Judith Schleicher

Reducing the global environmental impacts of rapid infrastructure expansion

Infrastructures, such as roads, mines, and hydroelectric dams, are proliferating explosively. Often, this has serious direct and indirect environmental impacts. We highlight nine issues that should be considered by project proponents to better evaluate and limit the environmental risks of such developments.

Social and Ecological Change over a Decade in a Village Hunting System, Central Gabon

Despite widespread recognition of the major threat to tropical forest biological diversity and local food security posed by unsustainable bushmeat hunting, virtually no long-term studies tracking the socioecological dynamics of hunting systems have been conducted. We interviewed local hunters and collected detailed hunting data to investigate changes in offtake and hunter characteristics over 10 years (2001-2010) in Dibouka and Kouagna villages, central Gabon, in the context of hunter recollections of longer term trends since the 1950s. To control for changes in hunter behavior, such as trap location and characteristics, we report hunting offtake data per trap. Our results suggest the hunting area was already highly depleted by 2001; local hunters reported that 16 large-bodied prey species had become rare or locally extirpated over the last 60 years. Overall, we observed no significant declines in hunting offtake or changes in species composition from 2001 to 2010, and offtakes per trap increased slightly between 2004 and 2010. However, trapping distance from the villages increased, and there was a switch in hunting techniques; a larger proportion of the catch was hunted with guns in 2010. The number of hunters declined by 20% from 2004 to 2010, and male livelihood activities shifted away from hunting. Hunters with the lowest hunting incomes in 2004 were more likely than successful hunters to have moved away from the village by 2010 (often in response to alternative employment opportunities). Therefore, changes in trap success (potentially related to biological factors) were interacting with system-level changes in hunter number and composition (related to external socioeconomic factors) to produce a relatively static overall offtake. Our results highlight the importance of understanding the small-scale context of hunting to correctly interpret changes or apparent stasis in hunting effort and offtake over time.

Indicators for wild animal offtake: Methods and case study for African mammals and birds

Unsustainable exploitation of wild animals is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and to millions of people depending on wild meat for food and income. The international conservation and development community has committed to implementing plans for sustainable use of natural resources and has requested development of monitoring systems of bushmeat offtake and trade. Although offtake monitoring systems and indicators for marine species are more developed, information on harvesting terrestrial species is limited. Building on approaches developed to monitor exploitation of fisheries and population trends, we have proposed two novel indicators for harvested terrestrial species: the mean body mass indicator (MBMI) assessing whether hunters are relying increasingly on smaller species over time, as a measure of defaunation, by tracking body mass composition of harvested species within samples across various sites and dates; and the offtake pressure indicator (OPI) as a measure of harvesting pressure on groups of wild animals within a region by combining multiple time series of the number of harvested individuals across species. We applied these two indicators to recently compiled data for West and Central African mammals and birds. Our exploratory analyses show that the MBMI of harvested mammals decreased but that of birds rose between 1966/1975 and 2010. For both mammals and birds the OPI increased substantially during the observed time period. Given our results, time-series data and information collated from multiple sources are useful to investigate trends in body mass of hunted species and offtake volumes. In the absence of comprehensive monitoring systems, we suggest that the two indicators developed in our study are adequate proxies of wildlife offtake, which together with additional data can inform conservation policies and actions at regional and global scales.

Evolving hunting practices in Gabon: lessons for community-based conservation interventions

Addressing todays environmental challenges is intimately linked to understanding and improving natural resource governance institutions. As a result conservation initiatives are increasingly realizing the importance of integrating local perspectives of land tenure arrangements, natural resource rights, and local beliefs into conservation approaches. However, current work has not sufficiently considered the dynamic nature of natural resource governance institutions over time and the potential implications for current conservation interventions. We therefore explored how and why hunting governance has changed since the precolonial period in two ethnic hunting communities in Gabon, Central Africa, integrating various ethnographic methods with resource-use mapping, and a historic literature review. In both communities, hunting governance has undergone significant changes since the precolonial period. A closed-access, lineage-based system of resource use with strict penalties for trespassing, has evolved into a more open-access system, in which the influence of customary governance systems, including magico-political aspects, has declined. These changes have occurred mainly in response to policies and governance structures put in place by the colonial government and postindependence, early state laws. This included a policy of merging villages, the introduction of more modern hunting techniques such as guns and wire cables, and a shift from community to government ownership of the land. Current governance structures are thus the product of a complex mixture of customary, colonial and state influences. These findings suggest that a historical perspective of resource governance, gained through in- depth and long-term engagement with local communities, can provide important insights for community-based conservation approaches, such as helping to identify potential causes and perceptions of environmental change and to design more suitable conservation initiatives with local people.

Engaging the conservation community in the IPBES process

There is increasing political and scientific recognition of the value of nature for human well-being (Dı́az et al. 2015). However, trade-offs between human development and the environment continue to harm biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) (Tittensor et al. 2014). The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was established in 2012 as a sciencepolicy platform to catalyze action on environmental issues by producing global and regional assessments that synthesize information on the state of the planet’s biodiversity, its ecosystems, and the essential services they provide to society and to support policy formulation to prevent further declines in BES. The IPBES serves a complementary role to biodiversity-related conventions such as the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and has a similar synthesizing role to the Intergovernmental Platform on Climate Change (IPCC). A key novelty of IPBES is that it acknowledges that socioecological relationships are an explicit component of the biodiversity landscape. The IPBES is an international science-policy platform, with the expectation, opportunity, and responsibility for experts from many disciplines globally to engage with it. IPBES offers rigorous and synthesized scientific information on BES that can drive public engagement and policy dialogue (Redford et al. 2012). Prior recommendations to ensure high-quality assessment reports through rigorous and transparent review and participation of a broad range of experts (Pe’er et al. 2013) are being addressed through its stakeholder engagement strategy (SES), work programs, and rules of procedure. Stakeholders are involved in all IPBES functions, including the contribution and integration of knowledge from scientists and indigenous and local knowledge systems (ILKs), integral to the platform’s success. The first IPBES assessments, Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production and Scenario Analysis and Modelling of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, are near completion. The latter assessment provides guidelines for using scenarios and models in policy and decision-making contexts that will support upcoming global and regional assessments and a thematic assessment on land degradation and restoration. Stakeholder Engagement

Ten‐year assessment of the 100 priority questions for global biodiversity conservation

In 2008, a group of conservation scientists compiled a list of 100 priority questions for the conservation of the worlds biodiversity. However, now almost a decade later, no one has yet published a study gauging how much progress has been made in addressing these 100 high-priority questions in the peer-reviewed literature. We took a first step toward reexamining the 100 questions to identify key knowledge gaps that remain. Through a combination of a questionnaire and a literature review, we evaluated each question on the basis of 2 criteria: relevance and effort. We defined highly relevant questions as those that - if answered - would have the greatest impact on global biodiversity conservation and quantified effort based on the number of review publications addressing a particular question, which we used as a proxy for research effort. Using this approach, we identified a set of questions that, despite being perceived as highly relevant, have been the focus of relatively few review publications over the past 10 years. These questions covered a broad range of topics but predominantly tackled 3 major themes: conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems, role of societal structures in shaping interactions between people and the environment, and impacts of conservation interventions. We believe these questions represent important knowledge gaps that have received insufficient attention and may need to be prioritized in future research.