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It is noteworthy that community-led biodiversity conservation programmes can address 10-13 of the 17 sustainable development goals set by the United Nations. The Partners Conservation Alliance is determined to help strengthen conservation efforts worldwide by empowering local and Indigenous communities and ensuring their voices are heard in the global conversation about biodiversity conservation. [Extracted from the article]

Indigenous Wichís and mestizos Criollos inhabit a rural, biodiversity rich, area of the Argentinean Dry Chaco. Traditionally, Wichís were nomads and their relations with wildlife were shaped by animistic and shamanic beliefs. Today, Wichís live in stable communities and practice subsistence hunting, gathering and in some cases, fishing. Criollos are mestizos, i.e. a mixture of the first Spanish settlers and different indigenous groups. They arrived during the 20th century from neighbouring Provinces. They practice extensive ranching, hunting and gathering. Our aim was to help develop effective and legitimate actions to conserve wildlife species in this region, focused on Wichís' and Criollos' perceptions of and relations with wildlife. We conducted semistructured interviews (N=105) in rural settlements. We found differences in both groups' hunting techniques, drivers and perceptions on the importance of wild meat for nutrition. However, both groups have a close relation with wildlife, they use wild animals in a variety of ways, including as food resource, medicine and predictors of future events. Wichís and Criollos also relate with wildlife in a spiritual dimension, have animistic and shamanic beliefs and have unique traditional ecological knowledge. Hunters in both communities are breaking traditional hunting norms but conservation measures grounded on these norms have a higher probability of success. Management recommendations include developing programmes focused on (i) conserving thin armadillos; (ii) conserving pregnant and breeding females of all species; (iii) managing dogs to avoid unnecessary killings and on (iv) improving local livelihoods. We also provide recommendations that are specific for each group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The persistence of large carnivore populations depends on their survival outside protected areas, where they often impact local livelihoods through livestock depredation. Understanding the impacts of human behaviour on large carnivores in shared landscapes is thus important but is often overlooked in habitat assessments or conservation planning. We employed an integrated approach that considers human behaviour and landscape structure metrics to assess the potential for human‐puma (Puma concolor) coexistence in the Chaco region, a global deforestation and defaunation hotspot. Location: Argentine Dry Chaco (~490,000 km2). Methods: We identified suitable puma habitat patches and movement areas using occupancy modelling and combined it with a spatial human‐puma conflict risk model based on interview data to identify 'safe' and 'unsafe' habitat patches. We then used resistance surfaces to identify 'safe' and 'unsafe' movement areas, as well as 'severed' movement areas where anthropogenic land conversion inhibits movement. Results: Safe puma habitat patches (i.e., suitable and safe) covered 29% of the region, whereas attractive sinks (i.e., suitable but risky) represented 12%. Movement areas corresponded to 60% of the region, while conflict risk and high landscape resistance undermined connectivity: unsafe and severed movement areas covered 10% and 11% of the region, respectively. Nearly 98% of safe habitat and movement areas occurred outside protected areas. Main Conclusions: We provide an integrated conceptual framework and spatial explicit template for a three‐pronged conservation strategy to (1) protect safe habitat and movement areas, (2) mitigate livestock depredation in attractive sinks and unsafe movement areas and (3) restore landscape in severed and matrix areas to improve ecological connectivity. This would allow pumas to maintain viable populations while reducing negative impacts on local people. More generally, we show how integrating habitat and conflict risk models can reveal opportunities and challenges for human‐carnivore coexistence beyond protected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Location Methods Results Main Conclusions Land‐use change and overexploitation are major threats to biodiversity, and climate change will exert additional pressure in the 21st century. Although there are strong interactions between these threats, our understanding of the synergistic and compensatory effects on threatened species' range geography remains limited. Our aim was to disentangle the impact of habitat loss, hunting and climate change on species, using the example of the endangered Chacoan peccary (Catagonus wagneri).Gran Chaco ecoregion in South America.Using a large occurrence database, we integrated a time‐calibrated species distribution model with a hunting pressure model to reconstruct changes in the distribution of suitable peccary habitat between 1985 and 2015. We then used partitioning analysis to attribute the relative contribution of habitat change to land‐use conversion, climate change and varying hunting pressure.Our results reveal widespread habitat deterioration, with only 11% of the habitat found in 2015 considered suitable and safe. Hunting pressure was the strongest single threat, yet most habitat deterioration (58%) was due to the combined, rather than individual, effects of the three drivers we assessed. Climate change would have led to a compensatory effect, increasing suitable habitat area, yet this effect was negated by the strongly negative and interacting threats of land‐use change and hunting.Our study reveals the central role of overexploitation, which is often neglected in biogeographic assessments, and suggests that addressing overexploitation has huge potential for increasing species' adaptive capacity in the face of climate and land‐use change. More generally, we highlight the importance of jointly assessing extinction drivers to understand how species might fare in the 21st century. Here, we provide a simple and transferable framework to determine the separate and joint effects of three main drivers of biodiversity loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many vertebrate species undergo population fluctuations that may be random or regularly cyclic in nature. Vertebrate population cycles in northern latitudes are driven by both endogenous and exogenous factors. Suggested causes of mysterious disappearances documented for populations of the Neotropical, herd-forming, white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari, henceforth "WLP") include large-scale movements, overhunting, extreme floods, or disease outbreaks. By analyzing 43 disappearance events across the Neotropics and 88 years of commercial and subsistence harvest data for the Amazon, we show that WLP disappearances are widespread and occur regularly and at large spatiotemporal scales throughout the species' range. We present evidence that the disappearances represent 7–12-year troughs in 20–30-year WLP population cycles occurring synchronously at regional and perhaps continent-wide spatial scales as large as 10,000–5 million km2. This may represent the first documented case of natural population cyclicity in a Neotropical mammal. Because WLP populations often increase dramatically prior to a disappearance, we posit that their population cycles result from over-compensatory, density-dependent mortality. Our data also suggest that the increase phase of a WLP cycle is partly dependent on recolonization from proximal, unfragmented and undisturbed forests. This highlights the importance of very large, continuous natural areas that enable source-sink population dynamics and ensure re-colonization and local population persistence in time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habitat destruction and overexploitation are the main threats to biodiversity and where they co‐occur, their combined impact is often larger than their individual one. Yet, detailed knowledge of the spatial footprints of these threats is lacking, including where they overlap and how they change over time. These knowledge gaps are real barriers for effective conservation planning. Here, we develop a novel approach to reconstruct the individual and combined footprints of both threats over time. We combine satellite‐based land‐cover change maps, habitat suitability models and hunting pressure models to demonstrate our approach for the community of larger mammals (48 species > 1 kg) across the 1.1 million km2 Gran Chaco region, a global deforestation hotspot covering parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. This provides three key insights. First, we find that the footprints of habitat destruction and hunting pressure expanded considerably between 1985 and 2015, across ~40% of the entire Chaco – twice the area affected by deforestation. Second, both threats increasingly acted together within the ranges of larger mammals in the Chaco (17% increase on average, ± 20% SD, cumulative increase of co‐occurring threats across 465 000 km2), suggesting large synergistic effects. Conversely, core areas of high‐quality habitats declined on average by 38%. Third, we identified remaining priority areas for conservation in the northern and central Chaco, many of which are outside the protected area network. We also identify hotspots of high threat impacts in central Paraguay and northern Argentina, providing a spatial template for threat‐specific conservation action. Overall, our findings suggest increasing synergistic effects between habitat destruction and hunting pressure in the Chaco, a situation likely common in many tropical deforestation frontiers. Our work highlights how threats can be traced in space and time to understand their individual and combined impact, even in situations where data are sparse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]