Stuart L Pimm

Duke University | DU · Nicholas School of the Environment

The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List classifies species according to their risk of extinction, informing global to local conservation decisions. Unfortunately, important geospatial data do not explicitly or efficiently enter this process. Rapid growth in the availability of remotely sensed observations provides fine-sc...

Significance The United States has one of the oldest and most sophisticated systems of protected areas in the world. Given the large amount of information on the country’s biodiversity, and the potential resources available, one might expect it to do well in protecting biodiversity. We find that it does not. The United States protected areas do not...

Technologies to identify individual animals, follow their movements, identify and locate animal and plant species, and assess the status of their habitats remotely have become better, faster, and cheaper as threats to the survival of species are increasing. New technologies alone do not save species, and new data create new problems. For example, i...

Background A principal function of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is to “perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity.” In December 2013, its second plenary session approved a program to begin a global assessment in 2015. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD...

The giant panda attracts disproportionate conservation resources. How well does this emphasis protect other endemic species? Detailed data on geographical ranges are not available for plants or invertebrates, so we restrict our analyses to three vertebrate taxa: birds, mammals, and amphibians. There are gaps in their protection and we recommend pra...

Loss of habitat can take many forms, ranging from the fragmentation of once-continuous habitat to the slow erosion of populations across continents. Usually, the harm leading to biodiversity loss is not immediately obvious: there is an extinction debt. Most modelling research of extinction debt has focussed on relatively rapid losses of habitat wit...

Local studies show upslope shifts in the distribution of tropical birds in response to warming temperatures. Unanswered is whether these upward shifts occur regionally across many species. We considered a nearly 2000-km length of the Northern Andes, where deforestation, temperature, and extreme weather events have increased during the past decades....

The ongoing destruction of habitats in the Tropics accelerates the current rate of species extinction. Range-restricted species are exceptionally vulnerable, yet we have insufficient knowledge about their protection. Species’ current distribution, range size, and protection gaps are key parameters to determine conservation priorities. Here, we iden...

We consider the distribution of fruit pigeons of the genera Ptilinopus and Ducula on the island of New Guinea. Of the 21 species, between six and eight coexist inside humid lowland forests. We conducted or analyzed 31 surveys at 16 different sites, resurveying some sites in different years. The species coexisting at any single site in a single year...

Southern Africa spans nearly 7 million km2 and contains approximately 80% of the world's savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) mostly living in isolated protected areas. Here we ask what are the prospects for improving the connections between these populations? We combine 1.2 million telemetry observations from 254 elephants with spatial data on...

India hosts multiple global biodiversity hotspots while being one of the most populous countries in the world. Here, we examine how well India has protected its avifauna, based on the fraction of their ranges falling within “protected areas.” India has protected 5% of its land this way. The issue is whether India has done better than expected in pr...

Major centres of global food export are not in places where biodiversity is greatest.

Stuart Pimm remembers ecologist and conservationist Tom Lovejoy, who coined the term biodiversity.

Evidence-based approaches are key for underpinning effective conservation practice, but major gaps in the evidence of the effectiveness of interventions limit their use. Conservation practitioners could make major contributions to filling these gaps but often lack the time, funding, or capacity to do so properly. Many funders target the delivery of...

The lives lost and economic costs of viral zoonotic pandemics have steadily increased over the past century. Prominent policymakers have promoted plans that argue the best ways to address future pandemic catastrophes should entail, “detecting and containing emerging zoonotic threats.” In other words, we should take actions only after humans get sic...

Pioneering naturalist with far-reaching insights

Accurate maps of species ranges are essential to inform conservation, but time-consuming to produce and update. Given the pace of change of knowledge about species distributions and shifts in ranges under climate change and land use, a need exists for timely mapping approaches that enable batch processing employing widely available data. We develop...

Different models of community dynamics, such as the MacArthur–Wilson theory of island biogeography and Hubbell’s neutral theory, have given us useful insights into the workings of ecological communities. Here, we develop the niche-hypervolume concept of the community into a powerful model of community dynamics. We describe the community’s size thro...

The U.N. has declared 2021-2030 the 'decade of restoration' (https://www.decadeonrestoration.org). This initiative aspires to many actions, but its agenda must include 'reconnecting nature'. Even when natural habitats remain, they often come in fragments too small or isolated to sustain viable populations. Human activities surround habitats with un...

In addition to habitat loss and fragmentation, demographic processes—the vagaries of births, deaths and sex ratio fluctuations—pose substantial threats to wild giant panda populations. Additionally, climate change and plans for the Giant Panda National Park may influence (in opposing directions) the extinction risk for wild giant pandas. The Fourth...

Biodiversity science in China has seen rapid growth over recent decades, ranging from baseline biodiversity studies to understanding the processes behind evolution across dynamic regions such as the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. We review research, including species catalogues, biodiversity monitoring, the origins, distributions, maintenance, and threat...

Biodiversity science in China has seen rapid growth over recent decades, ranging from baseline biodiversity studies to understanding the processes behind evolution across dynamic regions such as the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. We review research, including species catalogues; biodiversity monitoring; the origins, distributions, maintenance and threats...

Conservation science is a new and evolving discipline, so it seems prudent to explore different approaches. That said, we should examine what we know and, vitally, what works to conserve biodiversity and what does not. Ecosystem processes determine the fate of many species, but many attempts to theorise about ecosystems have led to ever more fancif...

The cause of deaths of 350 elephants in 2020 in a relatively small unprotected area of northern Botswana is unknown, and may never be known. Media speculations about it ignore ecological realities. Worse, they make conjectures that can be detrimental to wildlife and sometimes discredit conservation incentives. A broader understanding of the ecologi...

How has the global network of protected areas developed — and which decisions have guided this development? Answering these questions may give insight into what might be possible in the next decade. In 2021, China will host the Convention of Biological Diversity’s Conference, which will influence the coming decade’s agenda. We consider how China ex...

Social Impact Statement Human actions are driving plant species to extinction at rates a hundred to a thousand times faster than normal. To prevent extinctions, it would be helpful to have a more comprehensive taxonomic catalogue and much greater knowledge of where plant species live. Addressing these questions must be a scientific priority. Howeve...

The Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Targets address both biodiversity and ecosystem services. We explore the relationship between giant panda populations and three ecosystem services: carbon sequestration, water retention, and soil retention. Do pandas prefer areas with higher than average values of these services? Areas may be good for...

Conservationist who changed how we think about threats to biodiversity.

Although conventional wisdom considers knowledge of threatened species' ecology and status essential for conservation , few studies demonstrate this in a quantitative way across many species and within the same political entity. Here, we evaluated the impacts of scientific research against conservation interventions (including funding) and species-...

The terms sustainability, resilience and others group under the heading of ‘stability’. Their ubiquity speaks to a vital need to characterize changes in complex social and environmental systems. In a bewildering array of terms, practical measurements are essential to permit comparisons and so untangle underlying relationships.

Long-term studies to understand biodiversity changes remain scarce-especially so for tropical mountains. We examined changes from 1911 to 2016 in the bird community of the cloud forest of San Antonio, a mountain ridge in the Colombian Andes. We evaluated the effects of past land-use change and assessed species vulnerability to climate disruption. F...

To counter their widespread loss, global aspirations are for no net loss of remaining wetlands [1]. We examine whether this goal alone is sufficient for managing China's wetlands, for they constitute 10% of the world's total. Analyzing wetland changes between 2000 and 2015 using 30-m-resolution satellite images, we show that China's wetlands expand...

We discuss institutional reforms to China's protected area management. Currently (as elsewhere), protected areas suffer fragmented management, lack of a comprehensive classification, inadequate coverage of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and divided, inconsistent legislation. We recommend establishing a new system of protected area management...

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species includes assessment of extinction risk for 98 512 species, plus documentation of their range, habitat, elevation, and other factors. These range, habitat and elevation data can be matched with terrestrial land cover and elevation datasets to map the species' ar...

As a landscape becomes increasingly fragmented through habitat loss, the individual patches become smaller and more isolated and thus less likely to sustain a local population. Metapopulation theory is appropriate for analyzing fragmented landscapes because it combines empirical landscapes features with species‐specific information to produce direc...

The IUCN Red List has downgraded several species from "endangered" to "vulnerable" that still have largely unknown extinction risks. We consider one of those downgraded species, the giant panda, a bamboo specialist. Massive bamboo flowering could be a natural disaster for giant pandas. Using scenario analysis, we explored possible impacts of the ne...

Further expansion of agriculture in the tropics is likely to accelerate the loss of biodiversity. One crop of concern to conservation is African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis). We examined recent deforestation associated with oil palm in the Peruvian Amazon within the context of the region's other crops. We found more area under oil palm cultivation...

We analyze recently-collected feather tissues from two species of seabirds, the sooty tern (Onychoprion fuscatus) and brown noddy (Anous stolidus), in three ocean regions (North Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific) with different human impacts. The species are similar morphologically and are similar in the trophic levels from which they feed wit...

It is theoretically possible to protect large fractions of species in relatively small regions. For plants, 85% of species occur entirely within just over a third of the Earth’s land surface, carefully optimized to maximize the species captured. Well-known vertebrate taxa show similar patterns. Protecting half of Earth might not be necessary, but w...

Stuart Pimm on the tragic tale of a hobbyist, a heist and a great scientific legacy. Stuart Pimm on the tragic tale of a hobbyist, a heist and a great scientific legacy.

Article impact statement: Understanding causes and consequences of disease range shifts can help mitigate negative effects of such shifts on lions and other wildlife

Assessing the numbers and distribution of threatened species is a central challenge in conservation, often made difficult because the species of concern are rare and elusive. For some predators, this may be compounded by their being sparsely distributed over large areas. Such is the case with the cheetah Acinonyx jubatus. The IUCN Red List process...

Details of cheetah persecution data in Namibia

Overlap of cheetah distribution with the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA)

Additional detail on presence data and distribution mapping

Public data search methodology

Known cheetah lifespans in southern Africa

Relationship of cheetah presence locations with covariates i.e., human and livestock densities

Implementation of the Leslie Matrix model

Distribution of research and crowd sourced presence observations in the study area in southern Africa

Comparison of the cheetah distribution detailed here with that published by the IUCN

Farm characteristics where cheetah persecution occurred