ABSTRACT Pangolins (genus Manis) are globally threatened mammals facing intense pressure from poaching, illegal trade, and habitat loss, particularly in human‐dominated landscapes. As habitat specialists, it is crucial to map site‐specific distribution and ensure human activities are not detrimental to their local population. This study examined pangolin distribution in the eastern part of Shivapuri Nagarjun National Park and assessed the potential impact of the proposed Nagmati Dam. We conducted continuous belt transect surveys (600 m long and 50 m wide) along the centroid of each grid cell across 101 grids (600 × 600 m each) at elevations of 1606–2422 m, recording 67 burrows (49 inactive, 18 active), indicating a clumped distribution. Moderate vegetation cover (using NDVI as a proxy) and slope were the primary environmental factors positively associated with the distribution of active pangolin burrows in Shivapuri Forest, with a substantial proportion of variation (McFadden's pseudo‐R2 = 0.61). The proposed Nagmati Dam and its reservoir will inundate 25 ha of prime pangolin habitat and an additional 65.304 ha that likely fall within the home ranges and foraging areas of pangolins, resulting in substantial habitat loss. The Environmental Impact Assessment for the dam project overlooks this threat, failing to recognize its potential impact on pangolins or to propose mitigation measures to safeguard them during construction. We recommend robust conservation measures and a thorough reassessment of the dam's environmental impacts on this Critically Endangered species.

Unregulated and illegal wild orchid harvest is a serious threat to the conservation of many orchid species, but it is also important to rural livelihoods. Yet there is little data on harvest dynamics and limited effort to regulate it sustainably. We conducted a study of commercial harvest and trade of wild plants, including orchids and non-orchids, in Gandaki province of Nepal, in a sub-alpine village where over 90

In 2020, a global surge of activism linked to the Black Lives Matter movement prompted scientists to stage an academic 'strike', drawing attention to the ethical responsibility of addressing systemic racism. This catalysed debate in conservation, adding urgency to decades of scholarship on marginalization. In this Perspective, we review this literature and examine how exclusion in conservation persists across intersections of race, class, urban-rural divides, nationality and power dynamics from local to global levels. We highlight how marginalization and 'othering' disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities, especially in the Global South. Expansion of protected areas and the prioritization of individual animal lives over human well-being can intensify such inequities. We propose a framework for more inclusive conservation: recognizing and supporting human rights, ensuring local community agency, challenging entrenched norms in BIPOC engagement, and fostering educational opportunities led by and for BIPOC communities. Amid shifting global politics, including reduced US federal support for social and conservation issues, this framework provides guidance to counter racism and exclusion. By rethinking conservation practice, it seeks to build long-lasting, equitable and inclusive approaches that respect both people and nature.

Human-wildlife coexistence requires context-specific strategies that accommodate diverse community needs in landscapes where heterogeneous communities live in proximity to protected areas and wildlife. This study evaluates community priorities for eight coexistence strategies using importance-performance analysis across four management sectors of Chitwan National Park, Nepal. We documented a significant spatial variation among the management sectors (H = 34.638-243.425, all p < 0.001): Madi (Southern Sector) prioritized rapid response teams (12.5% of strategies classified as high priority), Sauraha (Eastern Sector) emphasized technology integration and community funding (25% as high priority), while Amaltari (Western Sector) focused on partnership diversification, integration of indigenous knowledge with science, and community funding (37.5% as high priority). In contrast, Kasara (Northern Sector) showed no clear preferences for specific strategies. Agriculture-dependent sectors demonstrated distinct priorities compared to tourism-dependent ones, with agriculture-dependent communities facing disproportionately higher conflict intensities. Community funding emerged as a shared priority only in tourism-dependent sectors. These findings demonstrate that uniform coexistence strategies are inadequate for spatially and socioeconomically heterogeneous protected areas. This study provides protected area managers globally with a sector-specific framework and evidence-based guidance for adapting interventions to local socioecological contexts, thereby enhancing both conservation effectiveness and community support.

Scientific communities need to understand and eliminate barriers that prevent people with diverse backgrounds from contributing to and participating in science. However, the combined impact of individuals' linguistic, economic, and gender backgrounds on their scientific productivity is poorly understood. Using a survey of 908 environmental scientists, we show that being a woman is associated with up to a 45% reduction in the number of English-language publications, compared to men. Being a woman, a non-native English speaker, and from a low-income country is associated with up to a 70% reduction, compared to male native English speakers from a high-income country. The linguistic and economic productivity gap narrows when based on the total number of English- and non-English-language publications. We call for an explicit effort to consider linguistic, economic, and gender backgrounds and incorporate non-English-language publications when assessing the performance and contribution of scientists.

Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) are key to infrastructure development globally, and serve to evaluate impacts and guide approval. Importantly, the EIAs typically include mitigation measures through which projects – if allowed to advance – will reduce and mitigate the most negative social and environmental impacts. There are mounting demands to ensure EIA assessments and procedures meaningfully address these impacts, particularly for large-scale, high-risk and long-lived projects such as hydropower infrastructure. We explore these challenges in Nepal, where more than 450 EIAs have been approved since 1997. However, existing EIA evaluations and procedures are widely recognized as failing to deliver on-the-ground. We provide the first public dataset of hydropower projects with approved EIA’s, as a basis for characterizing the state of EIA implementation in Nepal. Based on a purposive sample of hydropower EIA reports, we highlight 26 commonly-proposed mitigation measures, and examine the thoroughness of these reports as written. We then also evaluate whether and how these proposed mitigation measures were implemented, based on independent, field-based evaluations of 9 projects, including interviews with field staff and local residents. The results show strong patterns of incomplete and non-compliance EIA reports, particularly as relates to mitigation measures. In the field, we document low levels of implementation of proposed mitigation measures, as well as blatant violations of best practices, and very low rates of government monitoring ( 15

Governing wildlife resources is a global challenge, with illegal domestic and international trade emerging as a leading threat to biodiversity. This has prompted a range of international conservation commitments and do-mestic legislation, including protected species lists and legislation associated with the Convention on Interna-tional Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Despite their importance, heavy focus on national-level legislation potentially belies the complex networks of sub-national legislation that often inform on -the-ground wildlife management decisions. We highlight the need for a detailed understanding of sub-national legislation in order to meaningfully understand legal and illegal wildlife trade. We demonstrate this using the example of orchids - representing >70 % of all CITES-listed species - and focus on Nepal, a wildlife trade hotspot. We describe the available evidence on the country's overlapping legal and illegal orchid trade and provide a structured analysis of 55 pieces of domestic legislation that govern the country's orchid resources. It is likely that other countries and taxa face similar levels of complexity, and we propose an approach for more thorough and systematic evaluations of sub-national legislation - across areas of law, hierarchical levels of governance, and types of legislation.

The use of English as the common language of science represents a major impediment to maximising the contribution of non-native English speakers to science. Yet few studies have quantified the consequences of language barriers on the career development of researchers who are non-native English speakers. By surveying 908 researchers in environmental sciences, this study estimates and compares the amount of effort required to conduct scientific activities in English between researchers from different countries and, thus, different linguistic and economic backgrounds. Our survey demonstrates that non-native English speakers, especially early in their careers, spend more effort than native English speakers in conducting scientific activities, from reading and writing papers and preparing presentations in English, to disseminating research in multiple languages. Language barriers can also cause them not to attend, or give oral presentations at, international conferences conducted in English. We urge scientific communities to recognise and tackle these disadvantages to release the untapped potential of non-native English speakers in science. This study also proposes potential solutions that can be implemented today by individuals, institutions, journals, funders, and conferences. Please see the Supporting information files (S2-S6 Text) for Alternative Language Abstracts and Figs 5 and 6.

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Globally, pangolins are under serious threat of extinction, mainly due to poaching, illegal trade and habitat destruction. Meanwhile, there are growing efforts and interest in saving pangolins, including from governments, academia and conservation NGOs (Heighton & Gaubert, 2021; Shibaike, 2021). The eight surviving species of pangolins comprise the most traded mammal species globally, causing their wild populations to decline at an alarming rate (Challender, Nash, & Waterman, 2020). Of these eight species of pangolins, three are listed as critically endangered, three as endangered and two as vulnerable in the global IUCN red list, and the species are also listed in CITES Appendix I (CITES, 2022; IUCN, 2022). However, the international conservation commitments and legislation are unlikely to be enough to save pangolins on the ground. For example, in Nepal, it is common to see people struggling to get the correct information and having the right skills to deal with confiscated pangolins, and in many cases ending up with harming them, even though they intend to help pangolins. Frontline conservation communities require practical information about the pangolin, including ways to handle, rescue and rehabilitate confiscated individuals. Nepal hosts two pangolin species, i.e., the Chinese (Manis pentadactyla) and the Indian (Manis crassicaudata) pangolin. These species have been provided with national legal protection by listing them as protected species, mirroring the global conservation efforts. Nepal has demonstrated that it can protect megafauna (Aryal et al., 2017) but has limited interventions for elusive species like pangolins. This is mainly because the government's conservation priorities are focused on charismatic megafauna species, particularly within the protected area network (Heinen & Shrestha, 2006). In contrast, the pangolin is not a major tourist attraction, and, in Nepal, most of their habitats lie in human-dominated landscapes outside the protected areas (DNPWC & DoF, 2018). Our experiences show that the seizure and rescue of live pangolins are increasing in Nepal. So far, more than two dozen pangolins have been rescued and taken to the Central Zoo in Lalitpur, managed by the National Trust for Nature Conservation. Unfortunately, none of them survived, so we started to release individuals that were brought to us into their natural habitat as soon as they arrived (pers. comm. R. Shah, in charge of Central Zoo on 07 Feb 2022). In recent years, rescued live pangolins have been released in many districts including, for Chinese pangolins, in Taplejung, Panchthar, Sankhuwasabha, Solukhumbu, Kathmandu valley, Kavrepalanchok, Sindhupalchok, Parsa, Makwanpur, Chitwan, Dhading and Gorkha, and for Indian pangolins in Bardia, Kailali, Kanchanpur and Surkhet districts. However, there is no available information or skilled human resources to examine their health status and injuries. Also, there is no post-release monitoring; thus, nothing is known about the released pangolins and their survival. The real problem arises when evidently injured or pregnant pangolins need to be rescued, which are not in the state to immediately be released back into their natural habitat. To its credit, Nepal produced the Pangolin Conservation Action Plan 2018–2022, but unfortunately, the Plan failed to recognize the rescue, rehabilitation and management of live pangolins. When discussing live pangolin seizures and rescue events with the frontline officials, they often say that pangolin rescue comes with confusion. For example, in November 2020, a Chinese pangolin was seized near Kathmandu in Nepal (Fig. 1). Some of the authors of this Letter were called to help when the seized pangolin gave birth to a baby whilst in police custody. The police were unsure of how to deal with the mother and the baby pangolin; however, neither did the officials nor the researchers have any idea how to best help. This example is representative and reveals that merely having the laws in place is insufficient to save individual pangolins. We need practical information on the safer handling of pangolins, the best available foods, feeding techniques, basic first aid and treatment guidelines, and captive care skills. Furthermore, it is crucial to disseminate such information in local languages/dialects to frontline communities directly dealing with injured pangolins from illegal wildlife trade seizures. Every single pangolin matters as they are globally threatened, and wild pangolin populations are declining across their range. There is a growing public concern to save pangolins, which is encouraging, but that is not in itself adequate for conservation in the field. There is an urgent need to equip frontline communities with the knowledge and capacity to help individuals that are confiscated and rescued. Nepal's local communities are very receptive and positive towards pangolin conservation (Khatiwada et al., 2020). To add to this receptiveness, the science of proper rescue and rehabilitation techniques and enhanced capacity could help save many pangolins in Nepal's rural areas. Some of the conservation centres in Asia and Africa have successfully rehabilitated pangolins, i.e., Tikki Hywood Foundation in Zimbabwe, Nandankanan Zoological Park in India, and South China Normal University (see Zhang et al., 2017; Parker & Luz, 2020). In addition to the research and proper guidelines in local languages, we also call for the exchange of such experiences and skills in other pangolin range countries like Nepal, where adequate knowledge and training is lacking.

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is threatening many species across the world. It is important to better understand the scale and characteristics of IWT to inform conservation priorities and actions. However, IWT usually takes place covertly, meaning that the data on species, trade routes and volumes is limited. This means that conservationists often have to rely on publicly available law enforcement reports of seizures as potential indicators of the magnitude and characteristics of IWT. Still, even these data may be difficult to access, leading conservationists to use media reports of seizures instead. This is the case in countries like Nepal, which have limited capacity in data keeping and reporting, and no centralized data management system. Yet reliance on media reports risks introducing further biases, which are rarely acknowledged or discussed. Here we characterize IWT in Nepal by comparing data from three sources of information on IWT between January 2005 and July 2017: seizure reports from three Nepali national daily newspapers, official seizure records for Kathmandu district, and data on additional enforcement efforts against IWT in Nepal. We found a strong positive correlation between the number of official and media-reported seizures over time, but media under-reported seizure numbers, with 78% of seizures going unreported. Seizures of charismatic, protected species were reported more often and seizure reports involving tigers were most likely to be reported (57%). Media reports appeared to be a good indicator of trends and the species being seized but not overall seizure number, with the media largely underestimating total seizure numbers. Therefore, media reports cannot be solely relied upon when it comes to informing conservation decision-making. We recommend that conservationists triangulate different data sources when using seizure data reported in the media to more rigorously characterise IWT.

The use of English as the common language of science represents a major impediment to maximising the contribution of non-native English speakers to science. Yet few studies have quantified the consequences of language barriers on the career development of researchers who are non-native English speakers. Our survey demonstrates that non-native English speakers, especially early in their careers, spend more effort than native English speakers in conducting scientific activities, from reading and writing papers and preparing presentations in English, to disseminating research in multiple languages. Language barriers can also cause them not to attend, or give oral presentations at, international conferences conducted in English. We urge scientific communities to recognise and tackle these disadvantages to release the untapped potential of under-represented non-native English speakers in science.

This paper provides a detailed account of Indian Roofed Turtle Pangshura tecta (Gray, 1831) recorded alive from Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, Nepal.

It is time to acknowledge and overcome conservation's deep-seated systemic racism, which has historically marginalized Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities and continues to do so. We describe how the mutually reinforcing 'twin spheres' of conservation science and conservation practice perpetuate this systemic racism. We trace how institutional structures in conservation science (e.g. degree programmes, support and advancement opportunities, course syllabuses) can systematically produce conservation graduates with partial and problematic conceptions of conservation's history and contemporary purposes. Many of these graduates go on to work in conservation practice, reproducing conservation's colonial history by contributing to programmes based on outmoded conservation models that disproportionately harm rural BIPOC communities and further restrict access and inclusion for BIPOC conservationists. We provide practical, actionable proposals for breaking vicious cycles of racism in the system of conservation we have with virtuous cycles of inclusion, equality, equity and participation in the system of conservation we want.

This chapter highlights Nepal's successful approach to conserving high-profile trafficked wildlife (e.g., rhinoceros) within protected areas and explains why a community-led approach to conservation is necessary for the protection of the country's pangolin populations, which occur largely outside of the protected area network. Nepal's pangolins occur primarily in forested areas, which are managed locally and not by government agencies. Key challenges for successful pangolin conservation in Nepal are presented, with examples of successful case studies from community-based conservation projects across the country. These case studies exemplify the key challenges to pangolin conservation in Nepal and demonstrate common themes related to success.

ABSTRACT There are long‐standing debates about the effectiveness and social impacts of enforcement‐based conservation, particularly as investments into enforcement increase in response to growing alarm about Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT). However, there is little data on the people subject to this enforcement, including prison sentences, species targeted, what motivates and deters them, and the social impacts of enforcement. This study identified 384 individuals across Nepal who were in prison for IWT offences in late 2016, and involved interviews (n = 116) focused on respondents' trade practices, economic circumstances and motivations. IWT prisoners represented 10–20% of the total prison populations in two regions and often received stiff sanctions, with a range of downstream impacts on respondents' families. Most respondents were arrested for their involvement in the rhinoceros trade (61%). Most were poor (56%) and from indigenous communities (75%), highlighting potentially inequitable impacts of enforcement. Despite common assumptions about the links between IWT, poverty and organized crime, most respondents were motivated by the desire to earn extra income and by the ease of IWT compared to other employment. IWT was neither a primary livelihood strategy, nor had the attributes for formal organized crime. Respondents, particularly poor respondents, seemed to underestimate the risks of detection and incompletely understood the scale of sanctions. Improved public awareness about the scale and social impacts of sanctions could help increase deterrence effects while reducing unintended social harms of enforcement.

Illegal wildlife trade is gaining prominence as a threat to biodiversity, but addressing it remains challenging. To help inform proactive policy responses in the face of uncertainty, in 2018 we conducted a horizon scan of significant emerging issues. We built upon existing iterative horizon scanning methods, using an open and global participatory approach to evaluate and rank issues from a diverse range of sources. Prioritized issues related to three themes: developments in biological, information, and financial technologies; changing trends in demand and information; and socioeconomic, geopolitical shifts and influences. The issues covered areas ranging from changing demographic and economic factors to innovations in technology and communications that affect illegal wildlife trade markets globally; the top three issues related to China, illustrating its vital role in tackling emerging threats. This analysis can support national governments, international bodies, researchers, and nongovernmental organizations as they develop strategies for addressing the illegal wildlife trade.