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Community-based conservation can support livelihoods and biodiversity, while reinforcing local and Indigenous values, cultures, and institutions. Its delivery can help address cross-cutting global challenges, such as climate change, conservation, poverty, and food security. Therefore, understanding trends in community-based conservation is pertinent to setting and implementing global goals. We undertook a horizon scan to prioritize 15 emerging threats and opportunities expected to impact the future effectiveness of community-based conservation. Topics relate to global biodiversity policy; human rights; shifting human geography; inclusion, diversity, equity, and access; conservation finance and income; and economic reforms. Our findings offer guidance on strengthening community-based conservation to achieve global environmental and development goals., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests None declared by authors., (Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Over 1 million species around the world are at risk of extinction, and conservation organizations have to decide where to invest their limited resources. Cost-effectiveness can be increased by leveraging funding opportunities and increasing collaborative partnerships to achieve shared conservation goals. We devised a structured decision-making framework to prioritize species' conservation programs based on a cost-benefit analysis that takes collaborative opportunities into account in an examination of national and global conservation return on investment. Conservation benefit is determined by modifying the novel International Union for the Conservation of Nature Green Status for Species to provide an efficient, high-level measure that is comparable among species, even with limited information and time constraints. We applied this prioritization approach to the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo, Canada, a nonprofit organization seeking to increase the number of species it assists with conservation translocations. We sought to identify and prioritize additional species' programs for which conservation translocation expertise and actions could make the most impact. Estimating the likelihood of cost-sharing potential enabled total program cost to be distinguished from costs specific to the organization. Comparing a benefit-to-cost ratio on different geographic scales allowed decision makers to weigh alternative options for investing in new species' programs in a transparent and effective manner. Our innovative analysis aligns with general conservation planning frameworks and can be adapted for any organization., (© 2022 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology.)

Global knowledge about the spatial distribution of species is orders of magnitude coarser in resolution than other geographically-structured environmental datasets such as topography or land cover. Yet such knowledge is crucial in deciphering ecological and evolutionary processes and in managing global change. In this review, we propose a conceptual and cyber-infrastructure framework for refining species distributional knowledge that is novel in its ability to mobilize and integrate diverse types of data such that their collective strengths overcome individual weaknesses. The ultimate aim is a public, online, quality-vetted 'Map of Life' that for every species integrates and visualizes available distributional knowledge, while also facilitating user feedback and dynamic biodiversity analyses. First milestones toward such an infrastructure have now been implemented., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Community‐based conservation, which strives to simultaneously improve nature conservation and alleviate poverty, must provide biological and socioeconomic benefits that are linked through effective resilience mechanisms. To date, few community‐based conservation initiatives have published comprehensive assessments that track performance in these elements of success. With 45% of the world's protected areas in comanagement with local communities, standardized measures to effectively evaluate the dual goals of community‐based conservation are needed. We here introduce SPECCS, a user‐friendly Standardized Protocol for Evaluating Community Conservation Success that incorporates an appraisal of data quality to responsibly assess progress over time or to compare effectiveness among different initiatives. We illustrate SPECCS's use by evaluating the Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary (WCHS) of northern Ghana 10 and 20 yr after its inception. The WCHS has the dual objective of protecting one of Ghana's few remaining hippopotamus populations while alleviating poverty in the surrounding communities through the creation of economic opportunity and infrastructure development. Results suggest stable project performance in the 10‐yr (76%) and 20‐yr (76%) evaluation, with an improvement in evaluation quality from 30% to 34%. The project is currently stronger in socioeconomic (performance 86%; quality 30%) than biological (60%; 32%) outcomes and in benefits (83%, 42%) than resilience (63%, 21%). Biological resilience is challenged by poor connectivity and limited project control over threats, whereas socioeconomic resilience is affected by a decision balance that continues to favor external stakeholders. SPECCS helps pinpoint strengths and weaknesses for timely adaptive management, strategic investments, and evidence‐based recognition of community‐based conservation successes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Many indices have been proposed to measure functional diversity and its four distinct dimensions: functional richness, evenness, divergence and redundancy. Identifying indices that reliably measure the functional diversity dimension(s) of interest requires careful testing of how each index responds to species' traits and abundance distributions. In the absence of a convenient simulation tool, tests with artificial data have to date explored only a limited number of scenarios or have altered trait and abundance distributions only indirectly based on principles of evolution and community assembly. We provide simul.comms, an R function that allows users to test the efficacy of functional diversity indices by easily creating artificial species communities with user‐specified abundance and trait distributions for continuous, ordinal and categorical traits. To illustrate the function's utility, we examine the performance of R, a recently published abundance‐sensitive index for functional redundancy. We use two approaches to designing simulation tests for this example analysis. The first uses simul.comms to create six separate sets of artificial communities to qualitatively assess how R responds to predictable changes in functional redundancy. The second uses simul.comms to independently alter seven community composition parameters, whose influence on R is then examined quantitatively via effect sizes in linear regression. Our analyses indicate that R broadly mirrors expected changes in functional redundancy and predictably responds to changes in community composition parameters. R appears, however, to primarily reflect trait distributions, responding minimally to variance in abundance and counter‐intuitively to abundance range. Further refinement of tools to measure functional redundancy may therefore be desirable. The R tool we provide should assist with refining functional diversity measures, a critical step towards improving our ability to understand and mitigate the impacts of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning. Because simul.comms simply produces two linked matrices, a species‐by‐traits matrix and a site‐by‐species abundance matrix, it may be equally valuable in exploring questions and analytical approaches in other areas of community ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translocations, the human-mediated movement and free-release of living organisms, are increasingly used as conservation tools in imperiled terrestrial ecosystems. Marine ecosystems, too, are increasingly threatened, and marine restoration efforts are escalating. But the methods and motivations for marine restoration are varied, so the extent to which they involve conservation-motivated translocations is unclear. Because translocations involve considerable risks, building on previous experience to establish and implement best practice guidelines for policy application is imperative. We conducted a global literature review to determine what marine conservation translocation experience exists. Our review indicates marine conservation translocations are widespread and increasingly common. Reinforcements and reintroductions predominate, but precedent for assisted colonizations and ecological replacements also exists. In 39 years, 487 translocation projects were conducted to conserve over 242 marine species or their ecosystems. Most projects involved coastal invertebrates (44%) or plants (30%). Few species were of conservation concern according to the IUCN Red List, likely reflecting the leading objective for most (60%) marine conservation translocations, which was ecosystem rather than species recovery. With currently no standard metrics for evaluating translocation success or ecosystem function, we recommend future projects follow the relevant IUCN guidelines and identify specific targets to measure the efficacy of translocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Studies exploring the determinants of geographical gradients in the occurrence of species or their traits obtain data by: (1) overlaying species range maps; (2) mapping survey-based species counts; or (3) superimposing models of individual species’ distributions. These data types have different spatial characteristics. We investigated whether these differences influence conclusions regarding postulated determinants of species richness patterns. Location Our study examined terrestrial bird diversity patterns in 13 nations of southern and eastern Africa, spanning temperate to tropical climates. Methods Four species richness maps were compiled based on range maps, field-derived bird atlas data, logistic and autologistic distribution models. Ordinary and spatial regression models served to examine how well each of five hypotheses predicted patterns in each map. These hypotheses propose productivity, temperature, the heat–water balance, habitat heterogeneity and climatic stability as the predominant determinants of species richness. Results The four richness maps portrayed broadly similar geographical patterns but, due to the nature of underlying data types, exhibited marked differences in spatial autocorrelation structure. These differences in spatial structure emerged as important in determining which hypothesis appeared most capable of explaining each map's patterns. This was true even when regressions accounted for spurious effects of spatial autocorrelation. Each richness map, therefore, identified a different hypothesis as the most likely cause of broad-scale gradients in species diversity. Main conclusions Because the ‘true’ spatial structure of species richness patterns remains elusive, firm conclusions regarding their underlying environmental drivers remain difficult. More broadly, our findings suggest that care should be taken to interpret putative determinants of large-scale ecological gradients in light of the type and spatial characteristics of the underlying data. Indeed, closer scrutiny of these underlying data — here the distributions of individual species — and their environmental associations may offer important insights into the ultimate causes of observed broad-scale patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of accelerating biodiversity loss and limited data, species distribution models – which statistically capture and predict species’ occurrences based on environmental correlates – are increasingly used to inform conservation strategies. Additionally, distribution models and their fit provide insights on the broad-scale environmental niche of species. To investigate whether the performance of such models varies with species’ ecological characteristics, we examined distribution models for 1329 bird species in southern and eastern Africa. The models were constructed at two spatial resolutions with both logistic and autologistic regression. Satellite-derived environmental indices served as predictors, and model accuracy was assessed with three metrics: sensitivity, specificity and the area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristics plots. We then determined the relationship between each measure of accuracy and ten ecological species characteristics using generalised linear models. Among the ecological traits tested, species’ range size, migratory status, affinity for wetlands and endemism proved most influential on the performance of distribution models. The number of habitat types frequented (habitat tolerance), trophic rank, body mass, preferred habitat structure and association with sub-resolution habitats also showed some effect. In contrast, conservation status made no significant impact. These findings did not differ from one spatial resolution to the next. Our analyses thus provide conservation scientists and resource managers with a rule of thumb that helps distinguish, on the basis of ecological traits, between species whose occurrence is reliably or less reliably predicted by distribution models. Reasonably accurate distribution models should, however, be attainable for most species, because the influence ecological traits bore on model performance was only limited. These results suggest that none of the ecological traits tested provides an obvious correlate for environmental niche breadth or intra-specific niche differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]