Predicting spatial patterns of predation risk for boreal caribou from wolves across the boreal forest in Canada

Boreal caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) is listed as a threatened species in Canada. Environment Canada released a Recovery Strategy for this species in 2012. The document identified increased predation facilitated by human development as the species' primary threat which could be mitigated through coordinated resource planning, habitat restoration and management. The objective of this panCanadian research collaboration involving researchers from across the country was to identify factors influencing spatial variation in predation risk for boreal caribou. This objective was achieved by developing a national scale model of wolf habitat use using information about habitat types, patterns of natural and anthropogenic disturbances and climate as input variables. The wolf habitat model results were combined with existing caribou habitat models developed by Environment Canada. Landscape features predicting spatial variation in predation risk for boreal caribou were identified using patterns of co-occurrence between caribou and wolves as a surrogate measure of risk. These variables included anthropogenic disturbances, although the type of disturbance and their effect appeared to vary across ecozones found within the boreal region of Canada. This work provides a useful starting point for assessing predation risk for boreal caribou, particularly for areas in Canada where little information is available.

Managing human-wildlife conflict around the edges of a city is further complicated by the complexity of societal relations within an urban context. Over the past 10 years Cape Town has experienced an exponential increase in reports of baboon-wildlife conflict around the foothills of Table Mountain National Park. Attempts to manage the troops of Chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) have led to intensified intra-societal tensions amongst institutions, affected communities and the public with regards to race, space and class. In turn, these tensions have pressured authorities to produce tangible management outcomes, which have resulted in the removal of over half the male baboon population in the Cape Peninsula from 2009-2012. Although the Chacma baboon is not endangered presently, similar wildlife management practices in the past have led to regional extinctions of fauna in the Cape. This study has been conducted from 2012-2013 and investigates the dimensions of cross-racial human relations within a socially stratified urban context that has led to the application of strong wildlife management techniques. Interviews, baboon population surveys and behavioral monitoring, and spatial analysis have been conducted to achieve a greater understanding of these social dimensions. This study purports the integral importance of addressing intra-societal divisions in order to achieve a level of collaboration that can lead to effective and sustainable baboon management.

Ex situ conservation programs largely focus on minimizing mean kinship, thereby maintaining equal representation of the genetic founders used to initiate the captive population. This approach, however, relies heavily on a pedigree that is assumed correct. If errors exist, a pedigree-based approach becomes less effective for minimizing inbreeding depression. Both pedigree- and DNA-based methods were used to assess whether inbreeding depression existed in the endangered Attwater's Prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido attwateri) captive population. When examining the population for signs of inbreeding, variation in pedigree-based inbreeding coefficients (f-pedigree) was less than DNA-based methods (f-DNA). Survival of chicks and adults were also negatively correlated with parental relatedness (r-DNA) and f-DNA, respectively, while no correlation was observed with pedigree-based measures when controlling for additional variables such as age, breeding facility, gender, and captive/release status. Individual heterozygosity and parental r-DNA values were also positively correlated with adult survival and the occurrence of a lethal congenital defect in chicks, respectively, suggesting that inbreeding may be a contributing factor increasing the frequency of this condition. This study highlights the importance of using DNA-based methods to better inform management decisions when pedigrees are incomplete or errors may exist due to uncertainty in pairings.

Models for effective conservation communication exist, but?when reviewing accounts of where these models have been executed successfully?a disproportionate number come from urban, affluent areas. This study sought to design a transferable model for conservation communication that incorporates both urban and rural audiences. We conducted a case study in rural northeast Michigan where coastal communities have experienced the social and economic impacts of anthropogenic biodiversity changes in the Great Lakes. We interviewed 30 participants from three groups?natural resource managers, communication practitioners, and citizen stakeholders?to investigate how differences between urban and rural communities affect stewardship motivation. We found that differences in capacity (financial and human resources), land use, and culture strongly influence stewardship motivation. As such, these community characteristics act as guiding principles in our resulting model, which steers practitioners through three phases of a conservation communication plan?research and development, messaging, and implementation. To help both urban and rural practitioners succeed, the model provides tips on how to execute each phase based on the targeted community's financial and human capacity level and their cultural relationship with local natural resources. This preliminary research strongly supports the need for a more integrated and environmentally just approach to conservation communication design.

Conservation incentives encourage management and restoration of forest ecosystems to promote biodiversity in general, but specifically to enhance habitat for the threatened gopher tortoise in longleaf pine in the SE United States. This interdisciplinary project assesses how occurrence of habitat for tortoise leads to spillover effects on habitat for other species of terrestrial vertebrate wildlife, the tradeoffs among wildlife habitat diversity, and how this impacts potential ecosystem services. I use point-occurrence data for wildlife in Florida, USA, with course-scale environmental covariates to predict the relative probability of occurrence of habitat with maximum entropy modeling (Maxent). I use the probability of occurrence to identify correlations of each species' occurrence relative to probability of tortoise habitat. I found 30 species with overlapping ranges within tortoise habitat in the native range of longleaf pine in Florida. Additionally, I found a high probability of tortoise habitat may increase the probability of endangered red-cockaded woodpecker habitat, but decrease probability of threatened black bear habitat. The overall implications indicate that management and restoration may have a potential impact on overall species diversity. The relationships identified here are of value to the investigation of both ecological and ecosystem service tradeoffs, and should be considered for effective conservation planning and future management decisions.

The 17th century brought a large number of changes to New Mexico, many of which could be expected to have left a signature on New Mexican landscapes. Old World domesticates such as sheep and cattle became well-established members of New Mexico's faunal community; indigenous populations may (or may not) have undergone radical demographic shrinking due to new diseases; settlement patterns and strategies shifted for many indigenous groups; and a number of new ethnic groups, including the Spanish, moved into the area with their own distinct subsistence and settlement practices. Some or all these factors may have impacted New Mexican landscapes - but which ones, and how? This poster uses faunal data from both archaeological and paleontological contexts to explore human impacts -both direct and indirect - on New Mexican landscapes in the 17th century, and the legacies of those impacts on today's landscapes.

The 'silver bullet' allure of biodiversity hotspots - areas with exceptionally high numbers of endemic species and catastrophic levels of habitat loss - continues to capture the conservation communities' attention and funding. We advance Norman Myer's iconic idea by systematically optimizing the hotspot's underlying plant-based species maps. Globally, and then by region, we find the maximum number of species in the minimum amount of area. In doing so we show that 87% of all plant species in our database can be contained in 17% of the terrestrial land surface - 17% chosen with consideration of the Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi Target 11. Repeating this exercise while maintaining a rule of endemicity incurs computational complexity but ensures irreplaceability of 67% of all species in 17% of terrestrial area. The regions involved in those two calculations differ considerably, with one reasonably favoring continents and the other islands. Our single-point estimates, and the accumulation curves they originate from, bring a new understanding of global and regional biogeography. As the window begins to close on opportunities for expanding the global protected area network, our results provide guidance on areas critical for optimal conservation efforts, and provide a benchmark for reviewing conservation progress.

Overload of nutrients, especially nitrogen, is one of the largest threats to the Chesapeake Bay; causing depletion of dissolved oxygen, demise of submerged vegetation, and possibly declines in some fisheries. To investigate the factors affecting nutrient discharges, we measured discharges from 500 watersheds with differing land cover in four major physiographic provinces within the Chesapeake Bay basin, and we developed budgets of anthropogenic nitrogen inputs to the watersheds. The main inputs of nitrogen to the Chesapeake watershed are fertilizer application, nitrogen fixation by crops, atmospheric deposition, and import of animal feed. Much less than half of the net nitrogen input to the land reaches the Bay and the fate of the remaining nitrogen is poorly known. Developed land contributes nitrogen to the Bay via runoff from impervious surfaces and sewage releases. Agriculture contributes the majority of the nitrogen load to Chesapeake Bay, but the amounts differ greatly among physiographic provinces. Piedmont and Appalachian croplands release more nitrogen per unit area than do Coastal Plain croplands. This reflects higher nitrogen inputs to some Piedmont croplands and greater prevalence and effectiveness of nitrogen-absorbing riparian buffers along Coastal Plain streams. There are many ways to reduce nitrogen discharges but rising populations of people and livestock and lack of knowledge of the effects of management practices may slow progress.

IUCN is a leading provider of biodiversity knowledge, tools and standards linking science to policy and guiding action on the ground. IUCN's science and knowledge have been the foundation of the Union's work for many years. This is achieved by a network of more than 8,000 scientists and practitioners and by bringing together civil society, science, governments, and NGOs. One of the main priorities of IUCN's Programme for 2013-2016 is providing Knowledge Products. Two key knowledge products of IUCN are the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and Protected Planet (including the World Database on Protected Areas [WDPA]). Real-world examples how the IUCN Knowledge Products operate and how they effectively link science to policy will be presented. New developments such as the global consultation to consolidate the criteria to identify sites that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity (Key Biodiversity Areas) and the Red List of Ecosystems will be explained and demonstrated. Finally, IUCN's plans to integrate knowledge products and the added value this integration will bring, will be shown through practical case studies. IUCN supports and encourages the use of its knowledge products at local to regional scales to help guide decision-makers, both within and beyond the conservation community, to achieve sustainable development and meet their environmental policies.

Despite several years of studies on billfish biology, there is still a need for more effective conservation and management methods for this group, especially in the West Indian Ocean region. The goal of our study was to carry out education and awareness activities with recreational fishermen and measure the impact of these activities on billfish conservation in Malindi, Watamu and Kilifi fishing sites. To understand catch rates, we tagged billfish and collected release and recovery data of tagged individuals. From the year 1990 to 2010, a total of 44, 670 billfish had been tagged using hydroscopic plastic tags and 1,812 recaptured. Additionally, we gathered responses from 420 recreational fishermen on observed trends of billfish catches and opinions on the benefits of billfish conservation and education. We used this biogeographical data and interview responses to determine the influence of recreational fishing on billfish catches between the years 1990 and 2010. Preliminary analysis shows a positive contribution of the practices of recreational fishermen on billfish conservation efforts in Kenya. We also illustrate how capacity building activities and stakeholder collaboration through sharing of information is important in the conservation of billfish given their highly migratory status.

We investigate habitat selection elasticity of royal bengal tigers, Panthera tigris tigris, in Chitwan National Park Nepal through the use of tiger location data, remote sensing imagery, GIS techniques, and logistic regression models. Quantitative or categorical habitat variables or a mixture of both may characterize use-nonuse locations in habitats. Field data on the habitat use by the species in question were used in conjunction with the data on predictor variables obtained from satellite imagery to construct habitat selection models. We report that tigers select habitats in proximity to the mixed forests, high-density sal forests and water sources. Contrary to past findings, proximity to grassland did not predict tiger habitat use. Within the study area, tigers used the habitats, preferably, at higher altitudes. However, given the small extent of the study area and diversity of habitat types interspersed, tigers in CNP are habitat generalists. We also propose that probably habitat heterogeneity explains the persistence of tigers in such a higher density in Chitwan National Park. Our results will benefit tiger conservation and management through better understanding of habitats used by the species.

Poaching can disrupt wildlife-management efforts in community-based natural resource management. Monitoring, estimating, and acquiring data on poaching is difficult. We used local stakeholder knowledge and poaching records to rank and map the risk of poaching incidents in 2 in Caprivi, Namibia. We mapped local stakeholder perceptions of the risk of poaching, risk of wildlife damage to livelihoods, and wildlife distribution and compared these maps with spatially explicit records of poaching events. Recorded poaching events and stakeholder perceptions of where poaching occurred were not spatially correlated. Locations of documented poaching events were spatially correlated with areas that stakeholders perceived wildlife as a threat to their livelihoods. Local stakeholders thought that wildlife populations were at high risk of being poached and that poaching occurred where there was abundant wildlife. Findings suggest stakeholders were concerned about wildlife resources in their community and indicate a need for integrated and continued monitoring of poaching activities and further interventions at the wildlife-agricultural interface. Involving stakeholders in assessing poaching risks promotes participation in local conservation efforts, a central tenet of community-based management. Stakeholder-generated maps of human wildlife interactions may be a valuable enforcement and intervention support tool.

Few very large, unfragmented terrestrial wilderness areas remain on earth. Two large ecoregions in this category are the boreal forest region of Canada and Alaska and the Outback of Australia both of which offer unique opportunities for very large-scale landscape conservation initiatives. In Canada’s boreal forest region a host of unique conservation collaborations has achieved amazing success over the last ten years with over 150 million acres of protected areas, 200 million acres of pledged new protected areas, and 120 million acres of Forest Stewardship Council certifications. Australia too has made enormous strides to protect and maintain its wild landscapes now with over 200 million acres of terrestrial protected areas in the Outback region including in Indigenous Protected Areas. Similarities and differences in the conservation issues and strategies will be described and discussed.

Many populations of threatened mammals still occur outside protected areas and their survival depends on the willingness of communities to tolerate them. Thus an understanding of the attitudes and tolerance of these communities and the factors that determine these is essential. We conducted a meta analysis to determine factors found to affect attitudes to four groups of mammals. Urban residents had the most positive attitudes (80%) followed by commercial farmers (51%) and communal farmers (26%). Elephants (65%) elicited most positive attitudes followed by primates (55%), ungulates (53%) and carnivores (44%). A tolerance to damage index showed that tolerance for ungulates and primates was in proportion to damage levels while for elephants tolerance levels were higher than expected and for carnivores lower than expected. Among carnivores the most positive attitudes were for tigers, wild dog, lion, leopard, cheetah and jackal and the least were for wolverine, wolf, bear, hyaena and coyote. Multivariate analyses showed complex relationships between species group, stakeholder type and the probability of experiencing damage.We conclude that damage is not always the main factor determining tolerance while taxonomic bias may be an important additional factor. Determining what these other factors are and which ones operate at which sites for which species will be important in order to prioritize conservation investments.

The Northeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (NEAFWA) have an extensive history of collaboration in landscape-scale conservation and implementation. NEAFWA developed regional conservation planning and implementation priorities with US Fish and Wildlife Service and non-governmental partners. The NEAFWA states supported the development of a common habitat classification system and map and developed a regional list of priority species by combining responsibility (% of range in Region) with risk (as measured by the number of states listing a species in their SWAP). The regional collaboration makes it possible to coordinate and leverage capacity- building. For example, all 14 jurisdictions (including the District of Columbia) pool 4% of their annual State Wildlife Grant allocations into a Regional Conservation Need (RCN) fund administered by the Wildlife Management Institute. The collaboration has also facilitated conservation status assessments of regional priority species and risk assessments for species in greatest need of conservation. USFWS staff integrated the goals of the RCN program into the development of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC). NEAFWA and NALCC are working on the synthesis and delivery of data, maps and other tools generated through the RCN and NALCC program. Northeast states will use the information in their 2015 SWAP revisions and to improve access to and use of regional information by states and conservation partners.

We have been monitoring rare Colorado plants for up to 18 years using count-based Population Viability Analyses. While many PVA studies only use four years of data, we present data on the minimum number of years needed to estimate a stable population growth rate for plants with different life histories and environmental variability. The native plants studied have a variety of survival mechanisms, from the ability of the succulent to withstand years of extreme drought to perennial herb strategies, including periods of dormancy (both of the seeds and adults). While we do not yet know if the lack of growth and flowering for many of our study species in 2012 will affect long-term population trends, we can analyze this year's data in the context of long-term data to better understand the magnitude of the impact of this extreme year. As expected, with continued long-term data collection, the growth rates of the populations we monitor have stabilized and variance around the growth rates have decreased. The number of years required to reach a stable growth rate depends not only on population size, but also on the dependence of population size on environmental conditions. Using a count-based PVA allows multiple agencies with different monitoring methods and goals to communicate the status of a particular species. Understanding the length needed for confidence in PVA results can help agencies allocate appropriate resources to successfully monitor plant populations.