Showing papers in "Biological Conservation in 2018"

TL;DR: The authors argue that Fahrig's conclusions are drawn from a narrow and potentially biased subset of available evidence, which ignore much of the observational, experimental and theoretical evidence for negative effects of altered habitat configuration.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors combined historical national forest cover maps (covering the period 1953-2000) with a recent global annual tree cover loss dataset (2001-2014) to look at six decades of deforestation and forest fragmentation in Madagascar.

TL;DR: A strong quantitative relationship between eDNA concentration and the abundance of spawning sockeye salmon in a small stream in Alaska, USA is reported, suggesting that where a system is well-characterized, it may be possible to predict species' abundance from eDNA surveys, although it is underscore that species- and system-specific variables are likely to limit the generality of any given quantitative model.

TL;DR: A review of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List to examine the conservation status, distributions, threats, and conservation recommendations for all 557 raptor species is presented in this article.

TL;DR: This paper demonstrates how IPMs can be successfully implemented by synthesizing the elements, advantages, and novel insights of this modeling approach, and highlights the latest developments that are explicitly relevant to the ecology and conservation of threatened species.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors systematically reviewed, categorized and geo-referenced information from >1780 publications about threats affecting 121 marine mammal species worldwide between 1991 and 2016, and created risk maps by assigning threat to countries where they had been reported, further refining spatial allocation to specific ocean basins and Longhurst biogeographical provinces and subsequent intersection with mapped species' distributions.

TL;DR: The first global evaluation of countries' progress towards Aichi Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity that is to have at least 17% of the land covered by well-connected PA systems by 2020 is provided, using the Protected Connected (ProtConn) indicator.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors conducted a survey with 143 experts from the environmental and educational sector in Germany, Austria and Switzerland to investigate how these aims are realised in citizen science projects and assess needs and challenges for advancing citizen science and stimulating future initiatives.

TL;DR: The authors of these syntheses have failed to account for several primary drivers of biodiversity change, have relied on data poor time-series that lack baselines needed to detect change, and have unreasonably extrapolated conclusions as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this article, a comprehensive extinction assessment for endemic vascular plants under the full responsibility of a single country is presented, which would provide an important step towards the prioritization and conservation of threatened endemic flora at Italian, European, and Mediterranean level.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated whether different lawn mowing frequencies (1, 2 or 3 weeks) influenced bee abundance and diversity in 16 suburban western Massachusetts yards by increasing lawn floral resources and found that lawns mowed every three weeks had as much as 2.5 times more lawn flowers than the other frequencies.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors performed a systematic review of the literature available on bird collisions with power lines to: (i) assess overall trends in scientific research in recent decades; (ii) review the existing knowledge of species-specific factors (e.g. vision, morphology), sitespecific factors, and power line specific factors known to contribute to increased bird collision risk; and (iii) evaluate existing mitigation measures, as well as their effectiveness in reducing collision risk.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared the effects of continuous cover forestry and conventional rotation forestry on ecosystem services and biodiversity in boreal forests in Finland, and found that continuous cover forests may have a greater potential to produce simultaneously multiple benefits from forests.

TL;DR: A conceptual model that adopts a social-ecological systems approach and integrates social and ecological theory to identify the multiple, nested levels of influence on both human and animal behavior is proposed and applied to work on human-black bear conflicts in Colorado, USA to demonstrate its utility.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use multiple lines of evidence (palaeoecological, pedological, phylogenetic, palaeontological) from Central Eastern Europe and show that various types of grasslands have persisted in this area throughout the postglacial i.e., the past 11,700 years.

TL;DR: A severe constriction of the geographic range of Bombus terricola to high elevation regions in the latter half of the 20th century is found, and its role as pollinator of several alpine plants necessitates immediate conservation action.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors combined airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) with satellite imaging and other geospatial data to map forest aboveground carbon density at 30m (0.09) resolution throughout the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo.

TL;DR: This paper reviewed a total of 65 publications from an initial pool of 516 drawn from biological, ecological, social sciences as well as an emerging interdisciplinary literature in conservation conflict studies from 1993 to 2016.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors advocate for an expanded effort to examine all aspects of fence ecology: the empirical investigation of the interactions between fences, wildlife, ecosystems, and societal needs.

TL;DR: This paper conducted an online survey assessing a wide range of viewpoints about large carnivore conservation among international professionals and found broad consensus regarding intrinsic value of carnivores, reasons carnivores are imperilled, conflict drivers, and importance of proactive solutions, such as adopting preventative livestock husbandry methods or avoiding situations that put people at risk.

TL;DR: This article used list length analysis (LLA) on opportunistic data gathered by eBird to estimate population trends for 574 North American bird species and compare these estimates to population trends based on formal breeding bird surveys (54% of species declining) and population estimates from eBird data controlled using more rigorous correction.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the evolution of Madagascar's protected area system from 2003 to 2016 based on their experience as practitioners involved and discuss the principal challenges for the effectiveness of the expanded system and detail management/policy responses.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on South Africa as a developing country in which traditional medicines are highly valued, but also engages in exports of medicinal plant material to developed countries, and discuss the drivers of increased harvesting rates in South Africa.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors formally demonstrate that the subject of social justice (others) includes many non-human elements of nature and that realizing conservation that is also socially just requires being guided by a non-anthropocentrism principle, whereby no human should infringe on the well-being of others any more than is necessary for a healthy, meaningful life.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used landscape genetic simulations to model 86 different scenarios that incorporated impacts of future land-use change on inferred population connectivity and extinction, linking basic science to land use change policy and planned infrastructure development.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the CITES Trade Database for >16 million shipment records for 28,282 species, from 1975 and 2014, and revealed the scale of legal wildlife trade, shifting trade routes and sources over time and describe testable hypotheses for the causes of these changes.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors modelled the global distribution of seagrass using 43,037 occurrence records and 13 environmental variables within the modelling software MaxEnt at 30'arc sec resolution (c. 1'km at the equator).

TL;DR: The Future of Conservation survey, launched in March 2017, has proposed a framework to help with interpreting the array of ethical stances underpinning the motivations for biological conservation as mentioned in this paper, which is missing in this debate to date.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) as a proxy to assess the spatial and temporal trends in the anthropization at a global scale within and around protected areas and biodiversity hotspots.

TL;DR: DongFeng Yan, Jacob G. Mills, Nicholas J.C. Gellie, Andrew Bissett, Andrew J. Lowe, Martin F. Breed