We showed that the three largest wind energy contributors in Europe (France, Germany, and UK) do not comply with the EUROBATS guideline that was published in 2008 of siting wind turbines far enough from woody edges to limit threats to bat population viability through collisions. We did not find any improvement of compliance over time. We identified probable causes of these findings and provided key policy recommendations to achieve compliance to EUROBATS guidelines such as better: (i) inclusion in regulatory texts, (ii) notification of the environmental authorities, and (iii) strategic, well-informed, and forward planning of areas suitable for wind energy development.

We modeled population growth of a state endangered and federally threatened carnivore, the Humboldt marten, population in northern California, incorporating empirical demographic data under a variety of scenarios, but all scenarios indicated substantial variability in population growth trajectories as an artifact of highly variable survival estimates. Our work exemplifies the issues of using sparse data to inform conservation decisions. We suggest increased collaboration, purposeful study designs, standardized protocols, emerging technologies, and data sharing via public repositories are reliable actions that can produce biologically relevant results and inform future conservation efforts.

In the last few years, several states in the Western US have sanctioned extensive gray wolf (Canus lupus) kills via hunting and trapping. These management actions tend to be favored by ranchers seeking to protect their livelihoods. Consideration should also be given to indiscriminate wildlife losses due to nonselective traps or snares, as well as the many benefits of wolves as apex predators, and the opportunities offered by embracing alternative nonlethal approaches to minimizing livestock losses.

The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration holds much promise but there is need to ensure that efforts extend beyond terrestrial systems to include freshwater ecosystems. Freshwater biodiversity is in crisis and is often ignored. Here we provide suggestions for ensuring that freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity benefit from the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

To the extent that opportunity costs reflect lost opportunities for extractive uses, and to the extent that those extractive uses present threats to nature, opportunity costs reflect the positive differences for natural values that can be made through conservation management. We suggest that, if conservationists make choices to minimize opportunity costs, they are also necessarily limiting their impact. A better understanding of impact framing will enable a more honest and accountable language to be developed in conservation that explicitly focuses on the differences our actions make.

Attitudes and behaviors help explain compliance in Greenland's Atlantic salmon fishery. Joining together individual's attitudinal and behavioral responses to conservation rules illustrates the benefits and limitations of expanding actor- and opportunity-based theories of compliance. This case, where levels of fisheries compliance is high, offers empirical evidence for improving compliance in fisheries and illustrates the limits of fisheries management for conserving a highly migratory species.

In order to designate new protected areas, we assessed the exposure of Mediterranean sites of importance for biodiversity to climate change and land-use modifications using future projections under four scenarios. We highlighted that non-protected Mediterranean Key Biodiversity Areas that are most exposed are located in countries with the lowest protection of this network, reinforcing the necessity to strengthen conservation measures for this network, especially in Middle-East and Maghreb countries.

Nets are used across a wide variety of food production landscapes to control avian pests typically resulting in the death of entangled birds. Based on 1312 road-survey transects, we documented 735 individuals of at least 45 bird species caught in nets and parallel cords, including many species not regarded as pests. We suggest imposing a ban on netting.

Wildlife translocations have inherent disease risks that can jeopardize animal and human health and biodiversity conservation. We incorporated a disease risk analysis into planning for reintroduction of gray wolves to Isle Royale National Park and used outcomes of the analysis to mitigate risks for wildlife and human health.

Peninsular bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) are federally endangered due to multiple threats, including introduced infectious disease. We found that Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae seroprevalence was associated with lower lamb recruitment at the population level, and the primary predictor of pathogen infection/exposure at the individual level was the region in which an animal was captured. This work can help inform future pathogen surveillance and population monitoring for the long-term conservation of this population.

Japanese macaques have caused typical conservation issues originating from rapidly shrinking human communities in modern Japan. To optimize conservation interventions for macaques, we collected extensive data regarding the home ranges of >2000 troops on a nationwide scale and analyzed habitat connectivity among the current populations. Our findings could provide important lessons for conservation efforts under depopulating human societies, which various Asian and European nations will now experience.

Multispecies risk assessments provide opportunities for efficiency, but also risk overwhelming or biasing the assessment process. Available guidance generally emphasizes ecological similarity as the key to success. Due to widespread scale-dependence in ecology, focusing instead on the assessment methods and their potential for bias and increased efficiency may provide a stronger basis for developing consistent and transparent guidance.

The rapid growth of cage aquaculture in Lake Victoria has raised concerns regarding its contribution to eutrophication and implications for biodiversity conservation. We found no difference in environmental conditions between cage and control stations, and a significantly higher total fish biomass at cage stations. We discuss our findings to inform aquaculture management and conservation strategies.

Populations of dhole (Cuon alpinus) are declining in Southeast Asia, but no previous study has evaluated populations at a regional scale. We modeled suitable habitat using presence-only camera trap data of dhole and prey in mainland Southeast Asia and assessed threat levels to identify dhole long-term strongholds. Seventeen habitat patches were identified as having at least some potential as strongholds. The Western Forest Complex in Thailand was estimated to be a primary stronghold, with two secondary strongholds in Taman Negara Malaysia and north-eastern Cambodia. High quality, but smaller patches identified would require habitat restoration. Our habitat suitability model revealed forest cover and prey availability as the most influential factors affecting dhole occurrence. Similarly, our threat model predicted forest loss and prey depletion were the greatest threats facing dhole, followed by hunting, non-timber forest product collection, and domestic dog incursion. Our threat assessment technique for a species with scarce information might be applicable to other endangered species.

Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus) are a vulnerable species, yet their conservation is challenged by the continuation of retaliatory killing, mainly motivated by bear attacks on people and damages on livestock that occur frequently in rural areas. In this report, we distributed a questionnaire among 369 individuals in rural communities of the District Mansehra, Pakistan, where retaliatory killings are often reported. Most of the respondents (71%) believed that Asiatic black bears are the primary species driving negative interactions between humans and carnivores, such as livestock depredations, crop damages, and mauling of people. Interviewees reported a total of 30 attacks on people between 2015 and 2019, where 6% were fatal. Although livestock depredation was low in absolute numbers (an average of 11.5 heads per year), it had a large estimated economic impact of $1367 per year, or a total of $5.469. This cost is 93% of the per capita gross domestic product for Pakistan, equivalent to $55,853 to a US citizen. Conflicts associated to the presence of bears in this area have increased recently. More information on why conflicts are increasing and how to prevent conflicts are needed to facilitate coexistence and allow the persistence of Asiatic black bears in the area.

Measuring connectivity is key to track progress toward area-based targets for the protection of well-connected protected area networks, such as 30% of lands and seas globally. We developed a novel metric of connectivity called the Protected Network metric (ProNet), designed to assess the structural connectivity of a protected area network in a way that can be easily described, clearly communicated, and rapidly computed. We evaluated how ProNet adheres to fundamental conservation science principles using a library of hypothetical landscapes and demonstrated its performance in assessing connectivity for a set of real-world landscapes selected across the gradient of human modification.