In the Luangwa Valley, Zambia, persistent poverty and hunger present linked challenges to rural development and biodiversity conservation. Both household coping strategies and larger-scale economic development efforts have caused severe natural resource degradation that limits future economic opportunities and endangers ecosystem services. A model based on a business infrastructure has been dev...

The study of human beings in conservation is often eclipsed by the study of threatened species and their environments. This is surprising given that conservation activities are human activities, and that the very need for conservation arises out of human actions. In this chapter, we begin with the premise that understanding human activities and human roles in conservation is fundamental to effe...

Resource sustainability requires a thorough understanding of the influence of forest management programs on the conservation of genetic diversity in tree populations. To observe how differences in forest management affect the genetic structure of Fagus orientalis Lipsky (oriental beech), we evaluated thirteen beech sites across Hyrcanian forests, based on six microsatellite loci. Significant di...

Conservation and land management organizations such as The Nature Conservancy are developing conservation strategies to distribute protection efforts over larger areas and a broader range of ownership and management techniques. These ‘distributed conservation strategies,’ such as working forest conservation easements, are based on the premise that blending resource extraction, such sustainable ...

Water is a finite resource that must be shared among multiple users and economic and conservation objectives can often be seen as being in conflict. We explored this perception by conducting an integrated bioeconomic analysis of irrigated agriculture and the conservation of freshwater attributes in an agricultural landscape, the Tasmanian Midlands. We constructed a simple bioeconomic model base...

Conservation biology emerged in the mid-1980s, drawing on established disciplines and integrating them in pursuit of a coherent goal: the protection and perpetuation of the Earth's biological diversity. Opportunistic in its borrowing and application of knowledge, conservation biology had its roots within the established biological sciences and resource management disciplines but has continually...

We evaluated the conservation attitudes of the local villagers living adjacent to the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in southern India 6 years after implementation of a World Bank funded eco-development project. We assessed attitudes towards three facets of conservation: the tiger, an emblematic species signifying India's commitment to wildlife conservation; the forest, a principle source o...

Increasingly, natural resource conservation programs refer to participation and local community involvement as one of the necessary prerequisites for sustainable resource management. In frameworks of adaptive comanagement, the theory of participatory conservation plays a central role in the democratization of decisionmaking authority and equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. We observ...

Collaborative adaptive management merges three essential features of twenty-first century conservation and resource management—science, collaboration, and a focus on results. These features intersect in conservation and resource management contexts characterized by: (1) high degrees of uncertainty; (2) complexity resulting from multiple variables and non-linear interactions; (3) interconnectedn...

Indigenous people of north western Himalayan region of India utilize a wide range of biological resources for subsistence. The age-old practices of resource utilization have supported the rural economy with equity and social justice and conservation of resources since generations. However, in recent times, due to market demand, the biological resources are subjected to premature and frequent ha...