Papers by Elizabeth Bennett
Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 2015
Illegal hunting of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) for ivory is causing rapid declines in ... more Illegal hunting of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) for ivory is causing rapid declines in their populations. Since 2007, illegal ivory trade has more than doubled. African elephants are facing the most serious conservation crisis since 1989, when international trade was banned. One solution proposed is establishment of a controlled legal trade in ivory. High prices for ivory mean that the incentives to obtain large quantities are high, but the quantity of tusks available for trade are biologically constrained. Within that context, effective management of a legal ivory trade would require robust systems to be in place to ensure that ivory from illegally killed elephants cannot be laundered into a legal market. At present, that is not feasible due to corruption among government officials charged with implementing wildlife-related legislation. With organized criminal enterprises involved along the whole commodity chain, corruption enables the laundering of illegal ivory into leg...
Ecological Economics, 2001
Oryx
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution l... more This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY 4.0.
Diversity
In 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) introduced a novel method for ... more In 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) introduced a novel method for assessing species recovery and conservation impact: the IUCN Green Status of Species. The Green Status standardizes recovery using a metric called the Green Score, which ranges from 0% to 100%. This study focuses on one crucial step in the Green Status method—the division of a species’ range into so-called “spatial units”—and evaluates whether different approaches for delineating spatial units affect the outcome of the assessment (i.e., the Green Score). We compared Green Scores generated using biologically based spatial units (the recommended method) to Green Scores generated using ecologically based or country-based spatial units for 29 species of birds and mammals in Europe. We found that while spatial units delineated using ecoregions and countries (fine-scale) produced greater average numbers of spatial units and significantly lower average Green Scores than biologically based spati...
Conservation Biology, 2021
Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the Inte... more Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a “Green List of Species” (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species’ progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 separate but interlinked components: a standardized method (i.e., measurement against benchmarks of species’ viability, functionality, and preimpact distribution) to determine current species recovery status (herein species recovery score) and application of that method to estimate past and potential future impacts of conservation based on 4 metrics (conservation legacy, conservation dependence, conservation gain, and recovery potential). We tested the framework with 181 species representing diverse taxa, life histories, biomes, and IUCN Red List categories (extinction risk). Based on the observed distribution of species’ recovery scores, w...
Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2021
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2019
Historical data are a valuable resource for addressing present-day conservation issues, for examp... more Historical data are a valuable resource for addressing present-day conservation issues, for example by informing the establishment of appropriate recovery targets. However, while the recovery of threatened species is the end goal of many conservation programmes, data made available through the efforts of palaeoecologists and historical ecologists are rarely consulted. The proposal of a ‘Green List of Species’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) will soon change this. The Green List of Species measures recovery against historical baselines; in particular, the method requires estimates of species range and abundance in previous centuries. In this paper, we present the case for why setting species recovery against a historical baseline is necessary to produce ambitious conservation targets, and we highlight examples from palaeoecology and historical ecology where fossil and archival data have been used to establish historical species baselines. Finally, we intr...
Oryx, 2017
A controversy at the 2016 IUCN World Conservation Congress on the topic of closing domestic ivory... more A controversy at the 2016 IUCN World Conservation Congress on the topic of closing domestic ivory markets (the 007, or so-called James Bond, motion) has given rise to a debate on IUCN's value proposition. A cross-section of authors who are engaged in IUCN but not employed by the organization, and with diverse perspectives and opinions, here argue for the importance of safeguarding and strengthening the unique technical and convening roles of IUCN, providing examples of what has and has not worked. Recommendations for protecting and enhancing IUCN's contribution to global conservation debates and policy formulation are given.
PLoS Biology, 2010
The Perspective section provides experts with a forum to comment on topical or controversial issu... more The Perspective section provides experts with a forum to comment on topical or controversial issues of broad interest.
BioScience, 2011
The conservation of species is one of the foundations of conservation biology. Successful species... more The conservation of species is one of the foundations of conservation biology. Successful species conservation has often been defined as simply the avoidance of extinction. We argue that this focus, although important, amounts to practicing conservation at the "emergency room door," and will never be a sufficient approach to conserving species. Instead, we elaborate a positive definition of species conservation on the basis of six attributes and propose a categorization of different states of species conservation using the extent of human management and the degree to which each of the attributes is conserved. These states can be used to develop a taxonomy of species "recovery" that acknowledges there are multiple stable points defined by ecological and social factors. With this approach, we hope to contribute to a new, optimistic conservation biology that is not based on underambitious goals and that seeks to create the conditions under which Earth's biological systems can thrive.
Oryx, 2007
Wildlife managers require status and distribution information for informed decisions. Recognizing... more Wildlife managers require status and distribution information for informed decisions. Recognizing the tiger's globally threatened status and potential as an umbrella species for protection of forested landscapes, camera trap surveys for tigers and other large mammals have been conducted since 1997 in Peninsular Malaysia with the aim of assessing the population status of tigers in the Peninsula. Results from surveys at nine sites between December 1997 and December 1999 are reported here. Tigers were confirmed from six sites in the Main Range and Greater Taman Negara landscape, with multiple locations inside putative priority tiger areas. Although the data were collected 8 years ago, they are supplemented with more recent information, including tiger-human conflict investigations during 2000–2005 that indicate tiger persistence at these sites. Tiger density estimates were 0.51–1.95 tigers per 100 km2. With results from other surveys, this suggests a national population of up to se...
Oryx, 2011
In spite of significant recent advances in understanding how to conserve species we are failing t... more In spite of significant recent advances in understanding how to conserve species we are failing to conserve some of the most beloved and charismatic, with severe population losses, shrinking ranges and extinctions of subspecies. The primary reason is hunting for illegal trade of highly valuable body parts, increasingly operated by sophisticated organized criminal syndicates supplying wealthy East Asian markets. Current enforcement systems were not established to tackle such crime, and weak governance, low capacity and inadequate resources facilitate the trade. To save these species this trade must be treated as serious crime, with allocation of sufficient resources, highly trained personnel, and appropriate technologies to allow it to be tackled effectively. Success in tackling this trade will necessitate commitment from governments and non-governmental organizations and the support of civil society.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2021
Several hundred species are hunted for wild meat in the tropics, supporting the diets, customs, a... more Several hundred species are hunted for wild meat in the tropics, supporting the diets, customs, and livelihoods of millions of people. However, unsustainable hunting is one of the most urgent threats to wildlife and ecosystems worldwide and has serious ramifications for people whose subsistence and income are tied to wild meat. Over the past 18 years, although research efforts have increased, scientific knowledge has largely not translated into action. One major barrier to progress has been insufficient monitoring and evaluation, meaning that the effectiveness of interventions cannot be ascertained. Emerging issues include the difficulty of designing regulatory frameworks that disentangle the different purposes of hunting, the large scale of urban consumption, and the implications of wild meat consumption for human health. To address these intractable challenges, wepropose eight new recommendations for research and action for sustainable wild meat use, which would support the achiev...
Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2003
Oryx, 2021
In summer , IUCN launched the Green Status of Species, an optimistic new part of the Red List... more In summer , IUCN launched the Green Status of Species, an optimistic new part of the Red List of Threatened Species that provides a tool for assessing species recovery and the impact of conservation. The Green Status of Species assesses three facets of recovery. A species is Fully Recovered (or Non-Depleted) if, in all parts of its indigenous range (areas that were occupied prior to major human impacts), it is () present, () viable (i.e. not threatened with extinction), and () ecologically functional. These factors contribute towards a Green Score in the range -%, which shows how far a species is from its Fully Recovered state. This score is converted into recovery categories that mirror those of the Red List (e.g. Critically Depleted, Slightly Depleted). This definition of recovery is ambitious by design. It is not expected, nor is it a goal, that all species will eventually fulfil this definition of full recovery; for many species, large areas within their range have been irrevocably modified. Rather, this definition serves to standardize the assessment approach between species, and to identify areas of recovery opportunity in the context of what has been lost.
Conservation Biology, 2021
Some conservation prioritization methods are based on the assumption that conservation needs over... more Some conservation prioritization methods are based on the assumption that conservation needs overwhelm current resources and not all species can be conserved; therefore, a conservation triage scheme (i.e., when the system is overwhelmed, species should be divided into three groups based on likelihood of * email
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2021
International commercial trade in wildlife, whether legal or illegal, is one of the greatest thre... more International commercial trade in wildlife, whether legal or illegal, is one of the greatest threats to multiple species of wildlife today. Opinions on how to address it are deeply divided across the conservation community. Approaches fall into two broad categories: making the trade illegal to protect against any form of commercial trade or allowing some or all of the trade to be legal and seeking to manage it through sustainable trade. The conservation community is often deeply polarized on which is the better option. We posit that a way to choose between these options is by considering species-specific attributes of biological productivity, management context, and demand. We develop a conceptual framework to assess which option is more likely to result in successful conservation of a species. We show how to construct a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) to model how these attributes (1) interact to affect the sustainability of the species’ population and (2) vary under different trade ...
Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, Jan 26, 2018
Stopping declines in biodiversity is critically important, but it is only a first step toward ach... more Stopping declines in biodiversity is critically important, but it is only a first step toward achieving more ambitious conservation goals. The absence of an objective and practical definition of species recovery that is applicable across taxonomic groups leads to inconsistent targets in recovery plans and frustrates reporting and maximization of conservation impact. We devised a framework for comprehensively assessing species recovery and conservation success. We propose a definition of a fully recovered species that emphasizes viability, ecological functionality, and representation; and use counterfactual approaches to quantify degree of recovery. This allowed us to calculate a set of 4 conservation metrics that demonstrate impacts of conservation efforts to date (conservation legacy); identify dependence of a species on conservation actions (conservation dependence); quantify expected gains resulting from conservation action in the medium term (conservation gain); and specify requ...
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Papers by Elizabeth Bennett