showing 14 related works from this author
Planning for the future : identifying conservation priority areas for Iberian birds under climate change
2018
[Context]: Species are expected to shift their distributions in response to global environmental changes and additional protected areas are needed to encompass the corresponding changes in the distributions of their habitats. Conservation policies are likely to become obsolete unless they integrate the potential impacts of climate and land-use change on biodiversity.
Using the centre-periphery framework to explore human-carnivore relations
2023
Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M Living alongside carnivores can incur both costs and benefits on people's lifeways. While positive outcomes of carnivore presence can foster coexistence, negative relations with carnivores can trigger carnivores' killing and undermine their conservation. In response to this, conservation efforts increasingly focus on promoting positive human-carnivore relations, most often through improvements in the flow of economic benefits from carnivores to local communities. However, there is a question mark over the effectiveness and potential consequences of market-based instruments for carnivore conservation. To understand the opportunities and p…
Human-Bat Interactions in Rural Southwestern Madagascar through a Biocultural Lens
2021
Human-bat interactions are common in rural areas across the tropics. Over 40 bat species occur in Madagascar, most of which are endemic. Forest loss is changing the distribution of bats throughout the island, with potential increases in both the abundance of synanthropic species and human-bat interactions. We set out to study knowledge of, interactions with, and attitudes towards bats in rural Madagascar, including reports of food and ethnomedicinal uses of bats, their cultural representations in folklore, and the existence of culturally enforced taboos in relation to them. We administered 108 surveys with open- and closed-ended questions with adults from the Tanala and Betsileo ethnic grou…
Ecological dependencies make remote reef fish communities most vulnerable to coral loss
2021
Ecosystems face both local hazards, such as over-exploitation, and global hazards, such as climate change. Since the impact of local hazards attenuates with distance from humans, local extinction risk should decrease with remoteness, making faraway areas safe havens for biodiversity. However, isolation and reduced anthropogenic disturbance may increase ecological specialization in remote communities, and hence their vulnerability to secondary effects of diversity loss propagating through networks of interacting species. We show this to be true for reef fish communities across the globe. An increase in fish-coral dependency with the distance of coral reefs from human settlements, paired with…
Risk assessment for Iberian birds under global change
2013
Conservation priority areas and programs are often established without consideration of future changes in species distributions. However, global change is expected to threaten the persistence of several species while offering opportunities for range expansion to others. In this study, building on previous work, we develop and implement an approach to classify bird species according to their degree of exposure and vulnerability to future climate and land-use change, including climatically driven changes in vegetation. To examine species exposure to environmental changes, we first fitted environmental envelope models and projected then into the future under scenarios of climate, land use and …
Toward a holistic understanding of pastoralism
2021
Pastoralism is globally significant in social, environmental, and economic terms. However, it experiences crises rooted in misconceptions and poor interdisciplinary understanding, while being largely overlooked in international sustainability forums and agendas. Here, we propose a transdisciplinary research approach to understand pastoralist transitions using (1) social, economic, and environmental dimensions, (2) diverse geographic contexts and scales to capture emerging properties, allowing for cross-system comparisons, and (3) timescales from the distant past to the present. We provide specific guidelines to develop indicators for this approach, within a social-ecological resilience anal…
Convergences and divergences between scientific and Indigenous and Local Knowledge contribute to inform carnivore conservation
2021
There is increasing recognition that diverse knowledge systems can work in mutually enriching ways and that Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) can enhance biodiversity conservation. However, studies using scientific knowledge and ILK in a complementary manner, and acknowledging convergent and especially divergent insights have remained limited. In this study, we contrasted proxies of abundances and trends of threatened and conflict-prone carnivores (caracal, cheetah, jackal, lion, leopard, spotted hyaena, striped hyaena) derived separately from scientific knowledge and ILK. We conducted camera trapping, track surveys and semi-structured interviews with local pastoralists from northern Ken…
Are sacred caves still safe havens for the endemic bats of Madagascar?
2018
AbstractDespite conservation discourses in Madagascar increasingly emphasizing the role of customary institutions for wildlife management, we know relatively little about their effectiveness. Here, we used semi-structured interviews with 54 adults in eight villages to investigate whether sacred caves and taboos offer conservation benefits for cave-dwelling bats in and around Tsimanampetsotsa National Park, south-west Madagascar. Although some caves were described as sites of spiritual significance for the local communities, most interviewees (c. 76%) did not recognize their present-day sacred status. Similarly, only 22% of the interviewees recognized taboos inhibiting bat hunting and consum…
Biocultural conflicts: understanding complex interconnections between a traditional ceremony and threatened carnivores in north Kenya
2022
Abstract Biological and cultural diversity are inextricably linked and rapidly eroding worldwide. As a response, many conservation efforts foster synergies between cultural and biological diversity agendas through biocultural approaches. However, such approaches do not always address biocultural conflicts, where certain cultural practices can lead to biodiversity loss and, in turn, threaten the continuance of such practices. In this study, we examined a biocultural conflict in the Dimi ceremony, the most important rite of passage of the Daasanach agro-pastoralists of north Kenya, in which skins from threatened carnivore species are used extensively as traditional ornaments. We quantified th…
Interactions between Climate Change and Infrastructure Projects in Changing Water Resources: An Ethnobiological Perspective from the Daasanach, Kenya
2021
The fast and widespread environmental changes that have intensified in the last decades are bringing disproportionate impacts to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Changes that affect water resources are particularly relevant for subsistence-based peoples, many of whom already suffer from constraints regarding reliable access to safe water. Particularly in areas where water is scarce, climate change is expected to amplify existing stresses in water availability, which are also exacerbated by multiple socioeconomic drivers. In this paper, we look into the local perceptions of environmental change expressed by the Daasanach people of northern Kenya, where the impacts of climate change …
Data from: The dual role of rivers in facilitating or hindering movements of the false heath fritillary butterfly
2016
Background: Species movement responses to landscape structures have been studied using a variety of methods, but movement research is still in need of simple methods that help predicting and comparing movements across structurally different landscapes. We demonstrate how habitat-specific movement models can be used to disentangle causes of differentiated movement patterns in structurally different landscapes and to predict movement patterns in altered and artificial landscapes. In our case study, we studied the role of riparian landscapes to the persistence of the endangered false heath fritillary butterfly (Melitaea diamina) in its newly discovered coastal distribution region in Finland. W…
Institutional fit in the maintenance of dynamic habitat networks for metapopulations
2018
Species living in metapopulations depend on connected habitat networks for survival. If habitat networks experience fast temporal dynamics, species conservation requires preventing habitat discontinuities that could lead to metapopulation extinctions. Few institutional solutions exist for the maintenance of dynamic habitat networks. Institutional fit is a conceptual framework to study how well institutions are aligned with the realities they manage or govern. We studied the institutional fit of false heath fritillary (Melitaea diamina) conservation in Finland from the perspective of conservation institutions' ability to manage early successional habitat availability for this endangered spec…
Local perceptions of carnivores in Sibiloi National Park, Kenya.
2018
Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) is increasingly seen as an important data source for informing conservation efforts. However, its use as a guide for the sustainable management of natural resources is still heatedly debated in the context of pastoral grasslands. In this study, we examine the utility of ILK as an alternative source of biological information relevant to inform conservation efforts in Sibiloi National Park, Kenya. We carried out 106 semi-structured interviews with local pastoralists to understand their local perceptions of abundance and change of seven carnivore species, i.e. black-backed jackal, caracal, cheetah, leopard, lion, spotted hyena and striped hyena. Each interv…
Protected area effectiveness and management indicators do not correlate: what are we doing wrong?
2018
Protected areas are one of the key tools for conserving biodiversity and recent studies have highlighted the impact they can have in avoiding habitat conversion, finding that protected areas in general are effective, yet that this varies with governance regimes (Schleicher et al. 2017) and over time (Eklund et al. 2016). However, the relationship to management actions on the ground is far less studied (Coad et al. 2015) and we currently do not know which management actions are crucial for success. To investigate this in a challenging socio-ecological environment, we studied the effectiveness of the protected area network of Madagascar; a country with high deforestation rates and an unstable…