Geology topics

Duan Biggs

Publications and source records attributed to Duan Biggs.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2026

Enduring cultural legacies affect Euro-American wildlife values

Social values shape biodiversity conservation success. Yet information is lacking on how values form, change and adapt people to their environment. Our 33-nation survey in 2021–2023 ( n = 18,477) explored the effect of the institutions of European colonization on present-day values towards wildlife in the Americas. Here we found mutualism values (seeing wildlife as part of one’s social community) prevail in Iberian-origin Latin American countries, whereas domination values (seeing wildlife as a resource for human use) are more prevalent in British-origin North American countries. Multilevel analysis showed significant country-level effects of colonial institution (for example, colonial origin, Protestant versus Catholic religious cultures) and endowment (for example, pre-colonial population density, Indigenous ancestry, settler mortality) factors on wildlife values in the Americas. The strong mutualism emphasis in Latin America appears to be consistent with acculturation between the compatible ideologies of Indigenous peoples and the Iberian colonizers. The effectiveness of wildlife institutions and policies will depend on their congruence with the social values of publics being served.

Nature Sustainability↗

USGS2018

A vision for documenting and sharing knowledge in conservation

As editors, we mark the launch of Conservation Science and Practice , a journal of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), with the following remarks framing the purpose and aspirations of the journal. Our aim is to share scholarship on and experiences of the practice of conservation. We define conservation practice as the application of conservation principles or theory across conservation issues, from planning and directly managing nature to influencing public policy and private behaviors—at scales from local communities to international governing bodies. We are striving for Conservation Science and Practice to be a forum for sharing lessons learned from research and practice to reciprocally informing and improving both arenas.

Conservation Science and Practice↗

USGS2015

Understanding protected area resilience: a multi-scale, social-ecological approach

Protected areas (PAs) remain central to the conservation of biodiversity. Classical PAs were conceived as areas that would be set aside to maintain a natural state with minimal human influence. However, global environmental change and growing cross-scale anthropogenic influences mean that PAs can no longer be thought of as ecological islands that function independently of the broader social-ecological system in which they are located. For PAs to be resilient (and to contribute to broader social-ecological resilience), they must be able to adapt to changing social and ecological conditions over time in a way that supports the long-term persistence of populations, communities, and ecosystems of conservation concern. We extend Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework to consider the long-term persistence of PAs, as a form of land use embedded in social-ecological systems, with important cross-scale feedbacks. Most notably, we highlight the cross-scale influences and feedbacks on PAs that exist from the local to the global scale, contextualizing PAs within multi-scale social-ecological functional landscapes. Such functional landscapes are integral to understand and manage individual PAs for long-term sustainability. We illustrate our conceptual contribution with three case studies that highlight cross-scale feedbacks and social-ecological interactions in the functioning of PAs and in relation to regional resilience. Our analysis suggests that while ecological, economic, and social processes are often directly relevant to PAs at finer scales, at broader scales, the dominant processes that shape and alter PA resilience are primarily social and economic.

Ecological Applications↗