Fekede Regassa

Achieving global biodiversity targets, such as the commitment to conserve 30% of the planet by 2030, depends on the ability of individual countries to translate targets into reality. While there has long been recognition that protected areas can bring costs as well as benefits, the implications of this for delivery of global targets have not been fully explored. We focus on Ethiopia, a country supporting globally important biodiversity but facing substantial poverty challenges. We characterize the extent and representativeness of Ethiopia’s protected area network, demonstrating that a threefold expansion—particularly into ecoregions with higher opportunity cost—would be required to meet the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework Target 3. Using a quasi-experimental approach (accounting for known confounders and exploring sensitivity to potential unobserved confounders), we show that the existing protected area network has reduced forest loss and agricultural expansion, and helped to maintain grasslands. Yet, this has brought social wellbeing costs equivalent to 3.9 million fewer household-months of adequate food. Surveys show that national conservation stakeholders recognize these challenges and prioritize improving effectiveness of the existing network over expansion. Our findings highlight that trade-offs between environmental and social outcomes are not simply challenges to be managed, but are central to whether global biodiversity commitments can be delivered.

Wildlife rehabilitation is widely practiced to help injured animals recover and return to the wild, particularly benefiting endangered species that have small local populations. Here, we report the first case of a rehabilitated Ethiopian wolf that was successfully released back in the Simien Mountains. Through this case study, we documented the clinical treatment provided, recovery, and behavior of this individual during captivity, and post‐release monitoring in the wild using a GPS collar. After 51 days of captivity, during which a bone fracture in the hind leg caused by a gunshot was treated, the wolf was released back. After remaining with his pack members for 22 days, the wolf dispersed and settled in an unoccupied territory, where he paired with a female and successfully sired a litter. This study provides important insights on rehabilitation and post‐release monitoring that will inform conservation management of the Ethiopian wolf.

China has experienced a sudden multi‐focal and multi‐round of African swine fever (ASF) outbreaks during 2018. The subsequent epidemiological survey resulted in a debate including the possibility of a transboundary spread from European Russia to China through wild boar. We contribute to the debate by assessing a hypothetical overland Euro‐Siberian transmission path and its associated ASF arrival dates. We selected the maximum entropy algorithm for spatial modelling of ASF‐infected wild boar and the Spatial Distribution Modeller in ArcGIS to plot Least Cost Paths (LCPs) between Eastern Europe and NE China. The arrival dates of ASF‐infected wild boar have been predicted by cumulative maximum transmission distances per season and cover with their associated minimum time intervals along the LCPs. Our results show high costs for wild boar to cross Kazakhstan, Xinjiang (NW China) and/or Mongolia to reach NE China. Instead, the Paths lead almost straight eastward along the 59.5° northern latitude through Siberia and would have taken a minimum of 219 or 260 days. Therefore, infected wild boar moving all the way along the LCP could not have been the source of the ASF infection in NE China on 2 August 2018.

Independent Origin of Chytrid Fungus in China

African swine fever (ASF) is a transcontinental, contagious, fatal virus disease of pig with devastating socioeconomic impacts. Interaction between infected wild boar and domestic pig may spread the virus. The disease is spreading fast from the west of Eurasia towards ASF‐free China. Consequently, prediction of the distribution of ASF along the Sino‐Russian‐Korean borders is urgent. Our area of interest is Northeast China. The reported ASF‐locations in eleven contiguous countries from the Baltic to the Russian Federation were extracted from the archive of the World Organization for Animal Health from July 19, 2007 to March 27, 2017. The locational records of the wild boar were obtained from literature. The environmental predictor variables were downloaded from the WorldClim website. Spatial rarefication and pair‐wise geographic distance comparison were applied to minimize spatial autocorrelation of presence points. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to minimize multi‐collinearity among predictor variables. We selected the maximum entropy algorithm for spatial modelling of ASF and wild boar separately, combined the wild boar prediction with the domestic pig census in a single map of suids and overlaid the ASF with the suids map. The accuracy of the models was assessed by the AUC. PCA delivered five components accounting for 95.7% of the variance. Spatial autocorrelation was shown to be insignificant for both ASF and wild boar records. The spatial models showed high mean AUC (0.92 and 0.97) combined with low standard deviations (0.003 and 0.006) for ASF and wild boar respectively. The overlay of the ASF and suids maps suggest that a relatively short sector of the Sino‐Russian border has been a high probability entry point of ASF at current conditions. Two sectors of the Sino‐Korean border present an elevated risk.

The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the world’s rarest canid; ≈500 wolves remain. The largest population is found within the Bale Mountains National Park (BMNP) in southeastern Ethiopia, where conservation efforts have demonstrated the negative effect of rabies virus on wolf populations. We describe previously unreported infections with canine distemper virus (CDV) among these wolves during 2005–2006 and 2010. Death rates ranged from 43%–68% in affected subpopulations and were higher in subadult than adult wolves (83%–87% vs. 34%–39%). The 2010 CDV outbreak started 20 months after a rabies outbreak, before the population had fully recovered, and led to the eradication of several focal packs in BMNP’s Web Valley. The combined effect of rabies and CDV increases the chance of pack extinction, exacerbating the typically slow recovery of wolf populations, and represents a key extinction threat to populations of this highly endangered carnivore.

Ethiopian wolves are the rarest canid in the world, with only 500 found in the Ethiopian highlands. Rabies poses the most immediate threat to their survival, causing epizootic cycles of mass mortality. The complete genome sequence of a rabies virus (RABV) derived from an Ethiopian wolf during the most recent epizootic is reported here.