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International audience; La végétation marine des îles Kerguelen, inventaire de la flore et première analyse de ses affinités biogéographiques.Conçu comme une base de référence indispensable à la gestion et à la conservation de la flore marine dans l’aire marine protégée des Terres australes françaises (réserve naturelle nationale des Terres australes françaises), l’inventaire de la flore marine des îles Kerguelen a été mis à jour sur la base d’un examen approfondi de la littérature et des bases de données scientifiques, du premier rapport de l’expédition Ross, en 1840, jusqu’aux travaux les plus récents. Ce travail a aussi pour objectif de constituer un point de départ pour de futures investigations utilisant les outils de la systématique moléculaire, et pour le suivi des effets du changement global sur les écosystèmes marins subantarctiques. Après un bref historique des campagnes scientifiques menées, une liste de 166 espèces a été établie (103 Rhodophyta, 35 Chlorophyta et 28 Ochrophyta [Phaeophyceae]). Les travaux récents ont montré l’existence de divergences récurrentes entre la taxinomie actuelle, établie sur des caractères morphologiques et la délimitation moléculaire des espèces, préconisant une révision de la systématique des macroalgues. Une première analyse des affinités biogéographiques de la flore marine des îles Kerguelen a été cependant réalisée et les résultats préliminaires se sont révélés en partie congruents avec les grandes régions actuellement reconnues dans l’océan Austral, suggérant l’importance du phénomène de dispersion sur de longues distances pour expliquer les motifs de distribution observés.; Conceived as a baseline for the management and conservation of the marine protected area of the French Southern Territories (réserve naturelle nationale des Terres australes françaises), the checklist of marine macroalgae of the Kerguelen Islands was updated based on an extensive review of the literature and scientific databases, from the first report of the Ross expedition, in 1840, to the most recent works. This work was also conceived as a starting point for forthcoming investigations using molecular systematics tools and for monitoring the effects of global change on sub-Antarctic marine ecosystems. After a brief history of scientific campaigns, a list of 166 species was established (103 Rhodophyta, 35 Chlorophyta and 28 Ochrophyta [Phaeophyceae]). Molecular systematics studiess have shown the existence of recurrent discrepancies between the established, morphology-based taxonomy and molecular species delimitation, calling for a revision of systematics. Nevertheless, a first analysis of biogeographical affinities of the marine flora of the Kerguelen Islands is carried out and preliminary results are partially congruent with the main regions currently recognized in the Southern Ocean suggesting the importance of long-distance dispersal to explain the observed distribution patterns.

Forest conservation on privately owned lands is a cornerstone of the Brazilian environmental policy framework. Brazilian legislation requires that all farms in the country maintain and protect forest areas known as Legal Reserves. Since Legal Reserves have major implications for forest conservation and agricultural production, it is key that we understand landholders’ perceptions towards Legal Reserves. We applied Q methodology to identify different perspectives of medium and large landholders on Legal Reserves and their relation to agricultural intensification in the municipality of Paragominas, eastern Amazon. We conducted 31 interviews in which landholders sorted 36 statements in a quasi-normal distribution array. Three groups of landholders were identified: 1) Land use planning enthusiasts (n = 16) were interested in zoning initiatives to explore alternative landscape designs and legislation that may deliver better conservation and production outcomes; 2) Agrochemical-based agriculture supporters (n = 7) held the most critical views against Legal Reserves and perceived their costs as higher than the potential environmental and life quality benefits; 3) Policy complacentmarket responders (n = 4) showed no interest in Legal Reserves reforms and were the most market driven group.. While Paragominas has achieved notable successes in halting large-scale deforestation through a social “Green Municipality” pact, addressing persisting forest degradation and fragmentation in the region remains a key priority. Local governance initiatives that account for multi-stakeholder perceptions on forest conservation can foster dialogue and mutual understanding to effectively conserve and restore Legal Reserves. Insights on large landholders’ perceptions on Legal Reserves can inform such governance processes to reconcile forest conservation and sustainable agricultural intensification in Paragominas. Estación Experimental Agropecuaria Bariloche Fil: Pinillos, Daniel. Wageningen University & Research. Farming Systems Ecology; Holanda Fil: Poccard Chapuis, René. University of Montpellier. Agroecology and Sustainable Intensification of Annual Crops; Francia Fil: Bianchi, Felix J.J.A. Wageningen University & Research. Farming Systems Ecology; Holanda Fil: Corbeels, Marc. University of Montpellier. Agroecology and Sustainable Intensification of Annual Crops; Francia Fil: Timler, Carl A. Wageningen University & Research. Farming Systems Ecology; Holanda Fil: Tittonell, Pablo Adrian. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Estación Experimental Agropecuaria Bariloche; Argentina Fil: Tittonell, Pablo Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Forestales y Agropecuarias Bariloche; Argentina Fil: Ramos Ballester, Maria Victoria. Universidad de Sao Paulo. Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture; Brasil Fil: Schulte, Rogier P. Wageningen University & Research. Farming Systems Ecology; Holanda

In 2011, the Government of Uzbekistan established the Lower Amu Darya State Biosphere Reserve (LABR). This reserve aims to conserve the Tugay, an endangered riparian forest ecosystem straddling the main rivers of Central Asia's drylands, which is under extreme anthropogenic pressure. The LABR has reintroduced Bukhara red deer (Cervus hanglu bactrianus), a subspecies endemic to Asia whose numbers declined severely over the 20th century. The LABR development project aims to provide operational support to the Uzbek authorities for their application to join the World Network of Biosphere Reserves. GIZ (German Society for International Cooperation) requested CIRAD to provide a science-based estimate of the deer population in the LABR, using an internationally recognized method, and to issue recommendations to ensure ecologically and socio-economically sustainable management. The survey of the Bukhara red deer population began in October 2019. The study area covered 88 km2. The survey design consisted of 12 parallel straight lines 1400 m apart; the total transect length was 65 km. During the count, 127 observations of individuals or herds were made and a total of 336 individuals were observed. The data were analysed using DISTANCE 7.3 software. The encounter rates were 1.95 obs./km and 5.17 animals/km. The estimated density was 24 deer/km2 and the estimated total population was 2,112 deer [1,320 - 3,344, 95% CI]. The proportion of dead, dying or severely affected trees was roughly estimated at 10%, and the proportion of trees affected but with a good chance of survival at 15%. In the southern core area of the LABR, a very high proportion of seedlings and suckers was being eaten and the forest is no longer regenerating. Maintaining a population of 24 deer/km2 in the southern core area of LABR clearly seems incompatible with either the conservation of the Tugay forest ecosystem or the peaceful coexistence of deer with human populations adjacent to the LABR. Options to mitigate deer pressure include translocation to the northern core area of the LABR or other areas, and regulation of the deer population. The density is too high to ensure effective preservation of the species locally, although the deer population is under severe pressure in Asia as a whole.

Despite growing industrialization, the shift to a cash economy and natural resource overexploitation, indigenous people of the Amazon region hunt and trade wildlife in order to meet their livelihood requirements. Individual strategies, shaped by the hunters' values and expectations, are changing in response to the region's economic development, but they still face the contrasting challenges of poverty and overhunting. For conservation initiatives to be implemented effectively, it is crucial to take into account people's strategies with their underlying drivers and their adaptive capabilities within a transforming socio-economic environment. To uncover hunting strategies in the Colombian Amazon and their evolution under the current transition, we co-designed a role-playing game together with the local stakeholders. The game revolves around the tension between ecological sustainability and food security—hunters' current main concern. It simulates the mosaic of activities that indigenous people perform in the wet and dry season, while also allowing for specific hunting strategies. Socio-economic conditions change while the game unfolds, opening up to emerging alternative potential scenarios suggested by the stakeholders themselves. Do hunters give up hunting when given the opportunity of an alternative income and protein source? Do institutional changes affect their livelihoods? We played the game between October and December 2016 with 39 players—all of them hunters—from 9 different communities within the Ticoya reserve. Our results show that providing alternatives would decrease overall hunting effort, but impacts are not spatially homogenous. Legalizing trade could lead to overhunting except when market rules and competition come into place. When it comes to coupled human-nature systems, the best way forward to produce socially just and resilient conservation strategies might be to trigger an adaptive process of experiential learning and scenario exploration. The use of games as “boundary objects” can guide stakeholders through the process, eliciting the plurality of their strategies, their drivers and how outside change affects them., Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 7, ISSN:2296-701X

We report on the long-distance movements of subadult female buffalo within a Transfrontier Conservation Area in Africa. Our observations confirm that bovine tuberculosis and other diseases can spread between buffalo populations across national parks, community land, and countries, thus posing a risk to animal and human health in surrounding wildlife areas.

On a global scale, protected areas (PAs) are one of the main tools used for biodiversity conservation. However, accelerated biodiversity loss and lack of social acceptance of PAs call into question their ability to reach long-term biodiversity conservation objectives. To address this, conservation scientists and practitioners have moved from segregative to integrative models of PAs. When the segregative model sees PAs as human exclusion zones, the integrative model considers conservation and development projects and multiple partnerships with local stakeholders within and outside PAs. Given this paradigmatic evolution, a PA and its surrounding landscape are increasingly regarded as a single social-ecological system (SES). This development brings new challenges for conservationists: How should these complex and dynamic systems be managed, and how can their pathways be described and piloted? Using French nature reserves (NRs) as case studies, we propose a framework for analyzing the integration pathways of PAs within their social-ecological context. We identified the pathways of 10 NRs according to their degree of integration in the surrounding landscape (spatial), their management objectives (sectoral), and their governance systems (institutional). We analyzed these pathways using three metaphors associated with resilience thinking (adaptive cycle, adaptation, and transformation). We discussed how these 10 NRs have changed over time, revealing how practitioners anticipate future pathways and avoid undesirable states. Through an exploration of the totality of an SES’s spatial, sectoral, and institutional pathways, the framework we propose is a potential tool for identifying opportunities and constraints for long-term conservation actions.

Xu et al. (1) make a most useful contribution to the debate on protected areas (PAs) in China and make a welcome focus on ecosystem services rather than threatened species. Nonetheless, their continued focus is on the establishment of PAs, rather than wider landscape-scale approaches, which are more suitable to the Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, they say, “First, there is no PA type particular to ecosystem services conservation and directly aimed at enhancing ecological security for human beings. Nature reserves are established primarily for biodiversity conservation, not for ecosystem services. Second, important areas for conservation of biodiversity and … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: peter.bridgewater{at}canberra.edu.au. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Protected areas are often burdened with conflicts between environmental managers and neighboring rural communities. Unsuccessful top-down approaches for conservation may be replaced by alternative forms of systemic management involving local actors in the design and implementation of conservation management. Although theoretically sound and appealing, the involvement of local residents in the management of protected areas is often impaired in practice by scale mismatches, conflicting values and interests, power imbalance, and a lack of trust among actors. In this paper, we describe a process initiated in Zimbabwe to create a fair and balanced locally designed arena where local communities and protected area managers may collaborate to produce effective management plans. Adopting the Companion Modeling approach, we conducted a participatory modeling experiment to codesign a role-playing game that simulates the interactions between farming activities, livestock herding practices, and wildlife in a virtual landscape reproducing local social-ecological dynamics. After 18 months of intensive ethnographical fieldwork to gain knowledge and legitimacy, we spent one year codesigning the first version of the game with a group of volunteer villagers. The game, called Kulayijana (teaching each other), was tested and validated by other members of the rural communities and subsequently presented to protected area managers. We show how this approach allowed the negotiation of uncertainties and their inclusion in a model that constitutes a shared representation of farmers' interactions with the protected area. We emphasize the fact that working with marginalized actors first increased participation, appropriation, and confidence of rural communities to engage in a multistakeholder debate, thus reducing power imbalance among actors. We conclude by discussing the next phase of our work: the necessary involvement of conservation actors in the Kulayijana team, and the implementation of Kulayijana with higher hierarchical levels.

The Dindefelo Natural Community Reserve was declared with the objective of protecting biodiversity in this region. So far it was relatively unexplored regarding its herpetofauna. The location of this reserve, together with its unusual varied topography and well-conserved mosaic of vegetation formations, promised this area to harbour a very distinctive herp community. The aim of our preliminary inventory was to report a first list of the herpetofauna found in this unexplored area of south-east Senegal. We found 16 species of reptiles (5 lizards, 9 snakes, one tortoise and one crocodile) and 10 species of amphibians. Two of those records, Dipsadoboa aff. weileri (Colubridae) and Ptychadena retropunctata (Ptychadenidae), are first country records. The Dindefelo Natural Community Reserve seems to be a promising area for further herpetological research.

During the Bukavu Conference on flora and fauna conservation (26-31 October 1953), a French delegation submitted a recommendation, which was unanimously adopted, calling for an overall policy for nature protection in Africa. The 1933 London Convention, which only addressed the “conservation of fauna and flora in their natural state”, no longer seems adequate: the conservation of a few animal or plant species and the creation of national parks and nature reserves only address particular areas of nature conservation, which need to be extended to protect the whole environment in which African people live. This includes spontaneous vegetation, which protects water and soils and forms not only forests but also indeterminate “bush”. A specific convention for Africa is justified because nature in Africa is different and more seriously endangered than elsewhere. It is in danger because of the extreme climate, but also from bush fires and slash-and-burn agriculture that cannot sustain the undernourished population. Savannah encroachment, soil erosion and impoverishment and desertification are gaining ground. A common policy for all African territories has become essential to ensure their protection, and also to fight epidemics. Africa's nature forms a whole that has no boundaries, but natural regions that interact climatically. Over and above a Charter for nature protection in Africa, the issue is that of protecting Africa's populations, but without subjecting them to scientific planning that disregards their customary practices. Abstract adapted by the editorial team.

International audience; Résumé The Merlimont-Berck dune-field is typical of the Picardy coastal plain, in the North of France. The prevailing landwards wind, added to the megatidal environment and 800 m-wide sandy beach at low tide, offer the best conditions to create coastal dunes. The whole dune-field extends over more 1000 ha and is protected from urbanization. A part of it (450 ha) is an out-of-bounds National biological reserve, managed by the Office national des forêts (ONF). In the outer dune-system, which is linked with the beach (foredune, transverse trough blowouts, transgressive dunes and parabolic dunes) natural processes have been working for the last 20 years without any human interference. So the area is actually a reference site for aeolian landforms on any scale. Les dunes de Merlimont-Berck sont typiques de la plaine maritime picarde, dans le nord de la France. Les vents dominants d'ouest, le régime mégatidal (plus de 9 m de marnage) et un estran sableux large de 800 m à marée basse créent des conditions très propices à la formation de dunes littorales. Le champ de dunes forme un bloc d'un seul tenant sur plus de 1000 ha. Il est entièrement protégé de l'urbanisation. Une partie est gérée en Réserve Biologique Domaniale par l'ONF (Office National des Forêts) et fermée au public. Les dunes du système externe sont proches de la plage et offrent une grande diversité de formes (avant-dune, couloirs et siffle-vent transversaux étroitement corrélés avec des dunes transgressives appelées pourrières, caoudeyres et dunes paraboliques). Le gestionnaire (ONF) y laisse fonctionner librement les processus naturels depuis plus de 20 ans. Ces dunes sont aujourd'hui un site de référence pour étudier la dyna-mique éolienne à toutes les échelles. The dunes of Merlimont (north of France): a natural museum of aeolian landforms (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281464693_The_dunes_of_Merlimont_north_of_France_a_natural_museum_of_aeolian_landforms [accessed Feb 10, 2016].

Pastoralism and agriculture have affected rangeland ecosystems over the past millennia, including many ecosystems that are currently protected as reserves. However, the legacy of these land-use practices on current ecosystem functioning remains unclear. We studied legacy effects of former human land use on soil physical and chemical properties in a South African savanna. We did this by comparing soil properties in grazing lawns (patches of short grass maintained by the positive feedback between grazing intensity and forage quality) with the surrounding less grazed bunch grasslands within three different human land-use history contexts: (i) Abandoned bomas: permanent stone enclosures where livestock were kept overnight, and dung and urine accumulated for several years or decades. (ii) Old fields: areas where vegetation was cleared, soil tilled, and cultivated, but received little or no fertilization. (iii) Natural grasslands: not cultivated but grazed by livestock before the establishment of the reserve and wildlife thereafter. Former human land use rather than soil texture was the main determinant of grazing lawn location. Moreover, lawn soil properties also varied among land-use histories. In all grazing lawns, soil nutrient concentrations were higher than in adjacent grasslands but abandoned bomas contained three times more phosphorus, and twice as much nitrogen and carbon than old fields and natural grassland lawns. In addition to past land use, soil texture influenced lawn soil nutrients: Concentrations of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, total nitrogen, and carbon in lawns were higher on clayey soils than sandy soils, whereas phosphorus, C:N ratio, and pH did not change with soil texture. Our study confirms previous findings on the effect of human land use on savanna heterogeneity, but also highlights how legacy effects may vary among different historic land-use practices.

International audience; In the wake of different studies, the intention in this chapter is to perform a critical examination of the process of turning nature into heritage. Such a study, if used as a management tool, may help to yield broader debate on environmental governance. To do this we shall look at the two elements that lie at the heart of creating heritage, namely conserving and enhancing the value of a terroir particularly through ecotourism and other productive environmental activities under way in the two Biosphere Reserves of the Yucatán : Celestún and Ría Lagartos. It seems that a heritage creation process is taking place, as the sign at the entrance of the Ría Lagartos reserve and the management plans of each Reserve suggest. It is, however, rather discrete, as no other indication has so far been detected in the rhetoric of the different stakeholders on the Yucatán coast. Does it really point to the emergence of a heritage process ? Is this the starting point for such a process ? What are the potential social, economic and political implications of such a process ? Does it help to reduce unequal relations or does it exacerbate social and economic marginalisation ?

International audience

Présentation de l'éditeur : The introduction of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa was based on an enchanting promise: simultaneously contributing to global biodiversity conservation initiatives, regional peace and integration, and the sustainable socio-economic development of rural communities. Cross-border collaboration and eco-tourism became seen as the vehicles of this promise, which would enhance regional peace and stability along the way. However, as these highly political projects take shape, conservation and development policymaking progressively shifts from the national to regional and global arenas, and the peoples most affected by TFCA formation tend to disappear from view. This book focuses on the forgotten people displaced by, or living on the edge of, protected wildlife areas. It moves beyond the grand 'enchanting promise' of conservation and development across frontiers, and unfounded notions of TFCAs as integrated social-ecological systems. Peoples' dependency on natural resources - the specific combination of crop cultivation, livestock keeping and natural resource harvesting activities - varies enormously along the conservation frontier, as does their reliance on resources on the other side of the conservation boundary. Hence, the studies in this book move from the dream of eco-tourism-fuelled development supporting nature conservation and people towards the local realities facing marginalized people, living adjacent to protected areas in environments often poorly suited to agriculture. Contents: Foreword (Professor Marshall W. Murphree). 1. People at wildlife frontiers in Southern Africa. 2. TFCAs and the invisible peoples. 3. Defining the edge: boundary formation and TFCAs in Southern Africa. 4. Population and livelihoods on the edge. 5. Ethnic heterogeneity and its implications for natural resources management on the edge. 6. On the edge of state and economy. 7. Resource gradients and movements across the edge of transfrontier parks. 8. Consequences of animals crossing the edges of transfrontier parks. 9. Land and natural resource-based livelihood opportunities in transfrontier conservation areas. 10. Whither TFCAs and people on the edge in Southern Africa? Index

International audience

L’accroissement des besoins en espace et en ressource naturelle menace l’existence de l’actuelle biosphère par d’irrémédiables changements dans la composition et la structuration de sa diversité biologique. L’état des lieux des relations entre la société et la biodiversité fait ressortir l’extinction d’un certain nombre d’espèces. Face aux effets irréversibles de la chasse et de la destruction de biotopes, l’aménagement et le développement économique des territoires insulaires tendent à se concevoir en intégrant la protection, la conservation et la valorisation de la biodiversité mondiale. Ainsi, en prenant l’exemple des espèces aviennes à la Martinique, la diversité biologique tend à se concevoir de plus en plus comme étant une richesse à conserver mais bien plus encore comme un prétexte dans la mise en protection et dans la valorisation d’un certain nombre d’entités biospatiales, notamment à des fins ludiques.The increase in the needs for space and natural resource threatens the existence of the current biosphere with incurable changes in the composition and the structuring of its biological diversity. The inventory of the relations between man and biodiversity emphasizes the extinction of a certain number of species specific. Facing the irreversible effects of hunting and the destruction of biotopes, land-use planning and economic development of the insulars territory tend to be conceived by taking into account sustainable management integrating world diversity : that is the biodiversity in its broadest meaning. Thus, the avian species of Martinique are conceived as biological entities to be preserved but much more still like pretexts in the protection and valorization of some biospatials unit, particularly for recreation purposes.

Natural areas are essentially multifunctional, contributing in multiple ways to human well-being. Ecosystem goods and services are provided through ecosystem functions (regulation, habitat, production and information). Among the multiple services provided by natural areas, recreational services are increasingly valuable. The main objective of our paper is to evaluate the recreation demand of the “Sensitive Natural Areas”(SNA) public policy in the Hérault District (Languedoc-Roussillon Region, France). These natural areas are acquired as land ownership by the Hérault District to ensure their protection from urban pressure and making them free to access. We highlight the recreation benefits in a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) whilst measuring the direct use value set by visitors, and then we economically ground this SNA conservation policy. We show that the Consumer Surplus (CS) mean value is estimated at 58.82 euros (US$78.03) per visitor and per trip, from a range of 34.60 euros (US$45.90) to 83.04 euros (US$110.16). According to identified number of visitors, this result may show this SNA policy to be cost-efficient.

The way a household makes a living depends on the available options in terms of assets, activities and the context in which a household operates. People in the buffer zone of La Amistad Biosphere in Costa Rica live under conditions that differ from the national standard. While many are cultivating a piece of land, the remoteness of the area makes it unprofitable to cultivate for the market and limits access to public services. In order to fulfil basic needs many households in rural areas depend on goods collected from nature such as food, timber and medicine. The households in the buffer zone of La Amistad Biosphere Reserve are restricted by law, in cultivating and collecting food products and timber on land that was previously freely available to them. Hunting is forbidden and for lodging permission is necessary. Knowledge on the different types of livelihood strategies that exist, and comprehending the driving factors of each livelihood strategy is crucial for improving mechanisms creating a better balance between nature conservation and poverty alleviation. After conducting a hierarchical cluster analysis, a non-hierarchical cluster analysis was performed on the basis of income shares of different activities. Five distinct livelihood strategies were identified. A Non-parametric test showed that there is no significant relation between livelihood strategies and outcomes in terms of gross annual income, except for day labourers. Day labourers are significantly poorer compared to those who earn income from non-farm activities and coffee producers. Non-farm workers are on average the richest group and have higher education and more often a loan, if compared to the other strategies. Assets between those pursuing strategies based on agriculture (coffee production, day labour, niche market) differ not significantly. The binary choice model determining what factors influence the choice for forest conservation revealed that nonfarm- income is insignificant. Thus, agriculturalists are not less likely to conserve forest than those pursuing non-agricultural strategies. Yet, total farm size and owning land with a legal title is significantly positively affecting the choice for forest conservation.

International audience; no abstract

The immediate periphery of the Park of W (Burkina-Faso, Niger and Benin) constitutes a space that has various stakeholder groups of permanent actors (farmers and managers of the protected area) or temporary actors (trans-human breeders and hunter tourists). For the farmers, it is about a space of food production, cash crops and land appropriation; it must play an agro-ecological role. For the other stakeholders it is: a sort of large corridor for the breeders¿ cattle; a tank of a specific fauna for the hunter; and a space for maintenance of landscape mosaic and biodiversity gradients on the interface of the protected area anthropogenic zone for the land managers. The parkland system is the principal mode of land utilization, or at least the one which influences the landscape structure the most In this, it is seen to be assigned a multifunctional role. The contribution of the parkland system to multipurpose agriculture and a multifunctional space will be analysed under three aspects: 1) an evaluation of the degree of satisfaction of expectations of the different actors; 2) a graphic modelling of the space-time organization of the agroforestry space-resources of the village territory; 3) other chorems which integrate the level of integration of the different uses on this territory. (Texte intégral)

International audience; In some African protected areas, elephant populations have reached high densities causing concern about their influence on other forms of biodiversity, and in particular, other large herbivores. This has led to a debate whether management of elephant populations might need to be implemented. Surprisingly, few studies have focused on the influence of elephants on other herbivores and the existing results are conflicting. We investigated such influence in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, where elephants were culled and maintained at low density up to 1986, and have more than doubled since then, thus providing the opportunity to explore their possible influence on other herbivore species. Trends of different herbivore populations were obtained using long-term waterhole census data, with these results also being correlated to changes in dry season rainfall, as another fundamental determinant of herbivore population fluctuations. While our study did not allow us to properly disentangle the role of elephants and rainfall, it provided valuable insights. For five out of the 13 herbivore species studied, the population increased between 1973 and 1986 (high dry season rainfall; relatively low elephant abundance), then decreased between 1987 and 1995 (extremely low dry season rainfall; increase in the elephant population), and finally have increased since 1996 (high dry season rainfall; high elephant abundance). These results are consistent with an important role of dry season rainfall on herbivore population dynamics. Additionally, for four other species, the population increased between 1973 and 1986 and has decreased since then. As most herbivore declines occurred simultaneously with increase in the elephant population in the 1987–1995 period, and with the recent increase in most populations happening at a lower rate than the 1973–1985 period, our results suggest the possible existence of a negative influence of high elephant densities on other herbivores. We discuss what the possible underlying mechanisms can be and how to investigate them.

Peu d'études se sont portées sur la population d'éléphants du Parc Régional du W, en Afrique de l'Ouest (Bénin, Burkina Faso et Niger), et c'était dans une perspective essentiellement nationale plutôt que transfrontalière. Pendant quatre mois, d'avril à juillet 2004, deux femelles éléphants ont été équipées de colliers radio pour connaître leurs déplacements transfrontaliers. Cela a permis de rapporter 556 localisations. La taille des domaines vitaux calculée par la méthode de Kernel 95% a été estimée à 2.572 km2 pour l'une et 1.970 km2 pour l'autre. Les espaces vitaux des deux femelles se recouvraient fortement et elles étaient étroitement associées pendant la période concernée. Les déplacements des animaux du Niger vers la partie centrale du parc (au Burkina Faso) en passant par le nord du Bénin ont été observés au début de la saison des pluies, le long de la rivière Mekrou. Il faudrait encourager des études régionales et l'adoption de pratiques de gestion transfrontalière pour permettre à cette grande population restante d'éléphants de se maintenir.

International audience; no abstract

Local ecological knowledge and know-how play a central role in the negotiations on the Convention on Biological Diversity. Here the authors present and analyze the specific characteristics of the French approach on the subject: the concepts of terroir and heritage, a reinterpretation of indigenousness, and diverse forms of conservation; all of these are often tied to enhancing the status of products via the market.

Most protected areas in Western Africa are challenged by seasonal mobile livestock, either on short or long distance, through forage competition, water resources, illegal killing, and disease transmission. Impacts of livestock transhumance have been very dramatic in terms of population dynamic and behavior, especially of large mammals. To understand the roots of the growing conflicts between park managers, pastoralists, and farmers, various studies were carried out with a main focus on Regional Park W (Niger, Burkina, Benin). This article summarizes these stakeholders’ points of view and describes some possible solutions for addressing human–wildlife conflict in this park. Solutions include a vision for land use management that takes into account the protection of biodiversity and seasonal migration for livestock and wildlife. Also explored are mechanisms of negotiation at the local and regional levels including the need for involving pastoral representatives.