The management of wildlife hosts for controlling parasites and disease has a history of mixed success. Deer can be important hosts for ticks, such as Ixodes ricinus, which is the primary vector of disease-causing zoonotic pathogens in Europe. Deer are generally managed by culling and fencing for forestry protection, habitat conservation, and commercial hunting, and in this study we test whether these deer management methods can be useful for controlling ticks, with implications for tick-borne pathogens. At different spatial scales and habitats we tested the hypotheses that tick abundance is reduced by (1) culling deer and (2) deer exclusion using fencing. We compared abundance indices of hosts and questing I. ricinus nymphs using a combination of small-scale fencing experiments on moorland, a large-scale natural experiment of fenced and unfenced pairs of forests, and cross-sectional surveys of forest and moorland areas with varying deer densities. As predicted, areas with fewer deer had fewer ticks, and fenced exclosures had dramatically fewer ticks in both large-scale forest and small-scale moorland plots. Fencing and reducing deer density were also associated with higher ground vegetation. The implications of these results on other hosts, pathogen prevalence, and disease risk are discussed. This study provides evidence of how traditional management methods of a keystone species can reduce a generalist parasite, with implications for disease risk mitigation.

The carbon footprint of large astronomy meetings The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society took place in Lyon, France, in 2019, but in 2020 it was held online only due the COVID-19 pandemic. The carbon footprint of the virtual meeting was roughly 3,000 times smaller than the face-to-face one, providing encouragement for more ecologically minded conferencing.

Framing the Private Land Conservation Conversation: Strategic framing of the benefits of conservation participation could increase landholder engagement

The application of digital technology in conservation holds much potential for advancing the understanding of, and facilitating interaction with, the natural world. In other sectors, digital technology has long been used to engage communities and share information. Human development—which holds parallels with the nature conservation sector—has seen a proliferation of innovation in technological development. Throughout this Perspective, we consider what nature conservation can learn from the introduction of digital technology in human development. From this, we derive a charter to be used before and throughout project development, in order to help reduce replication and failure of digital innovation in nature conservation projects. We argue that the proposed charter will promote collaboration with the development of digital tools and ensure that nature conservation projects progress appropriately with the development of new digital technologies.

The concept of biocultural diversity is confronted with contemporary changes that impact on local communities, such as globalization and digital transformations. Engaging the conceptual flexibility of 'biocultural diversity', we studied nature-based tourism at the intersection of indigenous communities and the digital realm. We employed a political ecology perspective to examine online and offline representations of biocultural diversity in the Brazilian Pantanal, one of the biggest wetlands in the world, and home to groups of peoples known as the Pantaneiros. Data from interviews with 48 stakeholders in the tourist sector were structured along three 'myths'-the Uncivilised, Unrestrained, and Unchanged-for which we have also constructed counter narratives. Each myth denoted the primacy of biodiversity, and ignored broader dimensions of the Pantanal as a bioculturally diverse landscape. The relationships of the Pantaneiros with their environment were found to be intricate and had clear repercussions for tourism, but ironically, reference to the Pantaneiro culture in nature-based tourism was superficial. Moreover, thriving on the myths, this form of tourism perpetuates skewed power structures and social inequalities. Lower-class Pantaneiros likely suffer most from this. We recommend stakeholder engagement with a biocultural design that facilitates the integration of other-than-biodiversity values, and that thereby promotes sustainability of the entire social-ecological system. Sustainability 2018, 10, 3643 2 of 20 and parcel of mainstream environmental discourses and initiatives [1]. Yet, despite this, the concept has received criticism too. Focusing on landscapes, species, and genetic diversity, biodiversity overlooks human and cultural components of landscapes [2,3]. As such biodiversity conservation has conceptual roots in one of the earliest institutionalised expressions of nature conservation: the National Park movement that commenced with Yellowstone in 1872. In their most stringent form, both National Parks and biodiversity protection may lead to so-called fortress conservation in which rigid boundaries between human and nature are drawn. Both in historical and recent times, indigenous communities and other local peoples have been suffering from the consequences of fortress conservation, which have included displacement, restricted land access and rights, and unfair relations of production [4].Understandings of biocultural diversity-the interrelated and co-evolved diversity of life in its biological and cultural manifestations [5]-takes a more holistic approach to natural areas and its inhabitants than biodiversity conservation does. 'Biocultural diversity' explicitly embraces the notion of social-ecological systems, in which the interrelatedness between rural populations and the natural environment are emphasised, either in a traditional setting or with regard to newer human-nature interactions [2,6]. Moreover, biocultural diversity aims to pay heed to the various cultural manifestations-such as worldviews,...