Protected areas as social-ecological systems: perspectives from resilience and social-ecological systems theory

Conservation biology and applied ecology increasingly recognize that natural resource management is both an outcome and a driver of social, economic, and ecological dynamics. Protected areas offer a fundamental approach to conserving ecosystems, but they are also social-ecological systems whose ecological management and sustainability are heavily influenced by people. This editorial, and the papers in the invited feature that it introduces, discuss three emerging themes in social-ecological systems approaches to understanding protected areas: (1) the resilience and sustainability of protected areas, including analyses of their internal dynamics, their effectiveness, and the resilience of the landscapes within which they occur; (2) the relevance of spatial context and scale for protected areas, including such factors as geographic connectivity, context, exchanges between protected areas and their surrounding landscapes, and scale dependency in the provision of ecosystem services; and (3) efforts to reframe what protected areas are and how they both define and are defined by the relationships of people and nature. These emerging themes have the potential to transform management and policy approaches for protected areas and have important implications for conservation, in both theory and practice

Bridge hosts, a missing link for disease ecology in multi-host systems

In ecology, the grouping of species into functional groups has played a valuable role in simplifying ecological complexity. In epidemiology, further clarifications of epidemiological functions are needed: while host roles may be defined, they are often used loosely, partly because of a lack of clarity on the relationships between a host's function and its epidemiological role. Here we focus on the definition of bridge hosts and their epidemiological consequences. Bridge hosts provide a link through which pathogens can be transmitted from maintenance host populations or communities to receptive populations that people want to protect (i.e., target hosts). A bridge host should (1) be competent for the pathogen or able to mechanically transmit it; and (2) come into direct contact or share habitat with both maintenance and target populations. Demonstration of bridging requires an operational framework that integrates ecological and epidemiological approaches. We illustrate this framework using the example of the transmission of Avian Influenza Viruses across wild bird/poultry interfaces in Africa and discuss a range of other examples that demonstrate the usefulness of our definition for other multi-host systems. Bridge hosts can be particularly important for understanding and managing infectious disease dynamics in multi-host systems at wildlife/domestic/human interfaces, including emerging infections

Central Compact Objects in Supernova Remnants

Central Compact Objects (CCOs) are a handful of soft X-ray sources located close to the centers of Supernova Remnants and supposed to be young, radio-quiet Isolated Neutron Stars (INSs). A clear understanding of their physics would be crucial in order to complete our view of the birth properties of INSs. We will review the phenomenologies of CCOs, underlining the most important, recent results, and we will discuss the possible relationships of such sources with other classes of INSs.Comment: 9 pages. Invited talk at the conference "40 Years of Pulsars: Millisecond Pulsars, Magnetars and More", August 12-17, 2007, Montreal (CA). To appear in the proceedings, ed. by C.Bassa, Z.Wang, A.Cumming and V.Kaspi, AIP, in pres

Pathogens, disease, and the social-ecological resilience of protected areas

It is extremely important for biodiversity conservation that protected areas are resilient to a range of potential future perturbations. One of the least studied influences on protected area resilience is that of disease. We argue that wildlife disease (1) is a social-ecological problem that must be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective; (2) has the potential to lead to changes in the identity of protected areas, possibly transforming them; and (3) interacts with conservation both directly (via impacts on wild animals, livestock, and people) and indirectly (via the public, conservation management, and veterinary responses). We use southern African protected areas as a case study to test a framework for exploring the connections between conservation, endemic disease, and social-ecological resilience. We first define a set of criteria for the social-ecological identity of protected areas. We then use these criteria to explore the potential impacts of selected diseases (foot-and-mouth disease, anthrax, malaria, rabies, rift valley fever, trypanosomiasis, and canine distemper) on protected area resilience. Although endemic diseases may have a number of direct impacts on both wild animals and domestic animals and people, the indirect pathways by which diseases influence social-ecological resilience also emerge as potentially important. The majority of endemic pathogens found in protected areas do not kill large numbers of wild animals or infect many people, and may even play valuable ecological roles; but occasional disease outbreaks and mortalities can have a large impact on public perceptions and disease management, potentially making protected areas unviable in one or more of their stated aims. Neighboring landowners also have a significant impact on park management decisions. The indirect effects triggered by disease in the human social and economic components of protected areas and surrounding landscapes may ultimately have a greater influence on protected area resilience than the direct ecological perturbations caused by disease

Estimating dynamic risk factors for pathogen transmission using community-level bird census data at the wildlife/domestic interface

The ecology of host species is crucial for understanding the mechanisms of pathogen transmission and spread in complex multi-host systems. In this article, we use detailed observations of the host community to develop and apply a new approach to mapping temporal variation in risk for avian influenza. Working in an extensive wetland system near Harare, Zimbabwe, we use the overlap in space and time of highly variable bird communities, combined with ecological risk factors, to assess the risk of Avian Influenza viruses (AIV) maintenance and transmission between bird populations. The estimated introduction and maintenance risks associated with waterfowl populations at a given time are then multiplied by the level of interactions with neighboring domestic production systems during the same period. This approach is used to develop hypotheses for the dynamics of the introduction and circulation of AIV strains in waterfowl populations and as a way of understanding the potential role of "bridge" species at the wild/ domestic interface. The novel approach presented here offers a potentially useful way to explore AIV risk, identify which wild bird species may be acting as reservoirs or vectors of pathogens at a local scale, and improve local surveillance. (Résumé d'auteur

The relevance of spatial variation in ecotourism attributes for the economic sustainability of protected areas

In contemporary society, protected areas are increasingly expected to justify their existence through the services that they provide to society. Protected areas offer many important cultural services, but appraisal of these nonmaterial benefits has generally proven difficult and most studies have focused on single case studies. Data on tourist numbers across multiple camps and protected areas provide a tractable and previously unexploited case study for better understanding the economic sustainability of cultural service provision and the relevance of potentially confounding variables (e.g., location and infrastructure) for park sustainability. We used redundancy analysis and linear models to relate a 5-yr monthly data set (2007–2012) of tourist numbers and tourism-derived income in all camps in South African national parks to a set of largely GIS-derived, determinant attributes that captured key elements of location, biodiversity, infrastructure, and accommodation cost at a camp level. Our analysis suggests that the degree to which cultural services can be converted into revenue for conservation is strongly contingent on infrastructure, location, and the business model that the park adopts. When considered alone, ecological attributes explained 14.2% and 3% of day and overnight visitation rates, respectively. In contrast, models that considered ecosystems in combination with other elements could explain 53% and 67% of variation. Linear models confirmed the existence of complex interactions between groups of variables and highlighted individual covariates that affected visitation rates. Significant variables included ecological features that provided aesthetic services, number of water bodies, elevation, available units, unit costs, and distance to the coast, airports, and other national parks. Taken in context our results suggest that it may be simpler than expected to make predictions about the potential future economic viability of protected areas under alternative models of management, illustrate how ecological variables may represent the “supply” side in cultural services, and highlight the complex interplay between ecological and built infrastructure. Encouragingly, this in turn suggests that relatively small, targeted investments in infrastructure could lead to disproportionate increases in tourist visitation rates and hence in increased revenue for conservation