More than $1 billion needed annually to secure Africa's protected areas with lions.

Protected areas (PAs) play an important role in conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services, yet their effectiveness is undermined by funding shortfalls. Using lions (Panthera leo) as a proxy for PA health, we assessed available funding relative to budget requirements for PAs in Africa's savannahs. We compiled a dataset of 2015 funding for 282 state-owned PAs with lions. We applied three methods to estimate the minimum funding required for effective conservation of lions, and calculated deficits. We estimated minimum required funding as $978/km2 per year based on the cost of effectively managing lions in nine reserves by the African Parks Network; $1,271/km2 based on modeled costs of managing lions at ≥50% carrying capacity across diverse conditions in 115 PAs; and $2,030/km2 based on Packer et al.'s [Packer et al. (2013) Ecol Lett 16:635-641] cost of managing lions in 22 unfenced PAs. PAs with lions require a total of $1.2 to $2.4 billion annually, or ∼$1,000 to 2,000/km2, yet received only $381 million annually, or a median of $200/km2 Ninety-six percent of range countries had funding deficits in at least one PA, with 88 to 94% of PAs with lions funded insufficiently. In funding-deficit PAs, available funding satisfied just 10 to 20% of PA requirements on average, and deficits total $0.9 to $2.1 billion. African governments and the international community need to increase the funding available for management by three to six times if PAs are to effectively conserve lions and other species and provide vital ecological and economic benefits to neighboring communities.

Measuring impact of protected area management interventions: current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness.

Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world's land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to help measure the conservation impact of PA management interventions is high. Here, we summarize the status of PAME assessment, review the published evidence for a link between PAME assessment results and the conservation impacts of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring the impact of PA management interventions on conservation outcomes. We conclude that PAME data, while designed as a tool for local adaptive management, may also help to provide insights into the impact of PA management interventions from the local-to-global scale. However, the subjective and ordinal characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application in rigorous scientific impact evaluations, a problem that should be recognized and mitigated where possible.

Advocacy for mothers with psychiatric illness: a clinical perspective.

Motherhood is a challenging role and a life-changing experience. For women living with psychiatric illness, the challenge of motherhood is amplified. Psychiatric illness (including schizophrenia, affective and personality disorders) is associated with multiple adversities that can impair the capacity to parent. Social adversity, fluctuating symptoms, and medications and their related side-effects, can create difficulties for the new mother as she adjusts to her role. The risk for relapse among women who are unwell is heightened during the post-partum period. For many other women, the post-partum period is when psychiatric symptoms emerge for the first time. Equally important are the continuing concerns pertaining to infant well-being where maternal psychiatric illness is present. For mothers who exhibit symptoms at this time, a very real threat of protective removal exists. In the mother-infant setting, child protection legislation is biased towards the rights of the child. While there are cases for which this bias is clearly appropriate, there are less clear situations from which the infant is removed with little regard for the mother. Often mothers with psychiatric illness struggle to meet the cognitive, emotional, and financial demands of drawn-out custody proceedings. For these mothers, there is a paucity of appropriate support available, as will be evidenced throughout the present paper. There is an urgent need for professional advocacy to support women who are unwell in their transition to motherhood. The mental health nurse is able to fill a key advocating role in the perinatal psychiatric setting. Nurses in this role hold a unique position whereby social and community supports can be activated, while guidance is imparted from a ground-level standpoint. The nurse in this role has the capacity to liaise with authorities, negotiate service provision, and ensure that key parenting skills are acquired by the mother as she works to secure her role. Through the provision of proactive advocacy during this time, the nurse has the potential to ameliorate the outcomes of mothers who are unable to cope alone and the well-being of their infants.