They conclude by arguing that conservation initiatives can be a positive part of post conflict peacebuilding. This raises an important set of questions: how do we conserve wildlife effectively in a warzone? And what are the challenges of integrating wildlife conservation with a peacebuilding strategy?

Armed conflict puts wildlife at risk. Animals can be caught in the crossfire in a very direct sense, or they might be poached to feed armies and raise revenue to fund operations. But conflict also has more indirect effects, as parks departments crumble and enforcement efforts wane, leading to more poaching.

All this has meant that conservation has become part of post-conflict reconstruction strategies in several countries across the world, including in Colombia and Cambodia.

NGOs to the rescue?

One solution lies in the creation of public-private partnerships, in which governments (to a varying degree) transfer the management of a protected area “under threat” to an NGO. The new park directors will typically be from outside the country (often white men) and are presented as “neutral” actors merely “enforcing the law” in a volatile landscape. The assumption is that such approaches will lead to well-governed spaces, which will have a positive trickle-down effect on political and economic outcomes in the wider area.

For this reason Virunga, a national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo known for its rare mountain gorillas, is now managed by a British NGO, the Virunga Foundation, in a move part initiated and funded by the European Commission. Something similar has happened with Garamba (also DRC) and Chinko (Central African Republic) national parks which are now run by the NGO African Parks.

The idea is that these separated areas can function as peace sanctuaries, or islands of good governance. Virunga in particular is often hailed as a success story of a besieged park that has recovered since the Congolese state transferred management responsibilities to an NGO.

Conservation is political

Yet such transnational efforts to “save nature” have their problems. Though usually motivated by good intentions, they can become entangled within the complex dynamics of violent conflict. Conservation initiatives, including national parks and the wildlife within them, are not merely innocent victims of war, they are an inherent part of the warscape they are situated in.

As many national parks were created during colonisation, some rebel groups regard occupation of these spaces as a form of resistance, or a way to exercise and demonstrate sovereignty over territory and/or populations. Moreover, park guards and their managers are not politically-neutral agents. In the Central African Republic one park ranger who received paramilitary training funded by the European Union even became military leader of the country’s Séléka rebel movement and was joined by many other foreign-trained park guards.

In Virunga, the “new” management works together with the Congolese army, despite the fact the army has been accused of mass hippo poaching in the past and has facilitated the illegal production of charcoal in the park together with rebel groups. In order to protect the wildlife, local people were removed from the park in military-style operations. Not wanting to give up their livelihoods of fishing, agriculture or charcoal production, these people sought the protection of rebel groups to return into the park and as a result deadly battles between rebels and park guards became even more intense.

We also cannot assume that rebel groups are always hostile towards or “bad” for wildlife. While hippos have fared poorly at the hands of the national army, mountain gorillas have been relatively safe, even from rebel groups. In fact rebel groups in the DRC have offered their own gorilla tours for international visitors.

So, while the Nature study indicates that war is usually bad for wildlife, and that conservation should be part of post-conflict peacebuilding, this does not go far enough. We need to understand that wildlife protection is not a politically-neutral activity but rather something that should be seen in the context of the conflict. If this is not recognised then there is a risk that conservation will exacerbate armed conflicts and cause more harm to animals.

Esther Marijnen, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Sheffield and Rosaleen Duffy, Professor of International Politics, University of Sheffield

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The park’s violent past intrigued Daskin, then a first-year Princeton graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. As he explored the savannas and grasslands of Gorongosa with his advisor, Robert Pringle, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, they discussed whether similar wildlife declines might have occurred across Africa during the many conflicts of the 20th century. If so, they wondered how severe the impacts had been, and if animals generally retain the capacity to rebound like those in Gorongosa had, or if war was a human pressure that most animals just couldn’t withstand.

After years of examining conflict in Africa’s protected areas, Daskin and Pringle reported in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature that war has been a consistent factor in the decades-long decline of large mammals in Africa. Populations that were stable in peaceful areas needed only a slight increase in conflict frequency to begin a downward spiral. But, the researchers report, while wildlife populations declined in conflict areas, they rarely collapsed to the point where recovery was impossible.

The researchers found that more than 70 percent of Africa’s protected areas were touched by war between 1946 and 2010, an era during which the overthrow of European colonial rule was followed in many countries by violent post-colonial power struggles. Elephants, hippos, giraffes and other large mammals perished as combatants and hungry citizens hunted animals for meat and for marketable commodities such as ivory.

Nonetheless, said Daskin, who completed the study as part of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton, the findings show that even those protected areas most severely affected by conflict remain promising candidates for conservation and rehabilitation efforts. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI).

“We hope our data and conclusions will help in the effort to prioritize these areas for attention and funding from their governments and from international NGOs,” said Daskin, now a Donnelley Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. “We’re presenting evidence that although mammal populations decline in war zones, they don’t often go extinct. With the right policies and resources, it should often be possible to reverse the declines and restore functional ecosystems, even in historically conflict-prone areas.”

The study was needed to establish a general scientific expectation about how conflict typically affects wildlife populations, said Pringle, who is associated faculty in PEI.

“It wasn’t obvious to us in advance that conflict would have negative effects on wildlife populations,” Pringle said. “Different studies of different places at different times have found both positive and negative effects of conflict on biodiversity, but the overall net effect had never been measured.” For instance, previous research has shown that animal populations have increased in contested regions such as the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and rural Zimbabwe during that country’s Bush War of 1964–1979.

Daskin and Pringle, however, found that with few exceptions, frequent conflict resulted in a downward trend among large-animal populations. No other factor they evaluated exhibited the same consistent effect. There was no statistically detectable effect on wildlife trajectories from mining, urban development, corruption, drought, or even the intensity of the conflict as measured by the number of human battle fatalities.

“This enabled us to make some educated guesses about what the underlying mechanisms might be,” Daskin said. “Most of the effects of conflict on wildlife populations seem to be due to knock-on socioeconomic effects that degrade the institutional capacity for biodiversity conservation, or the collective societal ability to prioritize and pay for it.”

Hugh Possingham, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, concurred that social structures ultimately determine the fate of animals and protected areas. Possingham had no role in the research but is familiar with it and has published on related topics.

“The most surprising finding is the strength of the relationship between the presence of conflict and declines in large mammals,” Possingham said. “One might have imagined that the magnitude or scale of conflict would be the driver, but the mere presence of conflict seems to be a strong predictor in its own right.

“This is unusual and useful,” he continued. “It suggests to me that any sort of conflict needs to be avoided, even if it’s at a low level, and such conflicts may be indicative of broader social and institutional problems that are the primary drivers of mammal declines. Bottom line — to stop threats such as bushmeat hunting, governance really has to be strong.”

Daskin and Pringle found that 71 percent of Africa’s protected areas experienced one or more conflicts from 1946 to 2010. For a quarter of these areas, wars occurred for an average of nine or more years. Several large nations experienced an average of 20 or more years of conflict per protected area, including Chad, Namibia and Sudan (before it split into Sudan and South Sudan in 2011).

To conduct the analysis, Daskin drew from nearly 500 sources to find estimates of a specific animal species’ abundance from at least two years between 1946 and 2010. He compared those estimates in order to calculate the change in population density during a given time interval. Daskin then used a series of databases to identify how many conflicts overlapped with each of Africa’s protected areas during the study interval. In the end, the researchers examined the trends of 253 animal populations representing 36 species, ranging from antelopes to elephants, in 126 protected areas across 19 countries.

“No one else had made the effort to assemble conflict data across this range of parks and make them talk with the wildlife data,” Daskin said. “These data were all freely available, but not always highly accessible.”

Gorongosa, the park in Mozambique that originally inspired the study, exemplifies the thrust of the findings, Daskin and Pringle said. From 1977 to 1992, government soldiers, anti-government militias, and refugees alternately fought in or fled through the park. For years after the war, displaced and dispossessed residents hunted wildlife. By the early 2000s, the elephant population had crashed by more than 75 percent, while successive aerial counts found that buffalo, hippo, wildebeest and zebra numbers were hovering in the single or double digits.

Yet none of these animal populations disappeared completely. Since 2004, wildlife in Gorongosa have rebounded to 80 percent of their total pre-war abundance. Park staff, the Mozambican government and the nonprofit Gorongosa Restoration Project have worked with neighboring communities to nurture the remnant animal populations by suppressing illegal hunting and creating educational and employment opportunities for villagers within the park.

“Our results show that the case of Gorongosa could be general,” said Pringle, who serves on the board of the Gorongosa Project. “Gorongosa is as close as you can come to wiping out a whole fauna without extinguishing it, and even there we’re seeing that we can rehabilitate wildlife populations and regrow a functional ecosystem. That suggests that the other high-conflict sites in our study can, at least in principle, also be rehabilitated.”

Pringle and Daskin emphasized in their paper that wildlife recovery rests in the hands of local people. “I would love to see conservation and humanitarian organizations collaborate on post-conflict relief work,” Pringle said. “Long-term recovery hinges on the health and hopefulness of the people, and healthy environments catalyze human health and hope. It’s a positive-feedback loop.”

When people have a personal and economic stake in a thriving ecosystem, they embrace protective behaviors such as preventing poaching and monitoring wildlife, Possingham said. “This publication confirms the philosophy behind that approach,” he said.

“In any area where large-mammal protection is a concern, one has to get the people-side of the conservation initiative sorted — establishing alternative livelihoods, law and order, education, anti-corruption, etc. — at the same time as taking habitat-protection and anti-poaching actions on the ground,” he said. “If you don’t tackle the ultimate drivers such as a breakdown of civil society, then taking action on the ground and investing in park management might not work.”

The paper, “Warfare and wildlife declines in Africa’s protected areas,” was published online by Nature on Jan. 10. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant nos. DEB-1501306, DEB-1355122 and DEB-1457697) and the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Grand Challenges program (project title: “Ecosystem Spatial Pattern and Development Opportunities in African Rangelands”).

Story Source:

Materials provided by Princeton University. Author: Morgan Kelly.

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During the conflict elephant populations fled across the border into Botswana, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When the war ended in 2002 animal populations slowly started to return to their pre-conflict grazing grounds. But a huge problem remained: millions of landmines were still in situ and undetonated across Angola. Many elephants were killed and maimed by the explosives as they attempted to recolonise.

Data collected from collared elephants moving through the affected areas showed herds avoiding minefields. This suggested that at least some of the returning elephants had associated minefields with danger. What could this association be based on? Had the minefield-avoiding elephants seen others killed in those areas? Or had they associated the smell of landmines with danger, extrapolating risk to other areas where the odour was present?

We couldn’t answer all these questions. To narrow down our search my colleagues and I set about finding out whether elephants could smell the main component of landmines – Trinitrotoluene (TNT).

TNT has a low volatility – the ease at which a substance moves into the air column. This makes it difficult to detect using smell. But some animals are excellent landmine sniffers – among them dogs and Gambian Pouched Rats. Bees are also good at it.

Genetic aspect

What gives an animal a wide sense of smell comes down to how many different kinds of olfactory receptors it has, and this is determined by the species’ genes.

African elephants have more than double the number of genes associated with olfactory reception compared with dogs: about 2000 versus dogs’ 811. This suggests that olfaction must play an enormous role in elephants’ lives. In fact, elephants have the highest count of any species tested to date, meaning that they could quite possibly be the best smellers in the animal kingdom.

Not only were we eager to find out whether they could detect TNT using olfaction, but also how their abilities compared to those of highly trained, TNT-detection dogs.

To do this, we enlisted the help of three African elephants at “Adventures With Elephants” – an educational tourism facility focused on raising awareness about conservation. Using reward-based training techniques, we trained the elephants to indicate whenever they could smell TNT among a lineup of blank, non-smelly samples initially and then later, highly volatile distractor odours.

Samples were individual filter papers loaded with trace amounts of one of the following odours: TNT; petroleum; acetone; bleach; detergent; tea; or nothing at all (blanks). These filter papers, or samples, were placed individually into a bucket, and sample buckets (eight in total) were placed 6 metres apart, in a straight line. The elephants were trained to walk along the line and investigate each bucket, raising their front leg and waving it over the selected bucket whenever they thought they could smell TNT.

The results suggest that elephants are even better at one aspect of the sniffing process than dogs, the animals currently considered the gold standard in landmine detection.

Sensitivity and selectivity

Two metrics, sensitivity and selectivity, are incredibly important in detection science. Measures of these allow researchers to understand how well a biodetector such as a dog or elephant is performing. They also allow for comparisons across species.

The elephants missed only one out of 97 TNT samples during our trials. This translated into a phenomenal sensitivity score of 99.7%. Sensitivity is the propensity to indicate whenever a target substance (in this case TNT) is present. In comparison, sensitivity scores for TNT-detection dogs have been reported as 93.7%.

The elephants only made six false-positive indications, mistaking five out of 53 acetone samples and one out of 24 petrol samples for TNT. This incredibly low frequency of false-positives resulted in a respectable selectivity score – that is, the propensity to only indicate TNT, and not just any odourous substance – of 95.1%. This is a bit shy of the 100% score reported for dogs.

Our findings indicate that elephants are almost 5% more likely than dogs to indicate the presence of TNT when, in fact, there is none. But dogs are almost 6% more likely to miss TNT than elephants are. It’s obviously better for TNT detectors to be prone to false positives rather than false negatives: in fact it could be the difference between life and death.

Real world application

So does this mean that elephants should take over TNT-sniffing dogs’ duties?

No, absolutely not. We have no intention of putting elephants in harm’s way: their sheer size and weight makes them completely unsuited to being infield TNT detectors.

But remote elephant teams could act as valuable support to current demining operations in countries like Angola.

Samples collected via Remote Explosive Scent Tracing by unmanned vehicles such as drones could be sent to the elephants for screening. The information gathered from TNT-detection elephants could be passed on to demining teams working at the front lines, even before they are deployed. This early warning system could potentially save the lives of the deminers and their dedicated biosensor companions.

Other areas to explore

Elephants’ ability to correctly identify and discriminate a learned scent from other odours suggests that they may also be useful in other biosensor fields such as early disease detection.

Detection dogs are used in medical and biological settings. I have used them myself as a biologically-relevant model to demonstrate that puff adders are undetectable via olfaction.

Specially trained dogs already screen for cancers, diabetes, epilepsy, alien invasives, harmful microbes and pests. Some scent-matching dogs are even able to match collected samples to individuals, forgoing the need for expensive and time-consuming genetic testing. The dogs’ performance in these fields is, in most cases, proving more reliable than mechanical devices.

Elephants could rival dogs’ sensitivity abilities in these fields, as they did for TNT-detection. They require less maintenance training than dogs to keep them on the target scent. Our elephants were able to repeat the same tests with high success a year after their last trial, with no intervening maintenance training.

In addition, given their longevity – they can live to around 60 years in the wild – elephants, once trained, could serve as long-standing biosensors that far outlive any of their current biosensor counterparts.

And, importantly, biologically appropriate tasks that engage natural behaviours to gain reward is highly stimulating for captive animals. So not only could elephants potentially save lives while sniffing out danger – they could have fun at the same time.

Ashadee Kay Miller, PhD Candidate, School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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