Anticipating anthropogenic threats in acquiring new protected areas.

Biodiversity continues to decline despite protected area expansion and global conservation commitments. Biodiversity losses occur in existing protected areas, yet common methods used to select protected areas ignore postimplementation threats that reduce effectiveness. We developed a conservation planning framework that considers the ongoing anthropogenic threats within protected areas when selecting sites and the value of planning for costly threat-mitigating activities (i.e., enforcement) at the time of siting decisions. We applied the framework to a set of landscapes that contained the range of possible correlations between species richness and threat. Accounting for threats and implementing enforcement activities increased benefits from protected areas without increasing budgets. Threat information was valuable in conserving more species per spending level even without enforcement, especially on landscapes with randomly distributed threats. Benefits from including threat information and enforcement were greatest when human threats peaked in areas of high species richness and were lowest where human threats were negatively associated with species richness. Because acquiring information on threats and using threat-mitigating activities are costly, our findings can guide decision-makers regarding the settings in which to pursue these planning steps.

Anticipación de las amenazas antropogénicas durante la adquisición de áreas protegidas nuevas Resumen La biodiversidad sigue declinando a pesar de la expansión de áreas protegidas y los compromisos mundiales con la conservación. La pérdida de la biodiversidad ocurre en las áreas protegidas existentes, y todavía los métodos comunes usados para seleccionar las áreas protegidas ignoran las amenazas posteriores a la implementación, las cuales reducen la efectividad. Desarrollamos un marco de planeación de la conservación que considera las amenazas antropogénicas actuales dentro de las áreas protegidas durante la selección de sitios y el valor de la planeación de actividades mitigantes costosas, como la aplicación, al momento de decidir. Aplicamos nuestro marco a un conjunto de paisajes que comprende el rango de correlaciones posibles entre las amenazas y la riqueza de especies. Si consideramos las amenazas y la implementación de actividades de aplicación, los beneficios de las áreas protegidas incrementan sin incrementar el presupuesto. La información sobre las amenazas fue importante para la conservación de especies por nivel de gasto incluso sin la aplicación, especialmente en paisajes con amenazas distribuidas de forma azarosa. Los beneficios de incluir la información sobre las amenazas y la aplicación fueron mayores cuando las amenazas humanas llegaron a su tope en áreas con gran riqueza de especies y alcanzaron su punto más bajo cuando las amenazas humanas estaban asociadas negativamente con la riqueza de especies. Ya que es costoso adquirir información sobre las amenazas y mitigar las amenazas con actividades, nuestros descubrimientos pueden informar a los tomadores de decisiones con respecto al entorno para seguir los pasos de la planeación.

Environmental Discourse Exhibits Consistency and Variation across Spatial Scales on Twitter.

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, are an increasingly important source of information and are forums for discourse within and between interest groups. Research highlights how social media communities have amplified movements such as the Arab Spring, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. But environmental digital discourse remains underexplored. In the present article, we apply automated text analysis to 200,000 Twitter users in several countries following leading environmental nongovernmental organizations. Some issues such as public action to decarbonize society or species conservation were discussed more intensely than agriculture or marine conservation. Our results illustrate where environmental discourse diverges and converges on Twitter across countries, states, and characteristics, such as political ideology. Using the coterminous United States as a case study, we observed that the prominence of issues varies across states and, in some cases, covaries with political ideology across counties. Our findings show paths forward to characterizing environmental priorities across many issues at unprecedented scale and extent.

Should I shoot or should I go? Simple rules for prey selection in multi-species hunting systems.

Across the tropics, unregulated hunting targeting many different species presents a major conservation challenge. Prioritizing resources for monitoring and enforcement is difficult when multiple prey species are exploited. However, identifying which prey species are subject to hunting pressure can be achieved with diet choice models. We evaluate hunter diet sets using data from Southwest China and compare two diet choice models: optimal foraging theory and a relatively new diet model originating from economic optimal stopping problems. The optimal stopping diet choice model required fewer field parameters than optimal foraging models and more accurately reflected hunter catch in Southwest China. The optimal stopping model also indicated that hunters should be less selective when they experience a larger opportunity cost for their time. Finally, we illustrate a new method to evaluate harvest impact from single sites with limited data using dietary thresholds. This technique could be used to evaluate whether or not the community of exploited wildlife has shifted in its trait distribution, providing a means to anticipate trait-biased defaunation from minimal data.

Examining conservation compliance with randomized response technique analyses.

Understanding violations of laws or social norms designed to protect natural resources from overexploitation is a priority for conservation research and management. Because direct questioning about stigmatized behaviors can produce biased responses, researchers have adopted more complex, indirect questioning techniques. The randomized response technique (RRT) is one of the most powerful indirect survey methods, yet analyses of these data require sophisticated statistical models. To date, there has been limited user-friendly software to analyze RRT data, particularly for models that combine information from multiple RRT questions. We developed an R package, zapstRR (ZoologicAl Package for RRT) that provides functions for 3 RRT models that can be applied to single or multiple RRT questions. With these functions, researchers can estimate the prevalence of conservation noncompliance, determine the number of violations by individuals, perform regressions for univariate and multivariate RRT data, and correct prevalence estimates for evasive-response bias. We illustrate the use of these estimators for RRT data through an examination of 2 case studies: illegal bird hunting where the interview consisted of a standard RRT question design and a novel implementation designed to offer further anonymity to respondents and reveal the impact of educational interventions on illegal bushmeat consumption. The case studies demonstrate how the models can work in tandem to uncover distinct patterns within RRT data sets. The case studies also show how several assumptions are central to the application of the multivariate models.

The pleasure of pursuit: recreational hunters in rural Southwest China exhibit low exit rates in response to declining catch.

Hunting is one of the greatest threats to tropical vertebrates. Examining why people hunt is crucial to identifying policy levers to prevent excessive hunting. Overhunting is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where a high proportion of mammals and birds are globally threatened. We interviewed hunters in Southwest China to examine their social behavior, motivations, and responses to changes in wildlife abundance. Respondents viewed hunting as a form of recreation, not as an economic livelihood, and reported that they would not stop hunting in response to marked declines in expected catch. Even in scenarios where the expected catch was limited to minimal quantities of small, low-price songbirds, up to 36.7% of respondents said they would still continue to hunt. Recreational hunting may be a prominent driver for continued hunting in increasingly defaunated landscapes; this motivation for hunting and its implications for the ecological consequences of hunting have been understudied relative to subsistence and profit hunting. The combination of a preference for larger over smaller game, reluctance to quit hunting, and weak enforcement of laws may lead to hunting-down-the-web outcomes in Southwest China.

Ambushing the Ambush Hypothesis: predicting and evaluating off-frame codon frequencies in prokaryotic genomes.

BACKGROUND: In this paper, we address the evidence for the Ambush Hypothesis. Proposed by Seligmann and Pollock, this hypothesis posits that there exists a selection for off-frame stop codons (OSCs) to counteract the possible deleterious effects of translational frameshifts, including the waste of resources and potential cytotoxicity. Two main types of study have been used to support the hypothesis. Some studies analyzed codon usage and showed that codons with more potential to create OSCs seem to be favored over codons with lower potential; they used this finding to support the Ambush Hypothesis. Another study used 342 bacterial genomes to evaluate the hypothesis directly, finding significant excesses of OSCs in these genomes. RESULTS: We repeated both analyses with newer datasets and searched for other factors that could explain the observed trends. In the first case, the relative frequency of codons with the potential to create OSCs is directly correlated with the GC content of organisms, as stop codons are GC-poor. When evaluating the frequency of OSCs directly in 1,976 bacterial genomes we also detected a significant excess. However, when comparing the excess of OSCs with similarly obtained results for the frequency of out-of-frame sense codons, some sense codons have a more significant excess than stop codons. CONCLUSIONS: Two avenues of study have been used to support the Ambush Hypothesis. Using the same methods as these previous studies, we demonstrate that the evidence in support of the Ambush Hypothesis does not hold up against more rigorous testing.

Environmental users abandoned Twitter after Musk takeover.

In our sample of 380 000 environmentally oriented users, nearly 50% became inactive on Twitter after it was sold in October 2022, a rate much higher than a control sample. Given Twitter's importance for public communication, our finding has troubling implications for digital environmental information sharing and public mobilization.

Birds and beans: Comparing avian richness and endemism in arabica and robusta agroforests in India's Western Ghats.

Coffee is a major tropical commodity crop that can provide supplementary habitat for native wildlife. In Asia, coffee production is an increasingly important driver of landscape transformation and shifts between different coffee species is a major dimension of agroforestry trends. Yet few studies have compared the ecological impacts of conversion between different coffee species. We evaluated whether or not the two species of coffee grown globally-Coffea arabica and C. canephora (denoted "robusta")-had equivalent avian conservation value in the Western Ghats, India, where robusta production has become increasingly dominant. We found that habitat specialist and functional guild diversity was higher in arabica, and that arabica was more profitable. However, robusta farms generally supported the same or slightly higher abundances of habitat specialists and functional guilds, largely due to dense canopy and landscape-level forest cover. Farming practices, chiefly pesticide use, may affect the suitability of coffee agroforests as habitat for avian specialists, and at present, robusta farmers tended to use less pesticide. Given future projections for arabica to robusta conversion in tropical Asia, our study indicates that certification efforts should prioritize maintaining native canopy shade trees and forest cover to ensure that coffee landscapes can continue providing biodiversity benefits.

Author Correction: Birds and beans: Comparing avian richness and endemism in arabica and robusta agroforests in India's Western Ghats.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.