Central Chile, despite being a zone of conservation prioritization and threat, only benefits from limited ecological restoration and species reintroductions. We suggest that this is due to a lack of integration between ecology and historical ecology and paleo-ecology, and a consequent lack of baseline scenarios for public consideration. Here, we review the knowledge and knowledge gaps around the distributions, habitats, and ecological roles and interactions of a set of extant and extinct plant and animal species of conservation interest. We synthesize the current ecological understanding, which describes an accepted pre-Columbian ecological scenario, and we construct an alternative scenario based on the review and integration of paleo-ecological and historical sources. Both scenarios agree there has been significant land-cover change over the past 500 years, but disagree on pre-Columbian baselines. The accepted scenario proposes a species-poor primordial high forest without disturbance, evolving in isolation with static species distributions and realized niches, and recently threatened by invasive species. The alternative paleo-ecology-informed scenario proposes a frequently disturbed habitat mosaic whose community composition across time is dominated by long-distance dispersal, the Pleistocene-Holocene megafaunal extinctions, and changing species distributions and realized niches. We propose specific potential restoration baselines for the alternative scenario. Both scenarios can be the basis for hypotheses, restoration baselines, and novel environmental narratives.

The concept of nonhuman animal agency has recently been introduced in fields from more-than-human geography to wildlife conservation. Nonhuman animal agency refers to the capacity of animals to create, set in motion, and cause or influence actions through their relations with humans and other nonhumans. Ecologists have long recognized that animal species are active components of ecosystems and have important ecological functions, yet most wildlife management treats species as objects that are (or should be) passive and controllable. We argue that explicit recognition of nonhuman agency can reduce human-wildlife conflict, enhance the capacity for coexistence, and create better outcomes for conservation and other human-based projects. Rather than attempting to control species, the emerging more-than-human perspective suggests that a better target of management is place-based relationships, where humans and a variety of nonhumans are active participants in shaping landscape structures and lived experiences. To implement this concept in practice, we present design with nonhuman species as a pragmatic approach that draws on and may combine elements of contemporary design methods, coexistence approaches, rewilding perspectives, adaptive management, and traditional land management practices. The uniqueness of this approach is its focus on responding to both human and nonhuman agencies and its interactive problem solving mediated by materials, objects, structures, spaces, and spatiotemporal patterns. Design with seeks to appreciate and embody desires and concepts, which can be understood as being held by both humans and nonhumans. Critically, design with enables forms of negotiation that are not based on impractical anthropocentric linguistic and political models. We encourage conservationists to engage with designers interested in design with nonhumans.

Many South American dry woodlands lack good historical or paleoecological baseline data to inform restoration and conservation. However, functionalist approaches such as those popularized by rewilding suggest that functional interactions producing target ecosystem processes are valid even without data confirming compositionalist values such as a long coevolutionary histories or known historical range overlaps of target species. In central Chile, the guanaco (Lama guanicoe) has been extirpated but is known to browse trees in other regions of South America, and the tree Vachellia [Acacia] caven shows adaptations to browsing but has no extant browsers within its Chilean range. Both species are native to Chile but there are no data to assess their historical levels of interaction. Here we test the hypothesis that they can act as mutual “Eltonian proxy” species: interacting species for which we lack sufficient data (the Eltonian shortfall) to prove they are not proxies. Specifically we predict that they have complementary adaptations such that guanacos will browse Vachellia [Acacia] caven and the latter will show adaptive responses to their browsing. We introduced five guanacos into an enclosure of Vachellia [Acacia] caven “espinal” woodland, and over two years measured the growth responses of individual branches, compared to branches of trees in an area without browsing. We predicted that Vachellia [Acacia] caven would show compensatory growth in response to guanaco browsing resulting in an increase in branching. Guanacos browsed throughout the two years. In the presence of guanaco browsing, Vachellia [Acacia] caven branches grew longer, grew more sub-branches, and showed more densely streamlined branch architectures. These results indicate that guanacos could be used to substitute anthropogenic pruning as a restoration and management technique in Vachellia [Acacia] caven “espinal” woodlands. However, other extinct megaherbivores or extirpated deer may also be key components of a past herbivore community to which Vachellia [Acacia] caven was adapted. Further attention to a network of multiple interacting browsers, and their indirect and nontrophic effects, is an area for further research.

We provide a case study of how we position our rewilding project in central Chile in order to find scientific and social support and build alliances, collaborations, and consensus. Our core vision focuses on reintroducing guanacos (Lama guanicoe) to central Chile in order to provide natural restoration and ecosystem processes in espinal woodlands dominated by the native tree Vachellia [Acacia] caven. We envision a scenario of “social-ecological rewilding” with widespread guanaco browsing in woodlands and guanaco migration across the region, coexisting with multiple human uses of the landscape. Guanacos would ideally be managed by regional collectives who could benefit from guanaco tourism, sustainable harvest of their fiber (wool), and regulated hunting. Our wider vision for reintroductions and integrated conservation management extends to a set of other species that may have coexisted with guanacos and V. caven at various points in the past, but more research is necessary to establish and gain support for evidence-based baselines. Our strategy is to inspire actors with greater resources (land, money, influence) to share our vision and implement it, in collaboration with the NGO that we have formed to support our projects. Over ten years, circulating alternate interpretations and a novel imaginary of how central Chile was in the past and could be in the future, along with developing and testing scientific hypotheses, has moved our vision from an idea shared by two people to one that a wide variety of actors publicly embrace.

Rewilding is a flexible conservation approach that may be applicable to a wide variety of ecological, historical and socio-cultural contexts. We believe that comparative socio-ecological research on woodland habitat trajectories among contexts is an excellent opportunity to consider possible rewilding approaches. Here, we draw on a comparison between arid and seasonally dry woodlands of the Sahel region of Africa and the Southern Cone of South America. The two regions, while sharing a common Gondwanan floral origin, differ in terms of subsequent biogeographical processes and have different climatic gradients. Historically, both regions were colonised, although along different models, and the Southern Cone has experienced greater land-use change and agricultural modernisation. Culturally, both regions have indigenous populations with traditional management techniques and local ecological knowledge, although attention to these topics in research and conservation has had different emphases in each region. Rewilding, focusing on charismatic animals, has been proposed and implemented in some parts of the Southern Cone, but has hardly been mentioned for the Sahel. We discuss the applicability of potential rewilding models involving key plants for each region, and what a plant-focused rewilding practice could gain from a comparative approach in the two regions.

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Co-production of conservation projects is favored by incorporating local ecological knowledge into project design and implementation. Using a mixed method approach, we asked how the territorial practices and knowledge of cowboys and livestock farmers inform their attitudes to this proposed project. We predicted that cowboy territorial practices would be reduced in diversity compared to the past, and that this may be associated with a reduction in coping or adaptation capacity in the face of environmental challenges. We further predicted that due to growing environmental and social pressures reducing traditional livelihood opportunities for this group, they are likely to see the guanaco reintroduction project in a conflictual and negative light. We additionally predicted that they would perceive local carnivorous species in a conflictual and negative way. We found that territorial practices among the sample had indeed decreased in diversity. The sample coped with changing socio-ecological conditions by taking up other jobs. However, we also found that they had majority favorable views on the guanaco reintroduction project. Yet their knowledge of current guanaco behavior led them to believe that the project would fail. However, they also observed that pumas and condors changed their behaviors. We suggest that there are opportunities to co-produce knowledge about the possibility of flexible and adaptive guanaco behavior, which may lead to restoration and create more sustainable future scenarios, by engaging with the territorial practices and local ecological knowledge of cowboys and livestock farmers.

"Environmental anthropology and the interpretation of landscapes: review of The fluvial imagination." Biodiversity, 24(1-2), pp. 105–106

Photo 1. Mellisodes sp. attacking Danaus plexippus. Photo credit: Robert Root-Bernstein. Photo 2. Xylocopa virginica attacking a Bombus sp. Photo credit: Robert Root-Bernstein. Photo 3. Colletes sp. (upside down) and Mellisodes sp. altercating over a flower. Photo credit: Robert Root-Bernstein. Photo 4. Agapostemon sp. attacking a Polites coras. Photo credit: Robert Root-Bernstein. Photo 5. Agpostemon sp. wrestling with Bombus sp. Photo credit: Robert Root-Bernstein. These photographs illustrate the article “Flower visitor insects display an interspecific dominance hierarchy on flowers” by Thomas Renaud and Meredith Root-Bernstein published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3958

A few minutes of observation of flowers are sufficient to notice that some flower-visiting insects threaten, harass, or attack individuals from other species. Flies dive-bomb butterflies, and wild bees of different species wrestle one another. One of us (MR-B) has observed this phenomenon repeatedly over the course of at least 20 years in a garden in Michigan, USA (Figure 1). Yet, interspecific agonistic behaviors between flower visitors on flowers are not documented in the literature. Aggression has been studied in insects focusing on intercolony interactions or parasitoidism (Hardy et al., 2013). Few papers have looked at aggression on flowers while foraging. Sampson et al. (2016) showed that intraspecific agonistic behaviors of the wild bee Ptilothrix bombiformis could enhance the pollination of Hibiscus. Greenleaf and Kremen (2006) showed that honeybees were more likely to switch to another flower after “interacting” with a wild bee (increasing pollination efficiency), but these interactions were defined merely as the wild bee joining the honeybee on the flower head. There is a small but growing literature on interspecific aggression (Grether et al., 2013), but such a conceptual framework has not been applied to understanding interspecific flower visitor aggression on flowers. Drury et al. (2015) suggested that interspecific aggression over resources was maladaptive and evolutionarily unstable, unless sex was also nondiscriminating (females are a common resource). Grether et al. (2017) predicted that aggressive interference between species would either lead to competitive exclusion and local extirpation or temporal or spatial partitioning of habitats between species. Neither of these cases seems a priori to describe previous nonsystematic observations of flower visitor aggression on flowers: Species as diverse as butterflies, flies, and wasps cannot plausibly all be accidentally mating with each other, and they are clearly not partitioning floral resources but rather repeatedly interacting on the same flowers. Indeed, observations during the past 20 years by MR-B suggest an interspecific dominance hierarchy between flower visitor species at flowers, a possibility not mentioned in the literature on interspecific aggressive interference. The goal of this observational study was thus to characterize the agonistic behaviors of flower visitor insects within dyadic interactions and the factors influencing them and to establish a dominance hierarchy based on the propensity of morphospecies to initiate and be targeted by agonistic behaviors. Ad libitum observations were carried out from 25 April to 6 May 2022 in urban parks in Paris, France. Based on these initial observations, we constructed an ethogram of behaviors displayed by flower visitor insects (Table 1) with two categories: (1) initial agonistic behavior of the focal individual (“attacker,” initiating the interactions), including “neutral” behavior and four categories of increasing intensity of aggression; and (2) the reaction of both the focal individual and the targeted individual (“defender,” sharing the flower head). We also created a list of morphospecies grouped on taxonomic (e.g., order, family, genus, species) and morphological (e.g., size, color, pattern) criteria, covering mainly Hymenoptera and Diptera orders (Table 2). Incidental interaction A approaches B's flower and avoids it B is not affected by A's action and remains on its flower B's departure is not due to the action of A A does not land or stay on flower Systematic observations, carried out from 9 May to 2 June 2022, consisted of 64 sessions, fixed at 11 a.m., 12 p.m., 3 p.m., and 4 p.m., in four well-flowered urban parks in Paris: Parc André Citroën, Parc de Bercy, Parc Monceau, and Jardin des Plantes. We focused on plants with dense inflorescence, and we rotated the hours at which each plant was observed. We used a focal behavior approach, continuously recording as many behaviors as we observed during each 45-min session. The initiated and the resulting behaviors and the morphospecies of the “attacker” and the “defender” were noted for each interaction. See Appendix S1: Section S1 for the detailed protocol. In a total of 48 h of observation, we identified 1374 interactions (e.g., Figure 1) of which 67% were “aggressive” (intimidation [I1] = 40%, aggression [I2] = 15%, wrestling [I3] = 6%, hovering flight [I] = 6%). Among the resulting behaviors, statu quo (SQ) and defender escape (E) were predominant (37% each). Pursuit by the attacker (PA = 8%), tolerance (T = 7%), replacement (R = 5%), swirling (SW = 3%), shadowing (SH = 2%), and pursuit by the defender (PB = 1%) were far less common. The morphospecies most involved in the interactions were the “other wild bees” category (WB = 42%), honeybees (HB = 40%), “other bumblebees” (B = 30%), yellow-striped bumblebees (YB = 25%), gray bees (GB = 7%), and large hoverflies (LH = 6%). The 6% remaining were shared by hoverflies (H = 1.8%), Polistes wasps (PW = 1.2%), “other Brachycera” (BR = 1.0%), carpenter bees (CB = 0.5%), Coleoptera (C = 0.5%), green bottle flies (GF = 0.4%), and Lepidoptera (L = 0.4%) (grouped in “Other” category thereafter). Vespula wasps (VW), “other wasps” (W), bee flies (BY), flesh flies (FF), and Nematocera (NE) were not observed to be involved in interactions either as attackers or defenders, although they were observed several times on plants. To understand what meteorological and biotic factors promoted interinsect aggression, we conducted a confirmatory path analysis with the piecewiseSEM package (version 2.1.2) in R (version 4.1.2). This analysis (Appendix S1: Section S2) showed that number of insects was enhanced with increasing temperature and flower density and reduced with damaged flowers. This result is supported by studies showing that insect activity is strongly correlated with meteorological conditions and especially temperature since insects are ectothermic (Gilbert, 1985; Willmer, 1983). Moreover, the number of “neutral” interactions depended only on number of insects, whereas the number of “aggressive” interactions increased with increasing numbers of insects, sunlight and wind level, and number of “neutral” interactions. Direct sunlight might increase energy available to display agonistic behaviors. We speculate that wind may create a stressful environment that might increase the likelihood of aggressivity. Finally, the plant family does not explain either the number of insects or the number of interactions since this variable was nonsignificant in our model (Appendix S1: Figure S2 and Table S4). This is consistent with the results of Willmer (1983), who showed that insect activity was correlated not with flower rewards but rather with intrinsic parameters of insects and weather conditions. However, a systematic study across a greater range of plant families might reveal a taxonomic effect. In addition, systematic observations across weather conditions could reveal more fully how they affect aggression among insects. Our observations supported the idea that there was a nonrandom dominance hierarchy between species. We observed that large hoverflies and gray bees tended to attack most of the other individuals, whereas honeybees and yellow-striped bumblebees were much calmer and more peaceful. Pearson's χ2 tests on contingency tables show that some morphospecies were likely to initiate more “aggressive” than “neutral” behaviors (Pearson—χ2 = 152.26, df = 6, p = 2.58 × 10−30, VCramer = 0.33, n = 1374). Thus, large hoverflies, gray bees, “other wild bees” and the “Other” categories are more aggressive than honeybees, yellow-striped bumblebees, and “other bumblebees” (Appendix S1: Figure S3). Attackers also nonrandomly targeted specific morphospecies (Pearson—χ2 = 426.04, df = 3, p = 3.59 × 10−68, VCramer = 0.27, n = 914). Honeybees, yellow-striped bumblebees, and the “other bumblebees” and “other wild bees” categories mainly attacked within their own morphospecies. Yellow-striped bumblebees targeted honeybees, too, as did the large hoverflies. Large hoverflies and gray bees preferentially attacked the “other bumblebees” (Appendix S1: Figure S4). Interactions and resulting behaviors were also significantly nonrandom (Pearson—χ2 = 1456.74, df = 28, p = 1.25 × 10−289, VCramer = 0.51, n = 1374). “Neutral” interactions and “hovering flight” led to statu quo most of the time, whereas “intimidation,” “aggression,” and “wrestling” were mainly followed by the escape of the defender (Appendix S1: Figure S5). Finally, we further explored whether there was a dominance hierarchy by attributing the David's scores (David, 1987) to each morphospecies and classifying them in decreasing order (Figure 2). Only “aggressive” interactions (i.e., non-“neutral”) were used. To adapt David's score to this context, we considered multiple interactions between two morphospecies as different rounds of the same “match” whose winner was the one initiating the most “aggressive” behaviors. The resulting hierarchy yielded three groups: (1) large hoverflies and gray bees exhibiting the most “aggressive” behaviors; (2) “other bumblebees,” Lepidoptera, yellow-striped bumblebees, and honeybees, which received more attacks than they initiated; and (3) the remaining morphospecies, which initiated as many “aggressive” behaviors as they received. This outcome was interesting because honeybees tend to outperform and crowd out wild bees (Cane & Tepedino, 2017; Steffan-Dewenter & Tscharntke, 2000). This means that their dominance is not mediated by aggressive interference but by competition, presumably mediated by resource exploitation efficiency, which may be related to their eusociality. We observed no clear patterns relating the traits of our morphospecies categories to aggressivity or dominance. A finer identification of morphospecies to species level would allow an analysis of how species traits, such as size, sociality, foraging specialism, and so forth, affect positions in the interspecific dominance hierarchy. The observed interspecific dominance hierarchy in urban parks in Paris confirmed previous nonsystematic observations in a suburban garden on another continent with a substantially different and perhaps more biodiverse flower-visiting fauna (i.e., more beetles and butterflies). Further extending and refining the methodology to include finer morphospecies categories, more diverse habitats, weather conditions, species assemblages, and other parts of the world might reveal the factors influencing the formation and maintenance of interspecific dominance hierarchies by flower-visiting insects on flowers. The observation that the baseline behaviors are “neutral,” implying the least energy expenditure, along with the finding that sunshine and wind increase the rate of aggression, suggests that these aggressive behaviors could be partially explained by ethological accounts of arousal and stress. A fuller explanation that describes cost/benefit strategies of interspecific aggression among flower-visiting insects awaits elaboration. In addition, our observations suggest that the literature on interspecific aggressive interference should incorporate interspecies agonistic hierarchies. Thomas Renaud's internship was funded by the Direction Générale Deleguée à la Recherche, à l'Expertise, à la Valorisation et à l'Enseignement-Formations of the National Museum of Natural History (Paris). We thank Robert Root-Bernstein for two of the photographs in Figure 1. The authors declare no conflict of interest. The data set (Root-Bernstein, 2022) is available on Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/S68YR. Freely available data on the air temperature of each arrondissement of Paris was retrieved from the Météo-France website (https://meteofrance.com/) by searching for “Paris Xe Arrondissement” in the search field, with “X” being the number of the arrondissement. Appendix S1 Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.

Public perceptions and knowledge of forestry institutions are key for effective governance. Drawing from research among landholders in Chile through structured questionnaires, we examine the role that knowledge of forest regulations and agencies plays in relation to public perceptions of the forestry agency, and how tenure of forest land affects this association. Multivariate regressions showed a U-shaped relationship between perceptions and knowledge, explained by ownership of forested land. Landholders with more hectares of native forest reported a negative relationship between knowledge and perception, whereas landowners with fewer hectares of native forest reported a positive association. Our results suggest a forest management paradox: forestry institutions are established to sustainably manage and conserve biodiversity, especially for native threatened forests; nonetheless, the perceptions of landholders with greater areas of forest, who should be the targeted partners of these institutions, appear to become more negative as their knowledge of forestry institutions increased. Our results provide key information for adapting forestry institutions to socio-ecological contexts to produce effective outcomes..

Attention to epistemological relationships between Indigenous and local knowledges (ILK) and conservation science is increasing. Some approaches for doing so have been developed, but in general, serious engagement between ILK and science still feels experimental and does not have broad uptake. Here we address some of the main issues that arise when considering the epistemological relationships between ILK and conservation or ecological science. A key issue is the relationship between ILK and science that sets the expectations for how they may form dialogues, collaborations, or co-production. After reviewing several perspectives on this relationship, and their limitations, we suggest that a focus on shared meanings within an 'ethic of equivocation' is a productive path forward. In an ethic of equivocation, neither ILK nor science validates the other, yet meaning can be created. We explain and develop the concepts of meanings and equivocation in the ILK-science context. We, thus, argue for a broad and rich understanding of the joint roles of ILK and science, which goes beyond treating ILK as a data source. We argue that diverse styles of reasoning exist in science, and scientists may already treat observations, models, and collaborations in the ways that we discuss, providing ready-made analogies for thinking about ILK. We also discuss how to avoid abuses of power while engaging with ILK to co-produce new knowledge.

Shrub encroachment is understood to be an important problem facing rangeland ecosystems globally. The phenomenon is still poorly understood both in regard to its impacts (e.g., on diversity, productivity, and soil properties) and its causes. We study the impacts and causes of dwarf shrub encroachment in the highlands of Lesotho. There, shrubs have been described as indicators of generalized land degradation and soil erosion. Surprisingly, our findings show that grass abundance is not reduced by shrub abundance, but that forb abundance does decrease with shrub abundance. We suggest that not enough research has been done to examine the role of forbs in livestock diets, nor in assessing its role in plant-plant competition in grass-shrub systems. Equating shrub presence with declines in available forage may be hasty, as according to our results, grasses were not decreased by shrub expansion in this context; however, forbs are critical components of livestock diets. We propose that the role of forbs in this system should be further studied, focusing on the role that high-nutrient or N-fixing forbs could play in returning nutrients to the soil and affecting livestock grazing patterns, both of which could reduce shrub abundances and favor the establishment of a richer forb community.

Conservation projects in developing countries that depend on international donors or international capacity building partnerships often have to bridge a gap between donors’ or experts’ ideas of best practice and local ideas of best practice. We examine how this gap may be successfully bridged by examining the case of the Wangchuck Centennial National Park (WCNP) in Bhutan. This protected area was attracting considerable outside investment but presented an unusual situation in 2013: it was largely viewed positively by local communities living in the park, even though, five years after it was gazetted, it had no clear boundaries, and its management was identical to management outside the park. Why did the WCNP have this form, and why was it viewed favorably by local people? Our interviews and survey reveal that this may be due to practical and favourable integrated conservation and development projects implemented by the park management, more people-friendly rules adopted by the Bhutanese government, and a cultural ethos of sustainable development and environmentalist Buddhist sentiments. Applying the tacit working models of conservation framework, we argue that although the protected area as a form of conservation normally is designed to fit the ‘uniformity model’ of a bounded area with specific rules and management, the WCNP has been culturally re-designed to fit the more culturally suitable ‘normative model’ that is territorially extensive and values-based. We suggest that this adaptation of global conservation concepts to local cultural perspectives may be a factor in Bhutanese conservation success.