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- Unravelling responses of carnivore assemblages to conservation and management models in South AfricaPublication . Curveira-Santos, Gonçalo; Santos-Reis, Margarida; Swanepoel, Lourens; Sutherland, ChrisAttempts to curtail ongoing biodiversity declines hinge on a deep understanding of wildlife responses to conservation efforts. South Africa’s diverse carnivore assemblages and local conservation setting exemplify the schism between community paradigms in contemporary ecology and species-centric management. A decentralized approach to conservation gave rise to complex and intensively managed multi-use landscapes, where formal protected areas coexist with the private commercial wildlife industry (ecotourism and hunting). Management idiosyncrasies are orientated towards economically valuable and charismatic species, including some large predators, while responses of most carnivore taxa remain overlooked. In this thesis, I explored the nature of assemblage-wide responses of South African carnivores to alternative conservation and management models, as possibly facilitated by varying intraguild dynamics. Using a combination of management-induced quasi-experiments and multi-species inference, I provide empirical support for: i) top-down suppression of mesocarnivore species acting in tandem with proposed conservation benefits of reintroduced apex predator populations; ii) the conservation value of areas under long-term formal protection for free-ranging carnivores, and the risks with viewing wildlife businesses as a conservation panacea; and iii) the need to consider intricate and context-dependent species interaction networks when evaluating the outcome of management options. Finally, I revisited carnivoran intraguild killing as a pervasive ecological mechanism underlying the structure of species-rich South African assemblages. Evidence for accentuated interspecific heterogeneity and varying intraguild dynamics weighed heavily in favor for the need to formally consider unmanaged species and guild processes in the development of carnivore conservation efforts and predator management plans. Collectively, my research suggests that broader biodiversity benefits of multi-tenure South African conservation landscapes are underpinned by unknown recovery trajectories of free-ranging species and unheeded ecological effects of management interventions via intraguild interactions. By further unravelling the complexity of South African carnivore assemblages my findings add to calls for a more holistic view of wildlife conservation management.