POACHED: A young elephant shot by poachers near Rabi Reserve in southern Gabon. Although it has a bullet wound in its skull, the elephant evidently escaped and later died, because its tusks haven’t been removed.© RALPH BUIJYou couldn’t have witnessed the terrible carnage at Bouba N’Djida National Park in Cameroon and not be alarmed about the future of biodiversity. In March 2012, armed poachers invaded the park and slaughtered more than half of its 400 forest elephants for their valuable ivory tusks.
Fortunately, not all protected areas are suffering such incursions. In the Brazilian Amazon, where I’ve worked as an ecologist for the past 17 years, parks are helping to slow illegal logging and forest burning in vulnerable frontier areas. Likewise, in northeastern India, my doctoral student Nandini Velho is finding that protected parks are doing a much better job than surrounding community lands in sustaining vulnerable wildlife such as tigers.
Protected areas now span an eighth of the Earth’s land surface. Will they be a cornerstone for sustaining biodiversity, or a failed experiment, overrun by humanity’s growing demands for land, food, and natural resources?
With help from more than 200 field biologists, I recently coordinated one of the largest-ever studies of the biological health of protected ...
