Pangolin habitat conservation alongside anti-trafficking as the dual strategy for protecting the world's most trafficked mammal.
Pangolin habitat conservation addresses the underlying ecological vulnerability that makes trafficking pressure so devastating. A species in a large, intact habitat patch can sustain some hunting mortality; a species already confined to small fragments by deforestation cannot. Habitat conservation that maintains population density reduces the proportion of individuals that trafficking removes per year. At the individual level, pangolins in intact habitat have better access to food, suffer less territorial compression stress, and experience fewer encounters with human hunters. Habitat conservation and anti-trafficking enforcement are not alternative strategies but complementary ones — both are required for pangolin population recovery.