Suchergebnisse

Public support is a necessary component of large carnivore conservation. We analysed public opinion on Amur tigers, Panthera tigris altaica, in Russia's Far East, the northernmost stronghold of the world's rarest big cat. We surveyed 1035 people in 5 settlements at increasing distances to tiger habitat. Overall support for tiger conservation was high (95.4%), although lower in more rural communities—especially among hunters—with limited socio-economic opportunities, and where tigers pose a higher perceived threat to livelihoods. Nearly 20% of respondents supported lethal removal of individual problem tigers that posed a threat to humans. Non-hunters, higher-income earners, and people who rated their communities' pre-college education positively showed less support for even such restricted killing of tigers. Hunters were more likely to support the idea of legalising tiger hunting (hunting tigers is a felony in Russia), and less likely to attribute tiger decline primarily to poaching. Despite strong support for tiger conservation in both urban and rural settings, a subset of the local populace is still engaged in poaching and trading of tigers, making improved situational crime prevention a needed focus of future efforts, alongside behaviour change campaigns promoting active resistance to poaching among tiger supporters.

Abstract in Russian:
https://bit.ly/3KBDU1A


Supplementary material:
https://bit.ly/37B3cPj

Political borders and natural boundaries of wildlife populations seldom coincide, often to the detriment of conservation objectives. Transnational monitoring of endangered carnivores is rare, but is necessary for accurate population monitoring and coordinated conservation policies. We investigate the benefits of collaboratively monitoring the abundance and survival of the critically endangered Amur leopard, which occurs as a single transboundary population across China and Russia. Country‐specific results overestimated abundance and were generally less precise compared to integrated monitoring estimates; the global population was similar in both years: 84 (70–108, 95% confidence interval). Uncertainty in country‐specific annual survival estimates were approximately twice the integrated estimates of 0.82 (0.69–0.91, 95% confidence limits). This collaborative effort provided a better understanding of Amur leopard population dynamics, represented a first step in building trust, and lead to cooperative agreements to coordinate conservation policies.