Environmental Management最新文献

Prescribed burning is a key tool in land management globally used to reduce wildfire risks and achieve ecological, cultural and resource management objectives across both natural and human systems. Despite its widespread application, research on prescribed burning is marked by significant gaps. Subsequently, we posed the following research questions: (1) What are the key research topics that define international, peer-reviewed literature on prescribed burning? (2) What are the temporal and spatial trends of these topics? (3) What are the relationships between the national income of a given country and the trends in research topics? And, (4) What are the most salient knowledge gaps in peer-reviewed prescribed burning research, and how can they be addressed? We used structural topic modelling and geoparsing to conduct a detailed text analysis of 7878 peer-reviewed articles on prescribed burning. We revealed that research on prescribed burning is dominated by studies from high-income countries, particularly the United States. This highlights a geographical bias that may skew global understanding and application of prescribed burning practices. Our topic modelling revealed the most prevalent topics to be Fire Regimes and Landscape Biodiversity Management, whilst topics such as Air Pollution & Health, and Wildfire Risk Management gained prominence in recent years. Our analysis highlighted a disconnect between forestry-related research and broader landscape management topics. This finding emphasises the need for more interdisciplinary research, and research on the use and effects of prescribed burning in diverse ecosystems and underrepresented regions, particularly in the context of climate change.

The extent and timescale of climate change impacts remain uncertain, including global temperature increase, sea level rise, and more frequent and intense extreme events. Uncertainties are compounded by cascading effects. Nevertheless, decision-makers must take action. Adaptation pathways, an approach for developing dynamic adaptive policymaking, are widely considered suitable for planning urban or regional climate change adaptation, but often lack integration of measures for disaster risk management. This article emphasizes the need to strengthen Adaptation Pathways by bringing together explicitly slow-onset impacts and sudden climate disasters within the framework of Resilience Pathways. It explores key features of Adaptation Pathways-such as thresholds, performance assessments, and visual tools-to enhance their capacity to address extreme events and foster the integration of Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management.

Street and park trees often endure harsher conditions, including increased temperatures and drier soil and air, than those found in urban or natural forests. These conditions can lead to shorter lifespans and a greater vulnerability to dieback. This literature review aimed to identify confirmed causes of street and park tree dieback in urban areas from around the world. Peer-reviewed case studies related to urban tree decline were scanned for the words "urban", "city", "cities", "tree*", "decline", "dieback", "mortality", and "survival". From an initial pool of 1281 papers on Web of Science and 1489 on Scopus, 65 original peer-reviewed research papers were selected for detailed analysis. Out of all species reported to decline, 46 were native, while non-natives were represented by 35 species. The most commonly affected trees were Platanus, Fraxinus, Acer, and Ficus. Most studies were conducted in Mediterranean, humid subtropical, and humid continental climates, with the greatest representation from the United States, followed by Australia, Brazil, Iran, Italy, and Russia. Many authors focused on either biotic or abiotic causes of dieback; some explored both, and some also discussed underlying environmental and urban stresses as potential predisposing factors. The majority (81% of the papers) concluded that a decline was caused by either an arthropod or a microorganism. Overall, it was suggested that changing management strategies to improve water availability and soil health might help with tree resilience. Additionally, regular monitoring and research, along with improving tree species selection and implementing biological and chemical control methods, can help prevent or slow down tree decline. Increasing awareness and adopting preventative approaches could help to extend the lifespan of street and park trees in urban environments and mitigate some of the biological threats, especially considering the challenges we may be facing due to the changing climate.

In the face of unabated urban expansion, understanding the intrinsic characteristics of landscape structure is pertinent to preserving ecological diversity and managing the supply of ecosystem services. This study integrates machine-learning-based geospatial and landscape ecological techniques to assess the dynamics of landscape structure in cities of the rainforest (Akure and Owerri) and Guinea savanna (Makurdi and Minna) ecological regions of Nigeria between 1986 and 2022. Supervised classification using the random forest (RF) machine-learning classifier was performed on Landsat images on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, and landscape metrics were calculated with FRAGSTATS to assess landscape composition, configuration, and connectivity. The results reveal a consistent pattern of urban expansion in all four cities at varying intensities. The proportion of the built-up class exhibited positive correlations with the largest patch index (r = 0.86, p < 0.05) and aggregation (r = 0.39, p < 0.05), indicating a concurrent rise in landscape densification as urban expansion persists. For the agricultural and vegetation landscapes, landscape proportion correlates negatively with fragmentation (r = -0.88, p < 0.05) and connectivity (r = -0.77, p < 0.05), but positively with aggregation (r = 0.89, p < 0.05). The increased patch density indicates a rising magnitude of landscape fragmentation and heterogeneity over time with varying implications for ecosystem functioning. These findings demonstrate the complex interplay between urbanisation and ecological processes within and across different ecoregions, highlighting the need for targeted ecological management, sustainable urban planning, and regionally informed landscape conservation strategies.

The paradigm of Adaptive Planning and Management provides several methodological approaches for designing robust adaptive plans to cope with uncertain future changes, namely the Adaptation Pathways' method (APs). These approaches, particularly those containing APs, have captured increasing interest in the field of coastal climate adaptation as useful for guiding its planning and management. While these approaches have been tested in several research cases, there are still few real cases of application into coastal spatial planning instruments. Furthermore, the lack of implementation of coastal adaptation actions in urbanized coasts worldwide, so-called adaptation gaps, points to the need of investigating to what extent these Adaptive Planning approaches containing APs are being applied in coastal plans. A deeper analysis of cases of application of these approaches in coastal plans is required to understand how adaptive plans are being crafted. This article focusses on the two major cases of application of APs-based Adaptive Planning and Management approaches into planning and management instruments - the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan and the Delta Programme - to identify what elements were essential to design an adaptive plan and operationalize an Adaptive Planning and Management approach, including ingredients that the plan had to meet to be robust and adaptive. Our results suggest that at least five elements are required to craft and deliver a robust adaptive plan and accomplish a real Adaptive Planning and Management.

The adoption of sustainable land management practices (SLMPs) is crucial to improve soil health, and farm yield, and potentially limit the degradation of agricultural and ecological systems. However, farmers still encounter diverse challenges when trying to implement SLMPs. Research on the potential mitigation strategies to address the complex challenges to the adoption of SLMPs in the developing countries context is limited. Accordingly, this study investigates the constraints to adopting SLMPs using household survey data collected from 480 sampled farmers in erosion-prone areas of southeast Nigeria. Also, through focus groups and interviews with key stakeholders in the land sector, the study investigates the potential mitigation strategies to address the constraints. Descriptive statistics were used to explore the characteristics of the farmers, while Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to analyse the constraints to the adoption of SLMPs. The qualitative data collected were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The PCA result identified economic/financial factors as the principal constraint to the adoption of SLMPs. Other barriers to the adoption of SLMPs in the study area include constraints related to the characteristics of the SLMPs, institutional constraints and constraints related to land property rights. Based on the stakeholders' perspectives, financial and economic support, improved R&D, knowledge exchange and advisory system, policy and regulatory solutions, and multi-stakeholder engagement are important strategies to tackle the constraints to the adoption of SLMPs. Insights from this study could help practitioners, conservation planners and policymakers design more targeted and effective interventions to promote the widespread adoption of SLMPs.

This study investigates urban river policies, emphasizing the gaps in understanding the interactions between riverine communities and governance systems. Using empirical and theoretical methods, the research applies multivariate analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to data from a representative sample of 1740 residents of Curitiba. The study maintains a 95% confidence level with a ±2.4% margin of error. Latent social, governmental, responsive, and environmental engagement variables are analyzed, highlighting the complexity of urban policies and the necessity for adaptable strategies. The findings suggest that greater social and governmental engagement correlates with more favorable perceptions of river quality. In contrast, responsive engagement exhibits a weaker relationship, while environmental engagement underscores ongoing challenges. The research introduces a theoretical framework supported by an analytical model, advocating for urban policies that account for contextual specificities and encourage collaborative engagement between governments and communities. The study concludes that implementing comprehensive strategies within this integrated framework is crucial for sustaining and enhancing urban river ecosystems, as demonstrated by the case of the Belém River in Curitiba.

Citizen science has been increasingly utilized for monitoring resource conditions and visitor use in protected areas. However, the quality of data provided by citizen scientists remains a major concern that hinders wider applications in protected area management. We evaluated a prototype, citizen science-based trail assessment and monitoring program in Hong Kong using an integrated evaluative approach with a specific focus on the congruence of data collected by trained volunteers and managers. Datasets were evaluated in two ways. First, we compared differences in average values and standard deviations for measured trail indicators across all 30 sampling points. Second, we explored how result patterns characterized by the coefficients of variation and statistical significance differed for data collected by managers and volunteers at each sampling point or trail feature. Results revealed that the two trail assessment methods (one by volunteers, the other by managers) yielded incongruent data for some variables (e.g., trail width and maximum incision depth), but not others (e.g., Trail problems of erosions and multiple trail treads). Results of group interviews also revealed some possible factors that may have led to incongruent results, such as lack of experience and different perceptions between volunteers and managers in recognizing trail problems. While this study shows the potential value of citizen science-based monitoring programs, further steps are recommended to enhance the quality and usability of citizen science data to support effective trail monitoring and management.

The great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) is a generalist predator that inhabits wide-ranging territories that are relatively stable throughout the year. These owls are also involved in a variety of human-owl conflicts, including killing of domestic poultry, predating colonially nesting seabirds and shorebirds, and pose a hazard to safe aircraft operations. Managing these conflict situations presents unique challenges as great horned owls are nocturnally active and occupy a wide range of habitats. We evaluated information about great horned owl collisions with civilian aircraft and found this is a contemporary and growing aviation safety issue. We conducted a study to determine whether a biological (e.g., age of the bird) and logistical factors (e.g., month and translocation distance) influenced the return rate of great horned owls following a mitigation translocation from 13 civil airports and three military airfields during 2013-2023. Great horned owls (n = 1,020) were live-captured, banded, and translocated various distances from the airfields which were then monitored for returning owls. We developed a set of candidate binomial-distributed generalized linear models [involving all possible subsets of three factors (age, month, and distance translocated) as well as interactions]. The return rate of translocated great horned owls was very low (i.e., 2.6%) and we found no evidence that these biological and logistical factors influenced great horned owl homing behavior. Management programs that use release sites 40 km from the conflict location and translocate individual owls only once would increase program efficacy by minimizing homing behavior and decreasing implementation costs.