A spatially explicit assessment of factors shaping attitudes toward African elephant conservation.

Conservation plans that explicitly account for the social landscape where people and wildlife co-occur can yield more effective and equitable conservation practices and outcomes. Yet, social data remain underutilized, often because social data are treated as aspatial or are analyzed with approaches that do not quantify uncertainty or address bias in self-reported data. We conducted a survey (questionnaires) of 177 households in a multiuse landscape in the Kenya-Tanzania borderlands.

Mapping the connectivity-conflict interface to inform conservation.

Balancing the competing, and often conflicting, needs of people and wildlife in shared landscapes is a major challenge for conservation science and policy worldwide. Connectivity is critical for wildlife persistence, but dispersing animals may come into conflict with people, leading to severe costs for humans and animals and impeding connectivity. Thus, conflict mitigation and connectivity present an apparent dilemma for conservation.

Coupled effects of climatic forcing and the human footprint on wildlife movement and space use in a dynamic floodplain landscape.

With climate change, terrestrial fauna in riparian floodplain ecosystems must adapt to a predicted increase in frequency and magnitude of fluvial perturbations. Seasonal migration to seek refuge from floodwaters represents a central adaptation strategy, but may entail risky navigation of anthropogenic spaces in heterogeneous landscapes. Here, we demonstrate the opportunities and constraints large-bodied mammalian herbivores face during an adaptive response of obligatory flood-driven refuge migration, across a human-dominated environment.

Author Correction: Towards a reliable assessment of Asian elephant population parameters: the application of photographic spatial capture-recapture sampling in a priority floodplain ecosystem.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A Bayesian hierarchical approach to quantifying stakeholder attitudes toward conservation in the presence of reporting error.

Stakeholder support is vital for achieving conservation success, yet there are few reliable mechanisms to monitor stakeholder attitudes toward conservation. Approaches used to assess attitudes rarely account for bias arising from reporting error, which can lead to falsely reporting a positive attitude toward conservation (false-positive error) or not reporting a positive attitude when the respondent has a positive attitude toward conservation (false-negative error). Borrowing from developments in applied conservation science, we used a Bayesian hierarchical model to quantify stakeholder attitudes as the probability of having a positive attitude toward wildlife notionally (or in abstract terms) and at localized scales while accounting for reporting error.

Towards a reliable assessment of Asian elephant population parameters: the application of photographic spatial capture-recapture sampling in a priority floodplain ecosystem.

The hitherto difficult task of reliably estimating populations of wide-ranging megafauna has been enabled by advances in capture-recapture methodology. Here we combine photographic sampling with a Bayesian spatially-explicit capture-recapture (SCR) model to estimate population parameters for the endangered Asian elephant Elephas maximus in the productive floodplain ecosystem of Kaziranga National Park, India. Posterior density estimates of herd-living adult females and sub-adult males and females (herd-adults) was 0.

"In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings": Woodlands in an agricultural matrix maintain functionality of a wintering bird community.

The agricultural matrix has increasingly been recognized for its potential to supplement Protected Areas (PAs) in biodiversity conservation. This potential is highly contextual, depending on composition and spatial configuration of matrix elements and their mechanistic relationship with biological communities. We investigate the effects of local vegetation structure, and proximity to a PA on the site-use of different guilds in a wintering bird community within the PA, and in wooded land-use types in the surrounding matrix.

Spatio-temporal interactions facilitate large carnivore sympatry across a resource gradient.

Species within a guild vary their use of time, space and resources, thereby enabling sympatry. As intra-guild competition intensifies, such behavioural adaptations may become prominent. We assessed mechanisms of facilitating sympatry among dhole (), leopard () and tiger () in tropical forests of India using camera-trap surveys.

Resource distribution and group size in the common langur Semnopithecus entellus in southern India.

We investigated the influence of resource abundance and distribution on the group size and composition of the common langur Semnopithecus entellus in the contiguous forests of Bandipur National Park, Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary and Nagarahole National Park in southern India. We also explored any additional effect of predator pressure and the risk of take-over on the same attributes. Data on group composition and vegetation were collected from January to May 2006.