Search

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.

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.

Promoting co-existence between humans and their physical and ecological environment, including wildlife, has been given an increased importance due to a recent shift of society to become environmentally sustainable. However, humans and large carnivores have been in conflict throughout history. One of the most prominent reasons for this conflict is damages to livestock and domestic animals. Population reduction or even local eradication has often been used as a damage mitigation strategy. However, number of carnivore damages need to be positively related to carnivore densities for population reduction to be an effective damage limitation tool. Sweden is a country in northern Europe with frequent human-carnivore conflicts, spurred by an intense and polarized public debate. We use a 20-year data set on brown bear (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) and wolf (Canis lupus) and their damages in Sweden to evaluate if temporal variation in carnivore densities has caused an equivalent variation in the number of damages to cattle, sheep and domestic dogs, if such relationships differed between the carnivore species and damage types, and if there were geographic scale dependencies in these relationships. We observed contradictory effects of large carnivore densities on damages, which included both positive and negative effects. Differences occurred between carnivore species, damage types, geographic areas, and spatial scales. However, wolf densities appeared to have been positively related to the number of damages more often than bear and lynx densities. Our results highlight that large carnivore damages can be highly context dependent, and that other factors than the size of local or regional carnivore populations may be more important damage determinants. Such an interpretation implies that population reduction may not necessarily be an effective method for limiting large carnivore damages, and highlight that damage mitigation strategies need to be flexible over time and space. We recommend further studies identifying the contexts in which large carnivore densities influence damages to livestock and domestic animals, as well as studies aimed at identifying other factors that may be related to the number of damages., Funding was provided by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness in Spain (grant number RYC2013-14662) and by the National Research Foundation in South Africa (grant numbers SFP2008072900003, IFR2011032400087, CPRR13081929244 and IFR150119112493).

Floral and faunal biodiversity are jeopardized by a number of ecological, environmental, and anthropogenic factors. Increasingly however, an evident disconnect between the science and policy spheres problematizes efforts to conserve biodiversity. One of the issues that informs this research-implementation gap is discordance among the scales at which: i) the research objective is devised, ii) the data are collected, and iii) the inferences are applied. This issue might be influential among human-carnivore conflict research where applied results are intended to optimize the implementation of interventionist activities. Using human-lion (Panthera leo) conflict research as a novel case study, we reviewed papers studying patterns of conflict from 1990 to 2016. Despite the fact that the majority (70.5%, 62 of 88) of these papers devised their research objectives at broad spatial scales (i.e., either landscape or regional), most (64.8%, 57 of 88) envisioned their inferences at fine scales (i.e., either household or community). Mismatches between the coarsest reported scale of data collection and the finest reported scale of inference were also evident. For instance, 24 of 79 papers (30.4%) had potentially problematic mismatches given that the scale of inference was at a finer scale than the scale of data collection. We infer that scale discordance in human-lion conflict research is common and derives, in part, from the lack of fine-scale geospatial data describing the systems in which humans and lions interact. Efforts to develop more resolute geospatial libraries across biodiverse regions will help to make conservation research more effectual by narrowing the research-implementation gap. One sentence summary Discordance between the scale of data collection and the scale of prediction problematize efforts to devise interventions for human-carnivore conflict.

Modern day investigation in fields of archaeology and palaeontology can be greatly characterised by an exponential growth of integrated new technologies, nevertheless, while these advances are of great significance to multiple lines of research, their evaluation and update over time is equally as important. Here we present an application of inter and intra-observer analysis in taphonomy based geometric morphometrics, employing robust non-parametric statistical analyses for the study of experimental carnivore tooth pit morphologies. To fully understand the influence of measurement errors in the collection of this data, our statistical assessment was performed on fully superimposed, partially superimposed and raw landmark coordinates collected from 3D surface scanning. Experimental samples used to assess these errors includes wolf and dog tooth pits used in modern day ecological livestock predation analysis. Results obtained from this study highlight the importance of landmark type in the assessment of error, emphasising the value of semi-landmark models over the use of ambiguous Type III landmarks. In addition to this, data also reveals the importance of observer experience for the collection of data alongside an interesting increase in error when working with fully superimposed landmarks due to the “Pinocchio Effect”. Through this study we are able to redefine the geometric morphometric models used for tooth pit morphological analyses. This final hybrid Type II fixed landmark and semi-landmark model presents a significant reduction in human induced error, generating a more metrically reliable and replicable method that can be used for data pooling in future inter-institutional research. These results can be considered a fundamental step forward for carnivore inspired studies, having an impact on archaeological, palaeontological, modern-day ecological research as well as applications in other forensic sciences., L.A.C. is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities with a FPI Predoctoral Grant (Ref. PRE2019-089411) associated to project RTI2018-099850-B-I00 and the University of Salamanca. R.H. is supported by MICINNFEDER PGC2018-093925-B-C32, the AGUAR project number SGR 2017-1040; the Universitat Rovira I Virgili (2014, 2015 and 2016 PFR-URV-B2-147) and CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya. D.H.R. is supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, under the contract REF: PEJ2019-005420-A as part of the i+D+I Garantía Juvenil. Finally L.A.C., M.Á.M.G and D.G.A. are supported by the General Foundation of the University of Salamanca under the Plan TCUE 2018-2020; Project “WOLF_FOOTPRINT” (PC-TCUE18-20_2013).

In Finland, the conservation of large mammalian carnivores—brown bear, lynx, wolf and wolverine—is undermined by illegal killings that have commonly taken place after the implementation of national carnivore management plans. This hidden form of criminality cannot occur to such an extent without strong support from the local community. We examined the support of proximate groups by collecting data from hunters and women. In collecting data, we used non-active role playing with empathy-based fictitious stories. We used argumentation analysis to reveal the assumed species, the background of the illegal killing and especially the justifications and importance of community support for illegal killing. The results show that we have a conflict with strong basic emotions in hand as both illegal killing and support for illegal killing and hunting violators are based on anger and fear for children and domestic animals as well as frustration toward the authorities and the lack of proper management actions. The wolf is at the centre of the conflict due to the specific character of the species. Current policies have inevitably been lacking in terms of place-based policy, and that has led to conflicts between game management authorities/researchers and ordinary citizens. To facilitate a change in attitudes, we suggest focusing on affective factors via confidence-building measures.

Adaptive co-management (ACM) is a key concept in science and an increasingly adopted policy response in conservation, associated with a number of positive outcomes. However, the effects and mechanisms of co-management arrangements, including the conditions under which ACM gives rise to higher levels of internal and external legitimacy, are yet to be explored. This endeavor, in turn, requires theoretically driven models providing assumptions and outlining testable hypotheses. Considering the social challenges of ACM and using an institutional change within the Swedish carnivore management system aimed at achieving legitimacy through co-management as an illustrative example, this article develops a conceptual model that encompasses conditions and possible explanations to ACM outcomes. More specifically, drawing on lessons from social theory, we model the impact of three key factors—social networks, deliberation and learning—on the external and internal legitimacy resulting from ACM arrangements. Based on the model proposed, the popular assumptions of ACM outcomes can thus be empirically scrutinized and the conditions for increased legitimacy through ACM arrangements better comprehended.

This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature about distributional impacts (who wins and who loses) of implementing new management plans for non-market priced environmental goods and services. ...

George Orwell 1949-ben megjelent, Ezerkilencszaznyolcvannegy cimű regenyenek első oldalan csupa nagybetűvel szuletett meg a NAGY TESTVER fogalma, amely kozgondolkodasunk resze lett. Szimbolikus jelentese, az eletunk minden teruletere kiterjedő szinte mikroszkopikus megfigyeles, a hatalmi elit gatlastalan visszaelese hatalmaval. Orwell mindehhez megteremtette a telekep eszkozrendszeret es az ujbeszel nyelvet, ami meg a gondolkodas szabalyozasat (megfigyeleset) is lehetőve tette. Jelen dolgozat celja, hogy dokumentumokra, tudomanyos-technikai eredmenyekre alapozva, felhivja a figyelmet arra a megdobbentő tenyre, hogy Orwell 60 eves utopiaja a 21. szazad informacio alapu e-tarsadalmanak napi valosaga lett. Sőt, a technika Orwell altal elkepzelhetetlen 20. szazadi fejlődese messze tulszarnyalta az eredeti utopiat, es mara az utopia az ECHELON, a Carnivore, az RFID stb. rendszerek, azaz a GLOBALIS NAGY TESTVER valosagava valt. Fel kell tehat hivnunk a figyelmet arra, hogy a „terrorizmus elleni kuzdelem”, a „so...

To discuss the fate of my discipline entails the old problem of Nietzschean perspectivism: how can I observe my own practices if there is no vantage point from which I can view my own culture, my own scientific lifeworld, and so on? Isn’t it asking for too much? Can one be one’s own prophet? Probing fate reminds us of tragedies and their relationship to action and death. Sailing with the tailwind of a future fate reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history; it is the storm of the past that blows the angel into the future.1 For Benjamin this storm is the image of progress. One can ask oneself whether or not reading the future in the signs of the past is a futile endeavor. To speak about fate is to speak in terms of life and death. Therefore I

Carnivore is a surveillance technology, a software program housed in a computer unit, which is installed by properly authorized FBI agents on a particular Internet Service Provider's (ISP) network. The Carnivore software system is used together with a tap on the ISP's network to “intercept, filter, seize and decipher digital communications on the Internet”. The system is described as a “specialized network analyzer” that works by “sniffing” a network and copying and storing a warranted subset of its traffic. In the FBI's own words “Carnivore chews on all data on the network, but it only actually eats the information authorized by a court order”. This article, in two parts, provides an overview of the FBI's Carnivore electronic surveillance system.

A lot has happened in our world since last we met. The FBI is under siege for its Carnivore system, Verizon, confronted with a security hole that allowed access to customer data fixed it, but really didn't. A new flavor of the Love Bug bit, and a new back-door Trojan hit the streets. Law enforcement started recruiting hackers. And 2600 actually took the (unsuccessful) position that computer code is covered under the First Amendment, which would have allowed them to publish code that could crack the DVD copy-protection program. Add to that the position taken by my 18-year-old son and most of his friends that copyrighted material (specifically music) should be free to anyone who wants it, regardless of license and copyright. I guess I'm beginning to see why people of my parent's generation think that the United States has sunken into a moral abyss worthy of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Internet voting has received a significant amount of attention in the aftermath of the 2000 U.S. presedential election. Internet voting is defined as the casting of a secure and secret ballot that is transmitted to election officials using the Internet. This column reviews recent developments in electronic voting, including on-site and remote Internet voting, the National Science Foundation study of “e-Voting,” voting standards from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Federal Election Commission. Congressional review of voting technologies as well as state government inititives to test e-voting technologies are also discussed.

We present CARNIVORE, a system for in situ, unobtrusive monitoring of cryptic, difficult-to-catch/observe wildlife in their natural habitat. CARNIVORE is a network of mobile and static nodes with sensing, processing, storage, and wireless communication capabilities. CARNIVORE's compact, low-power, mobile animal-borne nodes collect sensor data and transmit it to static nodes, which then relay it to the Internet. Depending on the wildlife being studied, the network can be quite sparse and therefore disconnected frequently for arbitrarily long periods of time. To support "disconnected operation", CARNIVORE uses an "opportunistic routing" approach taking advantage of every encounter between nodes (mobile-to-mobile and mobile-to-static) to propagate data. With a lifespan of 50–100 days, a CARNIVORE mobile node, outfitted on a collar, collects and transmits 1 GB of data compared to 450 kB of data from comparable commercially available wildlife collars. Each collar records 3-axis accelerometer and GPS data to infer animal behavior and energy consumption.Testing in both laboratory and free-range settings with domestic dogs shows that galloping and trotting behavior can be identified. Data collected from first deployments on mountain lions (Puma concolor) near Santa Cruz, CA, USA show that the system is a viable and useful tool for wildlife research.

Many countries, including Sweden and Finland, are decentralizing the management of large carnivore species within their borders and emphasizing the role of stakeholder participation in legitimizing formal policy. Regional large carnivore committees (RLCCs), including representatives of authorities and non-governmental organizations, are essential to these endeavors. These committees are formally constituted in Sweden, whereas in Finland, they are informally developed from the bottom-up. In both countries, the declared roles of these committees are consultative. A comparative study based on survey data is described here, which address the question of how procedural legitimacy is shaped and maintained in institutional settings with different origins, such as top-down or bottom-up. The results indicate no clear difference in the representatives’ general satisfaction with the country-specific arrangements. Notable differences were found in specific perceptions of the clarity and purposes of the RLCCs. In both countries, the perceived rationale for the establishment of RLCCs emphasized the knowledge and expertise of the represented interest groups and authorities. Between the countries, similarities were also found in the strong links between overall satisfaction and personally perceived success and progress in communication and information exchange, i.e., deliberative processes. The capacity of the RLCCs to improve trust and acceptability with regard to different opinions was viewed as a key element underlying satisfactory RLCC activities, irrespective of the institutional settings.

Environmental and Resource Economics, 48 (2), ISSN:0924-6460, ISSN:1573-1502

A gene expression n-BDD (binary decision diagram) is proposed in the paper. The gene expression is suitable for agent models to decide agent's behavior using information from environment. We can apply genetic algorithm to evolve behavior of agents. A simulator of a quasi-ecosystem developed using the gene expression is described. In the quasi-ecosystem, a herbivore, a carnivore and plants make a food chain. A herbivore using an n-BDD more rapidly acquire its ability to survive from a carnivore than using finite state automaton.

This article argues that the common wisdom on the USA Patriot Act is wrong. Far from being a significant expansion of law enforcement powers online, the Patriot Act actually changed Internet surveillance law in only minor ways and added several key privacy protections. The article focuses on three specific provisions of the Patriot Act: the provision applying the pen register law to the Internet, the provisions relating to Carnivore, and the new computer trespasser exception to the Wiretap Act. By explaining the basic framework of surveillance law and applying it to the Patriot Act, the author shows how the Internet surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act updated the law in ways that both law enforcement and civil libertarians should appreciate.

Ecologists are interested in assessing the absolute or relative size of a population in a given community in many contexts. A forester wants to develop an inventory of the flora of an area. A conservationist wishes to monitor the effect of protection on an endangered species. A wildlife manager wishes to see if there is a reasonable balance between herbivore and carnivore animals. In all cases a statistical approach has to be adopted.

According to documents released to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on 4 December 2000, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is not only expanding the role of Carnivore to interact with other electronic surveillance systems but is marketing the tool to other Federal and state law enforcement agencies. The documents were released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request and a subsequent US Federal Court order.

Testifying before the House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee, representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defended the Internet surveillance system code-named Carnivore as a rarely used but necessary law enforcement 'surgical' tool. Members of the subcommittee, however, were not convinced that Carnivore has the necessary checks and controls in place to prevent abuses of privacy of E-mail. Representative Mel Watt of North Carolina said, ''I have a generalized concern about the government's ability to invade the privacy of its citizens'', adding, ''there is a growing level of ...concern about 'Big Brotherism' fed by the increasing electronic world.'' Representative John Conyers of Michigan stressed, ''Constitutional rights don't end where cyberspace begins.''

According to documents released by the FBI to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Carnivore Internet surveillance system is able to capture more than targeted ‘filtered’ traffic.

Documents released to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on 2 October 2000 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shed some new light on the technical genesis of the Carnivore Internet collection system. The release of the documents follow a lawsuit brought against the FBI by EPIC following a refusal to release them under the Freedom of Information Act. A federal judge subsequently ruled in EPIC's favor. According to the released information, the Carnivore program began as ‘Omnivore’ in late 1997. Omnivore was officially closed out on 9 June 1999 and the documents peg its development costs at US $900 000.

This is the second anniversary of my return to being a carnivore after 10 years. Being a vegetarian was one of the few student ideals that I remained faithful to since I decided to stop eating meat one day at the end of a long session at the anatomy dissection table. To some extent over the past two years I've missed the occasional taste of the moral high ground at the dinner table that some vegetarians constantly occupy, to everyone's annoyance. Looking forward to barbecues and cold meat salads this summer, I wonder why I continued to eschew animal flesh as a foodstuff for so long, even though the importance of most of the “isms” that make student life so colourful had long faded. My first contact with the idea was during my first Christmas holiday after starting university. I was asked to speak to another member of the family who had “gone vegetarian.” Having an interest in the biological sciences, I was expected to convince her that meat was essential for health and that, given the season, turkey was an especially wholesome food. Others had tried to bring her back to the straight and narrow with no success, but she would listen to me as I was going to be a doctor. It was during this discussion …

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.