David Wilkie

Wildlife Conservation Society | WCS · Center for Global Conservation

Background Global policy initiatives and international conservation organizations have sought to emphasize and strengthen the link between the conservation of natural ecosystems and human development. While many indices have been developed to measure various social outcomes to conservation interventions, the quantity and strength of evidence to sup...

Background: Women often use natural resources differently than men yet frequently have minimal influence on how local resources are managed. An emerging hypothesis is that empowering more women in local resource decision-making may lead to better resource governance and conservation. Here we focus on the forestry and fisheries sectors to answer the...

Background Women often use natural resources differently than men yet frequently have minimal influence on how local resources are managed. An emerging hypothesis is that empowering more women in local resource decision-making may lead to better resource governance and conservation. Here we focus on the forestry and fisheries sectors to answer the...

Protected areas are controversial because they are so important for conservation and because they distribute fortune and misfortune unevenly. The nature of that distribution, as well as the terrain of protected areas themselves, have been vigorously contested. In particular, the relationship between protected areas and poverty is a long-running deb...

Measures of socio-economic impacts of conservation interventions have largely been restricted to externally defined indicators focused on income, which do not reflect people's priorities. Using a holistic, locally grounded conceptualization of human well-being instead provides a way to understand the multi-faceted impacts of conservation on aspects...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) mechanisms leverage economic and social incentives to shape how people influence natural processes and achieve conservation and sustainability goals. Beneficiaries of nature's goods and services pay owners or stewards of ecosystems that produce those services, with payments contingent on service provision ( 1 ,...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) mechanisms leverage economic and social incentives to shape how people influence natural processes and achieve conservation and sustainability goals. Beneficiaries of nature's goods and services pay owners or stewards of ecosystems that produce those services, with payments contingent on service provision. Inte...

Unsustainable hunting threatens both biodiversity and local livelihoods. Despite high levels of research effort focused on understanding the dynamics of bushmeat trade and consumption, current research is largely site specific. Without synthesis and quantitative analysis of available case studies, the national and regional characteristics of bushme...

Unsustainable hunting threatens both biodiversity and local livelihoods. Despite high levels of research effort focused on understanding the dynamics of bushmeat trade and consumption, current research is largely site specific. Without synthesis and quantitative analysis of available case studies, the national and regional characteristics of bushme...

Impact evaluation methods (mixed effects models and matching) were used to investigate the effect of protected areas (PAs) on poverty and livelihoods in Cambodia, comparing households inside PAs with bordering villages and controls. There was no evidence that PAs exacerbated local poverty or reduce agricultural harvests in comparison with controls....

Conservationists are increasingly engaging with the concept of human well‐being to improve the design and evaluation of their interventions. Since the convening of the influential Sarkozy Commission in 2009, development researchers have been refining conceptualizations and frameworks to understand and measure human well‐being and are starting to co...

Research has shown that consumers of wildlife are price sensitive and that the quantity of meat purchased is influenced by the cost of bushmeat and its substitutes. Although there is evidence that hunter-gatherers are optimal foragers whose behaviour is influenced by costs associated with foraging, there is a paucity of studies on whether the behav...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a mechanism for promoting sustainable management of ecosystem services, and can also be useful for supporting rural development. However, few studies have demonstrated quantitatively the benefits for biodiversity and rural communities resulting from PES. In this paper we review four initiatives in Gua...

Over the 50+ years that {WCS} has been implementing biodiversity conservation programs across the world we have learned that supporting and promoting transparent and equitable local resource governance systems is not only the most efficient and sustainable approach to conserving wildlife and wild places, it is a critically important pathway towards...

Habitat loss and degradation, over-exploitation of resources, invasive species, pollution, disease, and climate change are conservation priorities. Road proliferation facilitates all of these, yet how many conservation organisations have a Roads Coordinator? In tropical forests road impacts can be catastrophic. In central Africa, large mammals are...

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to hu...

Hunted wild animals (i.e., bushmeat) are a main source of protein for many rural populations in the tropics, and the unsustainable harvest of these animals puts both human food security and ecosystem functioning at risk. To understand the correlates of bushmeat consumption, we surveyed 1219 households in 121 rural villages near three newly establis...

Understanding the role that protected areas play in the livelihood security of local communities is essential to ensure that local people are not left shouldering the costs of what is a public good, and to help maintain robust local and national constituencies for biodiversity conservation. To provide baseline data for a longitudinal study on the e...

Tropical forests are among the most species-rich ecosystems on the planet. Some authors argue that predictions of a tropical forest extinction crisis based on analyses of deforestation rates are overly pessimistic since they do not take account of future agricultural abandonment as a result of rural-urban migration and subsequent secondary regrowth...

The unique wildlife of the Ewaso Nyiro and valuable services that the ecosystem provides for humans (e.g., clean water and productive grasslands) cannot be conserved by working solely on traditional conservation strongholds such as the national reserves and private ranches of central Laikipia. To reach objectives for conserving wild-life, stakehold...

Protected areas are the defined spaces where human societies seek to ensure the persistence of those parts of nature that they value. As such, they have changed through time, evolving and expanding from early origins where local resource users sought to prevent outsider access and use, to imperial hunting reserves and sacred forests where local eli...

Over the last decades, native Amazonians have put increasing pressure on animal wildlife owing to growth in demand. Across societies, household monetary income and wealth shape food consumption; hence, so it is natural to ask what effect might these variables have on the demand for wildlife consumption among native Amazonians, particularly as they...

Comparaison de l'efficacite des deux techniques de chasse utilisees selon les groupes par les Mbuti de la foret de l'Ituri du Zaire. Raisons du choix de l'une ou l'autre : type de foret et de vegetation, type d'animal chasse

Unlike neighboring disciplines, anthropology rarely studies how actual future events affect current behavior. Such studies could lay the groundwork for studies of ethno-forecasting. Psychologists argue that people forecast poorly, but some empirical work in cultural anthropology suggests that at least with weather, rural people might make reasonabl...

Conservation projects may be reluctant to attempt Systematic Conservation Planning because existing methods are often prohibitive in the time, money, data, and expertise they require. We tried to develop a “resource light” method for Systematic Conservation Planning and applied it to the Ewaso Ngiro Landscape of central Kenya. Over a 6-month prepar...

The Amazon rain forest harbors some of the world's richest biological diversity. During the twentieth century, two types of actors cleared that forest: native Amazonians and outside encroachers. Of the two actors, we know more about what drives outside encroachers to clear forest than about what drives native Amazonians to clear forest. The past re...

Ce document porte sur la chasse aux animaux sauvages dans les forêts tropicales à des fins d’alimentation (portant aussi le nom de «viande de brousse», «viande sauvage» et/ou «viande de gibier sauvage». Il a été préparé pour le Secrétariat de la Convention sur la diversité biologique sous la coordination du CIFOR, en collaboration avec le Groupe de...

We used empirical data to simulate the impacts, over the next 40 years, of subsistence‐level agricultural clearing and bushmeat consumption on forest resources within the recently established Okapi Wildlife Reserve in northeastern Zaire. Satellite imagery, human population census data, and field measurements were used to calculate present and proje...

An essential foundation of any science is a standard lexicon. Any given conservation project can be described in terms of the biodiversity targets, direct threats, contributing factors at the project site, and the conservation actions that the project team is employing to change the situation. These common elements can be linked in a causal chain,...

There is growing interest in assessing how income influences the consumption of wildlife in poor rural areas of developing nations. The interest stems from the possibility of using income to contribute to the conservation of wildlife. Though promising, efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate measures of income. We propose...

Unregulated hunting for the bushmeat market is posing excessive pressures on wildlife. Taxation of the bushmeat trade has been proposed as one of the effective regulatory means. This paper reviews the conservation risks and the economic and administrative feasibility of legalizing the commercial trade in bushmeat, using empirical data on bushmeat c...

This paper examines the vulnerability of the Congo Basin's forests through a GIS platform, taking into consideration the variables of population growth, road density, logging concession, and forest fragmentation. The assessment indicates that the forests will continue to shrink towards the interior over the next 50 years. Current contiguous forests...

Researchers have developed several indices to estimate the significance of plant species for humans. We build on previous methods in ethnobotany and anthropology to develop a new way to value plant species along three dimensions: cultural, practical, and economic. We used interview and observational data on the use of wild plants by the Tsimane’, a...

Researchers have developed several indices to estimate the significance of plant species for humans. We build on previous methods in ethnobotany and anthropology to develop a new way to value plant species along three dimensions: cultural, practical, and economic. We used interview and observational data on the use of wild plants by the Tsimane’, a...

Human–nature interactions shape biodiversity and natural resources. Planning conservation and engaging stakeholders in dialogues about conservation require an understanding of indirect threats arising from socioeconomic and political conditions, plus participatory methods to build consensus for action. We present a method for spatial assessment of...

Researchers have often equated ethnobotanical knowledge collected through interview questions with actual uses of plants, but knowledge and uses of plants might or might not move in lockstep. Using data from 132 adults living in two villages of a foraging-farming society in the Bolivian Amazon, the Tsimane, we compare ethnobotanical knowledge with...

Evidence has been accumulated about the adverse effects of income inequality on individual health in industrial nations, but we know less about its effect in small-scale, pre-industrial rural societies. Income inequality should have modest effects on individual health. First, norms of sharing and reciprocity should reduce the adverse effects of inc...

Unsustainable hunting of wildlife for food is often a more immediate and significant threat to the conservation of biological diversity in tropical forests than deforestation. Why people eat wildlife is debated. Some may eat bushmeat because they can afford it; others may eat it because it is familiar, traditional, confers prestige, tastes good, or...

Abstract Researchers have often equated indigenous knowledge,of plant uses collected

Of all the regions in the World, sub-Saharan Africa is the least well equipped to respond to the issues associated with climate change. This paper discusses the significance of climate change to African nations and the related needs and opportunities. At the centre of the discussion are the important issues, often raised by African colleagues, of s...

Trade theory predicts that the expansion of markets induces households to specialize and intensify production. We use plot-level data (n = 64) from a panel study of 2 village and cross-sectional data from 511 households in 59 villages of Tsimane Amerindians (Bolivia) to test the predictions. Results of bivariate analyses using both data sets sugges...

Integration into a market economy or economic development can erode the quality of life of indigenous people by, for example, increasing income inequalities. The Kuznets hypothesis predicts that the link between income inequality and income (a proxy for economic development) resembles an inverted U. We test the hypothesis using a survey of 511 hous...

Patience, or the ability to delay gratification, matters in the behavioral and medical sciences and in public policy because it correlates with a wide range of desirable outcomes. For instance, patience correlates positively with income, wealth, conservation of natural resources, health, and savings and negatively with crime and drug addiction. Ant...

In this article, the authors contribute to the empirical study of culture as shared knowledge by exploring correlations of individual responses to different questionnaires of the same tasks and correlation of individual responses to different tasks. They collected data on ethnobotanical knowledge from 149 adult Tsimane’ Amerindians in Bolivia. The...

Trade theory predicts that the expansion of markets induces households to specialize and intensify production. We use plot-level data (n = 64) from a panel study of 2 village and cross-sectional data from 511 households in 59 villages of Tsimane' Amerindians (Bolivia) to test the predictions. Results of bivariate analyses using both data sets sugge...

To assess rates of deforestation, researchers typically use questionnaires. But do questionnaires provide accurate information about the extent of forest clearance by households? In this article, the authors provide data on the amount of deforestation in a Tsimane' Amerindian village (Bolivia) and assess informant error by cross-checking three diff...

Massive overhunting of wildlife for meat across the humid tropics is now causing local extinctions of numerous species. Rural people often rely heavily on wild meat, but, in many areas, this important source of food and income is either already lost or is being rapidly depleted. The problem can only be tackled by looking at the wider economic and i...

Because rapidly expanding human populations have devastated gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) habitats in East and West Africa, the relatively intact forests of western equatorial Africa have been viewed as the last stronghold of African apes. Gabon and the Republic of Congo alone are thought to hold roughly 80% of t...

To preserve humanity's patrimony and diversity and avoid misappropriation by outsiders, laws should protect indigenous knowledge. Firms producing pharmaceutical, agricultural, and cosmetic goods have used ethnobotanical knowledge of indigenous people to develop commercial goods ([1][1], [2][2]). The

Although researchers have documented the role of anthropogenic huntingpressure on the abundance of game, few have measured the direct effects ofincome or economic development on game abundance. Economic theory tends topredict an ambiguous causal relation between income and the abundance of game.Here we test whether income (a standard proxy of econo...

-

In recent years a group of researchers at Cambridge (UK) have (re)introduced conceptions of open and closed systems into economics. In doing so they have employed these categories in ways that, in my assessment, both facilitate a significant critique of current disciplinary practices and also point to more fruitful ways of proceeding. In an issue o...

Researchers generally express the local value of tropical rain forests in dollars/ha/year. The approach is problematic because it produces low values to local users, underestimating the importance of the forest expressed as a share of household consumption or earnings. Here we contribute to valuation studies of rain forests by estimating the financ...

In sub-Saharan Africa conservation of biodiversity is increasingly predicated on finding ways to ensure that the economic value of maintaining a landscape in its ‘natural’ state meets or exceeds the expected returns from converting the area to an alternative land use, such as agriculture. ‘Wildlands’ in Africa must generate, directly or from donor...

The tropical forests of the world are receiving considerable attention in terms of their role in climate change. Not only does tropical land use change provide an important term in balanc- ing the global carbon budget, but tropical forests also present opportunities for carbon trading in the emerging carbon markets. The Congo Basin contains the sec...

To estimate the effect of tenure security and private time preference on the use of different types of natural resources, such as old-growth and fallow forests, fish, and game, we did a survey and a psychological experiment with 443 households in 42 villages of Yuracaré, Mojeño, Tsimane’, and Chiquitano Indians in the Bolivian lowlands. Results of...

Consumption of bushmeat is an important component of household economies in most tropical forested regions of the world and is resulting in unsustainable levels of hunting, even in relatively isolated re-gions. We conducted standardized surveys of household consumption, income, wealth, and education level among Amerindian societies in Central and S...

Protected areas in the Congo Basin cover approximately 6% of the landscape, and several international NGOs are proposing substantial additions to the present network of parks and reserves. Yet, chronic under-funding has long precluded effective management of most parks and reserves resulting in their progressive ecological impoverishment, and the l...