Population decline assessment, historical baselines, and conservation

Bonebrake, Timothy C.; Christensen, Jon; Boggs, Carol L.; Ehrlich, Paul R.

doi:10.1111/j.1755-263x.2010.00139.x

Cited by 95 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…One of the greatest challenges for the conservation of threatened species is to detect changes in their abundance and understand the effect of specific threats in their population dynamics (Bonebrake et al 2010). Demographic parameters (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population trends and survival of nesting green sea turtles Chelonia mydas on Aves Island, Venezuela

Garcia-Cruz¹,

Lampo²,

Peñaloza³

et al. 2015

Endang. Species. Res.

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Long-term demographic data are valuable for assessing the effect of anthropogenic impacts on endangered species and evaluating recovery programs. Using a 2-state open robust design model, we analyzed mark-recapture data from green turtles Chelonia mydas sighted between 1979 and 2009 on Aves Island, Venezuela, a rookery heavily impacted by human activities before it was declared a wildlife refuge in 1972. Based on the encounter histories of 7689 nesting females, we estimated the abundance, annual survival, and remigration intervals for this population. Female survival varied from 0.14−0.91, with a mean of 0.79, which is low compared to survival of other populations from the Caribbean (mean = 0.84) and Australia (mean = 0.95), even though we partially corrected for tag loss, which is known to negatively bias survival estimates. This supports prior suggestions that Caribbean populations in general, and the Aves Island population in particular, may be more strongly impacted than populations elsewhere. It is likely that nesters from this rookery are extracted while foraging in remote feeding grounds where hunting still occurs. Despite its relatively low survival, the nesting population at Aves Island increased during the past 30 years from approx. 500 to >1000 nesting females in 2009. Thus, this population, like others in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, seems to be slowly recovering following protective management. Although these findings support the importance of long-term conservation programs aimed at protecting nesting grounds, they also highlight the need to extend management actions to foraging grounds where human activities may still impact green turtle populations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population trends and survival of nesting green sea turtles Chelonia mydas on Aves Island, Venezuela

Garcia-Cruz¹,

Lampo²,

Peñaloza³

et al. 2015

Endang. Species. Res.

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“…Specifically, we find that those who perceive more change in coral reef ecosystems are willing to pay more to protect them. With large and often undocumented changes in both marine and terrestrial ecosystems (Lotze and Worm, 2009;Bonebrake et al, 2010), the implications of our results to conservation planning are substantial; in places with more unrecognized degradation, conservation projects will have less support, whereas goals for ecosystem restoration, protected areas, and species recovery are likely to be more ambitious if the public is aware of long term change. Therefore, it is important that conservation scientists and practitioners continue to document long term change and communicate these changes to the public.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Shifted Baselines Reduce Willingness to Pay for Conservation

McClenachan

Matsuura²,

Shah

et al. 2018

Front. Mar. Sci.

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A loss of memory of past environmental degradation has resulted in shifted baselines, which may result in conservation and restoration goals that are less ambitious than if stakeholders had a full knowledge of ecosystem potential. However, the link between perception of baseline states and support for conservation planning has not been tested empirically. Here, we investigate how perceptions of change in coral reef ecosystems affect stakeholders' willingness to pay (WTP) for the establishment of protected areas. Coral reefs are experiencing rapid, global change that is observable by the public, and therefore provide an ideal ecosystem to test links between beliefs about baseline states and willingness to support conservation. Our survey respondents perceived change to coral reef communities across six variables: coral abundance, fish abundance, fish diversity, fish size, sedimentation, and water pollution. Respondants who accurately perceived declines in reef health had significantly higher WTP for protected areas (US $256.80 vs. $102.50 per year), suggesting that shifted baselines may reduce engagement with conservation efforts. If WTP translates to engagement, this suggests that goals for restoration and recovery are likely to be more ambitious if the public is aware of long term change. Therefore, communicating the scope and depth of environmental problems is essential in engaging the public in conservation.

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“…As a result, insights into key properties of biodiversity-for example, ecosystem structure and composition in the absence of human modification, or the specific ecological requirements of threatened species now restricted to remnant distributions in potentially suboptimal habitat-will remain incomplete and biased by an "extinction filter" if only assessed using modern-day data (Balmford 1996). There is therefore 28 increasing awareness of the need for a new discipline of 'conservation palaeobiology' that integrates a range of long-term archives into conservation research and management, to identify past environmental baselines and provide novel insights into regional biodiversity, extinction dynamics and ecosystem properties that are unavailable from short-term studies (Bonebrake et al 2010;Rick and Lockwood 2013;Davies et al 2014;Barnosky et al 2017). …”

Section: Conservation Palaeobiologymentioning

confidence: 99%