Jennifer R. B. Miller

Defenders of Wildlife · Center for Conservation Innovation

Trophy hunting plays a significant role in wildlife conservation in some contexts in various parts of the world. Yet excessive hunting is contributing to species declines, especially for large carnivores. Simulation models suggest that sustainable hunting of African lions may be achieved by restricting offtakes to males old enough to have reared a...

A major challenge in carnivore conservation worldwide is identifying priority human–carnivore conflict sites where mitigation efforts would be most effective. Spatial predation risk modeling recently emerged as a tool for predicting and mapping hotspots of livestock depredation using locations where carnivores attacked livestock in the past. This l...

Carnivore attacks on livestock are a primary driver of human–carnivore conflict and carnivore decline globally. Livestock depredation is particularly threatening to carnivore conservation in Central India, a priority landscape and stronghold for the endangered tiger. To strengthen the effectiveness of conflict mitigation strategies, we examined the...

Innovative conservation tools are greatly needed to reduce livelihood losses and wildlife declines resulting from human–carnivore conflict. Spatial risk modeling is an emerging method for assessing the spatial patterns of predator–prey interactions, with applications for mitigating carnivore attacks on livestock. Large carnivores that ambush prey a...

Carnivore predation on livestock is a complex management and policy challenge, yet is also intrinsically an ecological interaction between predators and prey. Human-wildlife interactions occur in socio-ecological systems, in which human and environmental processes are closely linked. However, underlying human-wildlife conflict and key to unpacking...

The Supreme Court in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that “critical habitat” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) must first be “habitat,” but it did not attempt to define exactly what habitat is or how much deference the federal wildlife agencies should get on what is both a biological and policy question. The C...

Conflict between livestock producers and wild predators is a central driver of large predator declines and simultaneously may imperil the lives and livelihoods of livestock producers. There is a growing recognition that livestock–predator conflict is a socio‐ecological problem, but few case studies exist to guide conflict research and management fr...

Despite widespread evidence of climate change as a threat to biodiversity, it is unclear whether government policies and agencies are adequately addressing this threat to species. Here we evaluate species sensitivity, a component of climate change vulnerability, and whether climate change is discussed as a threat in planning for climate-related ma...

As scientists, we call on the U.S. Congress to fully fund wildlife conservation programs to protect biodiversity from severe and growing threats. The effort to conserve threatened and endangered species must be prioritized to protect our national heritage and safeguard human well-being. In light of the unprecedented global biodiversity crisis ident...

In recent decades the ‘landscape of fear’ has grown in popularity to become a central consideration in wildlife management, and has even been reconceptualized as the ‘landscape of coexistence’ for understanding human-wildlife conflicts such as predator attacks on livestock. Yet fear effects are not always the predominant driver of predator-prey int...

Despite widespread evidence of climate change as a threat to biodiversity, it is unclear whether government policies and agencies are adequately addressing this threat to species. We evaluate species sensitivity, a component of climate change vulnerability, and whether climate change is discussed as a threat in planning for climate-related manageme...

The fencing of protected areas (PAs) is highly controversial, and much remains unknown about the associated financial, ecological, and social impacts. We surveyed experts on 63 fenced and 121 unfenced PAs across 23 African countries to assess the advantages and drawbacks of fencing. Where fences exist, they are largely supported and widely viewed a...

Significance Protected areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of conservation yet face funding inadequacies that undermine their effectiveness. Using the conservation needs of lions as a proxy for those of wildlife more generally, we compiled a dataset of funding in Africa’s PAs with lions and estimated a minimum target for conserving the species and mana...

Carnivore predation on livestock often leads people to retaliate. Persecution by humans has contributed strongly to global endangerment of carnivores. Preventing livestock losses would help to achieve three goals common to many human societies: preserve nature, protect animal welfare, and safeguard human livelihoods. Between 2016 and 2018, four ind...

Although interspecific competition plays a principal role in shaping species behaviour and demography, little is known about the population‐level outcomes of competition between large carnivores, and the mechanisms that facilitate coexistence. We conducted a multilandscape analysis of two widely distributed, threatened large carnivore competitors t...

Approaches for resolving incidences of human-wildlife conflict such as predator attacks on people or livestock typically use methods that address physical loss but ignore social, cultural, and emotional trauma. To holistically and more permanently alleviate conflicts, wildlife management agencies and other conservation practitioners require resourc...

Competition can have profound impacts on the structure and function of ecological communities. Despite this, the population-level effects of intraguild competition on large carnivores remain largely unknown, due to a paucity of long-term studies that focus simultaneously on competing species. Here, we comprehensively examine competitive interaction...

Sport hunting of wildlife can play a role in conservation but can also drive population declines if not managed sustainably. Previous simulation modelling found that large felid species could theoretically be hunted sustainably by restricting harvests to older individuals that have likely reproduced. Several African countries currently use age‐base...

Community ecology was traditionally an integrative science devoted to studying interactions between species and their abiotic environments in order to predict species' geographic distributions and abundances. Yet for philosophical and methodological reasons it has become divided into two enterprises: one devoted to local experimentation on species...

Food caching is a common strategy used by a diversity of animals, including carnivores, to store and/or secure food. Despite its prevalence, the drivers of caching behaviour, and its impacts on individuals, remain poorly understood, particularly for short‐term food cachers. Leopards Panthera pardus exhibit a unique form of short‐term food caching,...

Persecution of large carnivores by local communities in response to livestock depredation is a global occurrence and cause of concern for carnivore conservation. An important step for initiating mitigation measures would be to investigate factors that drive conflict. Predation risk modeling is now increasingly being used to understand spatial varia...

Mitigation of large carnivore depredation is essential to increasing stakeholder support for human–carnivore coexistence. Lethal and nonlethal techniques are implemented by managers, livestock producers, and other stakeholders to reduce livestock depredations by large carnivores. However, information regarding the relative effectiveness of techniqu...

Human-carnivore conflict is challenging to quantify because it is shaped by both the realities and people's perceptions of carnivore threats. Whether perceptions align with realities can have implications for conflict mitigation: misalignments can lead to heightened and indiscriminant persecution of carnivores whereas alignments can offer deeper in...

ANOVA results for effects of previous experience with livestock depredation on perceived risk. (DOCX)

ANOVA results for effects of previous experience with livestock depredation on use of livestock protection methods. (DOCX)

Tiger observed kill risk probability for each variable. (TIF)

Leopard observed kill risk probability for each variable. (TIF)

Ordinal logistic regression results testing effect of village location on perceived risk. (DOCX)

Ordinal logistic regression results testing effect of land-use near villages on perceived risk. (DOCX)

Ordinal logistic regression results testing effect of observed risk near villages on perceived risk. (DOCX)

Model validation results for observed attack risk. (TIF)

Ecologists have long searched for a framework of a priori species traits to help predict predator–prey interactions in food webs. Empirical evidence has shown that predator hunting mode and predator and prey habitat domain are useful traits for explaining predator–prey interactions. Yet, individual experiments have yet to replicate predator hunting...

Surveys conducted in the late 1990’s indicated that pheasant populations in the Great Himalayan National Park, Himachal Pradesh, India were declining. In 1999, the government legally notified the park and authorities began enforcing the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, banning biomass extraction within park boundaries and reducing human disturbanc...

Koklass pheasant Pucrasia macrolopha biddulphi are secretive birds found in temperate broadleaf, conifer and sub-alpine oak forests between 2100 m and 3300 m (Madge et al., 2002). Koklass spend most of the day skulking through dense forest undergrowth where visual encounters are typically rare and short-lived. As a result, accounts of the species a...

The global decline of amphibian populations has created a high demand for effective tools to measure how species respond to environmental change. We investigated the effectiveness of the Hayne Estimator for evaluating the population densities of Dendrobates granuliferus and Dendrobates auratus. We observed frogs in three Costa Rican lowland forest...