Connectivity between countries established by landbirds and raptors migrating along the African-Eurasian flyway.

The conservation of long-distance migratory birds requires coordination between the multiple countries connected by the movements of these species. The recent expansion of tracking studies is shedding new light on these movements, but much of this information is fragmented and inaccessible to conservation practitioners and policy makers. We synthesized current knowledge on the connectivity established between countries by landbirds and raptors migrating along the African-Eurasian flyway.

The bean method as a tool to measure sensitive behavior.

Conservationists need to measure human behavior to guide decisions and evaluate their impact. However, activities can be misreported and reporting accuracy may change following conservation interventions, making it hard to verify any apparent changes. Techniques for asking sensitive questions are increasingly integrated into survey designs to improve data quality, but some can be costly or hard for nonexperts to implement.

The major barriers to evidence-informed conservation policy and possible solutions.

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision-making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence-informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global survey aimed at identifying top barriers and solutions to the use of conservation science in policy.

Audience segmentation to improve targeting of conservation interventions for hunters.

Audience segmentation could help improve the effectiveness of conservation interventions. Marketers use audience segmentation to define the target audience of a campaign. The technique involves subdividing a general population into groups that share similar profiles, such as sociodemographic or behavioral characteristics.

Assessing population viability while accounting for demographic and environmental uncertainty.

Predicting the future trend and viability of populations is an essential task in ecology. Because many populations respond to changing environments, uncertainty surrounding environmental responses must be incorporated into population assessments. However, understanding the effects of environmental variation on population dynamics requires information on several important demographic parameters that are often difficult to estimate.

Conserving the birds of Uganda's banana-coffee arc: land sparing and land sharing compared.

Reconciling the aims of feeding an ever more demanding human population and conserving biodiversity is a difficult challenge. Here, we explore potential solutions by assessing whether land sparing (farming for high yield, potentially enabling the protection of non-farmland habitat), land sharing (lower yielding farming with more biodiversity within farmland) or a mixed strategy would result in better bird conservation outcomes for a specified level of agricultural production. We surveyed forest and farmland study areas in southern Uganda, measuring the population density of 256 bird species and agricultural yield: food energy and gross income.

Eradication of invasive mammals on islands inhabited by humans and domestic animals.

Non-native invasive mammal species have caused major ecological change on many islands. To conserve native species diversity, invasive mammals have been eradicated from several islands not inhabited by humans. We reviewed the challenges associated with campaigns to eradicate invasive mammals from islands inhabited by humans and domestic animals.

Should conservation strategies consider spatial generality? Farmland birds show regional not national patterns of habitat association.

A key assumption underlying any management practice implemented to aid wildlife conservation is that it will have similar effects on target species across the range it is applied. However, this basic assumption is rarely tested. We show that predictors [nearly all associated with agri-environment scheme (AES) options known to affect European birds] had similar effects for 11 bird species on sites with differing farming practice (pastoral vs.

Winter availability of cereal stubbles attracts declining farmland birds and positively influences breeding population trends.

Many studies have demonstrated the selection of stubble fields by farmland birds in winter, but none have shown whether provisioning of this key habitat positively influences national population trends for widespread farmland birds. We use two complementary extensive bird surveys undertaken at the same localities in summer and winter and show that the area of stubble in winter attracts increased numbers of several bird species of conservation concern. Moreover, for several farmland specialists, the availability of stubble fields in winter positively influenced the 10 year breeding population trend (1994-2003) whereas hedgerow bird species were less affected.