Environmental Conservation最新文献

Mediterranean climate regions (hereafter ‘Med-regions’) cover small areas globally but harbour a wide diversity of ecosystems that are under serious threat due to current global climate change. Despite intensive research and conservation efforts in freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems to prevent the consequences of habitat fragmentation, overfishing and changes in fire regimes and heatwaves, there is still no global consensus on how to conserve and manage Med-region ecosystems. We define integrative research as an interdisciplinary approach with common concepts and metrics enabling a better understanding of the general mechanisms underlying ecosystems. Building upon existing literature that promotes integrative research in Med-region ecosystems, we advocate for a more integrative approach that takes into consideration cross-ecosystem generalities and common resilience mechanisms. We propose examples of potential studies for implementing such integrative research, including: (1) integrative research across ecosystems; (2) integrative research across Med-regions; and (3) integrative research across political boundaries. We then offer recommendations for promoting integrative studies, including leveraging biodiversity data, establishing working groups in research syntheses and testing theoretical frameworks. Promoting integrative research in Med-regions would enable and facilitate the roadmap towards a better understanding of Med-region ecosystems’ responses to natural and anthropogenic disturbances and the identification of ecological baselines. We seek to foster future research synergies to identify tipping points across ecosystems and aid in determining desired future conditions in Med-regions globally.

Guidelines for managers of protected areas are an important component of conservation policies, on a par with large-scale frameworks and vehicles for conservation funding. In line with the recent literature proposing evaluations of conservation actions or political strategies to improve them, here we use an innovative, hybrid methodology, based both on an interpretative approach anchored in social sciences and a quantitative literature review, to identify available frameworks for evaluating conservation guidelines. The main result of this analysis is that the relevant literature in conservation is sparse and heterogeneous, but a relevant encompassing framework is provided by the literature in decision sciences based on the policy analytics framework. This evaluation framework consists of three criteria: scientific credibility, operationality and legitimacy. We then implement a pilot application by evaluating guidelines currently used in France to support all of the actors involved in protected areas management. The study concludes that these guidelines are plagued by significant weaknesses that could be overcome by implementing relevant participatory processes.

Programmes focused on buffer zones (BZs) and park revenue-sharing (PRS) are aimed at sharing protected area (PA) benefits with local communities to meet their development needs and, in turn, improve the PA–people relationship. However, whether and how these programmes improve public attitudes towards PAs is little understood. We assessed how residents perceive the benefit and burdens of Nepal’s BZ programme, which shares up to 50% of PA revenue with communities, and how this process relates to their perceptions of change in the PA–people relationship since the BZ programme was implemented. Survey results from 2122 households in the BZs of six PAs showed that residents’ perceptions of PA–people relationships had improved since the BZ programme’s implementation. Furthermore, the perceived trend in the PA–people relationship was positively related to the perception of benefits and satisfaction with coordination between the PA and local government; it was negatively related to perceived burdens of BZ-related laws in rural development, history of damage/loss from wildlife and misunderstandings of the purpose behind BZ funds being given to local communities. These findings provide valuable insights for PA managers in Nepal and worldwide in designing new or improving existing mechanisms of benefit-sharing with local people and to improve PA–people relationships.

Understanding how selective logging affects biodiversity is crucial to planning cost-effective conservation strategies in tropical forests, yet there is limited understanding of its impacts on fauna functional diversity in the tropical Americas. We assessed how selective logging intensification and time since logging influence multiple metrics of fauna functional integrity in the Brazilian Amazon by collecting bird and dung beetle data within 48 logging management units that had experienced varying exploitation intensities between 1.5–2.0 and 5.0–6.0 years before the faunal surveys. We investigated assemblage responses and used functional attributes to assess changes in functional diversity, specialization, originality and species rarity. Using point counts and pitfall traps, we collected 5081 records of 182 bird species and 7892 dung beetles from 45 species. Logging intensification led to significant declines in most dung beetle responses and bird body mass, whereas time since logging was a key driver of dung beetle and bird functional and taxonomic diversity. Our study presents novel empirical evidence of how logging intensification effects vary across taxa, ecological metrics and time since logging, which is key to informing forest conservation and further investigating environmental degradation impacts on tropical biodiversity.