Anthropogenic habitat transformation has led to population declines and increasing isolation of populations of many species, particularly top predators, where small and fragmented populations often experience limited dispersal and reduced genetic diversity. Jaguars ( Panthera onca ), for example, have lost half of their historical range and most populations outside the Amazon biome are small, isolated and highly threatened. He...

Tourism and hunting both generate substantial revenues for communities and private operators in Africa, but few studies have quantitatively examined the trade‐offs and synergies that may result from these two activities. We evaluated financial and in‐kind benefit streams from tourism and hunting on 77 communal conservancies in Namibia from 1998 to 2013, where community‐based wildlife conservation has been promoted as a land‐us...

We propose the wildlife premium mechanism as an innovation to conserve endangered large vertebrates. The performance‐based payment scheme would allow stakeholders in lower‐income countries to generate revenue by recovering and maintaining threatened fauna that can also serve as umbrella species (i.e., species whose protection benefits other species with which they co‐occur). There are 3 possible options for applying the premiu...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a popular conservation strategy, but their impacts on human welfare are poorly understood . To inform future research and policy decisions, we reviewed the scientific literature to assess MPA impacts on five indicators of human welfare: food security, resource rights, employment, community organization, and income . Following MPA establishment, food security generally remained stable or increa...

Aim Twelve per cent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is covered by protected areas, but neither these areas nor the biodiversity they contain are evenly distributed spatially. To guide future establishment of protected areas, it is important to understand the factors that have shaped the spatial arrangement of the current protected area system. We used an information‐theoretic approach to assess the ability of vertebrate bio...

Conservation scientists recognize the urgency of incorporating opportunity costs into conservation planning. Despite this, applications to date have been limited, perhaps partly because of the difficulty in determining costs in regions with limited data on land prices and ownership. We present methods for estimating opportunity costs of land preservation in landscapes or ecoregions that are a changing mix of agriculture and na...

We used data from over 100 countries to investigate the link between numbers of threatened species and per‐capita gross national product. We corrected for factors that might otherwise confound such a relationship. Our study was motivated by the continuing debate over the relationship between environmental degradation and per‐capita income. Proponents of the environmental Kuznets‐curve hypothesis argue that although environment...

We investigated the effect of gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar L.) larval abundance on annual radial growth of preferred, intermediate, and avoided host trees: northern red oak (Quercus rubra L.), sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.), and white ash (Fraxinus americana L.), respectively. Individual trees were surveyed for gypsy moth larvae from 1979 to 1992 in a chronically infested forest on a drought-prone site in southwestern Qué...