Forests provide vital ecological, economic, and social services, yet their sustainability is increasingly threatened by deforestation, climate variability, and biological stressors such as pests and diseases. Despite the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for environmental monitoring, there remains a critical knowledge gap in how diverse AI methods spanning machine learning, deep learning, and IoT-based systems can be operationally integrated for real-time and near-real-time forest health surveillance. This study systematically reviews Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for real-time and near-real-time forest health monitoring, synthesizing evidence from 79 peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2025. Using a PRISMA-guided methodology, data were extracted on study context, data sources, AI algorithms, computational frameworks, and performance indicators. The analysis identifies three dominant AI application domains: (1) disease and pest detection, (2) deforestation and illegal logging surveillance, and (3) wildfire risk prediction and damage assessment. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models, including Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and hybrid CNN-LSTM frameworks, demonstrated strong performance, achieving accuracy levels above 90

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic, as a holistic event of cultural trauma, significantly influenced social structures and behaviors globally. Under its impact, social movements leveraged digital platforms to sustain and amplify their causes, creating new forms of solidarity and resistance, and fostering a rise in digital and hybrid collective actions. Concurrently, social media thrived as a transformative tool for social change, revolutionizing communication, mobilization, and advocacy. Platforms like WhatsApp and X redefined traditional activism by enabling rapid information dissemination and facilitating global grassroots movements. This technological evolution has provided marginalized communities, including the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, with a powerful voice. These communities face challenges such as land rights disputes, environmental degradation, and socioeconomic marginalization. Social media allows them to raise awareness, galvanize support, and engage with a broader audience beyond their geographical confines. The paper hypothesizes that social media plays a multifaceted role in supporting indigenous movements, by not only providing a platform for activists to organize and advocate, but also enabling engagement with the general public and influencing the perspectives and actions of policymakers and other audiences. Through the lenses of rural or indigenous activists who leverage these digital platforms to drive change, audiences who consume and interact with digital content and feeds, and policymakers who are increasingly mindful of the power of social media narratives, this paper aims to understand the complex interplay of forces that shape the trajectory of digital indigenism (indigenous digital activism).MethodsThe paper employs a mixed-methods approach to investigate the influence of social media on social movements among indigenous communities in Southern Africa. The methodology incorporates (a) netnography and in-depth interviews to explore the experiences and strategies of indigenous activists, (b) the counterpublics framework to understand the formation and dynamics of indigenous digital activism, and (c) the Technology-Media-Movements Complex (TMMC) as a theoretical anchor to analyze the interplay between technology, media, and social movements. The case study of the Community Leaders Network (CLN) of Southern Africa is used to contextualize the findings.ResultsFindings reveal that indigenous activists recognize the power of social media in amplifying their voices but use these platforms out of necessity rather than preference. They find social media solutions often misaligned with their contextual needs, citing concerns over platform constraints, privacy issues, cultural insensitivity, superficial engagement metrics, and breaches of consent. Additionally, they reckon that the global emphasis on social media engagement can divert focus from essential field activities that directly benefit local communities, causing social media fatigue. It was also revealed that trying to convey practical information to an audience with preconceived notions is incredibly time-consuming and often feels like an endless loop for indigenous activists. Subsequently, they expressed a desire for platforms that consider users’ mental well-being in their architectural design and incorporate cultural and linguistic practices, suggesting a preference for digital environments that are more aligned with values and modes of communication that contrast with western models.DiscussionThe results underscore social media’s complex role in indigenous movements, highlighting its empowering potential while also presenting significant challenges due to algorithms and platform dynamics. While the ability to share stories, disseminate information about rights abuses, and mobilize support has significantly transformed social movement dynamics in rural communities, social media’s potential for advocacy and mobilization is tempered by challenges that can limit their effectiveness. The findings highlight a pressing need for social media innovations that resonate with indigenous cultural identities, ensuring that their narratives are disseminated in a manner that faithfully preserves their authenticity. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for policymakers, activists, audiences and technology developers, emphasizing the importance of creating digital spaces that are culturally sensitive and supportive of indigenous activism.

As wildlife populations decline globally, there is a growing need to discover ways that humans and wildlife can sustainably coexist in shared landscapes. One way to assess the potential for human-wildlife coexistence is by examining human attitudes, perceptions, and tolerance of wildlife. However, the relationships between these interlinked concepts are not always clear. Furthermore, much of the research on human tolerance of wildlife to date fails to assess differences across species. Here, we use a novel application of ethnoecological methodologies (including free-listing and pile-sorting) to assess local people’s attitudes toward and tolerance of a variety of wildlife species. We conducted our study in Mukungule Game Management Area outside North Luangwa National Park in Zambia. Our results reveal significant nuance in people’s attitudes toward and tolerance of local wildlife. We found that people generally like local wildlife, but the positive attitudes did not always translate into tolerance of those wildlife species. Elephants (Loxodonta africana) were collectively considered the most liked, disliked, beneficial, and harmful (according to Smith’s Salience scores from free-listing), and 32 percent of participants were tolerant of elephants. We highlight the importance of assessing determinants of tolerance within a local and species-specific context.

Efforts to promote human‐wildlife coexistence may be overly focused on wildlife‐related costs and benefits. We conducted research in Mozambique to gain insights into how governance of wildlife influences potential for human‐wildlife coexistence. Mozambique is an under‐studied region with a unique history of Portuguese rule, extended civil unrest, substantial wildlife trafficking, and current re‐wilding efforts. We conducted surveys, logistic regression, and hotspot analysis to assess which variables are correlated with positive attitudes toward living with wildlife. Most respondents (61%) expressed positive attitudes toward living with wildlife. Attitudes were positively correlated with age, gender, distance from the park, wildlife benefits, restricted access to natural resources, and agreement with wildlife rules. Conflict with wildlife (i.e., livestock predation, human harm, and crop loss) were not significant predictors of attitudes. Respondents who agreed with the rules governing wildlife were 30‐times more likely to have positive attitudes. This new and important finding highlights the possibility that institutions that address environmental justice, including the devolution of wildlife to local communities, may be more salient than the conventional measures of costs and benefits for understanding human‐wildlife coexistence. Our results suggest that much more attention should be dedicated to the role of local institutions in promoting human‐wildlife coexistence.

The economic performance, through wildlife tourism, of African protected areas (PAs) varies widely. Though proximal management level factors responsible for economic performance and conservation outcomes are well known, underlying institutional, governance and organizational factors, which influence management regimes, have not been as extensively studied. In this paper, an institutional-economic framework forms the basis of a cross-sectional comparison of the local economic contributions of state, private, and communal PAs of the Lower Luangwa Valley in the institutionally centralized country of Zambia, and of the Greater Kruger National Park system in the institutionally devolved country of South Africa. Whereas in South Africa, private reserves neighboring the national park generate the majority of economic benefits, in Zambia, wildlife-related benefits from private and communal PAs are few relative to the neighboring national park. The contrast underscores the role of property regimes and other policies in the economic integration of public parks with surrounding landscapes. From an organizational and governance perspective, the performance of state-managed parks in both settings is tied to an ability to retain revenue, while the performance of co-governed PAs is undermined by power inequities between governing partners. These observations and their implications for policy reform are made clearer through the systematic collection and analysis of PA economic data, which our framework can guide.

Like their ancestors, forest dwellers in the Republic of the Congo depend heavily on bushmeat for their livelihoods. National regulations and enforcement are ineffective, yet undermine indigenous institutions. In common with many forest communities globally, this is creating an open-access resource at the same time that demand for bushmeat is increased by roads, towns, markets and new harvesting technology (guns, wire). We argue that the intractability and contradictions of the bushmeat problem globally reflect outdated institutions of exclusionary conservation and that the disempowerment of local people can be framed as an 'empty laws' open-access syndrome in which neither national nor local controls are working. We propose that this is an institutional predicament that needs to be resolved by re-establishing local tenure and rights, and drawing on the commons literature, New Institutional Economics and the long experience with private and community wildlife in southern Africa to design alternative governance regimes. In proposing measures to re-build local commons (private-community ownership), this review highlights community rights, the controversial issue of commercial use and markets, and the substantial advantages of participatory face-to-face community governance relative to the representational committee-based governance associated with development projects.

The objective of Tourism Economic Model for Protected Areas (TEMPA) is to offer a tool to estimate the economic impact of tourism in protected areas, and therefore provide a way to inform stakeholders of the value of PAs in serving not just for conservation purposes, but as engines for relatively low-impact, high added-value economic growth. TEMPA is based on the Money Generation Model (MGM2)--a system used by the US National Park Service - with modifications to address particular issues of developing countries. TEMPA was designed to be used with different levels of information considering the budget, time, and capacity constraints that protected area managers from developing countries may face. TEMPA can help managers and consultants on designing a study, gathering the right information, and presenting the results.

Economic impacts from tourism may benefit people living near parks and contribute to national-level economic growth. However, economic evaluations of park-tourism, which could be used to advocate for greater support of management, are rare in developing countries. Local multiplier effects of tourist spending, which can potentially promote business growth even where leakage is high, have also received little attention. We demonstrate an approach for estimating these local economic effects from an iterative set of surveys tracing the flow of tourism money near South Luangwa National Park, Zambia, and synthesize results with qualitative and quantitative analyses of national multiplier effects, park finances, local perceptions, and the park's management history. Despite high leakage, tourism accounts for ~40% of local household income and at least half of business growth in the gateway community. Results also reveal that GDP contributions are an order of magnitude above park management costs. Circumstances promoting the park's economic performance include key access infrastructure and commercial autonomy in management.

Roughly 65% of the African continent is classified as savanna. Such regions are of critical importance given their high levels of biological productivity, role in the carbon cycle, structural differences, and support of large human populations. Across southern Africa there are 79 national parks within savanna landscapes. Understanding trends and factors of vegetation health in these parks is critical for proper management and sustainability. This research strives to understand factors and trends in vegetation health from 2000 to 2016 in and around the 79 national parks across southern Africa. A backward stepwise regression was used to understand the factors (e.g., precipitation, population density, and presence of transfrontier conservation areas) affecting the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) during the 21st century. There was a statistically significant positive (p < 0.05) relationship between mean annual precipitation and NDVI, and a significant negative relationship between population density and NDVI. To monitor vegetation trends in and around the parks, directional persistence, a seasonal NDVI time series-based trend analysis, was used. Directional persistence is the net accumulation of directional change in NDVI over time in a given period relative to a fixed benchmarked period. Parks and buffer zones across size classes were compared to examine differences in vegetation health. There was an overwhelmingly positive trend throughout. Additionally, national parks, overall, had higher amounts of positive persistence and lower amounts of negative persistence than the surrounding buffer zones. Having higher positive persistence inside of parks indicates that they are functioning favorably relative to the buffer zones in terms of vegetation resilience. This is an important finding for park managers and conservation overall in Southern Africa.

Southern Africa is one of the two places on the planet where wildlife has increased in the past 50 years. Starting in the 1960s, wildlife administrators began to question the survival of public wildlife living outside parks on private and communal land. Recognising that wildlife is a private good with common pool properties, they reversed conventional conservation wisdom by devolving ownership of wildlife to landholders and communities, and increasing its price in the marketplace. This chapter explains the institutional history of private conservation and, later, community-based natural resource management in Southern Africa, as the "sustainable governance approach," which incorporates governance and economics. It suggests that this is a complementary and much-needed paradigm for the governance of wildlife, especially in Africa's drylands and forests. The chapter provides a synthesis of a vast oral and grey literature residing in communities of practice and field sites that this author has been visiting over the past 30 years.

Economic contributions of park-tourism are rarely documented for individual parks in developing countries or made relevant to management or governance concerns. If economic monitoring is to aid management, economic studies of tourism are a useful starting point but traditionally yield only narrow metrics or are applied only to public parks despite many parks being connected to private or communal reserves. We evaluated a network of private and public reserves - the Greater Kruger National Park (GKNP) - comparing economic contributions of member reserves while also attributing a range of values in financial, social and political domains to different components of the system, thus enabling integration of results with resilience-oriented management frameworks and decision-making processes. We show that the diversity of management units corresponds with a diversity of values that we argue underpins institutional resilience. Although private reserves constitute only 12% of the land area, visitor spending there is responsible for over 60% of employment, tax and GDP contributions. The national park is less commercialized but accounts for almost all domestic visits by maintaining affordable access, performing a vital political and social function. However, weak community and joint-governance undermines resilience and limits the ability of stakeholders to act on economic monitoring data.

Understanding trends or changes in biomass and biodiversity around conservation areas in Africa is important and has economic and societal impacts on the surrounding communities. Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique was established under unique conditions due to its complex history. In this study, we used a time-series of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to explore seasonal trends in biomass between 2000 and 2016. In addition, vegetation directional persistence was created. This product is derived from the seasonal NDVI time series-based analysis and represents the accumulation of directional change in NDVI relative to a fixed benchmark (2000–2004). Trends in precipitation from Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS) was explored from 2000–2016. Different vegetation covers are also considered across various landscapes, including a comparison between the Lower Gorongosa (savanna), Mount Gorongosa (rainforest), and surrounding buffer zones. Important findings include a decline in precipitation over the time of study, which most likely drives the observed decrease in NDVI. In terms of vegetation persistence, Lower Gorongosa had stronger positive trends than the buffer zone, and Mount Gorongosa had higher negative persistence overall. Directional persistence also varied by vegetation type. These are valuable findings for park managers and conservationists across the world.

This book develops the Sustainable Governance Approach and the principles of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). It provides practical examples of successes and failures in implementation, and lessons about the economics and governance of wild resources with global application. CBNRM emerged in the 1980s, encouraging greater local participation to conserve and manage natural and wild resources in the face of increasing encroachment by agricultural and other forms of land use development. This book describes the institutional history of wildlife and the empirical transformation of the wildlife sector on private and communal land, particularly in southern Africa, to develop an alternative paradigm for governing wild resources. With the twin goals of addressing poverty and resource degradation in the world's extensive agriculturally marginal areas, the author conceptualises this paradigm as the Sustainable Governance Approach, which integrates theories of proprietorship and rights, prices and economics, governance and scale, and adaptive learning. The author then discusses and defines CBNRM, a major subset of this approach. Interweaving theory and practice, he shows that the primary challenges facing CBNRM are the devolution of rights from the centre to marginal communities and the governance of these rights by communities, a challenge which is seldom recognised or addressed. He focuses on this shortcoming, extending and operationalising institutional theory, including Ostrom's principles of collective action, within the context of cross-scale governance. Based on the author's extensive experience this book will be key reading for students of natural resource management, sustainable land use, community forestry, conservation, and development. Providing practical but theoretically robust tools for implementing CBNRM it will also appeal to professionals and practitioners working in communities and in conservation and development.