People and habitat protection.

Human population, production and consumption are growing rapidly and are placing heavy pressures on those species and habitats that the conservation community is striving to protect. A major weakness in our organized abilities to deal with this problem lies in disciplinary specialization. The Global Biodiversity Research Network, an international scientific network, had been developed to bring together the necessary disciplines of human demography, management science, development studies, conservation biology and population biology, in an effort to a) understand the impact of local human populations on the survival of threatened ecosystems and their resident communities, and b) develop tools and processes for securing the involvement, collaboration and responsibility of a wider range of local in-country stakeholders in the processes of in situ species, habitat and ecosystem management. One such process is the Population and Habitat Viability Assessment, an inclusive consultation process designed to help develop priorities and methods for preview and habitat conservation. This paper describes how demographic data can help in the PHVA process, and provides a case study of a PHVA undertaken in Uganda in 1997. (Authors' Abstract)