between humans and the environment. Systems thinking offers approaches that could help conservation be more adaptive, transparent, and evidence-based. Using case studies and the literature, we trace the evolution of systems thinking and demonstrate how systems mapping could support the process of planning and evaluating interventions. Systems mapping helps disentangle the context of conservation and encourage collaborative planning that integrates diverse views. It can also change the way interventions are characterized and communicated by emphasizing the systems targeted for change as opposed to actions. Last, it can encourage evidence-based decision-making by identifying indicators attune to complexity, prompting discussion on knowledge gaps, and filling gaps through qualitative mapping or computational modeling. Integrating systems thinking in practice will help practitioners foster the capacity for learning and adaptation required for conservation to deliver global results.

Ocean ecosystems are in decline, yet we also have more ocean data, and more data portals, than ever before. To make effective decisions regarding ocean management, especially in the face of global environmental change, we need to make the best use possible of these data. Yet many data are not shared, are hard to find, and cannot be effectively accessed. We identify three classes of challenges to data sharing and use: uploading, aggregating, and navigating. While tremendous advances have occurred to improve ocean data operability and transparency, the effect has been largely incremental. We propose a suite of both technical and cultural solutions to overcome these challenges including the use of natural language processing, automatic data translation, ledger-based data identifiers, digital community currencies, data impact factors, and social networks as ways of breaking through these barriers. One way to harness these solutions could be a combinatorial machine that embodies both technological and social networking solutions to aggregate ocean data and to allow researchers to discover, navigate, and download data as well as to connect researchers and data users while providing an open-sourced backend for new data tools.

Stable forests — those not already significantly disturbed nor facing predictable near-future risks of anthropogenic disturbance — may play a large role in the climate solution, due to their carbon sequestration and storage capabilities. Their importance is recognized by the Paris Agreement, but stable forests have received comparatively little attention through existing forest protection mechanisms and finance. Instead, emphasis has been placed on targeting locations where deforestation and forest degradation are happening actively. Yet stopping deforestation and forest degradation does not guarantee durable success, especially outside the geographic scope of targeted efforts. As a result, today's stable forests may be at risk without additional efforts to secure their long-term conservation.

As editors, we mark the launch of Conservation Science and Practice, a journal of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), with the following remarks framing the purpose and aspirations of the journal. Our aim is to share scholarship on and experiences of the practice of conservation. We define conservation practice as the application of conservation principles or theory across conservation issues, from planning and directly managing nature to influencing public policy and private behaviors—at scales from local communities to international governing bodies. We are striving for Conservation Science and Practice to be a forum for sharing lessons learned from research and practice to reciprocally informing and improving both arenas.

Ensuring the persistence of biodiversity and ecosystem services represents a global challenge that need to be addressed with high urgency. Global priority areas can only be identified by means of an integrated prioritization approach that would not only preserve species numbers and ecosystem services, but also the evolutionary and functional components of diversity. In this study we combine global datasets on the distribution of mammals and birds with species traits and phylogenetic data and we identify conservation priorities for taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity, as well as for three ecosystem services, including potential for carbon sequestration, pollination potential and groundwater recharge. We show that, when priority areas are identified based only on individual, e.g. functional diversity, or any combination of the three biodiversity components, these areas do not allow a sufficient protection of the three ecosystem services. However, an integrated approach whereby prioritization is based on all biodiversity components and ecosystem services would allow to identify areas that maximize protection of all ecosystem services with a minimal loss in biodiversity coverage. Our results highlight the need for an integrated conservation planning framework in order to optimally allocate resources and achieve the long-term preservation of the multiple dimensions of biodiversity and ecosystems services.

Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental for biodiversity conservation, yet their impacts on nearby residents are contested. We synthesized environmental and socioeconomic conditions of >87,000 children in >60,000 households situated either near or far from >600 PAs within 34 developing countries. We used quasi-experimental hierarchical regression to isolate the impact of living near a PA on several aspects of human well-being. Households near PAs with tourism also had higher wealth levels (by 17%) and a lower likelihood of poverty (by 16%) than similar households living far from PAs. Children under 5 years old living near multiple-use PAs with tourism also had higher height-for-age scores (by 10%) and were less likely to be stunted (by 13%) than similar children living far from PAs. For the largest and most comprehensive socioeconomic-environmental dataset yet assembled, we found no evidence of negative PA impacts and consistent statistical evidence to suggest PAs can positively affect human well-being.

A variety of policy interventions from public authorities and private companies attempt to reduce deforestation in private forest concessions. These include fines for illegal deforestation and market incentives for forest management practices that meet sustainability standards. While some studies have found significant differences in forest outcomes between concessions that participate in sustainability commitments and those that do not, others have found small or inconclusive differences. We contribute to this literature by examining all privately allocated concessions in the Peruvian Amazon to determine whether sustainability commitments correspond with lower deforestation rates. Conversely, we examine whether fines correspond with higher deforestation rates, a question for which fewer analyses have been published. Using matching methods, we do not find significantly different deforestation rates between control groups and logging concessions with third party environmental certification. We also do not see significant differences in deforestation rates in petroleum concessions managed by companies who have made sustainability commitments. Regarding punitive fines, we do not find significant differences in deforestation rates between control groups and logging concessions with fines levied. The same holds true for fines levied in brazil nut concessions. Potential explanations for these findings include insufficient monitoring or inadequate stringency for sustainability commitments, and insufficiently punitive fines or low enforcement levels.