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Abstract High white-tailed deer abundance in the United States represents an ecological and human health threat. Reducing deer populations by lethal means and facilitating return of large predators are two potential, but controversial, management options. We used an online questionnaire to measure perspectives on deer management and predator return among a stratified sample of New York State residents. We found widespread acceptance (> 70%) for reducing deer populations using lethal means if doing so would reduce Lyme disease, increase forest regeneration, protect native plants and animals, and improve road safety. Acceptance for shooting more deer was unaffected by ethnicity but strongest among respondents who were older, identified as hunters or conservationists, owned more land, and considered health and safety while answering our questionnaire. Respondents who identified as animal protectionists were least accepting. Restoring regionally extirpated wolves and cougars had limited acceptance (

Abstract Public policy addressing biodiversity loss is most likely to be effective when it is informed by appropriate evidence and considers potential unintended consequences. We evaluate key evidence relating to the Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill that was discussed in the UK Parliament between 2022 and 2024. We characterize the UK's role in international hunting trophy trade by analyzing CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) trade data for 2000–2021 and 2015–2021. For CITES‐listed species imported to/exported from the UK as hunting trophies in these periods we use data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species to determine whether hunting designated as “trophy hunting” is (i) likely a major threat contributing to species being of elevated conservation concern, (ii) likely or possibly causing localized declines, or (iii) not a threat. We then use the Red List to determine whether such hunting provides, or potentially provides, benefits for species and/or people. Finally, we evaluate the UK Government's impact assessment of the bill. In 2000–2021 an estimated 3494 hunting trophies from 73 CITES‐listed species and subspecies were exported to the UK involving an estimated 2549 whole organism equivalents (WOEs), that is, individual animals. Imports involved 158.86 ± 66.53 (mean ± SD) trophies/year (115.83 ± 32.27 WOEs/year). In 2015–2021, 79% of imports were from countries where populations of the hunted species are stable, increasing, or abundant. Legal hunting for trophies is not a major threat to any of the species or subspecies imported to the UK, but likely or possibly represents a local threat to some populations of eight species. This hunting does, or could potentially, benefit 20 species and subspecies, and people. Among other concerns, the impact assessment failed to adequately consider the costs and benefits to local communities in countries where such hunting occurs. Informed by these analyses we discuss alternative regulatory options.

Forests in the United States continue to lose biodiversity and many fail to regenerate due to high deer (family Cervidae) abundance. Declines in biodiversity and overall ecosystem health due to high deer populations increases prevalence of wildlife and human diseases associated with increasing tick abundances and decreases forest resilience and the ability to deliver benefits provided by healthy ecosystems. In the eastern and midwestern United States, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are the main stressor, while in the western U.S. elk (Cervus elaphus) and black-tailed and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) can become equally problematic. Federal and State Wildlife Agencies are responsible for environmental stewardship and management of deer, migratory and endangered species, yet they lack authority to address human health concerns or commercial interests (we acknowledge tribal authority to manage wildlife as an important contributor to conservation). Furthermore, State Wildlife Agencies have retained their traditional focus to manage wildlife for recreational hunters while neglecting their obligations to manage wildlife in the interest of all citizens rather than special interest groups. Fragmented institutional arrangements and widely scattered responsibilities for human health, environmental conservation and management, agriculture, and commerce among tribal, federal, and state agencies have allowed deer impacts to grow into nationwide conservation and human health crises. Given that local, regional, and state-level initiatives have failed to provide appropriate remedies, federal leadership is now essential to integrate concerns among disciplines, policy domains, regions, habitats, and biota. We recommend developing a National Strategy to build strong collaborative efforts and diverse and inclusive relationships across environmental, human health and economic interests. These should reach beyond state boundaries to comprehensively address interrelated deer, human health, forest, and conservation crises. A well-coordinated and collaborative approach has the potential to overcome traditional turf battles between tribal, state, and federal interests by recognizing joint responsibilities and obligations to manage wildlife as a public trust resource. This collective approach can protect species before they become endangered, avoiding further declines in environmental and human health.

While telemetry technology has undoubtedly revolutionized ecological research, the impacts to conservation remain in question. Conservation is, after all, an applied discipline with research that is intentionally designed to inform policies and practices that can demonstrably protect biodiversity. Though telemetry is a tool that is commonly used to raise conservation funding, the technology itself cannot generate these policies and practices. Rather, it is the outputs of the analytical processes interrogating the data deriving from telemetry systems that can do so. This distinction is not semantic but rather fundamental to creating more actionable research. We developed conceptual frameworks to delineate the pathways by which telemetry research can be structured to inform conservation policies, practices, and the decisions of funders motivated to support conservation. We demonstrate how the application of these frameworks can reduce the research-implementation gap so as to make biodiversity conservation more effective. While our assessment uses collaring as a case study, our conceptual frameworks are applicable to all research using animal-borne technology seeking to promote the recovery of species of conservation concern.

Conservation ethics (i.e. moral concern for non-human organisms) are widespread, but we lack a comprehensive explanation for why people care about other species at all, and why they express strong moral concern for some species but not others. Recent theory suggests that conservation ethics might be rooted in cooperation between humans and members of other species. Building on central predictions of this eco-evolutionary theory, we conducted an online study (N = 651) and exploratory factor analysis to develop two scales that independently measure perceived fitness interdependence (PFI) and conservation ethics. The PFI scale measures perceived shared fate as a proximate indicator of human fitness interdependence with non-human organisms (i.e. the degree to which humans and other organisms influence each other's evolutionary success, that is, survival and reproduction). We designed the conservation ethics scale to measure moral beliefs and attitudes regarding those organisms. Both scales are composed of two factors and demonstrate good internal reliability. By combining insights from various branches of the evolutionary human sciences, including evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology and human behavioural ecology, we offer empirical tools to investigate eco-evolutionary foundations of conservation ethics and behaviour.

Hunting is an increasingly contentious topic. Trophy hunting, whereby people hunt individual animals with desirable characteristics in order to keep body parts (e.g. horns, heads, hides, antlers) as mementos, is especially contested. Political pressure, often in the form of trophy import bans, is being applied in multiple nations, and campaigns to ban trophy hunting, or trophy imports, attract considerable media attention. However, trophy hunting often has conservation value, acting to protect habitat and provide income for local communities. Assuming that media coverage can influence public and political opinion, negative or simplistic media coverage of trophy hunting has the potential to cause adverse outcomes for conservation and local communities. Here, we analyse coverage of trophy hunting from July 2010 - June 2020 (five years before and five years after the death of Cecil the Lion) in the most popular UK media outlets (624 articles in total), assessing the overall sentiment of each article, and the species and countries covered. Ninety percent of all coverage occurred after the death of Cecil the lion, marking this event as a watershed moment in UK mainstream media depiction of trophy hunting. The overall sentiment of articles was largely against trophy hunting (63.1%), and this was more pronounced in tabloids (84.2%) than broadsheets (42.2%). Pro-trophy hunting articles were very uncommon overall (3.5%). Articles that described the complexity of trophy hunting decreased following Cecil and were most common in pre-Cecil broadsheets (35.7%, dropping to 30.6%) and rarest in post-Cecil tabloids (3.1%). Articles focussed mainly on charismatic but rarely hunted species including lion, elephant and rhino, with commonly hunted species (such as impala or Cape buffalo) only rarely being mentioned. When countries were mentioned, southern African nations predominated, with four nations (Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Botswana) being named in 68% of qualifying articles. We conclude that simplistic media depiction of trophy hunting has the potential to cause negative outcomes for conservation through its impact on public perception and political opinion.

Large predators are thought of as ecological keystone species, posterchildren of conservation campaigns, and sought-after targets of tourists and photographers. At the same time, predators kill livestock and huntable animals, and occasionally people, triggering fears and antipathy among those living alongside them. Until the 1960’s government-sponsored eradication and persecution campaigns in the United States prioritized interests of livestock producers and recreational hunters, leading to eradication of wolves and bears over much of their range. Without large predators, subsidized by changes in agricultural practices and milder winters, ungulate populations erupted, triggering negative ecological impacts, economic damage, and human health crises (such as tick-borne diseases). Shifting societal preferences have ushered in more predator-friendly, but controversial wildlife policies, from passively allowing range expansion to purposeful reintroductions (such as release of wolves in Yellowstone National Park). Attempts to restore wolves or mountain lions in the U.S. and protecting coyotes appear to enjoy strong public support, but many state wildlife agencies charged with managing wildlife, and recreational hunters continue to oppose such efforts, because they perceive predators as competitors for huntable animals. There may be compelling reasons for restoring predators or allowing them to recolonize their former ranges. But if range expansion or intentional releases of large predators do not result in ecosystem recovery, reduced deer populations, or Lyme disease reductions, conservationists who have put their reputation on the line and assured decision makers and the public of the important functional role of large predators may lose public standing and trust. Exaggerated predictions by ranchers and recreational hunters of greatly reduced ungulate populations and rampant livestock killing by large carnivores may lead to poaching and illegal killing threatening recovery of predator populations. How the return of large carnivores may affect vegetation and successional change, ungulate population size, other biota, livestock and human attitudes in different landscapes has not been appropriately assessed. Societal support and acceptance of living alongside predators as they expand their range and increase in abundance requires development and monitoring of social, ecological and economic indicators to assess how return of large predators affects human and animal and plant livelihoods.

In Scotland, large deer populations are associated with negative ecological and socioeconomic impacts, such as damage to peatlands and forests, agricultural and commercial forestry losses, Lyme disease transmission, and road accidents. Increasing the annual deer cull might help address these negative impacts, but could be ethically controversial. A stratified sample of adults living in Scotland (n = 1,002) responded to our online questionnaire measuring perceptions of deer management, including the acceptability of increasing the deer cull if doing so would help achieve a variety of ecological and social objectives. Overall, respondents indicated that it would be acceptable to increase the deer cull if doing so would serve public interests by reducing negative impacts of deer, with deer welfare, environmental conservation, and public health and safety being the most relevant ethical considerations. Although rural and urban respondents reported significantly different experiences and perceptions of deer, their values (i.e., attitudes, beliefs, and policy preferences) regarding deer management were very similar. Understanding values of the general public, beyond vocal interest groups, can help inform decisions on contentious wildlife management issues.

What would successful deer management look like in Scotland? To some, flourishing populations of native wild deer represent success. But to others, negative impacts such as damage to woodlands and peatlands, agricultural and forestry losses, deer-vehicle collisions, and facilitating Lyme disease spread represent failure. Conflicting interests and incentives among people involved in deer management mean a common definition of success, and therefore clear management targets, remain elusive. While some environmental groups urgently call for an increase in the number of deer culled (shot) each year, other stakeholders aim to maximize deer numbers. Overcoming this governance failure will require clearly articulated, scientifically valid, and socially acceptable socio-ecological objectives to be co-produced by a broad range of stakeholders. Systematic monitoring of deer impacts will also be needed to evaluate the ability of specific management interventions to achieve defined objectives. Reintroducing Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) has been suggested as a means to reduce deer numbers and their negative ecological and socioeconomic impacts. However, evidence of lynx impacts on deer numbers, deer impacts, and social conflicts over deer suggest lynx reintroduction alone would not effectively reduce negative impacts of deer in Scotland, though it could be part of a broader solution. In the short-term, achieving sustainable numbers of deer in Scotland will require a substantial increase in the number of deer culled and effective changes to the way deer management is incentivized, regulated, implemented, and monitored.

Public wildlife management in the United States is transforming as agencies seek relevancy to broader constituencies. State agencies in the United States, while tasked with conserving wildlife for all beneficiaries of the wildlife trust, have tended to manage for a limited range of benefits in part due to a narrow funding model heavily dependent on hunting, fishing, and trapping license buyers. To best meet the needs, interests, and concerns of a broader suite of beneficiaries, agencies will need to reconsider how priorities for management are set. This presents an opportunity for conservation program design and evaluation to be elevated in importance. We argue that success in wildlife conservation in the U.S. requires assessment of both decision-making processes and management results in relation to four questions: conservation of what, under what authority, for what purposes, and for whom?

Abstract The world faces serious environmental problems. To solve them we must work together. Fortunately, humans are a very cooperative species. We have faced a range of cooperative problems in the past, and have evolved and invented a range of cooperative solutions to them—kin altruism, mutualism, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness, and property rights. Here, we illustrate how each of these solutions can be pressed into the service of conservation goals. Unlocking this potential will require overcoming conservationists' current cycloptic focus on only one type of cooperative problem (the prisoner's dilemma) and one type of solution (reciprocity). Only then will policy makers be able draw on the full range of cooperative dispositions and design more systematic and effective environmental interventions.

The theory of evolution by natural selection can help explain why people care about other species. Building upon recent insights that morality evolves to secure fitness advantages of cooperation, we propose that conservation ethics (moral beliefs, attitudes, intuitions and norms regarding other species) could be adaptations that support cooperation between humans and non-humans. We present eco-evolutionary cost–benefit models of conservation behaviours as interspecific cooperation (altruism towards members of other species). We find that an evolutionary rule identical in structure to Hamilton's rule (which explains altruistic behaviour towards related conspecifics) can explain altruistic behaviour towards members of other species. Natural selection will favour traits for selectively altering the success of members of other species (e.g. conserving them) in ways that maximize inclusive fitness return benefits. Conservation behaviours and the ethics that evolve to reinforce them will be sensitive to local ecological and socio-cultural conditions, so will assume different contours in different places. Difficulties accurately assessing costs and benefits provided by other species, time required to adapt to ecological and socio-cultural change and barriers to collective action could explain the apparent contradiction between the widespread existence of conservation ethics and patterns of biodiversity decline globally.

This article provides an overview of the key issues pertaining to international research and multicentre studies, with particular emphasis to international biomedical research in the developing world. The article begins with a brief explanation of the regulations governing international biomedical research and an exposition of the debate surrounding the standards of care that should be provided by research conducted in the developing and developed countries. The article describes the issues involved in the participation of vulnerable groups in research, with specific reference to developing countries. Eventually, the article considers matters related to emergency and post-trial care, exploitation, reward and undue inducement, voluntariness and benefits to local communities.