Diogo Verissimo

University of Oxford | OX · Oxford Martin School

Reducing demand for wildlife products from threatened species requires an in-depth understanding of consumers. Pangolins (Manidae spp.) may benefit from reduced consumer demand in Asia, yet there is a dearth of information about pangolin consumers in China, arguably the most important market. The aim of this research is to (1) estimate the prevalen...

Scientific communities need to understand and eliminate barriers that prevent scientists from reaching their full potential. However, the combined impact of individuals’ linguistic, economic, and gender backgrounds on their scientific productivity is poorly understood. Using a survey of 908 environmental scientists, we show that being a woman is as...

Digital games are an increasingly dominant form of digital entertainment with billions of players globally. While most of these games have a commercial focus, fields like public health and education have seen a growth of “serious games,” which aim to solve real world problems. In the context of biodiversity conservation, mobile games have been cont...

The global pet trade in invertebrates remains poorly understood and underrepresented in policy and research. Tarantulas are a highly traded invertebrate group. Many individuals in trade are wild caught, and trade regulation is often lacking, raising concerns about the effect of trade on local ecosystems and populations. We addressed local concerns...

Conservation literature addresses a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary questions and benefits. Conservation science benefits most when a diverse range of authors are represented, particularly those from countries where much conservation work is focused. In other disciplines, it is well known that barriers and biases exist in the academic publishin...

Conservation of biodiversity is above all else an exercise in human persuasion. Human behavior drives all substantive threats to biodiversity; therefore, influencing it is the only path to mitigating the current extinction crisis. We review the literature across three different axes to highlight current evidence on influencing human behavior for co...

Media campaigns can spur conservation action but may alienate local communities. Transforming such action into self‐sustaining community‐based conservation involves effective governance that rapidly integrates knowledge of resource dynamics, establishes flexible institutions, and fosters multilevel networks. This study examines the emergence of com...

Consumer behavior change is a key priority to address the illegal wildlife trade, but evaluation of these interventions is lacking. We used surveys and randomized controlled trials to assess the effectiveness of three types of messages, which were codesigned with key stakeholders, with 2496 potential consumers and nontarget consumers in China. We f...

The use of celebrity endorsement in environmental conservation interventions aiming to influence human behavior has increased in recent decades. Although good practice in designing, implementing, and evaluating behavioral interventions is outlined in recent publications, guidance on developing conservation interventions with celebrity endorsement r...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261734.].

La faune sauvage peut directement menacer la sécurité, les moyens de subsistance et le bien-être des gens. Des représailles contre l'espèce incriminée s'ensuivent souvent, entraînant un conflit entre les groupes de personnes concernées quant à ce qu'il convient de faire pour résoudre la situation. Les conflits entre les humains et la faune sauvage...

Conflict between humans and elephants is one of the more complex examples of human-wildlife conflict, a key challenge for wildlife conservation. While interven- tions exist to separate humans from elephants, few exist aimed at bringing the two species closer together. 2. This study assesses if a natural history film, The Elephant Queen (TEQ), makes...

Collecting reliable and consistent data about people’s relationship with the natural environment is likely to be crucial to effective policy delivery by governments. Social surveys are a prominent tool in delivering this insight. In the UK, surveys on people’s relationship with nature are run by government bodies, non-governmental organisations, ac...

Many threatened species suffer from a lack of conservation attention compared to others. Prioritisation of funding, research and conservation efforts seem to be driven by reasons beyond conservation need. This could be due to a ‘beauty bias’, whereby aesthetically pleasing species receive more attention. We examined how editing an image to increase...

Video games could offer interactive and immersive environments for players to meaningfully engage with ecological topics. The literature base is expanding to offer more studies concerning links between commercial games and players’ ecological knowledge, relationships, and interactions. The primary objective of this systematic map is to provide an o...

Sharks, rays and their cartilaginous relatives (Class Chondrichthyes, herein ‘sharks’) are among the world's most threatened species groups, primarily due to overfishing, which in turn is driven by complex market forces including demand for fins. Understanding the high‐value shark fin market is a global priority for conserving shark and rays, yet t...

Historicamente, os conservacionistas têm se concentrado em soluções financeiras e técnicas para os conflitos entre humanos e animais selvagens (Redpath et al., 2013). Ficou claro que, embora essas soluções sejam importantes para gerar um contexto em que a mudança seja possível, é necessário dar mais atenção ao comportamento humano para conseguir a...

As avaliações de impacto analisam o vínculo causal entre uma ação (por exemplo, a construção de uma cerca) e os resultados (por exemplo, uma mudança na taxa de invasão de plantações por elefantes). Isso vai além de entender se um projeto foi implementado (por exemplo, se as atividades foram concluídas) para entender quais mudanças ocorreram devido...

The unsustainable use of wildlife increases the risk of species extinction. In biodiversity-rich Indonesia, information on the scale of wildlife use is limited and requires further study. To address this, we explored the potential of text messaging (short message service; SMS) surveys to investigate levels and spatial patterns of domestic wildlife...

Changing public behaviour is an essential step for successful conservation, and can be achieved through effective use of message framing. However, its use in the conservation sector is not well-studied. We first performed a content analysis to assess what types of framing styles environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) often employ for...

Flagship species are an important tool for mobilizing support for conservation. Here, we extend this concept to include individual organisms, whose characteristics, fates, and connections to people can garner public attention, attract conservation support, and spur activism. Flagship individuals typically share a similar suite of characteristics, i...

Celebrities can generate substantial attention, and influence public interest in species. Using a large‐scale examination of publicly available data, we assessed whether species across six taxonomic groups receive more attention on Wikipedia jj(according to their page views) when named after celebrities than when not. We conducted our analysis for...

Conservation literature addresses a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary questions and benefits most by representing a diverse range of authors, particularly those from countries where much conservation work is focused. In other disciplines, it is well known that barriers and biases exist in the academic publishing sphere, which can impact research...

Species traits significantly influence pet trade dynamics, affecting demand, exploitation, and extinction risk. We examined the effect of species- and advertisement-level attributes on tarantula abundance and price in online markets, exploring rarely-considered fine-scale traits. Data from 977 ads showing 217 species and 81 ‘trade names’’ were coll...

The use of English as the common language of science represents a major impediment to maximising the contribution of non-native English speakers to science. Yet few studies have quantified the consequences of language barriers on the career development of researchers who are non-native English speakers. By surveying 908 researchers in environmental...

Co‐design, an approach that seeks to incorporate the experiences and perspectives of different stakeholders, is increasingly being used to develop audience‐oriented behaviour change interventions. The complexity of wildlife consumption behaviour makes the co‐design approach an important potential tool for the design of conservation interventions th...

Sharks, rays and their cartilaginous relatives (Class Chondricthyes, herein ‘sharks’) are amongst the world’s most threatened species groups, primarily due to overfishing, which in turn is driven by complex market forces including demand for fins. Understanding the high-value shark fin market is a global priority for conserving shark and rays, yet...

Societal awareness of, and engagement with, environmental problems is a critical prerequisite for effective conservation programs. Research has revealed a strong general pattern whereby public attention received by cultural products diminishes over time. If transposed to conservation, this transience of societal attention is likely to be of major i...

The statement is intended to promote conscious engagement with diverse ethical issues arising in social marketing work. As social marketers we have a duty to observe the highest standards of personal and professional conduct. Behaviour change programmes and projects that seek to influence individuals and communities ideally should be developed and...

The first target of the Convention for Biological Diversity (Aichi target 1) was to increase public awareness of the values of biodiversity and actions needed to conserve it—a key prerequisite for other conservation targets. Monitoring success in achieving this target at a global scale has been difficult; however, increased digitization of human li...

Historically, conservationists have focused on financial and technical solutions to human-wildlife conflicts (Redpath et al., 2013). It has become clear that although these are important to generate a context where change is possible, more attention to human behaviour is needed to achieve longer-term human-wildlife coexistence (Veríssimo & Campb...

As human-wildlife conflicts become more frequent, serious and widespread worldwide, they are notoriously challenging to resolve, and many efforts to address these conflicts struggle to make progress. These Guidelines provide an essential guide to understanding and resolving human-wildlife conflict. The Guidelines aim to provide foundations and prin...

Impact evaluations assess the causal link between an action (e.g. erecting a fence) and the outcomes (e.g. a change in the rate of crop raiding by elephants). This goes beyond understanding whether a project has been implemented (e.g. whether activities were completed) to understanding what changes happened due to the actions taken and why they...

Conflict between humans and elephants is one of the more complex examples of human-wildlife conflict, a key challenge for wildlife conservation. While interventions exist to separate humans from elephants, few exist aimed at bringing the two species closer together. This study assesses if a natural history film, The Elephant Queen(TEQ), makes commu...

in press in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2598). Citation: Jarić, I., Correia, R.A., Bonaiuto, M., Brook, B.W., Courchamp, F., Firth, J.A., Gaston, K.J., Heger, T., Jeschke, J.M., Ladle, R.J., Meinard, Y., Roberts, D.L., Sherren, K., Soga, M., Soriano-Redondo, A., Veríssimo, D. and Roll, U. (2023). Transience...

in press in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2599). Citation: Jarić, I., Normande, I.C., Arbieu, U., Courchamp, F., Crowley, S.L., Jeschke, J.M., Roll, U., Sherren, K., Thomas-Walters, L., Veríssimo, D. and Ladle, R.J. (2023). Flagship individuals in biodiversity conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Enviro...

Funding shortages limit conservation impact, making it vital to find effective fundraising methods. To explore how traditional and digital conservation fundraising methods perform, we conducted real‐world field experiments by using direct‐mail and Facebook advertisements. We compared three types of message frames (simple, seed money, and ecological...

Understanding human behavior is vital to developing interventions that effectively lead to proenvironmental behavior change, whether the focus is at the individual or societal level. However, interventions in many fields have historically lacked robust forms of evaluation, which makes it hard to be confident that these conservation interventions ha...

Co-design, an approach that seeks to incorporate the experiences and perspectives of different stakeholders, is increasingly being used to develop audience-oriented behavior change interventions. The complexity of wildlife consumption behavior makes the co-design approach an important potential tool for the design of conservation interventions that...

The criteria as laid out by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List are the gold standard by which the extinction risk of a species is assessed and where appropriate biological extinctions are declared. However, unlike all other categories, the category of extinct lacks a quantitative framework for assigning this cate...

The use of English as the common language of science represents a major impediment to maximising the contribution of non-native English speakers to science. Yet few studies have quantified the consequences of language barriers on the career development of researchers who are non-native English speakers. Our survey demonstrates that non-native Engli...

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) can have significant and deleterious impacts. Academic-practitioner knowledge exchange can improve the effectiveness of strategies to counter IWT; however, cases of inadequate knowledge exchange have been reported. To explore the challenges to academic-practitioner knowledge exchange on IWT, we conducted three workshops...

Although images play a significant role in environmental communications, few studies have empirically examined whether positive or negative images are more effective at engaging attention and promoting behavior change. We conducted a 6‐week public experiment at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida, to test whether viewing a...

Changing public behaviours is an essential step for successful conservation, and can be achieved through effective use of message framing. However, its use in the conservation sector is not well studied. A content analysis was first performed to assess what types of framing styles ENGOs often employ for their social media posts. A real-world online...

Games have a wide range of potential uses, from mediating conservation conflicts to changing behaviors. However, there have been few impact evaluations of serious games published in the environmental field. We conducted the first cross‐cultural evaluation of an environmental mobile game, Save The Purple Frog. In a randomized control trial with both...

Regulation of natural resource use might have unintended spillover impacts beyond the policy targets. Overexploitation is a major cause of species extinction and banning wildlife trade is a common and immediate measure to tackle it. However, few rigorous studies have investigated consequences of wildlife trade bans, and those few studies have focus...

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is threatening many species across the world. It is important to better understand the scale and characteristics of IWT to inform conservation priorities and actions. However, IWT usually takes place covertly, meaning that the data on species, trade routes and volumes is limited. This means that conservationists often h...

The first target of the Convention for Biological Diversity aimed to increase public awareness towards the values of biodiversity and actions needed to conserve it - a key prerequisite for conservation support. Nevertheless, monitoring success in achieving this target is difficult. Here, we used Google search volume data to evaluate interest in bio...

Serious games have a wide range of potential uses, from mediating conservation conflicts to changing behaviours. However, there have been few impact evaluations of serious games published in the environmental field. We conducted the first cross-cultural evaluation of an environmental mobile game, Save The Purple Frog. In a randomized control trial...

The archipelago state of Malta is renowned as a “blackspot” for illegal bird hunting. Since joining the European Union (EU), Maltese hunters have experienced restrictions on what and how much they can hunt. This article describes Malta's current enforcement efforts which, assisted by the Army and by volunteers from conservation groups, exceed EU st...

The ongoing global biodiversity crisis not only involves biological extinctions, but also the loss of experience and the gradual fading of cultural knowledge and collective memory of species. We refer to this phenomenon as 'societal extinction of species' and apply it to both extinct and extant taxa. We describe the underlying concepts as well as t...

Conservationists have long sought to reduce consumer demand for products from overexploited wildlife species. Health practitioners have also begun calling for reductions in the wildlife trade to reduce pandemic risk. Most wildlife‐focused demand reduction campaigns have lacked rigorous evaluations and thus their impacts remain unknown. There is thu...

When striving to motivate support for conservation, there is often a bias in focus and funding for some species over others (such as flagship species, because they are attractive and recognisable to the public). However, species’ names can also influence peoples’ attitudes and feelings towards them, and celebrity endorsement can lead to increased a...

Reducing demand for wildlife products has been recognised as an important global priority. However, consumer demand is a complicated phenomenon involving numerous interacting biological and socio-economic factors, operating at a range of scales and time periods. The demand for elephant ivory is an excellent illustration of the gaps in our current k...

Although they are only home to 16% of the global human population, high-income countries produce approximately one third of the world’s waste, the majority of which goes to landfills. To reduce pressure on landfills and natural systems, environmental messaging should focus on reducing consumption. Messages that signal social norms have the potentia...

1.Reducing demand for wildlife products has been recognised as an important global priority, especially with fears that there are expanding markets for certain taxa. However, consumer demand is a complicated phenomenon and as with many conservation issues, it can involve numerous interacting biological, social, political and socio-economic factors,...

The crisis generated by the emergence and pandemic spread of COVID-19 has thrown into the global spotlight the dangers associated with novel diseases, as well as the key role of animals, especially wild animals, as potential sources of pathogens to humans. There is a widespread demand for a new relationship with wild and domestic animals, including...

Promoting pro‐conservation behaviours has become a priority for conservation organisations world‐wide. Yet, current engagement strategies still face a number of barriers to creating successful interventions at the scale needed to meet global sustainability challenges. Online and mobile games enjoy immense world‐wide popularity, tapping into an audi...

Globally, illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade can drive biodiversity loss. Understanding which product attributes consumers consider when deciding between products of threatened species or alternatives, is key for conservation interventions. Labeled Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) are underutilized in wildlife trade literature but can aid t...

At least one third of sharks and their cartilaginous relatives (Class Chondrichthyes) meet the IUCN Red List Criteria for being threatened with extinction. Overfishing is the primary threat, with less than 4% of the world's shark catches managed for sustainability. The high‐value shark‐fin trade has gained the greatest attention as a conservation i...

Funding shortage limits conservation impact, making it vital to find effective fundraising methods. To explore how traditional and digital conservation fundraising methods perform, we conducted real-world field experiments by using mailshot and Facebook advertisements. We compare three types of message frames (Simple, Seed money, and Ecological) an...

While there is general skepticism regarding the progress made towards the 20 CBD targets set in 2010, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the progress towards this first target at the global and the national levels. We harnessed vast and readily available online data to gain insight into trends of people’s interest towards biodiversity and...

The report “Measuring global awareness of nature” represents the first step by On the EDGE Conservation towards the use of