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Finding new pathways for reconciling socioeconomic well-being and nature sustainability is critically important for contemporary societies, especially in tropical developing countries where sustaining local livelihoods often clashes with biodiversity conservation. Many projects aimed at reconciling the goals of biodiversity conservation and social aspirations within protected areas (PAs) have failed on one or both counts. Here, we investigate the social consequences of living either inside or outside sustainable-use PAs in the Brazilian Amazon, using data from more than 100 local communities along a 2,000-km section of a major Amazonian river. The PAs in this region are now widely viewed as conservation triumphs, having implemented community comanagement of fisheries and recovery of overexploited wildlife populations. We document clear differences in social welfare in communities inside and outside PAs. Specifically, communities inside PAs enjoy better access to health care, education, electricity, basic sanitation, and communication infrastructure.Moreover, living within a PA was the strongest predictor of household wealth, followed by cash-transfer programs and the number of people per household. These collective cobenefits clearly influence life satisfaction, with only 5%of all adult residents inside PAs aspiring tomove to urban centers, compared with 58% of adults in unprotected areas. Our results clearly demonstrate that large-scale “win–win” conservation solutions are possible in tropical countries with limited financial and human resources and reinforce the need to genuinely empower local people in integrated conservation-development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populations of migratory waterbirds are facing dramatic declines worldwide due to illegal hunting, habitat loss and climate change. Conservation strategies to reverse these trends are imperative, especially in tropical developing countries, which almost invariably allocate insufficient levels of investment for environmental protection. Here, we compared the effectiveness of sustainable-use Protected Areas (PAs) and Community-based Conservation (CBC) arrangements for the conservation of migratory waterbirds that breed on seasonal riverine sandy beaches in Brazilian Amazonia. We modeled local population responses of four migratory waterbird species on 155 beaches along a ~1,600 km section of a major tributary of the Amazon, as a function of community enforcement, official protection status, human pressure and landscape features. We show that 21 community-protected beaches within the study area host more than 80% of all sampled birds. Black Skimmers showed the most dramatic response, with breeding numbers 135-fold larger in CBC arrangements compared to beaches with no official protection status. The same pattern was observed for nesting Large-Billed and Yellow-Billed Terns. For the Near Threatened Orinoco Goose, PA status was the strongest predictor of local population size. These dramatic results demonstrate the value of protected refugia, achieved through the concerted action of participating local communities, to support breeding populations of key waterbird species. This highly-effective and low-cost conservation model can potentially be replicated in other regions of the developing world experiencing increasingly intensive exploitation of riverine natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involving communities in sustainable wildlife management in tropical forests can ensure food security and livelihoods of millions of forest dwellers that depend on wild meat, and also safeguard hunted species. Mathematical models have been developed to assess hunting sustainability; but these require empirical information on reproductive parameters of the prey species, often challenging to obtain.Here, we suggest that if local people can accurately identify the reproductive status of hunted animals in the field, these data could fill the existing knowledge gap regarding species' life‐history traits and enable better assessments of hunting impacts.We first tested whether local people in 15 rural communities in three Amazonian sites could accurately diagnose, before and after training, the pregnancy status of hunted pacas Cuniculus paca, which we use as our model. We then applied the results from these tests to correct reproductive status data of hunted specimens, voluntarily collected over 17 years (2002–2018) as part of a citizen-science project in one of our study sites. We ran generalized additive models to contrast these corrected reproductive rates with those obtained from the direct analysis of genitalia by researchers, and with indices describing game extraction levels (catch‐per‐unit‐effort, CPUE, and age structure of hunted individuals).Before training, interviewees correctly diagnosed pregnancy in 72.5% of tests, but after training, interviewees accurately diagnosed pregnancy in 88.2% of tests, with high improvements especially for earlier pregnancy stages. Monthly pregnancy rates determined by hunters and by researchers were similar. Reported annual pregnancy rates were negatively correlated with CPUE, and positively correlated with the percentage of immatures in the hunted population, in accordance with an expected density‐dependent response to variations in hunting levels.Synthesis and applications. We show that the voluntary diagnosis of game species' reproductive status by local people is a feasible method to obtain accurate life‐history parameters for hunted tropical species, and to assess hunting effects on game populations. Given that almost half of the protected areas in the world are co‐managed by local people, our results confirm the potential of integrating local communities in citizen-science initiatives to ensure faster, low‐cost and more accurate data collection for wildlife management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected areas (PAs) are the main spatial policy instrument for conserving biodiversity and have expanded dramatically in the last 30 years. This expansion has not been matched by a corresponding increase in financial investment, leaving many areas without sufficient resources for essential management actions. Moreover, in some parts of the world politicians and policy-makers are increasingly viewing PAs as an 'opportunity costs' that are holding back economic and social development. A major contributor to this perspective is that PAs are consistently undervalued, with the multiple benefits that they provide to society frequently obscured by the focus on their core missions to conserve biodiversity, protect rare species and sustain vital ecosystem processes and services. The recently proposed 'Protected Area Asset Framework' (PAAF) was designed to address these twin challenges (funding shortfalls and negative perceptions) by: i) revealing and highlighting the multiple values (tangible and intangible) that PAs generate for society, and; ii) leveraging the value-generating characteristics (assets) of PAs to attract inward investments. Here, we argue that, going forward, assets-based approaches will be essential for recapitalizing and safeguarding PAs, especially in developing countries. We conclude by proposing a protocol for implementing and monitoring the PAAF. • Protected areas (PAs) generate diverse values for society, but are frequently undervalued making them vulnerable to development pressures. • An assets-based approach can reveal the hidden value of PAs in a way that is easy to communicate to managers, citizens, policy-makers and investors. • PAs assets and associated 'value generating practices' (VGPs) are simple to identify and map. • The PAs asset framework (PAAF) aligns well with other valuation systems and easily translates into actionable management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are benefits that people receive from ecosystems, for example, through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, recreation, and aesthetic experiences. These are important contributors to human well-being, but are challenging to measure due to their intangible nature and because they may vary spatially depending on ecosystem condition and restrictions on use. Here, we employ a big data methodology to identify CES over a large scale case study with the purpose of providing insights for marine and coastal management. First, we used machine learning to identify features present in 21,789 Flickr photographs taken across approximately 8,500 km of the Brazilian coastline. Then, we associated the keywords describing the identified features with broad CES categories allowing us to identify and map the geographical distribution of cultural services. We found that CES related to aesthetic experiences were more represented in photographs taken in protected areas, while other forms of cultural value (e.g. sport recreation, social recreation) were more frequent in unprotected areas. Notwithstanding the unavoidable biases in favour of certain CES representations, our results illustrate diverse forms of cultural services generated by the Brazilian coast. While there was a generally higher provision of CES per user in protected areas reflecting their enhanced potential to support tourism and other CES-related activities, the image classification algorithm was not able to identify CES which are less dependent on the biophysical domain such as spiritual values, inspiration, education and arts. We believe that our approach can be applied at broader scales (continental and global) in order to uncover cultural services in multiple environments while strongly recommending integration with social science based methodologies and expertise. We further advocate for the employment of such automatic evaluation at local scale as a tool to complement other approaches in support of protected area management, including resource allocation and investments to potentialize CES (i.e. recreational infrastructure, wildlife observation posts) or other relevant ecosystem services. [Display omitted] • Coastal zones are important and threatened ecosystems. • We employed photo content analysis to unveil coastal cultural ecosystem services. • Protected areas had higher counts and richness of cultural services. • Our results highlight the cultural value of Brazilian coastline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When effectively managed, Protected Areas (PAs) are capable of generating multiple forms of value, both tangible and intangible, for individuals and institutions. However, the value-generating potential of many PAs may be going unrecognized and underutilized due to a limited view of management objectives as codified within the parks' Management Plan. Here, we test the hypothesis that PAs are undervalued by evaluating the degree to which Management Plans from four different Brazilian designations (National Parks, Ecological Stations, Environmental Protected Areas and National Forests) recognize different categories of nature-related assets (entities, attributes and relationships that can be protected, managed and/or invested in to generate forms of value). Based on a recently proposed PA Asset Framework, we identify what assets are mentioned by Management Plans and what assets are under-represented. Our results indicate that Human and Cultural assets are the least represented of the major asset classes (Biophysical, Human, Infrastructural, Institutional and Cultural) and that many asset sub-categories that should reasonably be expected to be present in Management Plans are frequently not mentioned. Assets that are not being considered in Management Plans are, by extension, less likely to be managed and/or invested in. Given the strong similarities between PA Management Plans in different countries, these results probably reflect a general trend. A simple way to ensure that PAs maximize the value generating potential (within the context of their designation) would be to survey their assets and generate a 'PA Asset Management and Investment Plan' to supplement and support existing planning documentation. • Key natural assets are undervalued in Brazilian Management Plans. • Recognizing key assets can be a way to strengthen the management of Protected Areas. • Human and cultural assets are relatively less represented in Management Plans. • The absence of assets indicating that potential values are may be being overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]