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Community-based tourism (CBT) aims to offer responsible travel to natural areas, conserving the environment, sustaining local communities' well-being, and promoting environmental and cultural education. The long-term sustainability of CBT depends on its ability to enhance local livelihoods while protecting natural landscapes. For the Kamoro indigenous tribe in Papua, Indonesia, CBT offers a way to engage with the capitalist world on their own terms while preserving their customs, traditions, and ecocentric worldviews, and sharing them with tourists interested in their culture. However, as evidenced by many failed CBT initiatives, it is not always a desirable or viable path for development due to numerous barriers faced by communities and the potential negative impacts of tourism. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the Kamoro people's attitudes towards tourism, the barriers to engaging in tourism, and their concerns about its impacts. Semi-structured and in-depth interviews were conducted with community members and local organizations. The results show that although local people view tourism as a viable economic alternative, they face significant challenges, including a lack of trained human resources, infrastructure, financial support, tourism knowledge, government backing, and cooperation among local stakeholders, among others. While tourism development does not always guarantee the protection of natural and cultural landscapes, a community-led initiative supported by the government can serve as a barrier against the engagement of less sustainable industries controlled by external agents, which could have far more serious negative consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased urbanisation influences the morphometric traits of various species, often resulting in urban individuals being smaller than their non-urban counterparts. Urbanisation can affect fundamental eco-evolutionary patterns and impact species' ability to adapt to and occupy rapidly changing environments through morphological changes. We investigated the morphometric responses of two passerine species, the non-native house sparrow (Passer domesticus) and its native congener, the Cape sparrow (Passer melanurus), along gradients of spatial and temporal urbanisation in South Africa over a 52-year period. The house sparrow was significantly heavier, larger and in better condition with increasing urban infrastructure and lower urban vegetation cover, while the Cape sparrow showed opposing trends along these gradients. Temporally, the house sparrow's body mass increased consistently over the 52-year study period, suggesting changes in morphology were concomitant with increasing urbanisation over time. This study demonstrates distinct differences in the morphological responses of the non-native house sparrow and the native Cape sparrow to increasing urban development. These morphological responses may also underpin community-level changes caused by urbanisation, enhancing the capabilities of non-native species to thrive over their native counterparts in these environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent waves of illegal deforestation for cattle pasture are damaging the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve and Rama-Kriol Territory of Nicaragua, with negative consequences to aquatic ecosystems and the people they support. This study creates a framework for how deforestation from cattle ranching causes shifts in stream community structure, mediated by changes in stream habitat over time. It integrates temporally explicit land use information with stream habitat, macroinvertebrate, freshwater shrimp, and fish community data to assess impacts of cattle ranching on 15 headwater streams. The deforestation history measure (DHM), a product of deforestation amount and time since deforestation for each catchment, strongly predicted stream habitat and biotic responses. Delayed effects of land-use change such as decreased allochthonous inputs (large wood, debris) and increased bank destabilization, sedimentation, flashiness, and the scouring effect were apparent in longer deforested catchments, causing lower richness and density and higher evenness of macroinvertebrates; lower shrimp abundance; and distinct changes in fish and invertebrate community composition. Both recently and longer deforested catchments had degraded riparia and smaller sized game fish. Otherwise, recently deforested catchments were more similar to forested catchments. Nicaragua's understudied primary rainforest ecosystems should be high priority for research and conservation before they are lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]