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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Estimating Economic Losses To Tourism In Africa From The Illegal Killing Of Elephants, Robin Naidoo, Brendan Fisher, Andrea Manica, Andrew Balmford
Estimating Economic Losses To Tourism In Africa From The Illegal Killing Of Elephants, Robin Naidoo, Brendan Fisher, Andrea Manica, Andrew Balmford
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications
Recent surveys suggest tens of thousands of elephants are being poached annually across Africa, putting the two species at risk across much of their range. Although the financial motivations for ivory poaching are clear, the economic benefits of elephant conservation are poorly understood. We use Bayesian statistical modelling of tourist visits to protected areas, to quantify the lost economic benefits that poached elephants would have delivered to African countries via tourism. Our results show these figures are substantial (∼USD $25 million annually), and that the lost benefits exceed the anti-poaching costs necessary to stop elephant declines across the continent's savannah …
Disaggregating The Evidence Linking Biodiversity And Ecosystem Services, Taylor H. Ricketts, Keri B. Watson, Insu Koh, Alicia M. Ellis, Charles C. Nicholson, Stephen Posner, Leif L. Richardson, Laura J. Sonter
Disaggregating The Evidence Linking Biodiversity And Ecosystem Services, Taylor H. Ricketts, Keri B. Watson, Insu Koh, Alicia M. Ellis, Charles C. Nicholson, Stephen Posner, Leif L. Richardson, Laura J. Sonter
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications
Ecosystem services (ES) are an increasingly popular policy framework for connecting biodiversity with human well-being. These efforts typically assume that biodiversity and ES covary, but the relationship between them remains remarkably unclear. Here we analyse >500 recent papers and show that reported relationships differ among ES, methods of measuring biodiversity and ES, and three different approaches to linking them (spatial correlations, management comparisons and functional experiments). For spatial correlations, biodiversity relates more strongly to measures of ES supply than to resulting human benefits. For management comparisons, biodiversity of â € service providers' predicts ES more often than biodiversity of functionally …
Opportunities For Biodiversity Gains Under The World's Largest Reforestation Programme, Fangyuan Hua, Xiaoyang Wang, Xinlei Zheng, Brendan Fisher, Lin Wang, Jianguo Zhu, Ya Tang, Douglas W. Yu, David S. Wilcove
Opportunities For Biodiversity Gains Under The World's Largest Reforestation Programme, Fangyuan Hua, Xiaoyang Wang, Xinlei Zheng, Brendan Fisher, Lin Wang, Jianguo Zhu, Ya Tang, Douglas W. Yu, David S. Wilcove
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications
Reforestation is a critical means of addressing the environmental and social problems of deforestation. China's Grain-for-Green Program (GFGP) is the world's largest reforestation scheme. Here we provide the first nationwide assessment of the tree composition of GFGP forests and the first combined ecological and economic study aimed at understanding GFGP's biodiversity implications. Across China, GFGP forests are overwhelmingly monocultures or compositionally simple mixed forests. Focusing on birds and bees in Sichuan Province, we find that GFGP reforestation results in modest gains (via mixed forest) and losses (via monocultures) of bird diversity, along with major losses of bee diversity. Moreover, all …
Spatial And Temporal Dynamics And Value Of Nature-Based Recreation, Estimated Via Social Media, Laura J. Sonter, Keri B. Watson, Spencer A. Wood, Taylor H. Ricketts
Spatial And Temporal Dynamics And Value Of Nature-Based Recreation, Estimated Via Social Media, Laura J. Sonter, Keri B. Watson, Spencer A. Wood, Taylor H. Ricketts
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications
Conserved lands provide multiple ecosystem services, including opportunities for naturebased recreation. Managing this service requires understanding the landscape attributes underpinning its provision, and how changes in land management affect its contribution to human wellbeing over time. However, evidence from both spatially explicit and temporally dynamic analyses is scarce, often due to data limitations. In this study, we investigated nature-based recreation within conserved lands in Vermont, USA.We used geotagged photographs uploaded to the photo-sharingwebsite Flickr to quantify visits by in-state and outof- state visitors, and we multiplied visits by mean trip expenditures to show that conserved lands contributed US $1.8 billion …
Do Insect Outbreaks Reduce The Severity Of Subsequent Forest Fires?, Garrett W. Meigs, Harold S.J. Zald, John L. Campbell, William S. Keeton, Robert E. Kennedy
Do Insect Outbreaks Reduce The Severity Of Subsequent Forest Fires?, Garrett W. Meigs, Harold S.J. Zald, John L. Campbell, William S. Keeton, Robert E. Kennedy
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications
Understanding the causes and consequences of rapid environmental change is an essential scientific frontier, particularly given the threat of climate- and land use-induced changes in disturbance regimes. In western North America, recent widespread insect outbreaks and wildfires have sparked acute concerns about potential insect-fire interactions. Although previous research shows that insect activity typically does not increase wildfire likelihood, key uncertainties remain regarding insect effects on wildfire severity (i.e., ecological impact). Recent assessments indicate that outbreak severity and burn severity are not strongly associated, but these studies have been limited to specific insect or fire events. Here, we present a regional …
The Geography Of Gender Inequality, Brendan Fisher, Robin Naidoo
The Geography Of Gender Inequality, Brendan Fisher, Robin Naidoo
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications
Reducing gender inequality is a major policy concern worldwide, and one of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, our understanding of the magnitude and spatial distribution of gender inequality results either from limited-scale case studies or from national-level statistics. Here, we produce the first high resolution map of gender inequality by analyzing over 689,000 households in 47 countries. Across these countries, we find that male-headed households have, on average, 13% more asset wealth and 303% more land for agriculture than do female-headed households. However, this aggregate global result masks a high degree of spatial heterogeneity, with bands of both high inequality …
The Moral Basis For Conservation - Reflections On Dickman Et Al., Douglas Sheil, Jane Cohen, Carol J.Pierce Colfer, David Price, Rajindra Puri, Manuel Ruiz-Perez, Yulia Sugandi, Paul Vedeld, Eva Wollenberg, Yurdi Yasmi
The Moral Basis For Conservation - Reflections On Dickman Et Al., Douglas Sheil, Jane Cohen, Carol J.Pierce Colfer, David Price, Rajindra Puri, Manuel Ruiz-Perez, Yulia Sugandi, Paul Vedeld, Eva Wollenberg, Yurdi Yasmi
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.