Biological resource monitoring systems are implemented in many countries and often depend on the participation of local people. It has been suggested that these systems empower local participants while promoting conservation. We reviewed three wildlife monitoring systems in indigenous lands and sustainable development reserves in Brazilian Amazonia and one in Namibian Caprivi conservancies, analyzing the strategies adopted and conditions that facilitated local empowerment, as well as potential impacts on conservation. This provided insights into potential avenues to strengthen empowerment outcomes of monitoring systems in Latin America and Africa. We assessed four dimensions of empowerment at individual and community scales: psychological, social, economic, and political. The conditions that facilitated local empowerment included the value of natural resources, rights to trade and manage resources, political organization of communities, and collaboration by stakeholders. The wide range of strategies to empower local people included intensifying local participation, linking them to local education, feeding information back to communities, purposefully selecting participants, paying for monitoring services, marketing monitored resources, and inserting local people into broader politics. Although communities were socially and politically empowered, the monitoring systems more often promoted individual empowerment. Marketing of natural resources promoted higher economic empowerment in conservancies in Namibia, whereas information dissemination was better in Brazil because of integrated education programs. We suggest that practitioners take advantage of local facilitating conditions to enhance the empowerment of communities, bearing in mind that increasing autonomy to make management decisions may not agree with international conservation goals. Our comparative analysis of cases in Latin America and Africa allows for a greater understanding of the relationships between resource monitoring systems, local empowerment, and conservation

Savanna ecosystems are an important component of dryland regions and yet are exceedingly difficult to study using satellite imagery. Savannas are composed are varying amounts of trees, shrubs and grasses and typically traditional classification schemes or vegetation indices cannot differentiate across class type. This research utilizes object based classification (OBC) for a region in Namibia, using IKONOS imagery, to help differentiate tree canopies and therefore woodland savanna, from shrub or grasslands. The methodology involved the identification and isolation of tree canopies within the imagery and the creation of tree polygon layers had an overall accuracy of 84%. In addition, the results were scaled up to a corresponding Landsat image of the same region, and the OBC results compared to corresponding pixel values of NDVI. The results were not compelling, indicating once more the problems of these traditional image analysis techniques for savanna ecosystems. Overall, the use of the OBC holds great promise for this ecosystem and could be utilized more frequently in studies of vegetation structure.

The islands of the Caribbean are considered to be a “biodiversity hotspot.” Collectively, a high level of endemism for several plant groups has been reported for this region. Biodiversity conservation should, in part, be informed by taxonomy, population status, and distribution of flora. One taxonomic impediment to species inventory and management is correct identification as conventional morphology‐based assessment is subject to several caveats.DNAbarcoding can be a useful tool to quickly and accurately identify species and has the potential to prompt the discovery of new species. In this study, the ability ofDNAbarcoding to confirm the identities of 14 endangered endemic vascular plant species in Trinidad was assessed using threeDNAbarcodes (matK,rbcL, andrpoC1). Herbarium identifications were previously made for all species under study.matK,rbcL,andrpoC1markers were successful in amplifying target regions for seven of the 14 species.rpoC1sequences required extensive editing and were unusable.rbcLprimers resulted in cleanest reads, however,matKappeared to be superior torbcLbased on a number of parameters assessed including level ofDNApolymorphism in the sequences, genetic distance, reference library coverage based onBLASTNstatistics, direct sequence comparisons within “best match” and “best close match” criteria, and finally, degree of clustering with moderate to strong bootstrap support (>60%) in neighbor‐joining tree‐based comparisons. The performance of both markers seemed to be species‐specific based on the parameters examined. Overall, the Trinidad sequences were accurately identified to the genus level for all endemic plant species successfully amplified and sequenced using bothmatKandrbcLmarkers.DNAbarcoding can contribute to taxonomic and biodiversity research and will complement efforts to select taxa for various molecular ecology and population genetics studies.