Academic Articles June 29

Source: Safeguarding the Endangered Mountain Gorilla during COVID-19 Crisis


The latest academic papers on conservation. If you have a paper that you would like to share, please get in contact with us. Click on the title to follow the link to each article. Please note that some of these articles are behind a paywall.

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Bridging compassion and justice in conservation ethics

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila, William S. Lynn
  • “Traditional conservation’ customarily engages in the dismissal of individual non-human animal claims when these conflict with human interests or prevailing ideas of biodiversity. Emerging conservation paradigms, compassionate conservation (CC) and multispecies justice (MJ)…

Landscape-scale forest loss as a catalyst of population and biodiversity change

  • Source: Science
  • Author(s): Gergana N. Daskalova et al.
  • New international research reveals the far-reaching impacts of forest cover loss on global biodiversity.

Climate-driven risks to the climate mitigation potential of forests

  • Source: Science
  • Author(s): William R. L. Anderegg et al.
  • Given the tremendous ability of forests to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, some governments are counting on planted forests as offsets for greenhouse gas emissions – a sort of climate investment. But as with any investment, it’s important to understand the risks.

The Pace of Human-Induced Change in Large Rivers: Stresses, Resilience, and Vulnerability to Extreme Events

  • Source: One Earth
  • Author(s): Jim Best, Stephen E. Darby
  • The livelihoods of millions of people living along the world’s biggest river systems are under threat by a range of stressors caused by the daily economic, societal and political activity of humans – in addition to the long-term effects of climate change…

Matching biodiversity indicators to policy needs

  • Source: Conservation Biology
  • Author(s): Simone L. Stevenson et al.
  • Policy makers rely on biodiversity indicators to assess when, where and how nature is changing. Some indicators, however, respond more quickly to pressures than others, measuring short‐term and potentially reversible change, while others capture permanent loss of biodiversity.

Using decision science to evaluate global biodiversity indices

  • Source: Conservation Biology
  • Author(s): Kate E. Watermeyer et al.
  • Global biodiversity indices are used to measure environmental change and progress towards conservation goals, yet their fitness for purpose is poorly understood. Few indices have been evaluated comprehensively for their capacity to detect trends of interest, such as declines in threatened species…

From Coast to Coast, the Winding Road of a Nested Governance and Management Approach: Reconciling Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development

  • Source: Evolution of Marine Coastal Ecosystems under the Pressure of Global Changes
  • Author(s): Yves Henocque
  • The urgency of addressing coastal issues is now considerably greater than it was a decade ago. Moreover, the Oceans Day at COP21 (Paris, 4 December 2015) recognized ‘the central role of the oceans in regulating climate, and the fact that the ocean will not be able to perform these functions in the future if global warming continues unabated’.

What Drives the Erasure of Protected Areas? Evidence from across the Brazilian Amazon

  • Source: Ecological Economics
  • Author(s): Derya Keles, Philippe Delacote, Alexander Pfaff, Siyu Qin, Michael B. Mascia
  • Protected areas (PAs) are a widely used strategy for conserving forests and ecosystem services. When PAs succeed in deterring economic activities that degrade forests, the impacts include more forest yet less economic gain.

Protected-area planning in the Brazilian Amazon should prioritize additionality and permanence, not leakage mitigation

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Carley Fuller, Stefania Ondei, Barry W. Brook, Jessie C. Buettel
  • The establishment of protected areas (PAs) where human land uses are restricted, especially in Amazonian forests, is an important bulwark against global biodiversity collapse and climate change. Here we assess if restriction of land clearing within Amazonian PAs…

COVID-19 lockdown allows researchers to quantify the effects of human activity on wildlife

  • Source: Nature Ecology & Evolution
  • Author(s): Chrisitan Rutz et al.
  • Reduced human mobility during the pandemic will reveal critical aspects of our impact on animals, providing important guidance on how best to share space on this crowded planet.

Impacts of Chilean forest subsidies on forest cover, carbon and biodiversity

  • Source: Nature Sustainability
  • Author(s): Robert Heilmayr, Cristian Echeverría, Eric F. Lambin
  • After forest loss, public subsidies often encourage reforestation with tree plantations. This modelling study finds that between 1986 and 2011, Chile’s forest subsidies probably reduced biodiversity without increasing carbon stored in above ground plant material.

Integrating Climate, Biodiversity, and Sustainable Land Use Strategies: Innovations from China

  • Source: National Science Review
  • Author(s): Guido Schmidt-Traub et al.
  • Ahead of landmark biodiversity and climate conferences in 2021, China’s policy innovations in land-use planning and the Ecological Conservation Redline offer lessons for other countries in developing integrated strategies on climate, biodiversity, and desertification. 

Keeping pace with climate change in global terrestrial protected areas

  • Source: Science Advances
  • Author(s): Paul R. Elsen, William B. Monahan, Eric R. Dougherty, Adina M. Merenlender
  • Protected areas (PAs) are essential to biodiversity conservation, but their static boundaries may undermine their potential for protecting species under climate change. We assessed how the climatic conditions within global terrestrial PAs may change over time. By 2070, protection is expected to decline…

The challenge of biased evidence in conservation

  • Source: Conservation Biology
  • Author(s): Alec P. Christie et al.
  • Severe taxonomic and geographic bias in the literature that tests the effectiveness of conservation actions threatens evidence‐based conservation efforts.

A first assessment of the impact of the extreme 2018 summer drought on Central European forests

  • Source: Basic and Applied Ecology
  • Author(s): Bernhard Schuldt et al.
  • No year has been as hot and dry as 2018 since climate records began. Central European forests showed severe signs of drought stress. Mortality of trees triggered in 2018 will continue for several years.

The role of traditional belief systems in conserving biological diversity in the Eastern Himalaya Eco-region of India

  • Source: Human Dimensions of Wildlife
  • Author(s): M. Janaki, Rohan Pandit, Rishi K. Sharma
  • Many areas of biodiversity rich regions in South Asia are governed by local communities through norms and practices enforced by traditional community institutions. The role of traditional belief systems in wildlife conservation in such regions continues to be debated in contemporary conservation discourse.

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