Publications by authors named "Arash Ghoddousi"

Article Synopsis
  • Land use intensification is putting pressure on protected areas, especially nonforested rangelands, which comprise about 40% of these areas and face issues like overgrazing and land conversion.
  • A study in the southern Caucasus assessed the effectiveness of 52 protected areas in mitigating land-use pressures and found that, overall, these areas failed to prevent green vegetation loss, with losses being greater inside protected zones in most countries.
  • The study revealed that livestock overgrazing is a major driver of the ineffectiveness, particularly in multiple-use protected areas, and emphasizes the need for better integration of conservation efforts that consider nonforest ecosystems.
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Hunting and its impacts on wildlife are typically studied regionally, with a particular focus on the Global South. Hunting can, however, also undermine rewilding efforts or threaten wildlife in the Global North. Little is known about how hunting manifests under varying socioeconomic and ecological contexts across the Global South and North.

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Poaching is driving many species toward extinction, and as a result, lowering poaching pressure is a conservation priority. This requires understanding where poaching pressure is high and which factors determine these spatial patterns. However, the cryptic and illegal nature of poaching makes this difficult.

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Both the number and the extent of protected areas have grown considerably in recent years, but evaluations of their effectiveness remain partial and are hard to compare across cases. To overcome this situation, first, we suggest reserving the term effectiveness solely for assessing protected area outcomes, to clearly distinguish this from management assessments (e.g.

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Article Synopsis
  • Large carnivores, like the Persian leopard, are facing threats from habitat loss, prey depletion, and human persecution, leading to a decline in their populations.
  • A model was created to analyze the impact of reducing persecution and restoring prey on leopard populations in the Caucasus, revealing potential for recolonization of suitable habitats if persecution is significantly reduced and prey is restored.
  • The study emphasizes that reducing human-induced persecution is crucial for the survival of small carnivore populations and highlights the utility of metapopulation models in developing effective conservation strategies.
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Human-carnivore conflicts over livestock depredation are increasingly common, yet little is understood about the role of husbandry in conflict mitigation. As shepherds and guarding dogs are most commonly used to curb carnivore attacks on grazing livestock, evaluation and improvement of these practices becomes an important task. We addressed this issue by studying individual leopard () attacks on sheep and goats in 34 villages near Golestan National Park, Iran.

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Livestock is represented in big cat diets throughout the world. Husbandry approaches aim to reduce depredation, which may influence patterns of prey choice, but whether felids have a preference for livestock or not often remains unclear as most studies ignore livestock availability. We assessed prey choice of the endangered Persian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor) in Golestan National Park, Iran, where conflict over livestock depredation occurs.

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Human-carnivore conflicts challenge biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods, but the role of diseases of domestic animals in their predation by carnivores is poorly understood. We conducted a human-leopard (Panthera pardus) conflict study throughout all 34 villages around Golestan National Park, Iran in order to find the most important conflict determinants and to use them in predicting the probabilities of conflict and killing of cattle, sheep and goats, and dogs. We found that the more villagers were dissatisfied with veterinary services, the more likely they were to lose livestock and dogs to leopard predation.

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