animals

This article introduces this issue of Conservation and Society, and argues strongly for new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens.

Allison L. Mayberry, Alice J. Hovorka and Kate E. Evans use qualitative methods to explore human experiences with elephants and perceived impacts of elephants on human well-being in northern Botswana. They emphasize the importance of investigating both visible and hidden impacts of elephants on human well-being to foster holistic understanding of human-elephant conflict scenarios and to inform future mitigation strategies.

Monika Krause and Katherine Robinson follow up on the observation that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation by investigating how cultural schemas and organizational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly.

Crystal A. Crown and Kalli F. Doubleday explore media representation of Human-Leopard Interactions (HLI) in India, focusing on detecting agenda-setting and framing in articles, and whether these differ with the level of association with HLI. They conclude that the largely negative depiction, and differences in representation between geographic locations, could hinder mitigation strategies and policy by presenting stakeholders with incomplete information.

Catrina A. MacKenzie, Rebecca K. Fuda, Sadie Jane Ryan, and Joel Hartter use interviews and focus group discussions to assess the interaction of oil exploration with the three primary conservation policies employed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority: protectionism, neoliberal capital accumulation, and community-based conservation.

Sorrel Jones, Malcolm D. Burgess, Frazer Sinclair, Jeremy Lindsell and Juliet Vickery present new data on rule-breaking prevalence in Gola Rainforest National Park, Sierra Leone, and use these data in spatially explicit simulations to assess the survey effort and design required to detect change and assess the effect of rule-breaker behavior to these designs.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Salazar explores world-making processes through which extreme frontiers of life are made habitable, arguing that microbial worlds are becoming part of worlding processes and projects that further these frontiers.

Timothy Hodgetts’s article for the Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities explores connectivity as a placeholder that seeks to capture multiple forms of multispecies mobility, using the eastern gray squirrel in English landscapes as an example.