Exposing illegal hunting and wildlife depletion in the world's largest tropical country through social media data.

Globally, illegal sport hunting can threaten prey populations when unregulated. Due to its covert nature, illegal sport hunting poses challenges for data collection, hindering efforts to understand the full extent of its impacts. We gathered social media data to analyze patterns of illegal sport hunting and wildlife depletion across Brazil.

A systematic mapping review of links between handling wild meat and zoonotic diseases.

1.Hunting, trade, and consumption of wildlife present a serious threat to global public health as it places humans in close contact with zoonotic pathogens.2.

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on livelihoods and wild meat use in communities surrounding the Dja Faunal Reserve, South-East Cameroon.

The COVID-19 outbreak has had considerable negative impacts on the livelihoods and living conditions of communities around the world. Although the source of COVID-19 is still unknown, a widely spread hypothesis is that the virus could be of animal origin. Wild meat is used by rural communities as a source of income and food, and it has been hypothesised that the pandemic might alter their perceptions and use of wild meat.

The scale of Nigeria's involvement in the trans-national illegal pangolin trade: Temporal and spatial patterns and the effectiveness of wildlife trade regulations.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) prohibits commercial trans-national trade in pangolin specimens. However, African pangolins are continually trafficked to Asia for traditional medicine, with Nigeria considered a key hub. Using reported Nigeria-linked pangolin seizure data and interviews with Nigerian law enforcement officials, we a) characterised Nigeria's involvement in global pangolin trafficking January 2010-September 2021, particularly observing trafficking trends after pangolin's CITES Appendix I listing; b) estimated the minimum number of pangolins whose scales are in Nigeria-linked seizures January 2010-September 2021, and; c) assessed ongoing efforts within Nigeria to curb pangolin trafficking.

Hunting territories and land use overlap in sedentarised Baka Pygmy communities in southeastern Cameroon.

A significant number of Baka Pygmies in Cameroon have been sedentarised in roadside villages, in contrast to their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence of the past. Although this change in lifestyle has had important consequences on health, most Baka villages still supplement their diets from forest products, especially wild meat. We used a combination of participatory methods and monitoring of individual hunters to map hunting territories in 10 Baka villages in southeastern Cameroon.

The life history of human foraging: Cross-cultural and individual variation.

Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters' increases and declines of skill from approximately 23,000 hunting records generated by more than 1800 individuals at 40 locations.

A global-level assessment of the effectiveness of protected areas at resisting anthropogenic pressures.

One-sixth of the global terrestrial surface now falls within protected areas (PAs), making it essential to understand how far they mitigate the increasing pressures on nature which characterize the Anthropocene. In by far the largest analysis of this question to date and not restricted to forested PAs, we compiled data from 12,315 PAs across 152 countries to investigate their ability to reduce human pressure and how this varies with socioeconomic and management circumstances. While many PAs show positive outcomes, strikingly we find that compared with matched unprotected areas, PAs have on average not reduced a compound index of pressure change over the past 15 y.

More than $1 billion needed annually to secure Africa's protected areas with lions.

Protected areas (PAs) play an important role in conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services, yet their effectiveness is undermined by funding shortfalls. Using lions () as a proxy for PA health, we assessed available funding relative to budget requirements for PAs in Africa's savannahs. We compiled a dataset of 2015 funding for 282 state-owned PAs with lions.

Capacity shortfalls hinder the performance of marine protected areas globally.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly being used globally to conserve marine resources. However, whether many MPAs are being effectively and equitably managed, and how MPA management influences substantive outcomes remain unknown. We developed a global database of management and fish population data (433 and 218 MPAs, respectively) to assess: MPA management processes; the effects of MPAs on fish populations; and relationships between management processes and ecological effects.

Measuring impact of protected area management interventions: current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness.

Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world's land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to help measure the conservation impact of PA management interventions is high.

The lion in West Africa is critically endangered.

The African lion has declined to <35,000 individuals occupying 25% of its historic range. The situation is most critical for the geographically isolated populations in West Africa, where the species is considered regionally endangered. Elevating their conservation significance, recent molecular studies establish the genetic distinctiveness of West and Central African lions from other extant African populations.

The effectiveness of contrasting protected areas in preventing deforestation in Madre de Dios, Peru.

Accurate monitoring of the effectiveness of protected areas (PAs) in decreasing deforestation is increasingly important given the vital role of forest protection in climate change mitigation. Recent studies on PA effectiveness have used remote-sensing imagery to compare deforestation rates within PAs to surrounding areas. However, remote-sensing data used in isolation provides limited information on the factors contributing to effectiveness.