Assessing the impacts of war on perceived conservation capacity and threats to biodiversity

The impacts of war and violent conflicts on biodiversity may vary widely across time and different contexts. However, our understanding of the complex effects of war is limited in most cases due to a lack of study or methodological limitations. We examine the impact of war on conservation in the Western Area Peninsula Forest Reserve in Sierra Leone, a biodiversity hotspot and a site of civil war between 1997 and 2002. We utilize a novel combination of methods, including threat reduction assessment (24 focus groups), structured survey (n = 842) and semi-structured interviews (n = 37). We find that perceived threats to biodiversity varied in space and time and increased after the cessation of conflict. We also find that conservation capacity was perceived to be at its lowest during the war, but did not rebound significantly directly after the conflict. These data indicate the importance of maintaining conservation capacity during conflict, and immediately building capacity following conflict, to mitigate increased levels of threat. Our approach also emphasizes the need to assess both conservation threats and capacity to evaluate the full effect of war.