Conservation Biology最新文献

{"title":"Assessment of demographic sustainability of Comanthera elegans under traditional management in the Brazilian savanna","authors":"Thiago da Silva Novato,&nbsp;Ulysses Paulino de Albuquerque,&nbsp;Juliana Loureiro de Almeida Campos,&nbsp;Gustavo Taboada Soldati","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Nontimber forest product (NTFP) agroextractivism plays a critical role in the livelihoods of billions and offers the potential to balance sustainable development with biodiversity conservation. However, its sustainability depends on analyzing species' vital rates and local management practices because extraction can contribute to their conservation or deplete NTFP populations and ecosystems. We integrated demographic and ethnobiological approaches to evaluate how traditional management affects the population dynamics of <i>Comanthera elegans</i> L. R. Parra &amp; Giul, a Brazilian endemic herb considered at risk of extinction due to harvesting pressures. Over 3 years, we conducted a demographic experiment with 28,441 individuals in the Sempre-Vivas National Park to examine the effect of the traditional harvest and management practices of the Sempre-Vivas Flower Pickers on the species' vital rates. We used six treatments, including variations in traditional harvest times (early or late), traditional use of fire, and control conditions. Fecundity rates, population growth, seedling and adult mortality, and flowering were monitored across 120 plots. Early harvests decreased fecundity and population growth due to reduced seed viability, whereas late harvests combined with fire increased flowering and population growth rates. Fire improved soil conditions by enhancing pH and potassium levels. The improved soil conditions lowered seedling mortality and increased population resilience. These results suggest that traditional fire and harvest management practices contribute to the long-term sustainability of <i>C. elegans</i> populations. We propose that national conservation policies decriminalize these practices because they support sustainable resource use thus enhancing biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods. Our results underscore the need to integrate traditional ecological knowledge into the management and conservation of NTFPs in the Brazilian savanna.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forest citizens and people-centered conservation in the Brazilian Amazon","authors":"Luke Parry,&nbsp;Thiago F. Morello,&nbsp;James A. Fraser,&nbsp;Natalia Guerrero,&nbsp;Gabriela S. Lotta,&nbsp;Rodrigo C. Martins,&nbsp;Peter Newton,&nbsp;Jessica C. Pires Cardoso,&nbsp;Andreza A. Souza Santos,&nbsp;Mauricio Torres","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70031","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Demands for territorial recognition are foundational to the claiming of rights by forest-proximate people who attempt to conserve their forests. The rights of these often-marginalized populations have been largely overlooked by conservationists, yet they are central to achieving people-centered conservation. We further developed the concept of forest citizenship as a normative framework and analytical tool based on Brazilian social environmentalism (<i>socioambientalismo</i>), <i>florestania</i> (a former political project in Acre state), Latin American scholarship on ecological citizenship, and Eurocentric political philosophy. Decades of struggle for territorial recognition and social inclusion have solidified the right to have rights for Amazonia's forest citizens. Hence, forest citizens are people who have become so through the sociopolitical dynamics of their rights claims. Forest citizenship is built on community mobilization to create legally recognized territories with participatory governance but becomes tangible only if individuals and communities can successfully claim other rights from institutions through everyday practices of citizenship. We also assessed the current number and distribution of forest citizens across Brazilian Amazonia based on gridded population data and spatial analyses to calculate the resident population in four territorial categories that meet these democratic preconditions: Indigenous lands, extractive reserves, sustainable development reserves, ecological settlement projects, and Afro-descendent <i>Quilombola</i> territories. The territories covered 31% of the Legal Amazon, were home to 1.05 million forest citizens, and had diverse primary policy objectives but shared goals of empowering communities and conserving forests. To be emancipatory, forest citizenship must be bottom-up, socially inclusive, and improve people's lives. We suggest that conservationists pay greater attention to power relations and decision-making structures related to forest territories. Territory-based forest citizenship may be relevant for other countries where environmentalism has intersected with struggles for land rights and democracy.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cobi.70031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Socioenvironmental impacts of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant as revealed by Indigenous and ribeirinho monitoring","authors":"Josiel Jacinto Pereira Juruna,&nbsp;Raimundo da Cruz e Silva,&nbsp;Orcylene Barbosa dos Reis,&nbsp;Amildon Moura Assunção,&nbsp;Anderson Sampaio da Silva,&nbsp;Helio Bezerra da Silva,&nbsp;Jailson Jacinto Pereira Juruna,&nbsp;Josimary Abreu Nunes,&nbsp;Micaele Souza Santos Kleme,&nbsp;Paulo Passos Ferreira,&nbsp;Ronald Txakui Viana da Silva Juruna,&nbsp;Rosilene Sousa dos Santos,&nbsp;Sara Rodrigues Lima,&nbsp;Sebastião Bezerra Lima,&nbsp;Tarukawa Juruna da Cruz Pereira,&nbsp;Adriano Quaresma,&nbsp;Alexya Cunha de Queiroz,&nbsp;André Oliveira Sawakuchi,&nbsp;Camila Cherem Ribas,&nbsp;Camila Duarte Ritter,&nbsp;Cristiane Costa Carneiro,&nbsp;Eder Mileno Silva De Paula,&nbsp;Gabriela Zuquim,&nbsp;Helena Palmquist,&nbsp;Ingo Wahnfried,&nbsp;Jandessa Silva de Jesus,&nbsp;Janice Muriel-Cunha,&nbsp;Jansen Zuanon,&nbsp;Juarez Carlos Brito Pezzuti,&nbsp;Marksuel Sandro Silva de Medeiros,&nbsp;Priscila F. M. Lopes,&nbsp;Thais Regina Mantovanelli","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Hydroelectric dams, once seen as clean and renewable energy sources, have been the subject of extensive research, particularly concerning their socioenvironmental impacts. The Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant (HPP) relies on the operation of 2 dams that divert water from a 130-km stretch of the Xingu River to generate energy. The dam has disrupted the seasonal flooding cycle (flood pulse) along the Volta Grande do Xingu (VGX) and created a reduced discharge condition analogous to a prolonged and extreme dry season in the watershed. Before the Belo Monte HPP, local communities relied on the highly diverse and abundant fish assemblage supported by seasonal flooding of the ecosystem. Local VGX residents sought partnerships and established the Independent Territorial Environmental Monitoring Program (MATI-VGX). Through this program, locals monitored fish spawning sites and fishing dynamics. This monitoring complemented and quantified local communities’ perceptions about the environmental impacts caused by the Belo Monte HPP. The HPP was associated with a water discharge shortage that critically undermined the river's capacity to sustain vital ecosystem processes that support local people's lives. Drastic transformations of traditional lifestyles, shifts in fishing practices, and a significant decline in fishing yield occurred that jeopardized food sovereignty and security. The Belo Monte HPP environmental licensing process ignored local ecological knowledge and the vital links among the river's flood pulse, the aquatic and seasonally flooded ecosystems, and the traditional lifestyles of VGX residents. To ensure the ecological sustainability of the VGX, the Belo Monte HPP operation needs to change to support key spawning areas, maintain water discharge, avoid short-term water fluctuations, and emulate natural interannual discharge variability to mitigate flood pulse disruption. Local ecological knowledge should never be ignored in projects where local communities are the most affected. These communities should be central in decision-making regarding socioenvironmental impact assessment, mitigation, and monitoring.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conservation Biology Awards","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70066","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Quantifying spatial patterns of game vertebrate abundance in Amazonian forests through local ecological knowledge-based methods","authors":"Ricardo Sampaio,&nbsp;Ronaldo G. Morato,&nbsp;Mark I. Abrahams,&nbsp;Adriano G. Chiarello,&nbsp;Carlos A. Peres","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Assessing local anthropogenic impacts on tropical forest wildlife is central to conservation science in low-governance regions, particularly in the context of community-based resource management. Two methods frequently used to sample wildlife are based on local ecological knowledge (LEK), which is low cost and draws on substantial human experience, and camera trap sampling (CT), which is widely used due to its spatial replicability and the increasing diversity of analytical frameworks. We compared the effectiveness of both methods in assessing the impact of hunting on wildlife at 70 local community catchments across the Brazilian Amazon. We did this by assessing local occurrences of 17 focal species as recounted by 187 subsistence hunters in interviews and by assessing data from 631 CT deployments. We evaluated correlations among the distances from the nearest community at which species and species groups occurred, derived from either LEK or CT data. We also assessed how species' morphological and socioecological traits influenced estimates derived from LEK and CT. Estimates derived from LEK were more strongly correlated with species abundance than with occupancy estimates. Large-bodied, harvest-sensitive species, such as tapir (<i>Tapirus terrestris</i>), white-lipped peccary (<i>Tayassu pecari</i>), and curassow (<i>Crax</i> or <i>Pauxi</i> spp.), were spatially depleted more than 15 km away from human communities. These species showed particularly strong positive correlations across all estimates. The precision of LEK estimates increased with independent data on local game species abundance. These results underline the utility of data derived from LEK in assessing patterns of local wildlife abundance, especially for large-bodied species sensitive to hunting pressure. Local ecological knowledge-based methods are valuable in their own right, especially in areas where alternative sampling methods are lacking and human impact is not matched by conservation efforts.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interdependencies between Indigenous peoples, local communities, and freshwater systems in a changing Amazon","authors":"Simone Athayde,&nbsp;Renata Utsunomiya,&nbsp;Lulu Victoria-Lacy,&nbsp;Claire Beveridge,&nbsp;Clinton N. Jenkins,&nbsp;Juliana Laufer,&nbsp;Sebastian Heilpern,&nbsp;Paulo Olivas,&nbsp;Elizabeth P. Anderson","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Globally, Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) are fighting for the recognition of their knowledge and decision-making authority in freshwater conservation. In the Amazon, decision-making around freshwater management and conservation has often overlooked Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and the connections between sociocultural and freshwater systems. We explored interdependencies between IPs and LCs and freshwaters in the Amazonian region through a narrative review of the academic peer-reviewed literature. The review process involved 2 phases: an initial scoping phase, which included the analysis of a large number of articles to identify main topics and develop research questions, and the review of a subset of 187 articles published from 2018 to 2022. We found that 178 studies were carried out in the Brazilian, Peruvian, and/or Bolivian Amazon, and 26 studies were conducted in other countries. A total of 60 studies focused on riverine communities and among them, 16 Indigenous groups were mentioned in 51 articles. Most studies (<i>n</i> = 148) emphasized the connections between water quality, fisheries, food security, health, and livelihoods. There was a paucity of studies conducted by IPs and LCs that had Indigenous or local community members among the authors. Recent studies highlighted the active role of IPs and LCs in leading community-based management efforts. We found innovative freshwater conservation and management experiences led by IPs and LCs, that effectively conserved freshwater biodiversity while promoting sustainable livelihoods. Our findings support inclusive and equitable freshwater conservation policies and practices in the Amazon and beyond, by showing the crucial role of IPs and LCs in managing and protecting freshwater resources.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cobi.70034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evolution of people-centered conservation in Brazil","authors":"Rafael Morais Chiaravalloti,&nbsp;Fabio Rubio Scarano,&nbsp;Claudio Valladares-Padua,&nbsp;Thais Q. Morcatty","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70041","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Over the past 50 years, conservation science has shifted from a species-centered to a people and nature-centered field of research and practice (Mace, &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;), and Brazil has played an important role in this transformation. Brazil is a biologically and culturally megadiverse country. It contains 6 of the world's terrestrial biomes and a large coastal area (Scarano et al., &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;), as well as over 300 Indigenous ethic groups that speak 254 different languages and millions of resource-dependent communities (IBGE, &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;). Biomes, such as the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal wetland, are globally iconic places for biodiversity and host healthy populations of numerous endemic and threatened species, but at the same time, they have a millennial history of human habitation and in some cases were cocreated by nature and people. In the Amazon, pre-Columbian management has significantly shaped forest composition; domesticated tree species dominate vast landscapes and influence local patterns of species richness and abundance (Levis et al., &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;; Maezumi et al. &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;). The distribution of species, such as Brazil nut (&lt;i&gt;Bertholletia excelsa&lt;/i&gt;), is particularly indicative of sustained human cultivation and landscape use (Shepard &amp; Ramirez, &lt;span&gt;2011&lt;/span&gt;). It is estimated that at least 6 million forest-dependent people now live in communities and rural settlements in the Brazilian Amazon (IBGE, &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;) and that 34 million people live in the Amazon region (Charity et al., &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;). In the Pantanal, over 90% of the area is occupied by cattle ranches (Chiaravalloti et al., &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;), and there are signs of human settlements 27,000 years BP on the northern border of the biome (Vialou et al. &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;). The Caatinga, an exclusively Brazilian biome, is the most densely inhabited semiarid land in the world (Tabarelli et al., &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;). Atlantic Forest and Cerrado are among the 10 original biodiversity hotspots due to their high levels of endemic species and deforestation rates (Myers et al., &lt;span&gt;2000&lt;/span&gt;). The Pampas, an extensive grassland biome, has over 10 million people living in its expansive plains, agricultural lands, and urban centers (Overbeck et al., &lt;span&gt;2007&lt;/span&gt;). Therefore, the implementation of conservation approaches strictly based on species protection has always faced challenges in Brazil (Silva, &lt;span&gt;2005&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;People-centered conservation programs emerged in different forms and in different regions of Brazil. They started to appear between the 1980s and 1990s, when the international conservation science and practice agenda was mostly still part of the “nature despite people” approach (Mace, &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;). Among the earliest and most influential examples was the Amazon's Rubber Tapper Movement, which laid the foundation to the creation of sustainable use protected areas. Spurred by the international demand","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cobi.70041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Using the past to tell more persuasive conservation stories.","authors":"J Q Goben, A M Mychajliw, O L Olson, G P Dietl","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70057","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>For millennia, stories have been central to conveying human experience-a tradition through which communities continue to share lessons, knowledge, and cultural values and are regularly used by communities to share lessons, knowledge, and cultural values. Now, conservationists are beginning to harness the power of telling stories to achieve conservation goals. We introduce the past stories hypothesis, in which we argue that existing conservation storytelling practices can be improved by incorporating the longer term perspectives available from geohistorical records, such as sediment cores, fossils, and other natural archives of the past. Contextualizing conservation problems on timescales beyond years or decades presents the opportunity to tell different stories about how biodiversity is currently changing and equips conservationists with the conceptual toolkit necessary for unshifting previously unrecognized shifted baselines by changing when the story starts. Geohistorical data sets thus provide an opportunity to restore lost environmental memory-collective observations or records of past environments-and avoid unintended biases. When the ethics, potential outcomes, and diversity of backgrounds and beliefs represented in each audience are considered, incorporating the past can result in compelling stories with the power to engage and persuade an individual or community to support conservation goals while maintaining credibility and trust. An inclusive storytelling approach anchored by geohistorical data may help conservationists tell stories more effectively in the service of identifying or adapting specific conservation goals. These new perspectives (provided by starting stories with new temporal baselines) may also bring new people to the discussion table and allow for a broader range of entry points to conversations and, thus, potential conservation actions.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":" ","pages":"e70057"},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144157251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving avian communities amid human impact in Nigeria.","authors":"Bello A Danmallam, Talatu Tende, Anthony Kuria, Samuel T Ivande, Iniunam A Iniunam, Peggy M Ngila, Ulf Ottosson, Rosie Trevelyan, Adams A Chaskda, Shiiwua A Manu","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70069","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Understanding the impacts of human activities on avian communities in- and outside protected areas (PAs) is essential for guiding conservation strategies and evaluating the effectiveness of PAs in conserving avian diversity. Effective PAs should not only safeguard species within their boundaries but also contribute to maintaining ecosystem functionality in surrounding landscapes. We used citizen science data from the Nigerian Bird Atlas Project (2015-2024) and the human footprint index (HFI) from the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) to analyze avian taxonomic and functional richness and diversity across 146 paired pentads (5' × 5' grid cells). Each protected area pentad (PAP) that covered ≥70% of a PA was paired with an unprotected pentad (UPP). Bayesian hierarchical models were applied to assess avian taxonomic and functional richness and diversity between PAPs and UPPs and to examine the influence of human activity on these community metrics based on HFI values. The PAPs had higher taxonomic richness and diversity than UPPs. In contrast, abundance-weighted functional diversity metrics (Rao's Q, functional dispersion, and divergence) were higher in UPPs than PAPs due to the proliferation of disturbance-tolerant generalist species. However, functional richness was lower in UPPs than PAPs, reflecting fewer ecological niches. Taxonomic and functional richness increased with moderate human impact, consistent with the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, but declined under higher levels of disturbance, suggesting a point beyond which species cannot adapt or persist. These findings support the critical role of PAs in conserving avian species and functional traits and highlight the effects of human impact on species survival. Conservation strategies must prioritize the maintenance of PAs and integrate sustainable management in UPAs to safeguard avian diversity and functional traits essential for ecosystem resilience, especially as anthropogenic pressures increase.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":" ","pages":"e70069"},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144157248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Using online reports of seahorse seizures to track their illegal trade.","authors":"Sarah J Foster, Syd J Ascione, Francesca Santaniello, Teale N Phelps Bondaroff","doi":"10.1111/cobi.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is a persistent and extensive threat to global biodiversity. Hundreds of marine fish species are subject to regulation under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), but it is unclear how much protection species gain from CITES because information on marine fish IWT is limited. We used online reports of seized shipments of seahorses (Hippocampus spp.) to investigate their illegal trade. Seahorses were the first genus of marine fishes to be listed under CITES. We compiled 297 unique seizure records from 192 online outlets posted from January 2010 to April 2021 and analyzed the number of seahorses seized, the value of the seized items, trade routes, and other seizure details. Dried seahorses accounted for nearly all seizures, which totaled around 5 million individuals valued at over US$28 million. The reported number of seizures and the number of seahorses seized increased over time. Reported illegal trade involved 62 countries and other jurisdictions. Seized seahorses predominantly originated in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. China was the primary destination. Seahorses were mostly intercepted in transit and in destination countries rather than source countries. Airports were the most common location for seizures, and passenger baggage represented the primary transportation method by number of seizures, but sea cargo facilitated the largest seizures. Seahorses were most commonly seized by customs, often in conjunction with other regulated wildlife products. Although seizures led to detention of actors, information on subsequent legal actions was limited. Addressing the illegal trade in seahorses requires greater enforcement in source countries and increasing the realized risks associated with smuggling. Our findings can inform intelligence-led enforcement efforts to curb seahorse trafficking and highlight data biases and gaps that should be addressed to facilitate enhanced deterrence measures.</p>","PeriodicalId":10689,"journal":{"name":"Conservation Biology","volume":" ","pages":"e70047"},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144157250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}