Lessons in resilience from the illegal wildlife trade during COVID-19 lockdowns.

The COVID-19 pandemic was an unexpected event with far-reaching long-term economic, political, and social consequences, entailing disruptive changes with potentially existence- and livelihood threatening consequences. Lessons in resilience from illegal economies such as the illegal wildlife trade could help society better cope with harms and risk from global environmental change. We critically review the Frictions and Flows framework and the case of the illegal wildlife trade-a globally distributed form of nature crime-in South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia-countries with different responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Advancing interdisciplinary science for disrupting wildlife trafficking networks.

Wildlife trafficking, whether local or transnational in scope, undermines sustainable development efforts, degrades cultural resources, endangers species, erodes the local and global economy, and facilitates the spread of zoonotic diseases. Wildlife trafficking networks (WTNs) occupy a unique gray space in supply chains-straddling licit and illicit networks, supporting legitimate and criminal workforces, and often demonstrating high resilience in their sourcing flexibility and adaptability. Authorities in different sectors desire, but frequently lack knowledge about how to allocate resources to disrupt illicit wildlife supply networks and prevent negative collateral impacts.

Old World Vultures Reflect Effects of Environmental Pollutants Through Human Encroachment.

African wildlife face challenges from many stressors including current and emerging contaminants, habitat and resource loss, poaching, intentional and unintentional poisoning, and climate-related environmental change. The plight of African vultures exemplifies these challenges due to environmental contaminants and other stressors acting on individuals and populations that are already threatened or endangered. Many of these threats emanate from increasing human population size and settlement density, habitat loss from changing land use for agriculture, residential areas, and industry, and climate-related changes in resource availability.

Voluntary consensus based geospatial data standards for the global illegal trade in wild fauna and flora.

We have more data about wildlife trafficking than ever before, but it remains underutilized for decision-making. Central to effective wildlife trafficking interventions is collection, aggregation, and analysis of data across a range of source, transit, and destination geographies. Many data are geospatial, but these data cannot be effectively accessed or aggregated without appropriate geospatial data standards.

Using crime script analysis to understand wildlife poaching in Vietnam.

Poaching can contribute to the failure of biodiversity conservation efforts and inflict diverse harms on human livelihoods. We applied crime script analysis to the case of snare poaching-an illegal hunting activity-in three Vietnamese protected areas. Our goal was to enhance the understanding about the opportunity structure underlying snare poaching to advance the suite of community-based crime prevention activities.

Importance of deepening integration of crime and conservation sciences.

Conservation crime is a globally distributed societal problem. Conservation crime science, an emerging interdisciplinary field, has the potential to help address this problem. However, its utility depends on serious reflection on the transposition of crime science approaches to conservation contexts, which may differ in meaningful ways from traditional crime contexts.

Trust in scientists and rates of noncompliance with a fisheries rule in the Brazilian Pantanal.

Natural resource rules exist to control resources and the people that interact with them. These rules often fail because people do not comply with them. Decisions to comply with natural resource rules often are based on attitudes about legitimacy of rules and the perceived risks of breaking rules.

Compliance with ivory trade regulations in the United Kingdom among traders.

Global demand for elephant ivory is contributing to illegal poaching and significant decline of African elephant (Loxondonta africana) populations. To help mitigate decline, countries with legal domestic ivory markets were recommended by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora to close domestic markets for commercial trade. However, implementing stricter regulations on wildlife trade does not necessarily mean compliance with rules will follow.

A conceptual framework for understanding illegal killing of large carnivores.

The growing complexity and global nature of wildlife poaching threaten the survival of many species worldwide and are outpacing conservation efforts. Here, we reviewed proximal and distal factors, both social and ecological, driving illegal killing or poaching of large carnivores at sites where it can potentially occur. Through this review, we developed a conceptual social-ecological system framework that ties together many of the factors influencing large carnivore poaching.

Moral dimensions of human-wildlife conflict.

Despite increasing support for conservation globally, controversy over specific conservation policies persists among diverse stakeholders. Investigating the links between morals in relation to conservation can help increase understanding about why humans support or oppose policy, especially related to human-wildlife conflict or human conflict over wildlife. Yet the moral dimension of human-wildlife conflict has mostly gone unconsidered and unmeasured; thus, policy and programmatic efforts to reduce controversy may be missing a key part of the equation.

Local Perspectives on Environmental Insecurity and Its Influence on Illegal Biodiversity Exploitation.

Environmental insecurity is a source and outcome of biodiversity declines and social conflict. One challenge to scaling insecurity reduction policies is that empirical evidence about local attitudes is overwhelmingly missing. We set three objectives: determine how local people rank risk associated with different sources of environmental insecurity; assess perceptions of environmental insecurity, biodiversity exploitation, myths of nature and risk management preferences; and explore relationships between perceptions and biodiversity exploitation.

Identity-driven differences in stakeholder concerns about hunting wolves.

Whereas past wolf management in the United States was restricted to recovery, managers must now contend with publicly contentious post-recovery issues including regulated hunting seasons. Understanding stakeholder concerns associated with hunting can inform stakeholder engagement, communication, and policy development and evaluation. Social identity theory (SIT) has been used to understand how groups interact, why they conflict, and how collaboration may be achieved.

Wildlife disease and risk perception.

Risk perception has an important influence on wildlife management and is particularly relevant to issues that present health risks, such as those associated with wildlife disease management. Knowledge of risk perceptions is useful to wildlife health professionals in developing communication messages that enhance public understanding of wildlife disease risks and that aim to increase public support for disease management. To promote knowledge of public understanding of disease risks in the context of wildlife disease management, we used a self-administered questionnaire mailed to a stratified random sample (n = 901) across the continental United States to accomplish three objectives: 1) assess zoonotic disease risk perceptions; 2) identify sociodemographic and social psychologic factors underlying these risk perceptions; and 3) examine the relationship between risk perception and agreement with wildlife disease management practices.

Social contagion of risk perceptions in environmental management networks.

An important requisite for improving risk communication practice related to contentious environmental issues is having a better theoretical understanding of how risk perceptions function in real-world social systems. Our study applied Scherer and Cho's social network contagion theory of risk perception (SNCTRP) to cormorant management (a contentious environmental management issue) in the Great Lakes Basin to: (1) assess contagion effects on cormorant-related risk perceptions and individual factors believed to influence those perceptions and (2) explore the extent of social contagion in a full network (consisting of interactions between and among experts and laypeople) and three "isolated" models separating different types of interactions from the full network (i.e.

Poaching risks in community-based natural resource management.

Poaching can disrupt wildlife-management efforts in community-based natural resource management systems. Monitoring, estimating, and acquiring data on poaching is difficult. We used local-stakeholder knowledge and poaching records to rank and map the risk of poaching incidents in 2 areas where natural resources are managed by community members in Caprivi, Namibia.

Australian and U.S. news media portrayal of sharks and their conservation.

Investigation of the social framing of human-shark interactions may provide useful strategies for integrating social, biological, and ecological knowledge into national and international policy discussions about shark conservation. One way to investigate social opinion and forces related to sharks and their conservation is through the media's coverage of sharks. We conducted a content analysis of 300 shark-related articles published in 20 major Australian and U.

Gendered risk perceptions associated with human-wildlife conflict: implications for participatory conservation.

This research aims to foster discourse about the extent to which gender is important to consider within the context of participatory approaches for biological conservation. Our objectives are to: (1) gender-disaggregate data about stakeholders' risk perceptions associated with human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in a participatory conservation context, and (2) highlight insights from characterizing gendered similarities and differences in the way people think about HWC-related risks. Two communal conservancies in Caprivi, Namibia served as case study sites.