75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave where species buried their dead

A new documentary has recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose flattened skull was discovered and rebuilt from hundreds of bone fragments by a team of archaeologists and conservators led by the University of Cambridge.

The team excavated the female Neanderthal in 2018 from inside a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where the species had repeatedly returned to lay their dead to rest. The cave was made famous by work in the late 1950s that unearthed several Neanderthals which appeared to have been buried in succession.

'Secrets of the Neanderthals', produced by BBC Studios Science Unit, is released on Netflix worldwide. The documentary follows the team led by the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores as they return to Shanidar Cave to continue excavations.

"The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different," said Dr Emma Pomeroy, a palaeo-anthropologist from Cambridge's Department of Archaeology, who features in the new film.

"Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life.

"It's perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species, to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA."

Neanderthals are thought to have died out around 40,000 years ago, and the discoveries of new remains are few and far between. The Neanderthal featured in the documentary is the first from the cave for over fifty years, and perhaps the best preserved individual to be found this century.

While earlier finds were numbered, this one is called Shanidar Z, although researchers think it may be the top half of an individual excavated in 1960.

The head had been crushed, possibly by rockfall, relatively soon after death -- after the brain decomposed but before the cranium filled with dirt -- and then compacted further by tens of thousands of years of sediment.

When archaeologists found it, the skull was flattened to around two centimetres thick.

The team carefully exposed the remains, including an articulated skeleton almost to the waist, and used a glue-like consolidant to strengthen the bones and surrounding sediment. They removed Shanidar Z in dozens of small foil-wrapped blocks from under seven and a half metres of soil and rock within the heart of the cave.

In the Cambridge lab, researchers took micro-CT scans of each block before gradually diluting the glue and using the scans to guide extraction of bone fragments. Lead conservator Dr Lucía López-Polín pieced over 200 bits of skull together freehand to return it to its original shape, including upper and lower jaws.

"Each skull fragment is gently cleaned while glue and consolidant are re-added to stabilise the bone, which can be very soft, similar in consistency to a biscuit dunked in tea," said Pomeroy. "It's like a high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle. A single block can take over a fortnight to process."

The team even referred to forensic science -- studies on how bones shift after blunt force trauma and during decomposition -- to help them understand if remains had been buried, and the ways in which teeth had pinged from jawbones.

The rebuilt skull was surface scanned and 3D-printed, forming the basis of a reconstructed head created by world-leading palaeoartists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal a face.

New analysis strongly suggests that Shanidar Z was an older female, perhaps in her mid-forties according to researchers -- a significant age to reach so deep in prehistory.

Without pelvic bones, the team relied on sequencing tooth enamel proteins to determine her sex. Teeth were also used to gauge her age through levels of wear and tear -- with some front teeth worn down to the root. At around five feet tall, and with some of the smallest adult arm bones in the Neanderthal fossil record, her physique also implies a female.

While remnants of at least ten separate Neanderthals have now come from the cave, Shanidar Z is the fifth to be found in a cluster of bodies buried at a similar time in the same location: right behind a huge vertical rock, over two metres tall at the time, which sits in the centre of the cave.

The rock had come down from the ceiling long before the bodies were interred. Researchers say it may have served as a landmark for Neanderthals to identify a particular site for repeated burials.

"Neanderthals have had a bad press ever since the first ones were found over 150 years ago," said Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who leads the excavations at the cave.

"Our discoveries show that the Shanidar Neanderthals may have been thinking about death and its aftermath in ways not so very different from their closest evolutionary cousins -- ourselves."

The other four bodies in the cluster were discovered by archaeologist Ralph Solecki in 1960. One was surrounded by clumps of ancient pollen. Solecki and pollen specialist Arlette Leroi-Gourhan argued the finds were evidence of funerary rituals where the deceased was laid to rest on a bed of flowers.

This archaeological work was among the first to suggest Neanderthals were far more sophisticated than the primitive creatures many had assumed, based on their stocky frames and ape-like brows.

Decades later, the Cambridge-led team retraced Solecki's dig, aiming to use the latest techniques to retrieve more evidence for his contentious claims, as well as the environment and activities of the Neanderthals and later modern humans who lived there, when they uncovered Shanidar Z.

"Shanidar Cave was used first by Neanderthals and then by our own species, so it provides an ideal laboratory to tackle one of the biggest questions of human evolution," said Barker.

"Why did Neanderthals disappear from the stage around the same time as Homo sapiens spread over regions where Neanderthals had lived successfully for almost half a million years?"

A study led by Professor Chris Hunt of Liverpool John Moores University now suggests the pollen was left by bees burrowing into the cave floor. However, remains from Shanidar Cave still show signs of an empathetic species. For example, one male had a paralysed arm, deafness and head trauma that likely rendered him partially blind, yet had lived a long time, so must have been cared for.

Site analysis suggests that Shanidar Z was laid to rest in a gully formed by running water that had been further hollowed out by hand to accommodate the body. Posture indicates she had been leant against the side, with her left hand curled under her head, and a rock behind the head like a small cushion, which may have been placed there.

While Shanidar Z was buried within a similar timeframe as other bodies in the cluster, researchers cannot say how contemporaneous they are, only that they all date to around 75,000 years ago.

In fact, while filming onsite for the new documentary in 2022, the team found remains of yet another individual in the same burial cluster, uncovering the left shoulder blade, some ribs and a fairly complete right hand.

In the sediments several feet above, another three Neanderthals dating to around 50,000 years had been found by Solecki, more of which have been recovered by the current team.

Further research since Shanidar Z was found has detected microscopic traces of charred food in the soil around the older body cluster. These carbonised bits of wild seeds, nuts and grasses, suggest not only that Neanderthals prepared food -- soaking and pounding pulses -- and then cooked it, but did so in the presence of their dead.

"The body of Shanidar Z was within arm's reach of living individuals cooking with fire and eating," said Pomeroy. "For these Neanderthals, there does not appear to be that clear separation between life and death."

"We can see that Neanderthals are coming back to one particular spot to bury their dead. This could be decades or even thousands of years apart. Is it just a coincidence, or is it intentional, and if so what brings them back?"

Read more at Science Daily

Protected areas for elephants work best if they are connected

Conservation measures have successfully stopped declines in the African savanna elephant population across southern Africa, but the pattern varies locally, according to a new study.

The evidence suggests that the long-term solution to elephant survival requires not only that areas are protected but that they are also connected to allow populations to stabilize naturally, an international research team says.

Their study, published on January 5th in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, collected survey estimates and calculated growth rates for more than 100 elephant populations in southern Africa between 1995 and 2020, accounting for an estimated 70% of the global savanna elephant population.

"This is the most comprehensive analysis of growth rates for any large mammal population in the world," said co-author Rob Guldemond, director of the Conservation Ecological Research Unit (CERU) at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa.

Overall, the survey's results are positive: There are the same number of elephants now as there were 25 years ago, a rare conservation win at a time when the planet is rapidly losing biodiversity.

However, the pattern is not consistent across regions. Some areas, such as south Tanzania, eastern Zambia, and northern Zimbabwe, experienced severe declines due to illegal ivory poaching.

In contrast, populations in other regions like north Botswana are booming.

"Unchecked growth isn't necessarily a good thing, however," says study co-author Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke Professor of Conservation at Duke University in North Carolina.

"Rapidly increasing populations can outgrow and damage their local environment and prove hard to manage -- introducing a threat to their long-term stability," Pimm says.

In addition to documenting local growth rates, the team also looked at the features of the local populations to identify what makes them stable, that is neither growing nor declining.

Elephant populations in well-protected but isolated parks, sometimes called "fortress conservation," grow rapidly in the absence of threats but are unsustainable in the long term.

These elephants will likely need future conservation interventions, such as translocation or birth control, which are both costly and intensive endeavors.

The team found that the most stable populations occur in large, core areas that are surrounded by buffer zones.

The core areas are defined by their strong levels of environmental protection and minimal human impact, whereas the buffers allow some activities such as sustainable farming, forestry, or trophy hunting.

Unlike the insular fortresses, core areas are connected to other parks, allowing herds to move naturally.

"What's crucial is that you need a mix of areas with more stable core populations linked to more variable buffer areas," said lead author Ryan Huang, a Duke Ph.D. now doing postdoctoral research at CERU.

"These buffers absorb immigrants when core populations get too high, but also provide escape routes when elephants face poor environmental conditions or other threats such as poaching," Huang said.

Connecting protected areas means elephants can freely move in and out.

This allows a natural equilibrium to occur without human intervention, sparing conservationists from using their limited resources to maintain balance.

"Calling for connecting parks isn't something new. Many have done so," Huang said.

"But surprisingly, there has not been a lot of published evidence of its effectiveness so far. This study helps quantify why this works."

Read more at Science Daily

Alaskan allies: Communities unite to protect the areas they love

Natural resource management decisions in protected areas impact more than the wildlife and landscapes they're charged to conserve. They also affect neighbors, who could otherwise hunt, build, or recreate as they choose on their own land. For decades, community members primarily voiced their opinions through brief and impersonal public comment periods. But an initiative led by environmental social scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is putting a new spin on neighborly communication.

"Historically, public land management agencies would offer brief periods where people could submit a remark that may or may not be considered and that typically wouldn't result in any meaningful dialogue," said Carena van Riper, associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U. of I. "For more inclusive conservation to happen, there needs to be in-depth engagement, communication, and deliberation with diverse stakeholders. There's real benefit to engaging people."

Van Riper has been working toward a model of inclusive conservation for nearly a decade in the area surrounding Alaska's Denali National Park, partnering with the National Park System (NPS) to examine the values and viewpoints of neighbors on everything from conservation priorities to tourism impacts. She and her colleagues published results of their latest engagement efforts in Sustainability Science.

The study brought Denali neighbors together in a month-long online discussion forum designed to understand their views on the benefits and threats facing the area, as well as how land management agencies could better incorporate their perspectives.

Van Riper noted that residents come from all walks of life and have priorities that span protected area conservation, indigenous use, tourism, energy development, and others.

"Although it is important, conservation is just one of many priorities," she said. "We tried to equalize the power dynamic among interest groups and in how we framed the National Park Service and its role in defining life in Interior Alaska."

Residents were grouped according to a values assessment, with two groups of like-minded participants and one group representing a mix of values. This allowed the research team to test whether the value-basis of decision-making affected the ways that people learned from one another and engaged in collaborative dialogue.

"I went into this project worried because a lot of online dialogue tends to be very combative. But the most wonderful discussions unfolded with this group of people; they were always thoughtful and respectful to one another. They disagreed, but we never had to step in and intervene," said lead author Devin Goodson, a doctoral student working with van Riper. "Another one of the benefits of engaging online is people weren't forced to fully explain their thoughts in the moment, like you'd have to do during a short public comment session. The platform created a really well informed and constructive conversation."

After a period where participants got to know each other during focus groups, they were engaged through the Denali Discussion Forum, where the researchers posed a series of questions about the park and its management. Residents were expected to answer the questions and interact with other participants' answers on a weekly basis during the month-long program.

Goodson said the residents discussed many of the same benefits of living near Denali, though the groups differed in the emphasis they placed on particular benefits, which included access to wilderness, solitude, recreation, hunting and fishing grounds, and the pursuit of a subsistence lifestyle. Likewise, the groups emphasized slightly different threats, including tourism, competing interests, mismanagement, and climate change -- the latter was mentioned only by the mixed values group, which comprised a younger demographic. The groups diverged more strongly in their discussions on management solutions.

"We found that residents value the Alaskan landscape in a lot of ways and often identify common threats, but they come up with different ways to solve these issues. However, a common thread across the proposed solutions for resource managers was that people just wanted to feel like they were a part of the process in a meaningful way," Goodson said. "They're open to what that looks like, but they want to feel that the process overall is fair."

Co-author William Stewart in the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism at U. of I. added, "The NPS makes well-intentioned decisions, yet sometimes, residents of nearby communities feel like their voices aren't being heard. They need help. Social scientists have a toolkit for that. We engage community residents not as decision-makers, but as outsiders who could represent community voices to help facilitate dialogue with the park, and within the park service."

Armed with results from the Denali Discussion Forum, which were summarized weekly by the study team with input from participants, NPS can move ahead with more informed management decisions. And they can use a similar model to solicit input for future management actions.

But the lessons extend well beyond Denali and even the National Park System. Goodson said the study is an example of one way to give average people a say in the things that impact them every day in their environment.

Read more at Science Daily

Nature photographers posting to social media help with protecting biodiversity

Nature photographers posting to social media are helping improve biodiversity conservation mapping in South Asia, and the method could go global.

Dr Shawan Chowdhury from UQ's School of the Environment led an international team which scoured images on Facebook nature photography groups in Bangladesh, to add to the existing Global Biodiversity Information Facility database.

"We found 44,000 photos of almost 1,000 animal species, including many birds and insects, 288 of which are considered threatened in Bangladesh," Dr Chowdhury said.

"This has vastly improved habitat mapping across the country where only 4.6 per cent of land is designated as protected.

"We identified many more high-priority areas for conservation, spanning 4,000 square kilometres for birds and 10,000 square kilometres for butterflies.

"We'd been missing out on the distribution data of hundreds of endangered species in Bangladesh so this is a big result.

"This could change the way scientists gather biodiversity information in the future, especially in regions where there is a lack of reliable and up-to-date structured monitoring to inform conservation efforts."

In Australia, social media posts are being used to track pest species.

"A South Asian butterfly, called the tawny coster, entered Australia in 2012," Dr Chowdhury said.

"We've searched for additional locality records from Facebook to analyse the movement, ecology and colonisation status of this species and shown that it expanded at about 135 kilometres per year in Australia between 2012 and 2020."

Co-author Professor Richard Fuller from UQ said while Facebook had been helpful, there are some big opportunities for social media companies.

"There is currently no automated way to collect this information, and it was a very arduous task for us to do it manually." Professor Fuller said.

"We hope our research can inspire the development of technology such as an app that transfers biodiversity data posted on Facebook directly to the global biodiversity databases.

"This way, conservation scientists can easily access that data and use it."

Read more at Science Daily

Killing remains a threat to Bornean orangutans

University of Queensland research has found despite considerable conservation efforts, the illegal killing of critically endangered orangutans on Borneo may be an ongoing threat to the species.

PhD candidate Emily Massingham from UQ's Faculty of Science managed a team of researchers which visited 79 villages across the Bornean orangutan range in Kalimantan, conducting face to face interviews with 431 people.

"Our study builds on previous research which indicated killing was one of the key reasons for orangutan population decline, alongside habitat loss," Ms Massingham said.

"The aim of our project was to understand whether orangutans have been killed in recent times, to look at whether conservation projects are effectively preventing killing, and to gain insights into community perceptions and the motivations behind it.

"It has been almost 15 years since the previous study, and we did not find a clear decrease in killings despite Indonesia's commendable efforts to reduce habitat loss.

"Thirty per cent of villages reported orangutans had been killed in the last 5 -10 years, despite the practice being both illegal and taboo -- which also makes it hard to get an accurate picture of the true scale."

Ms Massingham said Borneo's orangutan population had decreased by 100,000 in recent decades, with current estimates suggesting fewer than 100,000 animals remain.

"Our findings did not indicate that conservation projects are reducing killing, highlighting an urgent need to improve the collective approach to orangutan conservation," she said.

"Killing by humans needs to be addressed, as our findings suggest it may still be occurring and poses a real threat to the species."

Ms Massingham said orangutans have long lifespans and breed slowly, so are particularly vulnerable to population declines driven by the death of adult apes.

"Our interviews revealed some of the situations which lead to the killing or displacement of individual orangutans," she said.

"They include protecting crops and taking infant apes to keep as pets."

The researchers outlined recommendations that could improve future conservation efforts.

"Working with communities and collaborating across disciplines and projects will be key," Ms Massingham said.

"Conservationists need to work closely with individual villages to understand their needs and perspectives, identify the social drivers of killing of orangutans and implement solutions that reduce human-orangutan conflict."

Read more at Science Daily

Conservation in Indonesia is at risk, a team of researchers who study the region argues

Indonesia, home to the largest tropical rainforest in Southeast Asia and over 17,500 islands, is a country packed with biodiversity and endangered species. However, scientists studying the region's species and ecosystems are getting banned from Indonesia and conservation plans are being blocked. In a letter publishing in the journal Current Biology on July 10, a team of conservation researchers with long-term experience in Indonesia discuss scientific suppression and other research challenges they have witnessed while working in the region. They offer suggestions for how to promote nature conservation, protect data transparency, and share research with the public in this and other regions of the world.

"If you look at a heat map of the Earth, and where endangered species are located, Indonesia and that general region are just off the charts," says tropical environmental scientist William F. Laurance of James Cook University, who has been doing research on the environmental impacts of development in Southeast Asia for over a decade.

Laurance and his co-authors say they felt drawn to raise awareness about the issues facing conservation in Indonesia because during their time working in the region, they witnessed many instances when governments and corporations impeded research -- including their own.

For example, they write in the letter, in 2022, five leading conservation researchers were banned from working in Indonesia on the premise that they had "negative intentions" to "discredit the government." The researchers reference papers about forest conservation and wildlife management in Sumatra, for which the teams had multiple colleagues from Indonesia decline co-authorship "out of concerns that it might adversely impact their funding, research permits, or opportunities for commercial contracts in Indonesia."

"The researchers said, 'Well, no, you can't tell that story, even though it's true, and you can't identify me or include all the relevant details.' And this just kept happening over and over again. It's a climate of fear," says Laurance.

To protect environmental research in Indonesia and the contributors who work on it, Laurance and his team suggest that organizations funding research in the region require data transparency for studies that they support. They also recommend the implementation and usage of online "safe houses" (whistleblower websites designed to protect anonymity and information leakage) and anonymized journals (publications in which contributors are not named). They say these interventions could help researchers get information out to the public without worrying about the consequences of being personally tied to their findings.

The authors do note that several organizations are advocating for change, especially in Indonesia. Some examples of these groups include the Indonesian Caucus for Academic Freedom and the Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation, which are organizing to support conservation and thwart efforts to silence researchers. They also note that "scientific suppression is by no means unique to Indonesia."

Read more at Science Daily

Case study of rare, endangered tortoise highlights conservation priorities for present, future World Wildlife Days

Though wildlife trafficking has been effectively disrupted since the first World Wildlife Day -- established 50 years ago today via the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) of Wild Fauna and Flora -- a newly published case study on one of the world's rarest tortoise species, the ploughshare tortoise, highlights how much room for improvement still exists.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of the Sciences, University of Maryland Associate Professor Meredith Gore and her coauthors -- Babson College's Emily Griffin, Bistra Dilkina and Aaron Ferber from the University of Southern California, Michigan State University's Stanley E. Griffis, the University of Alabama's Burcu B. Keskin, and John Macdonald from Colorado State University -- detail a 2018 effort to map ploughshare tortoises' location within and around Soalala, Madagascar; nearby villages; known trafficking pathways and transit routes; and the amount of trafficking risk associated with each of those areas. The group of approximately 50 stakeholders also shared more qualitative information that might play a role in poachers' trafficking process, such as paths of cultural and spiritual significance, tides' influence on decision-making; and where poachers met to plan their activities.

This information was drawn onto a clear, plastic sheet that was laid across a color-based map of the region. That information was then digitized into a geographic information system, creating what the researchers' called a "mess" that nevertheless revealed novel information for the effective targeting of those ploughshare tortoise trafficking networks.

"Our science team used a cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to think about, measure, and analyze data," explains Gore. "Not only were we able to shift the data landscape to clarify how important water routes are to the resilience of the illicit supply chain, we were able to normalize technical spatial data with insights from traditionally marginalized voices -- women."

Gore and her co-authors argue that if a process like this were to be paired with the latest advancements in computational science, operations engineering, and supply chain management, together, researchers could dramatically disrupt wildlife trafficking networks, and thereby conserve more animals, like the ploughshare tortoise, who are already on the brink of extinction.

"As we celebrate World Wildlife Day, our recent work highlights the urgent need for interdisciplinary collaboration to address the complex global issue of wildlife trafficking," says Bistra Dilkina, an associate professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California. "I feel privileged to have the opportunity to work with a trans-disciplinary team to synthesize a roadmap of how our different disciplines can work together to fight illegal wildlife trafficking and trade. In particular, I am excited to think deeply about the advantages that data-driven approaches in machine learning and optimization can bring to this important endeavor."

Looking to the future, the researchers believe that with increased interdisciplinary collaborations, conservationists may one day be able to predict which path a trafficker will take, target areas where locals could undergo trainings and be empowered to play a part in preventing wildlife trafficking, better allocate limited resources to have the greatest interventional impact, and more.

Read more at Science Daily

At least half of Africa's rhinos are now in private hands; New paths for rhino conservation are needed

African rhino numbers are declining at unsustainable rates in core state-run parks which is why more than half the continent's remaining rhinos are now on private land.

Until the past decade, the largest population of rhinos was found in South Africa's Kruger National Park. This state-run park has, however, lost 76% and 68% of its white and black rhinos over the past decade, respectively. By contrast, the number of white rhinos on private land has steadily increased over the same decade, particularly in South Africa.

Private rhino owners now conserve at least half of the continents' remaining rhinos, and communal lands conserve a growing proportion as well.

In a new article published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, scientists from the University of Helsinki in Finland and the Universities of Stellenbosch and Nelson Mandela in South Africa have compiled publicly available rhino population data for African countries where rhinos occur, disaggregated by state, private, and communal land types where possible. They consider the implications of an emerging shift in rhino conservation from state to private and communal lands, and chart a new path for rhino conservation.

"Private and communal landowners in several southern and East African countries can generate revenues from wildlife tourism, trophy hunting and trade in live animals, making it financially viable to use their land to conserve wildlife rather than for farming livestock" explains paper author Dr Hayley Clements. "The result has been that hundreds of landowners conserve rhinos on their properties."

But the cost-benefit ratio of conserving rhinos is changing, explains study co-author Dr Dave Balfour. "Accelerating poaching has meant private rhino owners now spend on average US$150,000 per year on security measures. This is far more than state parks are able to spend per rhino or per unit area conserved. Combined with the generally smaller size of private rhino populations (averaging 100 km2), which likely makes them easier to protect than in places like Kruger (20,000 km2), this spending on security means private rhino populations have suffered lower poaching rates than in some core state-run parks. But these rising security costs mean many landowners are not willing or able to continue conserving rhinos, with some choosing to sell their rhinos, often at a loss."

"It is important that future policy enables new incentives that compensate for rising security costs, encouraging rhino conservation on private and communal land," explains senior author Prof. Enrico Di Minin. "For example, could landowners that conserve rhinos in extensive systems qualify for a more favourable tax structure? Could they be eligible for carbon or the emerging biodiversity credits or rhino bonds, given the role of rhinos in carbon cycling? Could they receive certifications for extensive management that increase the value of their wildlife-based tourism and hunting offerings? These are crucial questions that need to be addressed in order to support more sustainable conservation strategies for rhinos," he continues.

"If additional incentives are not enabled, we risk losing private and communal rhino custodians, and with them, half of the remaining African rhinos" concludes Dr Clements.

Read more at Science Daily

Appreciating the value of elephants

New research examining the services and benefits of elephants has revealed many values are often overlooked when deciding how they should be protected.

The collaboration between universities in England and South Africa, including the University of Portsmouth, found conservation strategies often have a narrow focus and tend to prioritise certain values of nature, such as economic or ecological, over moral ones.

When looking specifically at elephants, the study found financial benefits including ecotourism, trophy hunting and as a source of ivory or labour, often conflicts with the animal's ecological, cultural and spiritual contributions.

The authors argue not fully understanding or considering the value systems of all stakeholders involved in conservation, including local people, leads to social inequality, conflict and unsustainable strategies.

Study co-author Antoinette van de Water, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, said: "We chose to look at elephants as the case study because their conservation can be especially challenging and contentious.

"We're not saying economic contributions aren't important, but there's a lot of different values at play and they all need to be considered in conservation strategies if they are going to succeed."

The study also highlights conservation decision makers tend to take a single worldview when considering the value of nature.

Co-author Dr Lucy Bates, from the University of Portsmouth, explained: "Whether it's economic, ecological, or social, a blanket approach to values can impact the success of a conservation strategy.

"Consider something like the ivory trade for example. International trade in ivory is illegal, but many southern African countries want to restart the trade leading to contention across the African continent. If you focus less on the potential economic value of ivory, and turn to other ways elephants can support communities, it can be a game-changer.

"On a smaller scale, you can also apply this framework to defining protected areas and what land could be made available to elephants. By listening to those living in these areas, you can get a clear understanding of how decisions will affect human life as well, and work out ways to resolve any issues."

The paper, published in Ecosystems Services, says nature's non-material benefits include recreation, inspiration, mental health, and social cohesion.

But it points out broader moral values, such as human rights, environmental justice, rights of nature and intergenerational legacy, also have a big part to play in the success of conservation.

The study recommends incorporating moral values related to biodiversity conservation into the valuation framework to create a positive loop between benefits to humans and to nature.

The researchers believe that this approach will help policymakers and managers have a better understanding of what elephants mean to people, why elephants are important in themselves, and what values and interests are at stake. It can also be applied to other species and ecosystems.

"What is really needed is a change of thinking," added Antoinette van de Water.

Read more at Science Daily

Rhino conservation in Nepal creates a burden for communities, infrastructure and other species, study warns

Efforts to conserve rhinos in Nepal have put a burden on communities, infrastructure and other wildlife in Nepal, a new study warns.

Successful anti-poaching and conservation campaigns in the country has resulted in increases in tourist numbers and rhino populations, but also increased incidences of human and animal casualties.

Locals from the area reported being proud to share spaces with rhinos, and wanting to live together with them, but were aware of the dangers. People who faced crop loss or fatality were overwhelmingly negative about living with rhinos; however, they still ‘strongly’ supported conservation legislation. They reported widescale dissatisfaction with the official compensation scheme for losses suffered.

The study, by Michelle Szydlowski, from the University of Exeter, is published in the Journal of Ecotourism and is the result of observations in Sauraha, Nepal. It describes the “disconnect” of people, especially tourists, wanting to “save” wild animals but also having a lack of consideration of their behaviour. The same people fail to consider the cost to other species who have to adapt to live with the rhinos.

Dr Szydlowski, who has worked in rhino conservation and elephant health and welfare in Nepal for the past decade, said: “Hand reared individuals bring in tourists, and while tourism may provide much-needed community income, it also creates a burden on existing infrastructure and may further commodify wildlife or encourage the conversion of wild habitats into tourist housing, restaurants, and shops.

“Nepal’s success in protecting native rhinos has led to increases in human-rhino conflict and changing perspectives on who has the greatest claim to anthropocentric spaces. As rhino and human populations continue to grow, there is a need to reconsider the impacts of tourism.

“The rhinos have moved beyond their physical and species boundaries to exist alongside humans in shared landscapes. Perhaps it is time to re-examine this parallel existence and find new ways to truly coexist within such communities.”

Dr Szydlowski interviewed members of the local community near Chitwan National Park, nature guides, tourists, National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC) staff, and government employees. She also collected information about the animals and how they had been cared for and kept in touch with interviewees for a year afterwards.

The presence of human infrastructure has not deterred rhinos – whether human-reared or wild - from using the farms, gardens, or streets of town as quick passageways. Locals post videos of passing rhinos on social media, hoping to encourage tourists to visit their shops and hotels.

Mostly wild rhinos pay little attention to shop or hotel guests as they pass through town, and most are not considered dangerous. Locals said males made a noise when they didn’t want to interact, but wild females, particularly with young, were more unpredictable.

Injuries and fatalities from wild rhino occur when humans enter the rhinos’ habitat, not the other way around. Since 1998, rhinos have been responsible for 55 human fatalities and 180 injuries in the area.

Indigenous human populations which once lived within the area now were forcibly relocated when governmental focus shifted toward wildlife conservation. These populations now face the greatest number of fatalities from negative encounters with wildlife.

Dr Szydlowski said: “Zones have been set aside for local use, they rarely produce enough to support the number of people living there, nor are local people involved in decision making or land-use planning. People living there reported feeling that they were ‘less important’ than local wildlife, and experience increasing competition with wildlife for land, forest products, and funding.

Read more at Science Daily

Computer modelling aims to inform restoration, conservation of coral reefs

A UBC Okanagan research team has created a computer modelling program to help scientists predict the effect of climate damage and eventual restoration plans on coral reefs around the globe.

This is a critical objective, says Dr. Bruno Carturan, because climate change is killing many coral species and can lead to the collapse of entire coral reef ecosystems. But, because they are so complex, it's logistically challenging to study the impact of devastation and regeneration of coral reefs.

Real-world experiments are impractical, as researchers would need to manipulate and disrupt large areas of reefs, along with coral colonies and herbivore populations, and then monitor the changes in structure and diversity over many years.

"Needless to say, conducting experiments that will disturb natural coral reefs is unethical and should be avoided, while using big aquariums is simply unfeasible," says Dr. Carturan, who recently completed his doctoral studies with the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science. "For these reasons, no such experiments have ever been conducted, which has hindered our capacity to predict coral diversity and the associated resilience of the reefs."

For his latest research, published recently in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Carturan used models to create 245 coral communities, each with a unique set of nine species and each occupying a surface of 25 square metres. The model represents coral colonies and different species of algae that grow, compete and reproduce together while also being impacted by climate.

Crucially, he notes, all the key components of the model, including species' traits such as competitive abilities and growth rates, are informed by pre-existing, real-world data from 800 species.

The research team simulated various scenarios -- including strong waves, a cyclone or intense heat -- and then measured each model reef's resilience taking note of damage, recovery time and the quality of the habitat 10 years after the disturbance.

By running so many scenarios with computer modelling, the team found that more diverse communities -- those with species having highly dissimilar traits -- were most resilient. They were better at recovering from damage and had greater habitat quality 10 years after the disturbances.

"More diverse communities are more likely to have certain species that are very important for resilience," Dr. Carturan explains. "These species have particular traits -- they are morphologically complex, competitive and with a good capacity to recover. When present in a community, these species maintained or even increased the quality of the habitat after the disturbance. Contrastingly, communities without these species were often dominated by harmful algae at the end."

Coral diversity determines the strength and future health of coral reefs, he adds. Coral species are the foundation of coral reef ecosystems because their colonies form the physical habitat where thousands of fish and crustaceans live. Among those are herbivores, such as parrotfish and surgeonfish, which maintain the coral habitat by eating the algae. Without herbivores, the algae would kill many coral colonies, causing the coral habitat to collapse, destroying its many populations.

"What is unique with our study is that our results apply to most coral communities in the world. By measuring the effect of diversity on resilience in more than 245 different coral communities, the span of diversity likely overlaps the actual coral diversity found in most reefs."

At the same time, the study provides a framework to successfully manage these ecosystems and help with coral reef restoration by revealing how the resilience of coral communities can be managed by establishing colonies of species with complementary traits.

Looking forward, there are other questions the model can help answer. For instance, the coral species vital for resilience are also the most affected by climate change and might not be able to recover if strong climatic heatwaves become too frequent.

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'Ugly' reef fishes are most in need of conservation support

What's the relationship between people's perception of beauty and animals' conservation needs? According to a machine-learning study by Nicolas Mouquet at the University of Montpellier, France, and colleagues, publishing June 7thin the open-access journal PLOS Biology, the reef fishes that people find most beautiful tend to be the lowest priority for conservation support.

The researchers asked 13,000 members of the public to rate the aesthetic attractiveness of 481 photographs of ray-finned reef fishes in an online survey and used this data to train a convolutional neural network. They then used the trained neural network to generate predictions for additional 4,400 photographs featuring 2,417 of the most encountered reef fish species.

Combining the public's ratings with the neural network's predictions, they found that bright, colorful fish species with rounder bodies tended to be rated as the most beautiful. However, the species that were ranked as more attractive tended to be less distinctive in terms of their ecological traits and evolutionary history. Furthermore, species listed on the IUCN Red List as "Threatened" or whose conservation status has not yet been evaluated had lower aesthetic value on average than species categorized as "Least Concern." Unattractive species were also of greater commercial interest, whereas aesthetic value was not correlated with a species' importance for subsistence fisheries.

Our innate preferences for shape and color are probably a consequence of the way the human brain processes colors and patterns, the authors say, but mismatches between aesthetic value, ecological function, and extinction vulnerability may mean that the species most in need of public support are the least likely to receive it. The ecological and evolutionary distinctiveness of unattractive fishes makes them important for the functioning of the whole reef, and their loss could have a disproportionate impact on these high-biodiversity ecosystems.

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