Globally, land use change is the primary driver of biodiversity loss (IPBES, 2019). Land use change due to agricultural expansion is driving bird species to the brink of extinction in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Agriculture is one of the primary threats to bird species in the region, and agroforestry is being pursued in some communities as a potential solution to reduce agriculture's impacts on species, as agroforestry provides improved habitat for wildlife while also enabling livelihoods for people. Understanding how anthropogenic land use choices affect imperiled species is an important prerequisite for conservation policy and practice in the region. In this thesis, I develop a spatial model for quantifying expected threat abatement from shifting agricultural land use choices towards agroforestry. I used this model explored how agricultural land use impacts imperiled bird species in the Peruvian Amazon. My approach builds on the species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric to make the expected consequences of reducing agricultural threats spatially explicit. I then analyzed results of applying the metric to alternative scenarios with and without agroforestry conversion. I found that agroforestry could result in up to 18.68% reduction in mean bird projected population decline. I found that converting all terrestrial agriculture in the Peruvian Amazon to agroforestry could produce a benefit of up to 83% to imperiled birds in the region in terms of improvement in Red List status. This use of the STAR metric to model alternative scenarios presents a novel usage for the STAR metric and a promising approach to understand how to address terrestrial biodiversity challenges efficiently and effectively.

Minority women continue to be underrepresented in STEM fields and in STEM related degrees, leading to a lack of diversity in the research conducted and voices advocated for in STEM. To understand why there continues to be a lack of representation of minority women in STEM, I conducted a survey of approximately 20 high school girls who identified as minorities and had an interest in science and conservation to ask questions about their hesitancy to attend college and the different barriers they face. The results of this survey show that these minority girls have low hesitancy when considering applying to and attending college. The biggest barrier these girls face is cost, with 74% of respondents citing college expense as a source of hesitancy when considering applying to college. I then discuss possible interventions that would lead to an increase in the representation of minority women in STEM in higher education. I suggest that colleges and universities should highlight scholarships, financial aid, and programs available and that minority women are eligible for, or they should reduce the cost of tuition.

Understanding the dynamic interactions between humans and wildlife is essential to establishing sustainable wildlife-based ecotourism (WBE). Animal behavior exists within a complex feedback loop that affects overall ecosystem function, tourist satisfaction, and socioeconomics of local communities. However, the specific value that animal behavior plays in provisioning ecosystem services has not been thoroughly evaluated. People enjoy activities that facilitate intimate contact with animals, and there are many perceived benefits associated with these experiences, such as encouraging pro-environmental attitudes that can lead to greater motivation for conservation. There is extensive research on the effects that unregulated tourism activity can have on wildlife behavior, which include implications for population health and survival. Prior to COVID-19, WBE was developing rapidly on a global scale, and the pause in activity caused by the pandemic gave natural systems the chance to recover from environmental damage from over-tourism and provided insights into how tourism could be less impactful in the future. Until now it has been undetermined how changes in animal behavior can alter the relationships and socioeconomics of this multidimensional system. This dissertation provides a thorough exploration of the behavioral, ecological, and economic parameters required to model biosocial interactions and feedbacks within the whale watching system in Las Perlas Archipelago, Panama. Through observational data collected in the field, this project assessed how unmanaged whale watching activity is affecting the behavior of Humpback whales in the area as well as the socioeconomic and conservation contributions of the industry. Additionally, it is necessary to consider what a sustainable form of wildlife tourism might be, and whether the incorporation of technology will help enhance visitor experience while reducing negative impacts on wildlife. To better ascertain whether this concept of this integration would be favorably viewed, a sample of individuals was surveyed about their experiences about using technology to enhance their interactions with nature. This research highlights the need for more deliberate identification and incorporation of the perceptions of all stakeholders (wildlife included) to develop a less-impactful WBE industry that provides people with opportunities to establish meaningful relationships with nature that motivate them to help meet the conservation challenges of today.

Limited funding hinders endangered species recovery. Thus, decision makers need to strategically allocate resources to save the most species. Decision science provides guidance on efficient prioritization of conservation actions. However, endangered species recovery cost estimates are incomplete, so decision makers need to understand the implications of different cost estimation approaches. To test how different ways of estimating the expected costs of recovery action influence suggested recovery priorities, I used three different cost estimation scenarios for prioritizing recovery effort for 29 endangered species in Arizona. My scenarios explored “remaining” costs, calculated by subtracting historical spending from recovery plan cost estimates, “average” costs which substituted the average cost for actions in recovery plans, and “micro” and “macro” overlaps accounting for efficiency of costs due to implementing shared recovery actions for species with overlapping ranges. These different methods of estimating costs resulted in different numbers of recovery plans funded. At a representative budget, the macro overlap scenario recommended funding for 97% of plans as compared to 93% of plans under the baseline cost scenario. In contrast, the micro overlap (59%), the average (28%), and remaining (24%) cost estimation approaches all resulted in less plans recommended for funding than the baseline. There were also differences in how individual plans were ranked across the scenarios and variation in species chosen for funding. The order of recovery plans was similar between the baseline and the remaining scenario (WS = 0.833), and the baseline and the average scenario (WS=0.811). The similarity metric is based on the identity of species ranked equally. In contrast, there was less similarity in plan ranking between the baseline, the macro (WS=0.777), and micro (WS=0.442) overlap scenarios. A group of 4 plans remained within the top priority ranks, 5 plans were ranked as high priority for all scenarios except the remaining cost scenario, and 5 plans were consistently ranked as low priority. My results show how cost estimation approaches influence species priority rankings and can be used to help decision makers determine implications when they are exploring options for prioritization.

Stressors to marine environments are predicted to increase and affect the well-being of marine ecosystems and coastal communities. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are one most widely implemented interventions for marine stressors. Despite the implementation of thousands of protected areas worldwide, people are still striving to understand their dynamics as they vary in their efficacy and many MPAs have not met their objectives. Additionally, those that have often fail to protect the ecosystem services and cultural values necessary for human community health. Thus, research has expanded to include analyses of the human and social dimensions that may limit their effectiveness. This dissertation explores the role of community engagement in marine protected areas and perceptions of environmental changes in coastal communities. Currently, existing research on the roles of community engagement in marine conservation interventions is limited, particularly in the island-states of the Caribbean region. This dissertation contains a review of the literature to understand the nuances of community engagement in relation to MPAs. Through the review, it was determined that primary forms of engagement are interviews and surveys, and respondents primarily included businesses, community members, fishers, and resource users. To better understand the perceptions and practices on-the-ground, key informants were interviewed across the Caribbean. There are strong desires to conduct community engagement for innumerable benefits, but there are barriers that some participants have overcome. Sharing information between MPA sites offers an opportunity to effectively engage community members. For the local case study, Charlotteville, Trinidad and Tobago, a small, coastal fishing town in the northeast region of Tobago was selected to understand the role of perceptions of environmental changes. There were strong ties of environmental and social changes, with an emphasis on the impacts of environmental stressors to human health. The heterogeneity and diversity of responses in this chapter highlight the need to consider who is engaged in community engagement activities.

Marine ecosystems are currently being impacted by various threats; however, quantification of the impacts of known threats and the population status of species are often conducted at different scales, depending upon stakeholder needs. Global-scale species assessments can mask the impact of local or regional threats within the context of global conservation priorities even as conservation policies are generally implemented at the local or regional scale. This work aims to identify the regional threats currently impacting species present within the Gulf of Mexico as well as the current polices addressing those threats. Species currently impacted by threats were used to build an ecosystem model to estimate food web dynamics in the Gulf of Mexico. This model is the first of its kind to incorporate data from more than 1500 species occurring in the Gulf including all marine bony shorefishes, marine reptiles, complete clades of select marine invertebrates, marine birds, marine mammals, and chondrichthyans. Comprehensive analyses of these groups are important for an improved understanding of the functioning of the Gulf of Mexico food web and the impact of identified threats on food web dynamics. The identification of current threats and food web dynamics will help to inform conservation policy moving forward. Properly framed conservation efforts are more likely to be widely accepted and successful when there is an improved understanding on how policies can impact stakeholders both economically and through changing practices. Finally, an investigation of the legal frameworks currently recognized in the Gulf of Mexico was done to build an example tri-national framework between the United States, Mexico, and Cuba focusing on current conservation gaps allowing for specific regional conservation concerns to be addressed.

Institutions (rules, norms, and shared strategies) are social feedback systems that structure actors’ decision-making context. It is important to investigate institutional design to understand how rules interact and generate feedbacks that affect robustness, i.e., the ability to respond to change. This is particularly important when assessing sustainable use/conservation trade-offs that affect species’ long-term survival. My research utilized the institutional grammar (IG) and robust institutional design to investigate these linkages in the context of four international conservation treaties.

First, the IG was used to code the regulatory formal treaty rules. The coded statements were then assessed to determine the rule linkages and dynamic interactions with a focus on monitoring and related reporting and enforcement mechanisms. Treaties with a regulatory structure included a greater number and more tightly linked rules related to these mechanisms than less regulatory instruments. A higher number of actors involved in these activities at multiple levels also seemed critical to a well-functioning monitoring system.

Then, drawing on existing research, I built a set of constitutive rule typologies to supplement the IG and code the treaties’ constitutive rules. I determined the level of fit between the constitutive and regulatory rules by examining the monitoring mechanisms, as well as treaty opt-out processes. Treaties that relied on constitutive rules to guide actor decision-making generally exhibited gaps and poorer rule fit. Regimes which used constitutive rules to provide actors with information related to the aims, values, and context under which regulatory rules were being advanced tended to exhibit better fit, rule consistency, and completeness.

The information generated in the prior studies, as well as expert interviews, and the analytical frameworks of Ostrom’s design principles, fit, and polycentricity, then aided the analysis of treaty robustness. While all four treaties were polycentric, regulatory regimes exhibited strong information processing feedbacks as evidenced by the presence of all design principles (in form and as perceived by experts) making them theoretically more robust to change than non-regulatory ones. Interestingly, treaties with contested decision-making seemed more robust to change indicating contestation facilitates robust decision-making or its effects are ameliorated by rule design.