No abstract

Approximately two billion people — a quarter of the earth's population — directly harvest forest products to meet their daily needs. These individuals disproportionately experience the impacts of increasing climatic variability and global biodiversity loss, and must disproportionately alter their behaviors in response to these impacts. Much of the increasingly ambitious global conservation agenda relies on voluntary uptake of conservation behaviors in such populations. Thus, it is critical to understand how individuals in these communities perceive environmental change and use conservation practices as a tool to protect their well-being. To date however, there have been no quantitative studies of how individual perceptions of forest change and its causes shape real-world conservation behaviors in forest dependent populations. Here we use a novel participatory mapping activity to elicit spatially explicit perceptions of forest change and its drivers across 43 mangrove-dependent communities in Pemba, Tanzania. We show that perceptions of mangrove decline drive individuals to propose stricter limits on fuelwood harvests from community forests only if they believe that the resultant gains in mangrove cover will not be stolen by outsiders. Conversely, individuals who believe their community mangrove forests are at high risk of theft actually decrease their support for forest conservation in response to perceived forest decline. High rates of inter-group competition and mangrove loss are thus driving a 'race to the bottom' phenomenon in community forests in this system. This finding demonstrates a mechanism by which increasing environmental decline may cause communities to forgo conservation practices, rather than adopt them, as is often assumed in much community-based conservation planning. However, we also show that when effective boundaries are present, individuals are willing to limit their own harvests to stem such perceived decline.

We considered a series of conservation-related research projects on the island of Pemba, Tanzania, to reflect on the broad significance of Beier et al.'s recommendations for linking conservation science with practical conservation outcomes. The implementation of just some of their suggestions can advance a successful coproduction of actionable science by small research teams. Key elements include, first, scientists and managers working together in the field to ensure feedback in real time; second, questions jointly identified by managers and researchers to facilitate engaged collaboration; third, conducting research at multiple sites, thereby broadening managers' abilities to reach multiple stakeholders; and fourth, establishing a multidisciplinary team because most of the concerns of local managers require input from multiple disciplines.

No abstract

Ambient wildfire smoke in the American West has worsened considerably in recent decades, while the number of individuals recreating outdoors has simultaneously surged. Wildfire smoke poses a serious risk to human health, especially during long periods of exposure and during exercise. Here we aggregate data on black carbon, a major component of wildfire smoke, and recreational visitation in 32 U.S. national parks from 1980 - 2019 to examine how visitors respond to wildfire smoke. We hypothesize that visitor response may exhibit a threshold effect where ambient smoke reduces visitation after a critical level, but not before. We develop a series of breakpoint models to test this hypothesis. Overall, these models show little to no effect of ambient smoke on visitation to the 32 parks tested, even when allowing for critical thresholds at the extreme upper ranges of the smoke data. This suggests that wildfire smoke does not significantly alter behavior of park attendance. This finding has implications for the management of recreation areas, public health, and climate change adaptation broadly.