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In facing our greatest challenges, researchers have questioned where the ‘wild things’ will reside in the future, and large carnivores have been a primary focal area. The built environment plays a critical role in the propagation of countless species including carnivores; however, contemporary conceptualizations of human–nature relations do not satisfactorily attend to where the built environment should be placed within existing human–nature relation frameworks or how it impacts our ability to find space for carnivores. This paper fills this information gap by investigating the role of the built environment in social–ecological systems (SES), specifically wildlife and carnivore conservation. The paper unfolds in four stages: The first reviews empirical efforts to capture the relationship between human–natural–wildlife systems and the built environment. Second, using insights from the built environment literature, I argue that moving away from a common pool resource focus, decoupling wildlife and natural systems, investigating all infrastructure types and their interactions across systems, and considering the notion of hybrid systems offer pathways forward. Third, an explanation of the built environment's linkages to human and carnivore systems is undertaken to illustrate how the built environment facilitates the material and symbolic interactions through a blending of properties from human, wildlife and natural systems. Lastly, the argument is made that attending to the role of the built environment in human–wildlife relations can stimulate new research that reveals unhelpful habitual behaviour, feedbacks and barriers, and may also help explain unintended or unexplained consequences impacting human–carnivore relations not fully considered under existing frameworks. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

We use comparable 2005 and 2018 population data to assess threats driving the decline of lion Panthera leo populations, and review information on threats structured by problem tree and root cause analysis. We define 11 threats and rank their severity and prevalence. Two threats emerged as affecting both the number of lion populations and numbers within them: livestock depredation leading to retaliatory killing of lions, and bushmeat poaching leading to prey depletion. Our data do not allow determination of whether any specific threat drives declines faster than others. Of 20 local extirpations, most were associated with armed conflicts as a driver of proximate threats. We discuss the prevalence and severity of proximate threats and their drivers, to identify priorities for more effective conservation of lions, other carnivores and their prey.

1. Interspecific competition is an important evolutionary force, influencing interactions between species and shaping the composition of communities. In mammalian carnivores, to reduce the risks of negative encounters between competitors, species can employ a strategy of temporal partitioning, adapting activity patterns to limit synchronous activity. This strategy of non-human competitor avoidance, however, may be influenced by the expansion of human activities, which has driven wildlife towards nocturnality.\ud \ud 2. Therefore, it could be hypothesised that the disruption of temporal niche partitioning by humans and their activities could increase temporal overlap between carnivores, enhancing interspecific competition.\ud \ud 3. We reviewed the published literature systematically, and employed generalized linear models to quantitatively evaluate the relative influence of a range of human, meteorological and ecological variables on the coefficients of temporal overlap within carnivore communities on a global scale.\ud \ud 4. None of the models investigated showed evidence of an impact of humans on temporal partitioning between carnivores on a global scale. This illustrates that temporal avoidance of humans and competitors does not always follow a consistent pattern, and that its strength may be context-dependent and relative to other dimensions of niche partitioning (spatial and trophic).\ud \ud 5. Similarly, the regulation of activity patterns may be under strong site-specificity, and be influenced by a combination of biotic and abiotic characteristics. Temporal avoidance of both humans and competitors may be regulated by short, reactive responses that do not impact activity patterns in the longer term.\ud \ud 6. Although we did not detect a global disruption of temporal partitioning due to human disturbance, carnivore communities may still experience an increase in interspecific competition in other niche dimensions. Further research would benefit from using controlled experimental designs and investigating multiple dimensions of niche partitioning simultaneously. Finally, we recommend complementing the coefficient of temporal overlap with other metrics of fine-scale spatiotemporal interactions.

Funding: African Institute for Conservation Ecology; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. Grant Numbers: PD/BD/114037/2015, UID/BIA/00329/2019; National Geographic Society. Grant Number: EC-314R-18; Wild Tomorrow Fund; South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement. Grant Number: UID: 107099&115040. 1 Conservation efforts in South Africa play out across multi-use landscapes where formal protected areas coexist with private wildlife business (ecotourism and/or hunting) in a human-dominated matrix. Despite the persistence of highly diverse carnivore guilds, management idiosyncrasies are often orientated towards charismatic large predators and assemblage-level patterns remain largely unexplored. 2. We conducted an extensive camera-trap survey in a natural quasi-experimental setting in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. We sampled across a protection gradient characterized by a provincial protected area (highest and formal protection status), a private ecotourism reserve, game ranches and traditional communal areas (lowest protected status). We evaluated assemblage-level and species-specific responses of free-ranging carnivores to the varying management contexts and associated environmental gradients. 3. Despite similar assemblage composition between management contexts, site-scale carnivore richness and occupancy rates were greater in the formal protected area than adjacent private reserve and game ranches. Carnivore occupancy was more similar between these private wildlife areas, although putative problem species were more common in the private reserve, and contrasted with depauperate assemblages in least protected communal lands. Variation in carnivore occupancy probabilities was largely driven by land use contexts, that is, the level and nature of protection, relative to underlying fine-scale landscape attributes (e.g. distance to conservation fences) or apex predator populations. 4. Synthesis and applications. Our findings provide convincing empirical support for the added value of multi-tenure conservation estates augmenting and connecting South Africa's protected areas. However, our emphasis on free-ranging carnivores exemplifies the importance of maintaining areas under long-term formal protection and the risks with viewing lucrative wildlife business as a conservation panacea. We suggest that unmanaged carnivore species be the formal components of carnivore reintroduction and recovery programmes to better gauge the complementary conservation role of South Africa's private land. Postprint

Human–wildlife interactions occur when humans and wildlife overlap in the same landscapes. Due to the growing human population, the number of interactions will continue to increase, and in some cases, develop further into social conflicts. Conflicts may occur between people disagreeing about wildlife conservation or arguing over which wildlife management measures should be taken. Social conflicts between humans are based on different attitudes, values and land‐use aspirations. The success of solving these social conflicts strongly depends on building trust between the public, stakeholders, authorities and researchers, as trust is fundamental to all communication and dialogue. Here we have examined how trust in large carnivore research differs within a geographically stratified sample of the Norwegian population. The comprehensive survey, including 2,110 respondents, allows us to explore how people perceive factual statements about large carnivores depending on the source of these statements. Specifically, the respondents were given multiple statements and asked to judge them in terms of meaning and authenticity depending on whether the statements were made by a politician, the Norwegian farmers' association, the Norwegian Fish and Game association or a large carnivore researcher. Based on the variations in perceptions, we inferred that trust in large carnivore researchers and their research results varied with people's attitudes, values and direct experience of large carnivores. In general, respondents perceived 60% of the statements to be genuine when given no information of who had made them. Although this increased to 75% when informed that the statements were made by a large carnivore researcher, there was still a 25% probability that the statement was perceived as manipulative or political. Age, environmental values and negative experiences of carnivores increased the probability of perceiving research statements as manipulative or political. People living in areas with high proportions of hunters showed particularly polarized views, either more strongly perceiving the statements as political, or in contrast as research. This study provides a novel perspective in understanding the role trust plays in social conflicts related to human–wildlife interactions. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

ispartof: Frontiers In Ecology And Evolution vol:8 issue:10 status: published

Policy mixes (i.e. the total structure of policy processes, strategies, and instruments) are complex constructs that can quickly become incoherent, inconsistent, and incomprehensive. This is amplified when the policy mix strives to meet multiple objectives simultaneously, such as in the case of large carnivore policy mixes. Building on Rogge and Reichardt's analytical framework for the analysis of policy mixes, we compare the policy mixes of Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany (specifically Saxony and Bavaria), and Spain (specifically Castilla y Leon). The study shows that the large carnivore policy mixes in the case countries show signs of lacking vertical and horizontal coherence in the design of policy processes, weak consistency between objectives and designated policy instruments, and, as a consequence, lacking comprehensiveness. We conclude that creating consistent, coherent, and comprehensive policy mixes that build on multiple objectives requires stepping away from sectorized policy development, toward a holistic, systemic approach, strong collaborative structures across policy boundaries and regions, the inclusion of diverse stakeholders, and constant care and attention to address all objectives simultaneously rather than in isolation.

The 15th North American Caribou Workshop (NACW) was held from 12-16 May 2014, in the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council, in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. This biennial meeting is the largest technical conference of its kind dealing specifically with caribou biology and management. The first NACW was held in Whitehorse over three decades ago in 1983, and 13 subsequent workshops have been held across North America until now. With nearly 400 delegates from Canada, the United States, Norway, and Greenland attending the 2014 conference, it is evident that this “North American” gathering has truly become an international event. Furthermore, delegates attending this 15th NACW represented federal, provincial, territorial, state and First Nation governments, academia, non-governmental organizations, co-management boards and councils, private consultants, and industry, creating a relatively unique conference setting bringing together a variety of perspectives and concerns. The breadth of the participants in terms of geography, expertise and affiliation resulted in a rich base of human capacity to discuss issues related to caribou conservation and management.Given that it had been nearly three decades since the inception of this workshop, and with its return to the location of the first NACW, the organizing committee felt it was a fitting opportunity to look back and assess what had been achieved with respect to caribou conservation and management. As such, the theme of the 15th NACW was “Caribou Conservation and Management: What’s Working?” The opening session of the conference focussed on invited presentations explicitly addressing this question, and included topics on structured decision making, forest management, harvest monitoring, carnivore management, regional land use planning and management, and aboriginal perspectives on a long-term collaborative caribou recovery program in the southwest Yukon. We challenged our speakers to share what was working and why, and the information provided was valuable and timely, prompting many questions and discussion throughout the conference.

Noninvasive genetic sampling has been embraced by wildlife managers and ecologists, especially those charged with monitoring rare and elusive species over large areas. Challenges arise when desired population measures are not directly attainable from genetic data and when monitoring targets trans-border populations. Norwegian management authorities count individual brown bears (Ursus arctos) using noninvasive genetic sampling but express management goals in the annual number of bear reproductions (females that produce cubs), a measure that is not directly available from genetic data. We combine noninvasive genetic sampling data with information obtained from a long-term intensive monitoring study in neighboring Sweden to estimate the number of annual reproductions by females detected within Norway. Most female brown bears in Norway occur near the border with neighboring countries (Sweden, Finland, and Russia) and their potential reproduction can therefore only partially be credited to Norway. Our model includes a simulation-based method that corrects census data to account for this. We estimated that 4.3 and 5.7 reproductions can be credited to females detected with noninvasive genetic sampling in Norway in 2008 and 2009, respectively. These numbers fall substantially short of the national target (15 annual reproductions). Ignoring the potential for home ranges to extend beyond Norway's borders leads to an increase in the estimate of the number of reproductions by ;30%. Our study shows that combining noninvasive genetic sampling with information obtained from traditional intensive/invasive monitoring can help answer contemporary management questions in the currency desired by managers and policy makers. Furthermore, combining methodologies and thereby accounting for space use increases the accuracy of the information on which decisions are based. It is important that the information derived from multiple approaches is applicable to the same focal population and that predictions are cross- validated. When monitoring and management are constrained to administrative units, census data should be adjusted by discounting portions of individual space utilization that extend beyond the focal jurisdiction. Our simulation-based approach for making such an adjustment may be useful in other situations where management authorities target portions of trans- border populations.

Large carnivore management is typically a source of heated controversy worldwide and, in the Americas, jaguars (Panthera onca) are at the centre of many human–wildlife conflicts. Although findings suggest that social, rather than economic, factors are important reasons for why humans kill jaguars, few studies focus on stakeholder attitudes towards jaguar conservation beyond quantifying livestock depredation. Yet insights from other large carnivore conflicts demonstrate the importance of the political landscape and stakeholder attitudes in carnivore conservation. To explore the extent to which stakeholder views about jaguar conservation aligned with institutional arrangements, we conducted a stakeholder analysis among personnel working for key institutions in central Brazil. Using Q methodology, we identified three stakeholder perspectives focusing on: A) jaguars’ intrinsic right to exist; B) wider ecocentric values; and C) contesting jaguar-focused conservation. The three institutional stakeholder groups all accepted the jaguar’s fundamental right to exist and agreed that it was important to establish protected areas for jaguars. Yet, institutional stakeholder views diverged regarding the desired distribution of jaguars in Brazil, hunting policies, and the effects of hunting and development projects on jaguar conservation. These differences and their underlying motivations are important to consider for successful jaguar conservation strategies in Brazil.