Matthew F. Child

• Bsc.; Msc.; Mphil
• Project Manager at South African National Biodiversity Institute

The expansion of wildlife ranching has been broadly linked to conservation benefits, job creation, and economic contributions. However, a more nuanced understanding of the socioeconomic contributions of wildlife ranching accounting for the enterprise diversity in the sector remains a major limitation to assessing its potential to contribute to sust...

Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species’ population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate ‘intactness scores’: the remaining proportion of...

Fragmented systems for monitoring and assessing biodiversity and ecosystem services limit countries’ ability to track progress across multilateral environmental agreements, coordinate actions, and thus meet agreed upon global commitment. This paper initiates to address this gap through integrated data-to-decision workflows for more synergistic impl...

The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to assess the impacts of a global disturbance on conservation land uses and learn from responses to the crisis to enable more resilient conservation systems. To understand socio-economic responses of diverse wildlife working lands to COVID-19, we surveyed owners and managers of 78 private wildlife ranch...

Reversing biodiversity loss is a global imperative that requires setting aside sufficient space for species. In South Africa, an estimated area of 20 million ha is under wildlife ranching, a form of private land enterprise that adopts wildlife-based land uses for commercial gain. This land has potential to contribute towards biodiversity conservati...

Biodiversity risks losing relevance in an increasingly urbanised, unequal and disembodied world. Beyond basic material needs, we might gain the greatest well-being from eudaimonia – the freedom to flourish and live meaningfully. Immersion in nature improves the fundamentals of eudaimonia: psychological, emotional and social health. This presents an...

Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) contains the aim to ‘prevent extinctions of known threatened species’. To measure the degree to which this was achieved, we used expert elicitation to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993–2020 (the lifetime of th...

Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to 'prevent extinctions of known threatened species'. To measure its success, we used a Delphi expert elicitation method to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993 - 2020 (the lifetime of the CBD) and 2010 - 20...

A horizon scan was conducted to identify emerging and intensifying issues for biodiversity conservation in South Africa over the next 5–10 years. South African biodiversity experts submitted 63 issues of which ten were identified as priorities using the Delphi method. These priority issues were then plotted along axes of social agreement and scient...

As landscapes continue to fall under human influence through habitat loss and fragmentation, fencing is increasingly being used to mitigate anthropogenic threats and enhance the commercial value of wildlife. Subsequent intensification of management potentially erodes wildness by disembodying populations from landscape‐level processes, thereby disco...

Of the 343 species, subspecies and subpopulations recorded from the assessment region, six were Not Evaluated (considered vagrant) and five are Extinct, leaving 331 taxa that were assessed. Overall, 57 taxa are threatened (six Critically Endangered, 20 Endangered, 31 Vulnerable) and 35 are Near Threatened. Proportional to the number of taxa assesse...

Assessment Rationale: This sub-Saharan African species has a disjunct distribution between the eastern coastal forests of South Africa and the rest of its range. Within the assessment region, the species is inferred to be declining due to forest habitat loss from ongoing development along the coastal belt, illegal sand mining (which may represent...

Assessment rationale: Samango Monkeys are restricted to a variety of forest habitats and comprise three subspecies within the assessment region: Samango Monkey (C. a. labiatus), Stair’s White-collared monkey (C. a. erythrarchus), and Schwarz’s White-collared Monkey (C. a. schwarzi). While C. a. labiatus is endemic to the assessment region, C. a. e...

This species is restricted to forest patches within north-eastern South Africa and Swaziland. They can occur at densities as high as 1 individual / ha. In KZN, there are an estimated 3,046–4,210 individuals in protected areas alone, with the largest subpopulation of 1,666–2,150 individuals occurring in iSimangaliso Wetland Park (2012–2014 counts; E...

The Side-striped Jackal is listed as Least Concern as it appears to be expanding westwards into the Lowveld of South Africa and thus we infer that the population is increasing or at least stable. The species has been observed in areas where Black-backed Jackals (Canis mesomelas) have either been extirpated or have declined in Mpumalanga. Furthermor...

This enigmatic species occurs at naturally low densities but is also severely threatened by loss of productive habitats and hunting for the traditional medicine trade. Although this species has a wide range, it is not abundant. It is a specialist predator of small mammals and has a high metabolic rate, which means it can only exist in habitats cont...

The potential economic and energy security opportunities of a medium to large shale gas resource could be substantial for South Africa; as are both the potential social and environmental risks associated with a domestic gas industry in the Central Karoo. The development of shale gas using vertical and horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing or...

The IUCN Red List is the most widely used tool to measure extinction risk and report biodiversity trends. Accurate and standardized conservation status assessments for the IUCN Red List are limited by a lack of adequate information; and need consistent and unbiased interpretation of that information. Variable interpretation stems from a lack of qua...

The effects of management on ecosystem diver-sity, structure and function must be understood for the sustainable integration of conservation and development. A potential source of experimentation and learning in ecosystem management is the array of private protected areas worldwide. Autonomous management systems can be seen as natural experiments,...

Fork-tailed drongos, Dicrurus adsimilis, are facultative kleptoparasites of many bird and mammal species. They use complex alarm call strategies, a combination of both true and false alarm calls, to procure food items from their hosts. The evolution of this interspecific interaction may have been catalysed by a selective benefit for drongos that we...

Animals commonly steal food from other species, termed interspecific kleptoparasitism, but why animals engage in kleptoparasitism compared with alternate foraging tactics, and under what circumstances they do so, is not fully understood. Determining what specific benefits animals gain from kleptoparasitism could provide valuable insight into its ev...

There is widespread public misunderstanding of ecology and conservation. A culturally entrenched 'balance of nature' paradigm abets consumerism by encouraging the use of materialism to preserve a static socioeconomic identity. Static self-identities do not foster the depth and breadth of individual self-meaning that is necessary to integrate the ex...

Competition in plant communities is often a contentious issue because the mechanisms of competitive interactions are not obvious. We sought evidence that Proteaceae communities are competing along two leaf niche axes as observed in a previous study.Two functional characters, leaf size and leaf shape were measured on numerous individuals per species...

Anthropogenic modification of natural habitat is resulting in a widespread loss of biodiversity. One of the primary responses of human societies to biodiversity loss has been the creation of protected areas. Two of the most important questions in conservation biology are: (1) whether protected areas are playing their intended role as reservoirs of...

Functional and trophic perspectives on patterns of species occurrences have the potential to offer new and interesting insights into a range of spatially explicit problems in ecology and conservation. We present the function-area relationship (FAR) and explore linkages between functional and taxonomic species richness for South African birds. We fi...

Kleptoparasitism is a tactic used to acquire food opportunistically and has been shown to provide several benefits, including greater food intake rate and the acquisition of items not normally available during self-foraging. Host individuals may differ in their ability to defend themselves against kleptoparasitic attacks and therefore identifying t...

The coexistence of trees and grasses in savanna ecosystems is a contentious phenomenon. Fire and herbivory disturbances are often cited as major structuring forces that create a sustainable tree–grass relationship. However, periodic flooding of savanna patches may also enable coexistence. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of floo...

The coexistence of trees and grasses in savanna ecosystems is a contentious phenomenon. Fire and herbivory disturbances are often cited as major structuring forces that create a sustainable tree– grass relationship. However, periodic flooding of savanna patches may also enable coexistence. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of flo...

The coexistence of trees and grasses in savanna ecosystems is a contentious phenomenon. Fire and herbivory disturbances are often cited as major structuring forces that create a sustainable tree– grass relationship. However, periodic flooding of savanna patches may also enable coexistence. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of flo...

Audience effects are increasingly recognized as an important aspect of intraspecific communication. Yet despite the common occurrence of interspecific interactions and considerable evidence that individuals respond to the calls of heterospecifics, empirical evidence for interspecific audience effects on signalling behaviour is lacking. Here we pres...