Unintended multispecies co-benefits of an Amazonian community-based conservation programme

João V. Campos-Silva (), Joseph E. Hawes, Paulo C. M. Andrade and Carlos A. Peres
Additional contact information
João V. Campos-Silva: Universidade Federal de Alagoas
Joseph E. Hawes: University of East Anglia
Paulo C. M. Andrade: Universidade Federal do Amazonas
Carlos A. Peres: University of East Anglia

Nature Sustainability, 2018, vol. 1, issue 11, 650-656

Abstract: Abstract Urgent challenges posed by widespread degradation in tropical ecosystems with poor governance require new development pathways to reconcile biodiversity conservation and human welfare. Community-based conservation management has shown potential for integrating socio-economic needs with conservation goals in tropical environments; however, assessing the effectiveness of this approach is often held back by the lack of comprehensive ecological assessments. We conduct a robust ecological evaluation of the largest community-based conservation management initiative in the Brazilian Amazon over the last 40 years. We show that this programme has induced large-scale population recovery of the target giant South American turtle (Podocnemis expansa) and other freshwater turtles along a 1,500-km section of a major tributary of the Amazon River. Poaching activity on protected beaches was around 2% compared to 99% on unprotected beaches. We also find positive demographic co-benefits across a wide range of non-target vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. As a result, beaches protected by local communities represent islands of high biodiversity, while unprotected beaches remain ‘empty and silent’, showing the effectiveness of empowering local conservation action, particularly in countries experiencing shortages in financial and human resources.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0170-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natsus:v:1:y:2018:i:11:d:10.1038_s41893-018-0170-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/natsustain/

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-018-0170-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Sustainability is currently edited by Monica Contestabile

More articles in Nature Sustainability from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().