Comparing expedient and proactive approaches to the planning of protected area networks on Borneo.

Protected areas are an important tool for wildlife conservation; however, research is increasingly revealing both biases and inadequacies in the global protected area network. One common criticism is that protected areas are frequently located in remote, high-elevation regions, which may face fewer threats compared to more accessible locations. To explore the conservation implications of this issue, we consider a thought experiment with seven different counterfactual scenarios for the Sunda clouded leopard's conservation on Borneo.

Finding Purpose in the Conservation of Biodiversity by the Commingling of Science and Ethics.

Averting the biodiversity crisis requires closing a gap between how humans tend to behave, individually and collectively, and how we ought to behave-"ought to" in the sense of behaviors required to avert the biodiversity crisis. Closing that gap requires synthesizing insight from ethics with insights from social and behavioral sciences. This article contributes to that synthesis, which presents in several provocative hypotheses: (i) Lessening the biodiversity crisis requires promoting pro-conservation behavior among humans.

Conservation geopolitics.

We reviewed recent work concerning the impact of geopolitics on wildlife conservation (and vice versa) and identified future priorities in conservation geopolitics research. Geopolitics is understood as both an analytical focus on geopolitical practices (especially concerning the behavior) of countries with respect to territory and national security and a set of theories developed to explain and predict those behaviors. We developed a typology of core geopolitical practices of relevance to conservation: territorial practices of colonization and the management of migrations and borders, and security practices relating to military, economic, and environmental security.

Simulating impacts of rapid forest loss on population size, connectivity and genetic diversity of Sunda clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi) in Borneo.

Habitat loss is the greatest threat to biodiversity in Borneo, and to anticipate and combat its effects it is important to predict the pattern of loss and its consequences. Borneo is a region of extremely high biodiversity from which forest is being lost faster than in any other. The little-known Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) is the top predator in Borneo and is likely to depend critically on habitat connectivity that is currently being rapidly lost to deforestation.

Priorities for global felid conservation.

Conservation resources are limited, necessitating prioritization of species and locations for action. Most prioritization approaches are based solely on biologically relevant characteristics of taxa or areas and ignore geopolitical realities. Doing so risks a poor return on conservation investment due to nonbiological factors, such as economic or political instability.

Identification of areas in Brazil that optimize conservation of forest carbon, jaguars, and biodiversity.

A major question in global environmental policy is whether schemes to reduce carbon pollution through forest management, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), can also benefit biodiversity conservation in tropical countries. We identified municipalities in Brazil that are priorities for reducing rates of deforestation and thus preserving carbon stocks that are also conservation targets for the endangered jaguar (Panthera onca) and biodiversity in general. Preliminary statistical analysis showed that municipalities with high biodiversity were positively associated with high forest carbon stocks.

A review of financial instruments to pay for predator conservation and encourage human-carnivore coexistence.

One of the greatest challenges in biodiversity conservation today is how to facilitate protection of species that are highly valued at a global scale but have little or even negative value at a local scale. Imperiled species such as large predators can impose significant economic costs at a local level, often in poverty-stricken rural areas where households are least able to tolerate such costs, and impede efforts of local people, especially traditional pastoralists, to escape from poverty. Furthermore, the costs and benefits involved in predator conservation often include diverse dimensions, which are hard to quantify and nearly impossible to reconcile with one another.