Land use,soil loss,and sustainable agriculture in Rwanda

The conservation of scarce land resources is essential to the long-term viability of agriculture in Rwanda. High population density, steep slopes, and abundant rainfall prevail in the highland portions of this African country, making the task of erosion control uncommonly difficult for the peasant farmer. The specific use to which land is put, e.g., cultivation, fallow, pasture, woodlots, and, if it is cultivated, the particular combination of crops grown, can be seen as contributing to both the cause and the solution of the land degradation problem. Based on data from a nationwide survey of over 4800 agricultural fields in Rwanda, this study reviews the extent to which the land use and cropping patterns employed by farmers are appropriately suited, in terms of erosion control, to the topographical and environmental characteristics of their landholdings. Analyses of other aspects of the traditional agricultural system, e.g., variations in relative soil fertility, the use of organic fertilizers, and the location of fields relative to the household, are introduced to help explain why farmers often fail to maximize erosion control through land use and cropping practices. Adjustments to current land use practices that can be expected to reduce soil loss are discussed.     

Impact of land use and tenure changes on the Kitenden wildlife corridor,Amboseli Ecosystem,Kenya

This study assesses the ecological pressure exerted by changing land use and tenure on the Kitenden wildlife corridor, a critical cross‐border link between the Amboseli and Kilimanjaro national parks. The implications on viability of the two high‐value protected areas and their respective dispersal areas are both negative and serious. The extent of land use change and its impacts were assessed through household and vegetation surveys, while wildlife abundance was measured using transect walks. Approximately 30% of the study area has shifted from community to private land ownership over the last two decades. Except for baboon and vervet monkey, most wildlife avoided the cultivated area. Vegetation composition on the noncultivated area has been greatly altered by intense wildlife and livestock use, where mean herbaceous vegetation cover differed significantly among range‐plant categories (F_{3, 524} = 29.015, p < 0.05). The frequency of increaser I (21.4%) differs greatly from that of decreaser and forbs, at 8.3% and 7.4%, respectively Tree recruitment was low, with a significant difference in mean density among age classes (F_{2, 110} = 3.663, p < 0.05). Only through land leasing agreements between landowners and conservation organisations, and a widely supported land use plan, can the spread of cultivation be controlled and complete cessation of wildlife movement be prevented.     

Piospheres and Pastoralists: Vegetation and Degradation in Steppe Grasslands

The Mongolian plateau in East Asia is part of a new hotspot of land cover change. Recent human activity and natural forces have degraded grasslands in northern China with the southern Mongolia steppe similarly vulnerable. Investigating vegetation patterns at piospheres (the area around water points) can identify herder influence on pasture conditions. Through fieldwork and remote sensing this paper examines plant density and species richness at water sources to establish land cover patterns in two Mongolian provinces where overgrazing is thought to be the major cause of degradation. In contrast to standard piosphere patterns, vegetation was greater near water points and decreased with distance. This suggests that livestock are not concentrated at water points in Mongolia and that piosphere dynamics are more influenced by precipitation, edaphic factors and potential distinctive processes in cold drylands. It implies that pastoralism, with mobile livestock management, is a suitable adaptive strategy to the low forage capacity of steppe grasslands.     

Appetites and aspirations: Consuming wildlife in Laos

Research on wildlife use is strongly associated with conservation and environmental debates. Yet, popular beliefs about wildlife consumption also offer many opportunities for discussing identity and social change. To demonstrate this, I examine ideas about eating common types of wildlife in Laos in light of the dialectical contrast between civilised settlements (muang) and the wild forest (pa). The exclusion of wildlife from the widely practised baci ritual and the popularity of wildlife consumption indicate the potency of these animals as social objects. In a contemporary context of widespread social and environmental change across Laos, the practice of eating wildlife is being constructed as an assertion of Lao identity that blends an idealised tradition with a status‐conscious modernity. Ambivalent desires for social transformation draw upon ambiguous symbols to find expression in beliefs as well as in popular social practice.     

Insights into the Management of Large Carnivores for Profitable Wildlife-Based Land Uses in African Savannas

Large African predators, especially lions (Panthera leo) and leopards (Panthera pardus), are financially valuable for ecotourism and trophy hunting operations on land also utilized for the production of other wildlife species for the same purpose. Predation of ungulates used for trophy hunting can create conflict with landholders and trade off thus exists between the value of lions and leopards and their impact on ungulate populations. Therefore productionist and conservation trade-offs are complexly graded and difficult to resolve. We investigated this with a risk-benefit analysis on a large private wildlife production area in Zimbabwe. Our model showed that lions result in substantial financial costs through predation on wild ungulates that may not be offset by profits from hunting them, whereas the returns from trophy hunting of leopards are projected to exceed the costs due to leopard predation. In the absence of additional income derived from photo-tourism the number of lions may need to be managed to minimize their impact. Lions drive important ecological processes, but there is a need to balance ecological and financial imperatives on wildlife ranches, community wildlife lands and other categories of multiple use land used for wildlife production. This will ensure the competitiveness of wildlife based land uses relative to alternatives. Our findings may thus be limited to conservancies, community land-use areas and commercial game ranches, which are expansive in Africa, and should not necessarily applied to areas where biodiversity conservation is the primary objective, even if hunting is allowed there.     

Life Cycle Impact assessment of land use based on the hemeroby concept

The impact category ‘land use’ describes in the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology the environmental impacts of occupying, reshaping and managing land for human purposes. Land use can either be the long-term use of land (e.g. for arable farming) or changing the type of land use (e.g. from natural to urban area). The impact category ‘land use’ comprises those environmental consequences, which impact the environment due to the land use itself, for instance through the reduction of landscape elements, the planting of monocultures or artificial vegetation, or the sealing of surfaces. Important environmental consequences of land use are the decreasing availability of habitats and the decreasing diversity of wildlife species. The assessment of the environmental impacts of land use within LCA studies is the objective of this paper. Land use leads to a degradation of the naturalness of the area utilised. In this respect the naturalness of any area can be defined as the sum of land actually not influenced by humans and the remaining naturalness of land under use. To determine the remaining naturalness of land under use, this study suggests applying the Hemeroby concept. “Hemeroby is a measure for the human influence on ecosystems” (Kowarik 1999). The Hemeroby level of an area describes the intensity of land use and can therefore be used to characterise different types of land use. Characterization factors are proposed, which allow calculating the degradation of the naturalness of an area due to a specific type of land use. Since the resource ‘nature/naturalness’ is on a larger geographical scale by far not homogeneous, the assessment of land use needs to be regionalised. Therefore, the impact category ‘land use’ has been subdivided into the impact sub-categories ‘land use in European biogeographic regions’. Following the general LCA framework, normalization values for the impact sub-categories are calculated in order to facilitate the evaluation of the characterization results with regard to their share in a reference value. Weighting factors, which enable an aggregation of the results of the different land use sub-categories and make them comparable to other impact categories (e.g. climate change or acidification) are suggested based on the assumption that the current land use pattern in the European biogeographic regions is acceptable.     

Reckoning perverse outcomes of resource conservation policies using the Ecological Footprint

Spatially expanding economies threaten the status of basic natural resources. In particular, wildlife habitats rarely benefit. Apart from protected areas, political-economic decision-making is ill-prepared to accommodate wildlife habitats with standard valuation methods. In some cases habitat loss is an inadvertent outcome of resource conservation policies intended to lower resource consumption.We recognize the term resource conservation as multifaceted, with a range of meanings from protecting wildlife habitats to efficiently allocating and using materials and energy. Resource conservation policies that spur economic benefits may produce unwanted outcomes. This is partly because linkages between economic and conservation goals seem tangential. Moreover, relevant information is imperfect and predictive tools are limited. This is particularly true for land converting impacts, which are often addressed after the fact, not during policy formulation, and can lead to successive resource degradation.We argue for the need to calculate the positive and negative land converting impacts from resource conservation policies that may expand the economy. Using the Ecological Footprint (EF) approach, we tested for potentially perverse outcomes of an existing resource conservation policy. In doing so, we conceptually mapped linkages among economic sectors to their cumulative effects of converting land. We assume an inverse relationship between economic expansion and land conservation.A New York State energy efficiency incentive program was tested using recent data from all tracked economic sectors. The economic data were converted in a series of steps from dollar values to energy units, to carbon dioxide emissions, and ultimately expressed in hectares of net land conversion. A policy scenario was compared to a reference scenario (no resource conservation policy), and the results anticipate a net gain in conserving land (0.6% reduced conversion). We interpret this as a potentially proportional offset favoring wildlife habitat retention. Two sensitivity analyses demonstrated that the policy’s impact on conserving land depended on both the affected economy’s scale (tripling reduces the estimated benefit to 0.2%), and the level of economic expansion that followed (doubling leads to a net loss of wildlands).This novel use of the EF approach may serve as a model for a more general approach to assessing a broader class of policies. It may also hold promise toward developing tools that can better examine well-intentioned resource conservation policies with uncertain outcomes. Our hope is that work like this can lead to better sets of tools for examining critical ecological–economic linkages for improved policy design.     

Habitat associations of bats in a working rangeland landscape

Land‐use change has resulted in rangeland loss and degradation globally. These changes include conversion of native grasslands for row‐crop agriculture as well as degradation of remaining rangeland due to fragmentation and changing disturbance regimes. Understanding how these and other factors influence wildlife use of rangelands is important for conservation and management of wildlife populations. We investigated bat habitat associations in a working rangeland in southeastern North Dakota. We used Petterson d500x acoustic detectors to systematically sample bat activity across the study area on a 1‐km point grid. We identified calls using Sonobat autoclassification software. We detected five species using this working rangeland, which included Lasionycteris noctivagans (2,722 detections), Lasiurus cinereus (2,055 detections), Eptesicus fuscus (749 detections), Lasiurus borealis (62 detections), and Myotis lucifugus (1 detection). We developed generalized linear mixed‐effects models for the four most frequently detected species based on their ecology. The activity of three bat species increased with higher tree cover. While the scale of selection varied between the four species, all three investigated scales were explanatory for at least one bat species. The broad importance of trees to bats in rangelands may put their conservation needs at odds with those of obligate grassland species. Focusing rangeland bat conservation on areas that were treed prior to European settlement, such as riparian forests, can provide important areas for bat conservation while minimizing negative impacts on grassland species.     

Eating and conserving bushmeat in Africa

In Africa, overhunting of tropical wildlife for food remains an intractable issue. Donors and governments remain committed to invest in efforts to both conserve and allow the sustainable use of wildlife. Four principal barriers need to be overcome: (i) communities are not motivated to conserve wildlife long‐term because they have no formal rights to benefit from wildlife, or to exclude others from taking it on their land; (ii) multispecies harvests, typical of bushmeat hunting scenarios, place large‐bodied species at risk of extinction; (iii) wildlife production cannot expand, in the same way that livestock farming can, to meet the expected growth in consumer demand; and (iv) wildlife habitat is lost through conversion to agriculture, housing, transportation networks and extractive industries. In this review, we examine the actors involved in the use of wildlife as food and discuss the possible solutions required to address urban and rural bushmeat consumption. Interventions must tackle use and conservation of wildlife through the application of context‐relevant interventions in a variety of geographies across Africa. That said, for any bushmeat solution to work, there needs to be concurrent and comparable investment in strengthening the effectiveness of protected area management and enforcement of wildlife conservation laws.     

Smallholder perceptions and communication gaps shape East African riparian ecosystems

Human livelihood needs and nature conservation often contradict. Yet, healthy ecosystems are crucial for human livelihood quality. The semi-arid regions of East Africa suffer under demographic pressure and soil depletion. Ecosystem degradation becomes particularly visible along rivers in semiarid regions of south-east Kenya, where former pristine riparian forests have been transformed into agricultural fields and settlements with negative effects on ecosystem services. In this study, we aim to understand how local smallholders perceive the challenges for the riparian ecosystems and what factors affect their engagement in environmental conservation. We surveyed about 200 farmers and performed expert interviews with representatives from governmental institutions from the field of land- and resource management along Nzeeu River in south-east Kenya. We assessed the level of education, land use practices, environmental knowledge, attitudes and the willingness to contribute to nature conservation. We tested for spatial bias to understand smallholders’ perceptions on environmental challenges. Our data show that land division due to inheritance is not perceived as a problem by the farmers. However, owners holding?<?1 ha of land property are less willing to spare some of their land for conservation, as opposed to those holding land plots above this size. Despite a high level of general willingness to conserve ecosystems, our data underline that local people hardly actively engage in conservation action. Furthermore, our data indicate a communication gap between local smallholders and regional governmental officers as well as overconfidence in mass media through the radio which can contradict successful adoption of pro-environment behavior. Sustainable land management in our study area is not a matter of education, but depends from the size of land property. There is an urgent need to bridge this communication gap, as a prerequisite to improve sustainable land management.     

Biodiversity responses to land‐use and restoration in a global biodiversity hotspot: Ant communities in Brazilian Cerrado

Given that land‐use change is the main cause of global biodiversity decline, there is widespread interest in adopting land‐use practices that maintain high levels of biodiversity, and in restoring degraded land that previously had high biodiversity value. In this study, we use ant taxonomic and functional diversity to examine the effects of different land uses (agriculture, pastoralism, silviculture and conservation) and restoration practices on Cerrado (Brazilian savanna) biodiversity. We also examine the extent to which ant diversity and composition can be explained by vegetation attributes that apply across the full land management spectrum. We surveyed vegetation attributes and ant communities in five replicate plots of each of 13 land‐use and restoration treatments, including two types of native vegetation as reference sites: cerrado sensu stricto and cerradão. Several land‐use and restoration treatments had comparable plot richness to that of the native reference habitats. Ant species and functional composition varied systematically among land‐use treatments following a gradient from open habitats such as agricultural fields to forested sites. Tree basal area and grass cover were the strongest predictors of ant species richness. Losses in ant diversity were higher in land‐use systems that transform vegetation structure. Among productive systems, therefore, uncleared pastures and old pine plantations had similar species composition to that occurring in cerrado sensu stricto. Restoration techniques currently applied to sites that were previously Cerrado have focused on returning tree cover, and have failed to restore ant communities typical of savanna. To improve restoration outcomes for Cerrado biodiversity, greater attention needs to be paid to the re‐establishment and maintenance of the grass layer, which requires frequent fire. At the broader scale, conservation planning in agricultural landscapes, should recognize the value of land‐use mosaics and the risks of homogenization.     

Boom means bust: interactions between the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), rainfall and the processes threatening mammal species in arid Australia

We collated an environmental history for a 8580 km² study area in the Simpson Desert, Australia. Quantitative and qualitative data on climate, land-use, fire history and ecosystem dynamics were used to construct a chronology of processes threatening terrestrial mammal species. Over the last 150 years there has been the transition in land tenure from a hunter–gatherer economy to pastoralism, the loss of 11 mammal species, the cessation of small scale burning by Aboriginal people and the introduction of the fox and cat. Annual rainfall was highly variable and was influenced by the phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Irruptions of rodents, marked increases in the populations of native and introduced predators and extensive wildfires were associated with the La Niña phase of ENSO and occurred when rain-year (July–June) rainfall approached or exceeded the 90th percentile of the historical rainfall distribution. Large rainfall events in arid Australia have been viewed traditionally as the ‘boom’ times that benefit wildlife and pastoral production. However, because of hyper-predation and the risk of wildfire, we show that the years including and immediately following flooding rains should be identified as critical, or ‘bust’ periods for wildlife and conservation management. ENSO related climatic forecasts appear to be useful cues which can be incorporated into fire and predator management strategies in arid Australia. Studies such as this, which utilise a broad range of data types across extensive areas, can identify the timing and potential of threatening process not possible using contemporary studies alone.     

Entrepreneurs, Elites, and Exclusion in Maasailand: Trends in Wildlife Conservation and Pastoralist Development

Maasai pastoralists in Kenya are rapidly diversifying. Maasai may now derive their main livelihoods (and sometimes considerable income) from farming, wildlife tourism, and/or the leasing of land for large-scale cereal cultivation. The spread of large-scale commercial cultivation competes with wildlife for grazing land, and wildlife populations around protected areas are rapidly declining as a result. This paper presents new data to analyse the way returns from different land uses, and the social structures affecting their distribution, influence the land-use choices being made by Maasai around the Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Returns to different interest groups from livestock, cultivation, and wildlife enterprises, seen in the light of current social, economic, and political trajectories, can help to clarify likely future land-use trends in the Mara. In particular, community conservation initiatives that seek to make conservation worthwhile to reserve-adjacent dwellers inevitably have a strong economic dimension. However, the choices made by Maasai landowners are not a simple function of the economic returns potentially accruing from a particular enterprise. They are as much or more influenced by who is able to control the different flows of returns from these different types of enterprise. These findings are relevant not only for the wider Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem, but also for pastoral livelihoods and wildlife conservation elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Wildlife utilization and biodiversity conservation in Namibia: conflicting or complementaryobjectives?

This paper surveys different economic aspects of biodiversity conservation in Namibia's wildlife sector. One of the main causes of biodiversity loss has been the conversion of wildlife habitat to other land uses, notably livestock and crops. However, wildlife utilization strategies potentially yield significantly higher economic rates of return compared to these traditional land uses. Historically, the move towards land use patterns more favourable to wildlife has been hampered by a number of policy and institutional constraints. Since Namibia's independence, many of these constraints have now been removed or are in the process of reform. These moves are already encouraging investment in wildlife utilization, most notably in wildlife tourism and related activities. Some forms of wildlife utilization, particularly ecotourism and photographic safaris, will certainly complement the national and international commitment to biodiversity conservation. Consumptive uses may be economically attractive in some areas and will discourage further habitat conversion. However, uses which involve specialized management for the production of a few species may alter the species composition and functioning of ecosystems, causing conflict between the aims of wildlife utilization and biodiversity conservation. Less tangible components of biodiversity may remain under threat even under a well-designed wildlife utilization policy.     

Environmental factors affecting the distribution of African elephants in the Kasigau wildlife corridor,SE Kenya

The African elephant, Loxodonta africana, is under threat from habitat loss, poaching and human–elephant conflict. To mitigate for impact of habitat loss and reduce conflict, connectivity between elephant habitats can be improved through the protection of corridor areas. This study looks at elephant distribution and movement patterns within the Kasigau Wildlife Corridor (KWC) within the Tsavo Conservation Area in South‐east Kenya. Elephant presence data were obtained from observations by rangers during routine patrols across KWC, and were analysed in MaxEnt. The environmental factors predicting elephant distribution and density were tested, as well as the relationship between elephant maximum entropy and the presence and abundance of other wildlife. Seasonal variations in temperature and precipitation, plus presence of waterholes were found to play significant roles in elephant distribution across KWC. Higher elephant densities were not found to correlate with lower densities of other wildlife species; indeed, during the dry seasons, elephant presence was associated with greater wild herbivore densities. Besides illustrating the importance of the KWC for elephant conservation in the Tsavo ecosystem, both as a key corridor and habitat, this study also hopes to highlight the untapped utility of routine ranger patrol data, and encourage the use of such presence‐only data for deducing important knowledge for conservation of biodiversity.     

Modeling Historic Rangeland Management and Grazing Pressures in Landscapes of Settlement

Defining historic grazing pressures and rangeland management is vital if early landscape threshold crossing and long–term trajectories of landscape change are to be properly understood. In this paper we use a new environmental simulation model, Búmodel, to assess two contrasting historical grazing landscapes in Myvatnssveit Iceland for two key periods—the colonization period (ca. Landnám, a.d. 872–1000) and the early eighteenth century a.d. Results suggest that there were spatial and temporal variations in productivity and grazing pressure within and between historic grazing areas and indicate that land degradation was not an inevitable consequence of the livestock grazing introduced with settlement. The results also demonstrate the significance of grazing and livestock management strategies in preventing overgrazing, particularly under cooler climatic conditions. The model enables detailed consideration of historic grazing management scenarios and their associated landscape pressures.     

Restoration of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services on Agricultural Land

Cultivation and cropping are major causes of destruction and degradation of natural ecosystems throughout the world. We face the challenge of maintaining provisioning services while conserving or enhancing other ecosystem services and biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. There is a range of possibilities within two types of intervention, namely “land sharing” and “land separation”; the former advocates the enhancement of the farmed environment, but the latter a separation between land designated for farming versus conservation. Land sharing may involve biodiversity-based agricultural practices, learning from traditional farming, changing from conventional to organic agriculture and from “simple” crops and pastures to agro-forestry systems, and restoring or creating specific elements to benefit wildlife and particular services without decreasing agricultural production. Land separation in the farmland context involves restoring or creating non-farmland habitat at the expense of field-level agricultural production—for example, woodland on arable land. Restoration by land sharing has the potential to enhance agricultural production, other ecosystem services and biodiversity at both the field and landscape scale; however, restoration by land separation would provide these benefits only at the landscape scale. Although recent debate has contrasted these approaches, we suggest they should be used in combination to maximize benefits. Furthermore, we suggest “woodland islets”, an intermediate approach between land abandonment and farmland afforestation, for ecological restoration in extensive agricultural landscapes. This approach allows reconciliation of farmland production, conservation of values linked to cultural landscapes, enhancement of biodiversity, and provision of a range of ecosystem services. Beyond academic research, restoration projects within agricultural landscapes are essential if we want to halt environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.     

Sustainable use of wildlife: The view from archaeozoology

The concept of “sustainable use” is a polemic, especially when referring to wildlife and other “natural resources.” Claims vary from persistent overuse to traditional practices of sustaining the resource base. Arguments for either side routinely draw from contemporary situations, relying on relatively short time periods. But, if the notion “sustainable” is to be consequential, the period under consideration must be meaningful – claims that trends over a few years or even decades are representative of long-term phenomena are questionable, for they depend on numerous untested, if not untestable, assumptions. Research in anthropology, biology, biological conservation, ecology, policy, restoration ecology, social development, and wildlife management is routinely constrained to relatively short time periods, and such results are of limited value for evaluating sustainable use. Archaeozoology provides unique tools for investigating trends in human-resource relations over periods of centuries and millennia; it is one of the few disciplines explicitly dedicated to the study of material evidence over significant time periods that bears directly on the question of sustainable use. Hence, objective, scientific evaluation of sustainable use must contemplate archaeozoological evidence.Yet, archaeozoology often does not provide definitive answers: it is wrought with fundamental problems in sampling, data gathering, analysis, and interpretation (e.g., varying screen sizes; meta-sampling procedures; comparisons across diverse spatial, temporal, and environmental continua; etc.). Typically data must be evaluated through inference, rather than through direct observations and experiments. Moreover, environmental variation (e.g., climate change, sea level change, tectonic movement, etc.), as well as changes in societies, confounds the interpretation of long-term human–environmental trends. But, those challenges are not unique to archaeozoology, for biological and ecological phenomena are no less subject to multiple sources of environmental and social variation. The difference is that archaeologists are patently cognizant of these sources of variability, and they openly debate them when interpreting data, while in other disciplines these sources of change are routinely ignored. Nonetheless, despite the unique relevance of their work, few archaeozoologists have ventured outside their discipline to engage natural scientists and policy makers in issues of biological conservation and wildlife biology, and particularly the root questions of sustainable use. In addition to considering data and hypotheses regarding long-term prehistoric human–wildlife interactions, it is essential to view this information within broader perspectives, linked to other disciplines as well as to contemporary social and policy issues. Because sustainable use is mandated in international instruments and national policies, the notion has relevance in arenas far beyond academia, where archaeozoologists must be integrated into interdisciplinary teams.     

Habitat fragmentation is associated with dietary shifts and microbiota variability in common vampire bats

Host ecological factors and external environmental factors are known to influence the structure of gut microbial communities, but few studies have examined the impacts of environmental changes on microbiotas in free‐ranging animals. Rapid land‐use change has the potential to shift gut microbial communities in wildlife through exposure to novel bacteria and/or by changing the availability or quality of local food resources. The consequences of such changes to host health and fitness remain unknown and may have important implications for pathogen spillover between humans and wildlife. To better understand the consequences of land‐use change on wildlife microbiotas, we analyzed long‐term dietary trends, gut microbiota composition, and innate immune function in common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) in two nearby sites in Belize that vary in landscape structure. We found that vampire bats living in a small forest fragment had more homogenous diets indicative of feeding on livestock and shifts in microbiota heterogeneity, but not overall composition, compared to those living in an intact forest reserve. We also found that irrespective of sampling site, vampire bats which consumed relatively more livestock showed shifts in some core bacteria compared with vampire bats which consumed relatively less livestock. The relative abundance of some core microbiota members was associated with innate immune function, suggesting that future research should consider the role of the host microbiota in immune defense and its relationship to zoonotic infection dynamics. We suggest that subsequent homogenization of diet and habitat loss through livestock rearing in the Neotropics may lead to disruption to the microbiota that could have downstream impacts on host immunity and cross‐species pathogen transmission.     

人与大型兽类的冲突: 野生动物保护所面临的新挑战

人和大型兽类的冲突已经成为人们日益关注的问题。野生动物损害庄稼,捕食家畜,甚至危及到人身安全。人兽冲突增加了野生兽类保护工作的困难。目前,导致人兽冲突比较典型的物种包括野生非洲象和野生亚洲象、绝大多数食肉动物和鹿类等等。引发人和大型兽类冲突的具体原因包括人口增长、野生动物栖息地丧失、土地利用方式的改变以及实施保护后野生动物种群的恢复,多数情况是多种因素共同作用的结果。减少人和大型兽类的冲突应从两方面着手:加强野生兽类管理,利用各种方法减缓损失;另一方面,关注当地社区,在提高当地人的保护意识的同时也要提高当地的经济水平。