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By Richard Leakey and Virginia Morell. 2001. St. Martin's Press, New York. xi + 319 pp. ISBN: 0-312-20626-7 By now, the story of Richard Leakey's rise, fall, and resurrection to [...]

Riding the Tiger: Tiger Conservation in Human-dominated Landscapes. By J. Seidensticker, S. Christie, and P. Jackson (editors). 1999. Cambridge University Press. xix + 383 pp. Illustrated. In spite of valiant [...]

Knight, Richard L., and Peter B. Landres, editors. 1998. Island Press, Washington, D.C. xi + 371 p. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN: 1-55963-515-0 (acid-free paper); $29.95 (paper), ISBN: 1-55963-516-9 (acid-free paper). This [...]

We reviewed Miami-Dade County's Environmentally Endangered Lands (EEL) Program, created in 1990 for the purpose of acquiring and managing threatened native forests and wetlands within Miami-Dade County, Florida. Funds for the program were initially raised from a two-year extraordinary property tax millage approved by voters, with additional funding coming from various state, county, and private sources. To date, the program has protected over 9000 ha of natural areas within the urban and agricultural matrix of eastern Miami-Dade. Although many of these reserves are small, all are important for the conservation of numerous rare endemic upland plants and are used frequently by a variety of animal species. Their preservation also offers a series of ecosystem services that directly and indirectly benefit the community, such as flood control and aquifer recharge. Many issues remain concerning the program, however. The County has not yet opened most EEL sites to the public, and all sites are threatened by edge effects-including the introduction of invasive exotic plants—that require continual management. None-the-less, the program is popular with residents, successful for its stated purpose, and arguably important for the conservation of rare endemic flora-especially that found within South Florida's pine rocklands, a globally imperiled ecosystem type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of the modern protected area movement began in 1872 with the creation of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. For a century thereafter, as more nations began to set up protected area systems, the movement was largely western-dominated and adhered to ‘fences and fines’ forms of conservation. As many more developing nations gained independence in the latter half of the twentieth century, it was increasingly recognized that strict forms of conservation based on western ideals of nature could not be sustained in the long term. Specifically, many rural people in developing countries are dependent on local natural resources, and the conservation rules put into place in many protected areas frequently forbade all extraction and in many cases all entry except for tourism or research. This created a climate of increasing park-people conflicts that in many cases compromised conservation goals and led to a refocus in protected areas management and research in the social sciences worldwide. Here I describe survey and non-survey based protocols developed to study the effectiveness of protected areas in the societal realm. Policy gap analyses, rapid rural appraisals, key informant and focus group surveys and structured and semi-structured social surveys are described. Such studies can allow managers to plan for interventions where needed and can aid in designing appropriate local development projects in an effort to ameliorate park-people conflicts. I finish with a preliminary social research protocol, tested in May, 2009, for Yachang Orchid Reserve, Guangxi Province, the People’s Republic of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various conservation models have been implemented in Nepal since 1973, however their impacts on resources use and conservation attitudes are scarcely known. To address the hypothesis that conservation attitudes should improve around protected areas (PAs) with more social and economic interventions, stratified random questionnaire surveys of 234 households were conducted in two PAs in the Western Terai of Nepal: Bardia National Park (BNP), in which interventions have been more widespread for longer time periods, and Sukla Phanta Wildlife Reserve (SWR), in which interventions are relatively recent. Both are part of a major landscape-level conservation programme under implementation in Nepal, and both are under threat of political turmoil, uncontrolled immigration, inefficient land reform policies and unsustainable resource use. There was spatio-temporal variability in resource use patterns and dependence. People collected eight and seven types of resources in BNP and SWR, respectively, and people in BNP were more dependent on resources overall. About 72% of respondents mentioned the problem of inadequate firewood, and suggested the promotion of alternative energy and permission to collect from PAs as mitigating strategies. Of 11 attitude statements, five significantly differed between the two areas. Respondents from the BNP had more favourable attitudes about conservation than those from SWR, supporting the main hypothesis. Training received by respondents, damage by wildlife, dependence on resources and satisfaction towards user groups contributed significantly to the variation in conservation attitudes. The results suggest that the liberalization of PA management has enabled the use of resources, improved livelihoods to some extent and solicited more favourable conservation attitudes in Nepal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]