Community involvement works where enforcement fails: conservation success through community-based management of Amazon river turtle nests

These areas are designed to integrate local communities and protected areas to promote conservation. However, local community-based management often struggles to achieve success due to the massive spatial scale, physical and intellectual isolation, lack of funding, and lack of political will. River turtles are a common pool resource across tropical regions and are a focus of local community-based management in the Amazon. Aquatic turtles are one of the most endangered groups of vertebrates, with 52% of river turtles listed as 'threatened' by the IUCC. River turtles provide provisioning and cultural services for local populations, making them an important example of the challenges facing conservation of common pool resources in a rapidly changing world. Anthropogenic impacts, including overexploitation, have led to the decimation of many river turtle populations across the Amazon region. The eggs and meat of side-necked turtles continue to be a widespread component in the diet of both rural and urban populations in Amazonia, generating high demand and debate about effective management approaches. The most commonly adopted management approaches for Amazon river turtles involve actions around the protection and conservation of nesting areas, nests, and hatchlings during the critical life phase when individual turtles are highly concentrated on accessible river sands. Nesting areas are episodically available with seasonal changes in river levels and are typically common-pool resources that require governance mechanisms to ensure compliance. The relative efficacy of different governance approaches in the conservation management of river turtles remains unclear, with few studies comparing the effectiveness of enforcement-focused and stakeholder engagement approaches. A temporal comparison of management approaches in the Brazilian Amazon provides an opportunity to evaluate the relative success of community involvement versus enforcement for a shared-pool resource in a protected area. A 33-kilometer segment of the river between two Amazon sustainable-use protected areas was studied to compare the harvest history of yellow-spotted river turtle nests during years with contrasting management approaches. The study found that two years of law enforcement had no effect on nest harvesting, while community-based management approaches enacted for one year resulted in a nearly threefold decrease in harvest levels, to 26%, which is sufficient for river turtle population recovery.