Small-scale fishers working in the West African Bijagós Archipelago are predominantly regional in-migrants, often living in isolated fishing camps (or economic enclaves) where capture, processing and trading activities occur. This paper explores the factors driving the fishing camp formation, relations with non-camp communities and interactions with prominent authority groups. One camp, presented here in the context of an anthropological case study, lost access to Ancopado beach during the designation of Orango National Park. Following violent evictions, migrant fishers shifted their efforts into less-observed waters, introducing challenging power negotiations with indigenous Bijagós islanders and fisheries authorities. Fishing persists inside the marine protected area, indicative of non-compliance by small-scale fishers who continue to resist a weak resource management agenda. The implications of this situation are discussed in terms of human rights to fish.

Conservation strategies to protect biodiversity and support household livelihoods face numerous challenges. Across the tropics, efforts focus on balancing trade-offs in local communities near the borders of protected areas. Devolving rights and control over certain resources to communities is increasingly considered necessary, but decades of attempts have yielded limited success and few lessons on how such interventions could be successful in improving livelihoods. We investigated a key feature of household well-being, the experience of food insecurity, in villages across Tanzania's northern wildlife tourist circuit. Using a sample of 2,499 primarily livestock-keeping households we compared food insecurity in villages participating in the country's principal community-based conservation strategy with nearby control areas. We tested whether community-based projects could offset the central costs experienced by households near strictly protected areas (i.e. frequent human–wildlife conflict and restricted access to resources). We found substantial heterogeneity in outcomes associated with the presence of community-based conservation projects across multiple project sites. Although households in project villages experienced more frequent conflict with wildlife and received few provisioned benefits, there is evidence that these households may have been buffered to some degree against negative effects of wildlife conflict. We interpret our results in light of qualitative institutional factors that may explain various project outcomes. Tanzania, like many areas of conservation importance, contains threatened biodiversity alongside areas of extreme poverty. Our analyses highlight the need to examine more precisely the complex and locally specific mechanisms by which interventions do or do not benefit wildlife and local communities.

Finding ways for people and wildlife to coexist requires affording both parties access to critical resources and space, but also a behavioural change by both to avoid conflict. We investigated pathway use in a population of free-ranging African elephants Loxodonta africana in the Okavango Panhandle, Botswana that share their range with humans in a multi-use, heterogeneous landscape. We used detailed ground surveys to identify and map elephant movement pathways, and mixed-effect models to explore factors influencing elephant numbers and movement behaviour on and around these pathways. We found deviation in pathway use among the elephant population, suggesting behavioural adaptations to avoid human-associated risk: avoiding pathways near settlements, particularly near larger settlements; avoiding pathways close to cultivated land; and adopting a safety-in-numbers strategy when moving through areas of human use. Our findings suggest there is opportunity to capitalize on risk avoidance by elephant populations, to minimize resource-use overlap and reduce conflict between humans and elephants. We discuss a strategy that involves ensuring appropriate protection of elephant pathways in land-use planning, using development-free buffer zones, combined with mitigation techniques along the interface with agricultural lands to increase risk levels and reinforce human–elephant interface boundaries. We recommend further examination of the use of landscape-level mitigation techniques that encourage elephants to use pathways away from human activity and help define spatial boundaries for management of human–elephant conflict in multi-use landscapes.

Thornicroft's giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis thornicrofti is limited in distribution to a single population resident in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia. During 1973−2003 regular counts were recorded along the Luangwa River in the core section of the subspecies’ range. In 2013 we conducted a count in the same region for comparison with the earlier survey results. During the 30-year period 1973−2003 the giraffe index (no. of individuals per km surveyed) was relatively stable, with an increase in 1994 and 1995 coinciding with an influx of giraffes to the west bank following an exceptionally reduced flow of the Luangwa River. The mean giraffe index during this period was 0.51 km−1, whereas the 2013 count yielded an index of 0.44 km−1. Given the limited range of the Thornicroft's giraffe, we estimate that the population comprises c. 500–600 individuals.

Human–elephant conflict is one of the main threats to the long-term survival of the Asian elephant Elephas maximus. We studied the nature and extent of human–elephant interactions in the buffer zones of Chitwan National Park and Parsa Wildlife Reserve in Nepal, through household questionnaire surveys, key informant interviews, site observations, and analysis of the reported cases of damage during January 2008–December 2012. During this 5-year period 290 incidents of damage by elephants were reported, with a high concentration of incidents in a few locations. Property damage (53%) was the most common type of damage reported. Crop damage was reported less often but household surveys revealed it to be the most frequent form of conflict. There were also human casualties, including 21 deaths and four serious injuries. More than 90% of the human casualties occurred during 2010–2012. More than two thirds of the respondents (70%) perceived that human–elephant conflict had increased substantially during the previous 5 years. Despite the increase in incidents of human–elephant conflict in the area, 37% of respondents had positive attitudes towards elephant conservation. Our findings suggest that public awareness and compensation for losses could reduce conflict and contribute to ensuring coexistence of people and elephants in this human-dominated landscape.

We conducted community interviews and field surveys to determine the distribution and population of the Endangered Shortridge's capped langur Trachypithecus shortridgei, and the threats to the species, in the Dulong and Nu River valleys of north-western Yunnan Province, China. We found that c. 19 groups of T. shortridgei reside in the Dulong valley, mostly located in the southern portion of the valley. According to interview and observational records in the Gaoligong Mountains to the west of the Nu River, 12 individuals and no groups were observed. Family groups consist of one adult male, 2–3 adult females and up to five young. We estimate the population of T. shortridgei in China to be c. 250–370 individuals. Threats to the species include habitat loss and poaching. We suggest several measures to conserve T. shortridgei, such as a review of the Gaoligong National Nature Reserve management strategy, and increasing engagement, education, inclusion of local people in forest management, and the consistency of enforcement.

A population of Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx was established by reintroductions in the Bohemian Forest Ecosystem in the 1970s and 1980s. The most recent information on the population status indicates that the distribution has stagnated since the late 1990s, for unknown reasons. We assessed the availability of suitable habitat along the Austrian–German–Czech border, and hypothesized that the Bohemian–Bavarian lynx population is not in equilibrium with habitat suitability. Based on global positioning system data from 10 radio-collared lynx, we used a maximum entropy approach to model suitable habitat. Variables reflecting anthropogenic influence contributed most to the model and were negatively associated with the occurrence of lynx. We evaluated the model prediction using independent records of lynx from monitoring in Bavaria, Germany. Using our habitat approach we estimated the area of potential habitat, based on a mean annual home range of 445 km2 for males and 122 km2 for females. Our results indicated there were 12,415 km2 of suitable habitat, distributed among 13 patches, for a potential population of c. 142 (93–160) resident lynx. We assessed connectivity via least-cost paths and found that all suitable patches could be reached by the lynx. A comparison with the current distribution of lynx, however, confirms that a significant proportion of suitable habitat is not occupied, which indicates that the distribution is limited by factors other than habitat, with illegal killing being the most likely cause. Our study provides crucial information for the development of a conservation strategy and regional planning for the Bohemian–Bavarian lynx population.