Consumer demand for ivory perpetuates the unsustainable and illegal killing of African elephants and other wildlife species. Interventions that aim to change consumer behavior are increasingly recognized as a crucial element of demand management. However, poor design and implementation have limited their effectiveness. We evaluated how ivory demand‐management interventions in China and neighboring Southeast Asian countries ali...

Aim Homogenisation (decreasing beta‐diversity) among biological assemblages is often interpreted as being caused by already‐widespread species increasing. The link between individual species level trends and homogenisation between assemblages, however, has not been fully addressed, with most studies focused solely on either assemblage level or species level changes. Here we aim to test the widely held hypothesis that homogenis...

Connectivity is widely assumed to benefit biodiversity, but this has not been extensively quantified across multiple taxa and landscapes. Focusing on the UK, where woodland cover is low (13%), we analysed species occurrence records from citizen science for over 800 broadleaf woodland‐associated invertebrate species from 15 taxonomic groups in relation to woodland cover and connectivity. Overall, increased woodland connectivity...

Reconstructing historical land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) inevitably involves interpolation across regions for which there is limited data to support reconstructions. Here, we evaluate the extent to which the global land-use model HYDE v3.2.1 reflects historical land use in sub-Saharan Africa (including Madagascar) when compared to archaeological and historical reconstructions. Both the HYDE models and Widgren’s archaeo...

Aim Climate change and habitat loss or degradation are some of the greatest threats that species face today, often resulting in range shifts. Species traits have been discussed as important predictors of range shifts, with the identification of general trends being of great interest to conservation efforts. However, studies reviewing relationships between traits and range shifts have questioned the existence of such generalize...

Aim Humans have altered ecosystem productivity and biodiversity worldwide by changing land‐cover types and management. High local species richness is commonly found in geographic areas and ecosystems with high net primary productivity (NPP), but the long‐term effects of modification on productivity and biodiversity change, and particularly on the relationship between the two, are poorly understood. Here we evaluate whether hum...

Tropical montane ecosystems are highly vulnerable to global climate change, but their species-level conservation vulnerability assessments generally do not incorporate climate threats. The Colombian páramo is a highly diverse montane ecosystem but it contains relatively few species currently identified as threatened on the IUCN Red List. We explore whether current assessments need revising to account for climate change threats...

Aim Rapid advances in technology have created tools able to explore how animals differ in their use of the environment based on behaviour, which can provide insights into the ecology of endangered animals and the threats they face. Though threatened, we know little of vultures' spatial ecology. We examine the external variables that affect vultures' decisions regarding space use, specifically during foraging and feeding when t...

Protected area (PA) networks have in the past been constructed to include all major habitats, but have often been developed through consideration of only a few indicator taxa or across restricted areas, and rarely account for global climate change. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) aims to improve the efficiency of biodiversity conservation, particularly when addressing internationally agreed protection targets. We apply...

Fire is a key driver in savannah systems and widely used as a land management tool. Intensifying human land uses are leading to rapid changes in the fire regimes, with consequences for ecosystem functioning and composition. We undertake a novel analysis describing spatial patterns in the fire regime of the Serengeti‐Mara ecosystem, document multidecadal temporal changes and investigate the factors underlying these patterns. We...

The threat posed to protected areas by the illegal killing of wildlife is countered principally by ranger patrols that aim to detect and deter potential offenders. Deterring poaching is a fundamental conservation objective, but its achievement is difficult to identify, especially when the prime source of information comes in the form of the patrols’ own records, which inevitably contain biases. The most common metric of deterr...

Fire is a fundamental process in savannas and is widely used for management. Pyrodiversity, variation in local fire characteristics, has been proposed as a driver of biodiversity although empirical evidence is equivocal. Using a new measure of pyrodiversity (Hempson et al .), we undertook the first continent‐wide assessment of how pyrodiversity affects biodiversity in protected areas across African savannas. The influence of p...

Climate change vulnerability assessments are commonly used to identify species at risk from global climate change, but the wide range of methodologies available makes it difficult for end users, such as conservation practitioners or policymakers, to decide which method to use as a basis for decision‐making. In this study, we evaluate whether different assessments consistently assign species to the same risk categories and whet...

The extent to which climate change might diminish the efficacy of protected areas is one of the most pressing conservation questions. Many projections suggest that climate‐driven species distribution shifts will leave protected areas impoverished and species inadequately protected while other evidence suggests that intact ecosystems within protected areas will be resilient to change. Here, we tackle this problem empirically. W...

Temperature‐, rainfall‐ and habitat‐driven change in food availability is one likely mechanism by which anthropogenic factors may affect animal population dynamics and species distributions. Long‐distance migratory birds must synchronize their migrations with food availability at locations hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart, so changes in the overall abundance of food or the phenology of peaks in food availability may b...

Ecologists trying to understand the value of habitat to animals must first describe the value of resources contained in the habitat to animals and, second, they must describe spatial variation in resource quality at a resolution relevant to individual animal foraging. We addressed these issues in a study of koalas ( Phascolarctos cinereus ) in a Eucalyptus woodland. We measured beneficial and deterrent chemical characteristics...

Understanding functional relationships within ecological networks can help reveal keys to ecosystem stability or fragility. Revealing these relationships is complicated by the difficulties of isolating variables or performing experimental manipulations within a natural ecosystem, and thus inferences are often made by matching models to observational data. Such models, however, require assumptions—or detailed measurements—of pa...

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 246–264 Abstract Many of the most interesting questions ecologists ask lead to analyses of spatial data. Yet, perhaps confused by the large number of statistical models and fitting methods available, many ecologists seem to believe this is best left to specialists. Here, we describe the issues that need consideration when analysing spatial data and illustrate these using simulation studies. Our compa...

Most attempts to manage disturbance by visitors to nature reserves concentrate on limiting visitor access in some way, which is often unpopular with both visitors and managers. In a few nature reserves the daily numbers of visitors are limited, an action that need not necessarily reduce the total number of visitors. As a test of the assumptions that underlie this management practice, we examined the relationship between daily...