Academic Articles September 29

Source: Rewilding: conservationists want to let elephants loose in Europe – here’s what could happen


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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Refocusing multiple stressor research around the targets and scales of ecological impacts

  • Source: Nature Ecology & Evolution
  • Author(s): Benno I. Simmons et al.
  • Ecological communities face a variety of environmental and anthropogenic stressors acting simultaneously. Stressor impacts can combine additively or can interact, causing synergistic or antagonistic effects. Our knowledge of when and how interactions arise is limited…

Tragic trade‐offs accompany carnivore coexistence in the modern world

  • Source: Conservation Letters
  • Author(s): Jeremy T. Bruskotter et al.
  • Two vital policy aims—biodiversity conservation and food production—are increasingly in conflict. Efforts to evaluate trade-offs between agriculture and conservation have shaped scholarly discourse around two broad strategies to agricultural production that seek to either “share” land with…

Anthropogenic transitions from forested to human-dominated landscapes in southern Macaronesia 

  • Source: PNAS
  • Author(s): Alvaro Castilla-Beltrán et al.
  • Assessing the ecological consequences of human settlement can help preserve island forests and their ecosystem services, but to understand the legacy of these interactions requires datasets that span centuries. We used paleoecological data (e.g. fossil pollen) to show that prehuman Holocene…

Bright Spots of Carbon Storage in Temperate Forests

  • Source: Journal of Applied Ecology
  • Author(s): Erin TH Crockett et al.
  • Mitigating climate change is an urgent challenge for society. Increasing carbon storage in forests, which cover more than 30% of the global land surface, presents a key opportunity to meet this challenge. Although the biophysical and ecological factors that affect carbon storage have…

Designing a Path for the Sustainable Development of Key Ecological Function Zones: A Case Study of Southwest China

  • Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
  • Author(s): Meiying Sun et al.
  • The Chinese government has designated areas with critically important ecosystems as key ecological function zones (KEFZs) under restrictive development regimes to maintain and improve their supplies of ecological products and services. A strategy of sustainable development is required for KEFZs…

Getting the ‘Most Out of the Hotspot’ For Practical Conservation of Groundwater Biodiversity

  • Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
  • Author(s): Mattia Iannella et al.
  • Conservation planning aimed at halting biodiversity loss has seldom focused on groundwater environments due to the lack of suitable management tools and data. Using harpacticoid crustaceans as a test case, we explore the potential of implementing an approach based on Conservation-Relevant Hotspots…

A Global Invader’s Niche Dynamics with Intercontinental Introduction, Novel Habitats, and Climate Change

  • Source: Science of the Total EnGlobal Ecology and Conservation
  • Author(s): Vasiliy T. Lakoba et al.
  • Species niches have been defined in different ways, variably encompassing abiotic and biotic parameters limiting an organism’s spatial distribution. Climate is often the primary component of the abiotic (fundamental) niche, especially among terrestrial plants. In invasion biology, there is an ongoing debate…

Scientists’ Warning – The Outstanding Biodiversity of Islands is in Peril

  • Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
  • Author(s):  José María Fernández-Palacios et al.
  • Despite islands contributing only 6.7% of land surface area, they harbor ~20% of the Earth’s biodiversity, but unfortunately also ~50% of the threatened species and 75% of the known extinctions since the European expansion around the globe. Due to their geological and geographic history…

Addressing ‘biodiversity naivety’ through project-based learning using iNaturalist

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation 
  • Author(s): K. Denise Kendall Niemiller et al.
  • Conservation and education outreach programs often highlight charismatic species or species of economic or ecological importance. However, without appreciable connections to nature, the foundation necessary to empathize with these programs is insufficient…

Assessing the effectiveness of protected areas against habitat fragmentation and loss: a long-term multi-scalar analysis in a mediterranean region

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): Jesus Santiago Ramos et al.
  • Landscape fragmentation and human-induced land-cover changes are two of the main current threats to nature conservation. To face such challenges, the development of networks of Protected Areas (PAs) has become a central element of nature conservation policies. The main objective of this study is to…

A heuristic tool to assess regional impacts of renewable energy infrastructure on conservation areas

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Matthew J. Troia et al.
  • Wind and hydropower are important renewable components of national energy portfolios, but their infrastructure negatively affects biodiversity. Regional development requires identification of scenarios that minimize the cumulative impacts of multiple facilities. We introduce the cumulative impact plot (CIP) to quantify…

Time at risk: Individual spatial behaviour drives effectiveness of marine protected areas and fitness

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): David Villegas-Ríos et al.
  • The effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) depends on the mobility of the populations that are the target of protection, with sedentary species likely to spend more time under protection even within small MPAs. However, little is understood about how individual variation in mobility may influence the risk of crossing…

Evolution of stakeholders’ behavioral strategies in the ecological compensation mechanism for poverty alleviation

  • Source: Resources, Conservation and Recycling
  • Author(s): Fang Ju et al.
  • Because poverty and natural resource conservation are multi-dimensional, complex interactive processes, ecological compensation (EC) mechanism, which is global environmental resource management policy instruments, have become important tools for poverty alleviation…

Envisioning a resilient future for biodiversity conservation in the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic

  • Source: People and Nature
  • Author(s): Ruth H. Thurstan et al.
  • The pandemic has highlighted the inherent vulnerabilities in the social and economic models upon which many conservation efforts are based. In so doing, it presents an opportunity to reconsider the status quo for conservation, and promotes behaviours and actions that are resilient to future perturbation…

Urban Park Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Are Socially Vulnerable Communities Disproportionately Impacted?

  • Source: Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
  • Author(s): Lincoln R. Larson et al.
  • Research tracking outdoor recreation patterns during the pandemic has yielded inconsistent results, and few studies have explored the impacts of COVID-19 on park use across diverse neighborhoods. We used a mixed methods approach to examine changes in park use patterns in cities during the COVID-19 pandemic…

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