In the Greater Serengeti-Mara ecosystem, with Serengeti National Park (SNP) at its core, people and wildlife are strongly dependent on water supply that has a strong seasonal inter-annual variability. The Mara River, only perennial river in SNP, number of small streams originate from outside SNP before flowing through it. those watersheds increasing grazing pressure livestock, deforestation, ir...

science data for wildlife surveys Cara Steger* , Bilal Butt and Mevin B. Hooten Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1499, USA; School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48103, USA; and U.S. Geological Survey, Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit,...

Traditional grazing grounds near Amboseli National Park (Kenya) are being rapidly converted to cropland – a process that closes important wildlife corridors. We use a spatially explicit simulationmodel that integrates ecosystem dynamics and pastoral decision-making to explore the scope for introducing a ‘payments for ecosystem services’ scheme to compensate pastoralists for spillover benefits a...

Pathogens that are transmitted between the environment, wildlife, livestock and humans represent major challenges for the protection of human and domestic animal health, the economic sustainability of agriculture, and the conservation of wildlife. Among such pathogens, the genus Mycobacterium is well represented by M. bovis, the etiological agent of bovine tuberculosis, M. avium ssp. paratuberc...

Agricultural production affects environmental and human health. Many consequences are borne involuntarily rather than chosen because no formal market trading takes place for ecosystem functions or health attributes. These impacts, or externalities, may be quantified indirectly by assigning dollar values through a process called valuation, which informs agricultural production and policy decisio...

In many regions around the world, wildlife impacts on people (e.g., crop raiding, attacks on people) engender negative attitudes toward wildlife. Negative attitudes predict behaviors that undermine wildlife management and conservation efforts (e.g., by exacerbating retaliatory killing of wildlife). Our study (1) evaluated attitudes of local people toward the globally endangered tiger (Panthera ...

Riparian meadows occupy a small proportion of the public lands in the western United States but they provide numerous ecosystem services, including the production of high-quality forage for livestock grazing. Modern conservation management strategies (e.g., reductions in livestock stocking rates and adoption of new riparian grazing standards) have been implemented to better balance riparian con...

The usefulness of variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) typing based on limited numbers of loci has previously proven inferior compared to IS6110-RFLP typing when applied to the study of the molecular epidemiology of bovine tuberculosis in both livestock and wildlife in southern Africa. In this study, the discriminatory power of 29 published VNTR loci in the characterization of 131 Mycobacterium...

BACKGROUND Pastoralists in low-income countries usually live in close proximity to their animals and thus represent an important repository of information about livestock disease. Since wild and domestic animals often mix freely whilst grazing, pastoralists are also able to observe first-hand the diseases that are present in wildlife and as such are key informants in disease outbreaks in sylvat...