There is a growing concern regarding the conservation status of amphibian species worldwide; they are more threatened and declining more rapidly than mammals or birds, and Mexico is considered one of the richest countries on Earth in terms of reptile and amphibian species. Composite models of the current distribution patterns of endemic amphibians in western Mexico were used to predict their potential distributional changes as a consequence of expected climatic changes. The models identified the most significant conservation areas within the region (hotspots), considering existing natural protected areas (NPAs) and previously recognized terrestrial priority regions for conservation (TPRCs). Three niche modelling algorithms (Bioclim, GARP and MaxEnt) used 2412 locality records for 29 species to model their climate envelopes under current and future conditions for the years 2020, 2050 and 2080. The models indicated that overall species persistence was 60% for the years 2020 and 2050, but dropped to < 20% by the year 2080. The current network of NPAs included only 8% of the areas that currently possess the greatest predicted potential richness (16–21 species), and, by 2050, the models indicate they will encompass only 3% of these areas. Six TPRCs included 44% of currently predicted areas with the highest potential species richness, but, by 2050, models predicted only 3% of such areas would persist within one TPRC. Higher uncertainty levels and variability among species surrounded the 2080 projections generated by the three algorithms. Recognition of the potential effects of climate change and consideration of the conservation value of the six TPRCs identified in this study may counteract the potential consequences of climate change on biodiversity in Mexico.

Private protected areas (PPAs) are a board category that includes reserves established and managed by non-government entities, including civil society organizations, businesses and private individuals. It was recently suggested that the creation of a system of PPAs in Brazil may act as a useful model for extending protected area systems internationally. While it is clear that RPPNs have an important role to play in the future development of Brazil's protected area system, there are several significant challenges that need to be overcome if they are fulfil their potential: (1) ensuring that RPPNs contribute to coverage and representation; (2) ensuring adequate governance; and (3) increasing the attractiveness of the RPPN model. While it is still too early to determine whether RPPNs constitute a robust PPA model that could (or should) be exported to other countries, they are creating new opportunities for innovation and novel management strategies that might eventually lead to a vibrant and distinctly Brazilian protected area movement.

The development of species distribution models (SDMs) has benefited biodiversity conservation through their linkage of science to policy and decision processes. These models have evolved to provide scenarios of future landscapes based on known and projected environmental parameters. Whereas there are many caveats to their use, the persuasive power of the models for conveying the consequences of environmental change to the non-science community is immense. Scientists are obliged to convey the uncertainty of the futures depicted in their models, but also to involve the stakeholders who will shape those future conditions. Stakeholders can identify the natural resources they want to sustain, voice their priorities in environmental policy, and articulate the range of solutions they are willing to accept. The creation of alternative futures is an academic exercise if not linked to real viable decisions concerning important resources. SDMs only reach their full potential when they bring together scientists, public stakeholders and policy makers, and are used as an adaptive management tool to understand complex landscapes that are undergoing short- and long-term change.

Shared values, public trust in an agency, and attitudes can influence support for successful conservation initiatives. To understand these relationships, this paper examines the role of social trust as a partial mediator between salient values similarity and attitudes toward wolves in south-western Alberta, Canada. Rural residents in this area face increasing wolf depredation on livestock. Data were obtained from a mail questionnaire (n = 566 respondents, response rate = 70%) sent to rural residents in three municipal districts in south-western Alberta. Attitudes were predicted to directly influence behavioural intention to support or oppose wolf management. Most respondents held slightly similar values as the management agency and minimally trusted the agency to effectively manage wolves. As predicted, social trust in the agency served as a partial mediator between salient value similarity and attitudes toward wolves. Salient value similarity was also a strong predictor of attitudes toward wolves. Attitudes toward wolves predicted behavioural support. Thus, social trust of the management agency can influence attitudes and management preferences concerning a species. When dealing with human-wildlife conflict, social trust should be examined to understand the context of the problem.

Collaborative management is a widely accepted means of resolving conflict amongst natural resource stakeholders. Power sharing is central to most conceptualizations of collaboration, but theoretical insights about power are only rarely used to interrogate collaborative processes. Agenda-setting theory was used to analyse cases of collaborative deer management in England, Scotland and Indiana (USA). Collaborative management agendas across scales and social contexts were found to be primarily set by contextual factors, particularly stakeholders drawing on specific cultures and policies, and pre-defining issues. These findings highlight significant gaps between the theory and practice of collaboration. If, in practice, substantial power has been wielded in advance, the capacity of subsequent collaborative processes to share power amongst stakeholders may be severely limited. To provide opportunities for differing cultural perspectives to be expressed and challenged, convenors of collaborative processes therefore need to be aware of and reflexive upon existing power relationships and structures.

A recent Comment article suggested replacing the established term warfare ecology with the name ‘military ecology’. This emerging and important sub-discipline requires an accurate, inclusive, and descriptive name. Maintaining the broad term warfare ecology reaches beyond the military to beyond to involve a much wider range of processes and stakeholders, including non-state parties and insurgencies, contractors, civilians, humanitarian and relief organizations, and reconstruction/restoration efforts. It has been adopted by practitioners from a similarly diverse range of disciplines, and used for important research that would not be included under a field limited to military studies.

Conservation managers and policy makers require models that can rank the impacts of multiple, interacting threats on biodiversity so that actions can be prioritized. An integrated modelling framework was used to predict the viability of plant populations for five species in southern California's Mediterranean-type ecosystem. The framework integrates forecasts of land-use change from an urban growth model with projections of future climatically-suitable habitat from climate and species distribution models, which are linked to a stochastic population model. The population model incorporates the effects of disturbance regimes and management actions on population viability. This framework: (1) ranks threats by their relative and cumulative impacts on population viability, such as land-use change, climate change, altered disturbance regimes or invasive species, and (2) ranks management responses in terms of their effectiveness for land protection, assisted dispersal, fire management and invasive species control. Too-frequent fire was often the top threat for the species studied, thus fire reduction was ranked the most important management option. Projected changes in suitable habitat as a result of climate change were generally large, but varied across species and climate scenarios; urban development could exacerbate loss of suitable habitat.

Efforts to frame conservation interventions in terms of idealized outcomes that benefit both human well-being and biodiversity, and the rhetoric of consensus that often accompanies these, have been criticized. Acknowledgement of trade–offs between often incommensurable interests and perspectives, has been argued to be more democratic and transparent. This paper critically examines calls to consensus in conservation on the Galápagos Islands, where the population has been urged to unite around a shared vision of conservation in order to secure a sustainable future. Q methodology was used to examine the discourses of conservation on the islands, and to assess whether a shared vision of Galápagos is either achievable or desirable. Thirty-three participants carried out Q sorts about Galápagos conservation. Three discourses emerged from the analysis: conservation of Galápagos as an international/global concern; conservation linked with sustainable development; and social welfare and equitable development. The results highlight the subjective and political nature of the different discourses, and the paper concludes that calls to consensus or shared visions, while seductive in their promise of harmonious cooperation for conservation, can be read as attempts to depoliticize debates around conservation, and as such should be treated with caution.

Environmental policy integration is an acknowledged principle of sustainable development. Spatial planning may be a useful means of integrating two policies with differing objectives. The Birds and Habitats Directives of the European Union (EU) aim at preserving biodiversity through the conservation of the Natura 2000 protected areas network, while the EU's Environmental Noise Directive aims at improving human health and wellbeing by controlling environmental noise, through the preservation of Quiet Areas (QAs). Using Greece as an example, an integrated network of Natura 2000 sites and QAs permitted the identification of potential spatial overlaps. The established Natura 2000 network incorporates more than 30% of the QAs located in the open countryside of Greece, and the combined network includes 17 out of the 19 conservation priority habitat types. Flagship species (like bear, wolf and wild goat) show a preference for sites containing QAs. It may be possible to combine these two EU policies efficiently, as protected and quiet areas appear to be mutually beneficial.

Extractive reserves are conservation units that are concurrently expected to sustain subsistence and cash economies of reserve residents, often through use of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) has been central to many Amazonian reserves and resident livelihoods therein, due to its basin-wide distribution, significance in global markets, and potential for sustainable use and forest conservation. Yet, do the benefits of this and other NTFPs extend to all extractive reserve residents? A livelihood survey, structured interviews, and Brazil nut inventories from 2008 to 2010, randomly sampling the widely dispersed households and corresponding forests across the three regions of Riozinho do Anfrísio Extractive Reserve (RDAER), revealed significant social and ecological heterogeneity among RDAER regions. There were differences in Brazil nut stand access, individual tree characteristics (including crown form and marginally, and fruit production), stand and tree management, multiple household characteristics that shape resident investment and dependence on NTFPs, and the contribution of Brazil nut to forest-based income. If Brazil nut and other NTFPs are to reconcile conservation and development in forest communities, then policies to regulate and promote NTFP use must integrate the socioecological heterogeneity inherent in these forest products and within reserve polygons.

Ecosystems services have become a key concept in understanding the way humans benefit from ecosystems. In Costa Rica, a pioneer national scheme of payment provides compensation for forest conservation that is assumed to jointly produce services related to biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, water and scenic beauty, but little is known about the spatial correlations among these services. A spatial assessment, at national scale and with fine resolution, identified the spatial congruence between these services, by considering the biophysical potential of service provision and socioeconomic demand. Services have different spatial distributions but are positively correlated. Spatial synergies exist between current policies (national parks and the payment scheme) and the conservation of ecosystem services: national parks and areas receiving payments provide more services than other areas. Biodiversity hotspots have the highest co-benefits for other services, while carbon hotspots have the lowest. This finding calls for cautiousness in relation to expectations that forest-based mitigation initiatives such as REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) can automatically maximize bundled co-benefits for biodiversity and local ecosystem services.

As climates change, some plant species will need to migrate across landscapes fragmented by unsuitable environments and human activities to colonize new areas with suitable climates as previously habited areas become uninhabitable. Previous modelling of plant's migration potential has generally assumed that climate changes at a constant rate, but this ignores many potentially important aspects of real climate variability. In this study, a spatially explicit simulation model was used to investigate how interannual climate variability, the occurrence of extreme events and step changes in climate might interact with gradual long-term climate change to affect plant species’ capacity to migrate across fragmented landscapes and persist. The considered types of climate variability generally exacerbated the negative effects of long-term climate change, with a few poignant exceptions where persistence of long-lived trees improved. Strategic habitat restoration ameliorated negative effects of climate variability. Plant functional characteristics strongly influenced most results. Any modelling of how climate change may affect species persistence, and how actions such as restoration may help species adapt, should account for both short-term climate variability and long-term change.

There is burgeoning interest in predicting road development because of the wide ranging important socioeconomic and environmental issues that roads present, including the close links between road development, deforestation and biodiversity loss. This is especially the case in developing nations, which are high in natural resources, where road development is rapid and often not centrally managed. Characterization of large scale spatio-temporal patterns in road network development has been greatly overlooked to date. This paper examines the spatio-temporal dynamics of road density across the Brazilian Amazon and assesses the relative contributions of local versus neighbourhood effects for temporal changes in road density at regional scales. To achieve this, a combination of statistical analyses and model-data fusion techniques inspired by studies of spatio-temporal dynamics of populations in ecology and epidemiology were used. The emergent development may be approximated by local growth that is logistic through time and directional dispersal. The current rates and dominant direction of development may be inferred, by assuming that roads develop at a rate of 55 km per year. Large areas of the Amazon will be subject to extensive anthropogenic change should the observed patterns of road development continue.

Climate change is predicted to be a major threat for biodiversity and, from a conservation prospective, it is important to understand how ecosystems may respond to that change. Predicted climate change effects on the distribution of meadows in the arid and semi-arid Argentinean Patagonia by 2050 were assessed for change trends and areas of desertification vulnerability using species distribution models (SDM) and climate-change models. Four modelling techniques composed an ensemble-forecasting approach. Suitable areas for meadows will decrease by 7.85% by 2050 given predicted changes in climate. However, there were two contrasting trends: severe reduction of suitable areas for meadows in north-west Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego Island, and an expansion of suitable areas for meadows in the south and a small section in the north-west. Meadows in Patagonia will likely be impacted by climate change, probably due to changes in precipitation regimes, and consequently many species that rely on meadows in an arid environment will also be impacted. Given the low level of protection of meadows in Patagonia, such information on meadow distribution and vulnerability to climate change will be important for increasing and improving the network of conservation areas through conservation planning.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List provides a globally-recognized evaluation of the conservation status of species, with the aim of catalysing appropriate conservation action. However, in some parts of the world, species data may be lacking or insufficient to predict risk status. If species with shared ecological or life history characteristics also tend to share their risk of extinction, then ecological or life history characteristics may be used to predict which species may be at risk, although perhaps not yet classified as such by the IUCN. Statistical models may be a means to determine whether there are non-threatened or unclassified species that share the characteristics of threatened species, however there are no data on which model might be most appropriate or whether multiple models should be used. In this paper, three types of statistical models, namely regression trees, logistic regression and discriminant function analysis are compared using data on the ecological characteristics of Finnish lepidopterans (butterflies and moths). Overall, logistic regression performed slightly better than discriminant function analysis in predicting species status, and both outperformed regression trees. Uncertainty in species classification suggests that multiple analyses should be performed and particular attention devoted to those species for which the methods disagree. Such standard statistical methods may be a valuable additional tool in assessing the likely threat status of a species where there is a paucity of abundance data.

Traditionally, conservation programmes assume that local peoples’ support for parks depends on receiving material benefits from foreign exchange, tourism, development and employment. However, in the case of forest parks in Africa, where annual visitation can be small, local support may instead result from ecosystem services. Kibale National Park, a forest park in Uganda, demonstrates that people appreciate parks in ways that are seldom cited nor explored. Public perceptions of benefits accrued from Kibale were explored using two different sampling techniques: a community census and a geographic sample. In both surveys, over 50% of respondents perceived benefits provided by Kibale National Park, and over 90% of those who perceived benefits identified ecosystem services, whereas material benefits were cited less frequently. Multimodel selection on a suite of general linear models for the two different sampling methods provided a comparison of factors influencing perceptions of ecosystem services. Perceptions of Park benefits were influenced by geography, household and respondent characteristics, and perception of negative impacts from the Park. Perceived ecosystem benefits played an important role in the way the Park was viewed and valued locally. Parks have considerable impacts on neighbouring communities, and their long-term political and economic sustainability depends on managing these relationships well. Since local people have the most to gain or lose by conserving neighbouring parks, analyses that incorporate the perceptions of local people are essential to management and sustainability of park landscapes.

Human-wildlife conflict is detrimental to the conservation of threatened carnivores and the livelihoods of rural communities. This paper compares perceived levels of human-carnivore conflict experienced on five Namibian communal conservancies and four resettled farming areas. Factors explored include how reported depredation was affected by livestock husbandry practices, the perceived annual cost of depredation and the reported problem predator species. Of the 147 respondents interviewed, perceived depredation was greater than in previous studies; high perceived depredation was associated with greater rates of predator removal, increased ranking of predators as problems and increased predator sighting frequency. Small stock species were the most commonly depredated livestock. The most frequently perceived predators were: jackals on goats and sheep, wild cats on chickens, leopards on horses and spotted hyenas on cattle. The financial cost of this predation was US$508898, mostly attributable to cattle depredation, and agricultural training schemes recommending good livestock management may help reduce this cost. A move from small to large stock farming could be promoted in areas with an abundance of small- to medium-sized carnivores and a lack of large carnivores. Further incentives, such as meat provision and income from consumptive and non-consumptive tourism could ensure benefits outweigh costs of wildlife coexistence.

Knowledge of the factors determining species distributions is essential for developing conservation strategies. Sandgrouse Pterocles alchata and P. orientalis are threatened in Spain, the stronghold of European populations. Spatial modelling was used to: (1) assess the relative importance of abiotic, anthropogenic and geographical factors in the distribution of both sandgrouse species, (2) determine the most important anthropogenic predictors for each species occurrence, and (3) identify areas where conservation efforts should be prioritized. Abiotic and anthropogenic factors explained most of the variation in sandgrouse distributions. Both species were associated with arid flatlands, arable land cover being the most important anthropogenic variable determining their distribution. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the main driver of agricultural management in Europe, and may thus have a direct effect on sandgrouse distributions. P. orientalis exhibited broader habitat tolerance than P. alchata; the latter species tolerates warmer climates. Consequently, the network of core and marginally suitable areas identified for each species differs, and connectivity between the populations of these areas seems unlikely. Potential future changes in sandgrouse distribution will probably be directed principally by the synergistic effects of climate change and expected land-use transformations resulting from the new CAP and ongoing population growth, urbanization and infrastructure development.

Local people's involvement in the management of conservation initiatives is central to ongoing debates on the relative merits of distinct biodiversity conservation models. Since different governance models provide distinct opportunities for local people to participate in the management of protected areas, their knowledge of these governance models and motivation to collaborate will vary. This paper analyses cognisance and participation in (1) government-imposed biosphere reserves and (2) community conservation areas, in which ecotourism projects take place. Qualitative and quantitative data (n = 205) were gathered in two indigenous communities in Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Whereas local cognisance of community-driven conservation initiatives is not always greater than cognisance of government-imposed Biosphere Reserves, local participation is always greater. Cognisance of and participation in conservation initiatives depend on the management approach, extent of external resource support, and a community's social organization. Gender and land holding status influence access to information about conservation initiatives, since men with land rights had more access than other people. More participatory mechanisms for decision-making and direct communication strategies between managers and local people are required to improve communities’ involvement in conservation.

Arid regions are increasingly being anthropogenically altered. In the north-western Sahara, a growing road network facilitates the use of habitats adjacent to roads. In regions where livestock is the traditional and main economic resource, local people are currently building numerous water cisterns for watering livestock, leading to an increase in the extent of pasturing of domestic livestock. Cisterns may attract desert vertebrates and act as death traps for species with already sparse populations in these arid areas. This paper is the first to examine the impact of cisterns as lethal traps for amphibians and reptiles in the Sahara, using a survey of 823 cisterns in south-western Morocco to identify and quantify species affected. Four amphibians and 35 reptiles were trapped in cisterns, some of which were listed as threatened. At least 459 017 individual amphibians and reptiles were trapped annually within the study area. The low productivity and low population densities of terrestrial vertebrates in this arid region suggest cisterns have a substantial impact upon amphibian and reptile species. As cistern construction is increasing, management actions are required to mitigate this impact on the herpetological community.