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A common narrative about protected areas (PAs) is that social benefits accrue globally whereas burdens are felt locally, particularly in lower income countries. Researchers tend to focus on conflicts, and data on perceptions of PAs tend to be very locally specific and disproportionately available across regional contexts. As a result, we know surprisingly little about how benefits from PAs are distributed among local populations. Here, we use data from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s social monitoring program to map patterns of perceived benefits from more than 3,500 households around five PAs in Central Africa and Madagascar. We examine where benefits are perceived and what benefits are perceived. We find that in all five cases, the majority (55–84 percent) of households aware of the PAs perceive some form of benefit, but sources and spatial patterns of benefits vary significantly. We draw from these patterns to propose that, at least for forest PAs in lower income regions, surrounding forest cover might be a key factor conditioning the frequency, spatial arrangement, and type of perceived benefits. Research on the social impacts of PAs should attend to this geographic variation. Closer attention to variability in local perceptions of PA benefits can improve conservation practice by informing where different types of programming might be best received and flagging potential for long-standing local inequalities to either be mitigated or perpetuated by interventions associated with PAs. 

Understanding uneven patterns of forest use and tracking changes in the composition of forest residents are both important for sensitive forest policy and management. With increases in migration streams in several tropical forest regions, we need corresponding information about how new immigrants are influencing human-environment relations in sites of ecological significance. We use data from over 6500 household surveys collected by the Wildlife Conservation Society in three sites in Central Africa: the forests surrounding Nouabale-Ndoki National Park and Lac Tele Community Reserve in the Republic of Congo, and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We compare household characteristics, livelihoods, and forest use among recent migrants (arriving within the past decade), longer-established households, and households belonging to an Indigenous group. We find that recent migrants are less likely to engage in forest-harvest-based livelihoods and harvest several types of forest foods and fibers less frequently than other households. Recent migrants also tend to be wealthier, younger, and over-represented in salaried jobs. Meanwhile, Indigenous households are 3 to 16 times more likely to participate in a forest-based livelihood, depending on the site. Other consistent predictors of forest harvest include village, age of the household head, household size, whether a household is female-headed (−), and wealth (−). Many trends hold broadly across all three sites, but there are also site-specific patterns related to differences in remoteness and economic opportunities. We conclude with reflections about what the changing make-up of forest-proximate communities might mean for forest management and governance.