Toward integrated analysis of human impacts on forest biodiversity: lessons from Latin America.
Adrian C. Newton,Luis Cayuela,Cristian Echeverría,Juan J. Armesto,Rafael F. del Castillo,Duncan Golicher,Davide Geneletti,Mario González-Espinosa,Andreas Huth,Fabiola López-Barrera,Lucio R. Malizia,Robert H. Manson,Andrea C. Premoli,Neptalí Ramírez-Marcial,José María Rey Benayas,Nadja Rüger,Cecilia Smith-Ramírez,Guadalupe Williams-Linera +17 more
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In this paper, the authors summarize the experience gained by an international collaborative research effort spanning more than a decade, focusing on the tropical montane forests of Mexico and the temperate rain forests of southern South America, both of which are global conservation priorities.Abstract:
Although sustainable forest management (SFM) has been widely adopted as a policy and management goal, high rates of forest loss and degradation are still occurring in many areas. Human activities such as logging, livestock husbandry, crop cultivation, infrastructural development, and use of fire are causing widespread loss of biodiversity, restricting progress toward SFM. In such situations, there is an urgent need for tools that can provide an integrated assessment of human impacts on forest biodiversity and that can support decision making related to forest use. This paper summarizes the experience gained by an international collaborative research effort spanning more than a decade, focusing on the tropical montane forests of Mexico and the temperate rain forests of southern South America, both of which are global conservation priorities. The lessons learned from this research are identified, specifically in relation to developing an integrated modeling framework for achieving SFM. Experience has highlighted a number of challenges that need to be overcome in such areas, including the lack of information regarding ecological processes and species characteristics and a lack of forest inventory data, which hinders model parameterization. Quantitative models are poorly developed for some ecological phenomena, such as edge effects and genetic diversity, limiting model integration. Establishment of participatory approaches to forest management is difficult, as a supportive institutional and policy environment is often lacking. However, experience to date suggests that the modeling toolkit approach suggested by Sturvetant et al. (2008) could be of value in such areas. Suggestions are made regarding desirable elements of such a toolkit to support participatory-research approaches in domains characterized by high uncertainty, including Bayesian Belief Networks, spatial multi-criteria analysis, and scenario planning.read more
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Communities and change in the anthropocene: understanding social-ecological vulnerability and planning adaptations to multiple interacting exposures
TL;DR: In this article, a conceptual framework for integrating multiple exposures into vulnerability analysis and adaptation planning is presented, and a comprehensive typology of drivers and exposures experienced by coastal communities is developed.
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Translating Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interdependencies into Policy Advice
TL;DR: A roadmap for how research on interdependencies can meaningfully provide orientation for policy action is proposed, with a particular focus on methodological weaknesses, practical applicability to specific contexts, and utility for the development of policy strategies for coherent SDG planning and implementation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Remote sensing and the future of landscape ecology
Adrian C. Newton,Ross A. Hill,Cristian Echeverría,Duncan Golicher,José María Rey Benayas,Luis Cayuela,Shelley A. Hinsley +6 more
TL;DR: In a survey of 438 research papers published in the journal Landscape Ecology for the years 2004-2008, only 36% explicitly mentioned remote sensing as mentioned in this paper. But the majority of these studies focused on the analysis of spatial patterns and their relationship to ecological processes.
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Strategic foresight: how planning for the unpredictable can improve environmental decision-making.
Carly N. Cook,Carly N. Cook,Sohail Inayatullah,Mark A. Burgman,William J. Sutherland,Brendan A. Wintle +5 more
TL;DR: This work highlights several ways foresight could play a more significant role in environmental decisions by: monitoring existing problems, highlighting emerging threats, identifying promising new opportunities, testing the resilience of policies, and defining a research agenda.
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Social-ecological traps and transformations in dryland agro-ecosystems: Using water system innovations to change the trajectory of development
TL;DR: In this paper, a social-ecological resilience approach was used to investigate how this type of water management technology would influence agro-ecosystem dynamics, using a catchment in northeastern Tanzania as an example.
References
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Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities
Norman Myers,Russell A. Mittermeier,Cristina G. Mittermeier,Gustavo A. B. da Fonseca,Jennifer Kent +4 more
TL;DR: A ‘silver bullet’ strategy on the part of conservation planners, focusing on ‘biodiversity hotspots’ where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat, is proposed.
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Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference
TL;DR: Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems as mentioned in this paper is a complete and accessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty, and provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief.
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Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions
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Predictive habitat distribution models in ecology
TL;DR: A review of predictive habitat distribution modeling is presented, which shows that a wide array of models has been developed to cover aspects as diverse as biogeography, conservation biology, climate change research, and habitat or species management.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology: The Robert H. MacArthur Award Lecture
TL;DR: The second volume in a series on terrestrial and marine comparisons focusing on the temporal complement of the earlier spatial analysis of patchiness and pattern was published by Levin et al..
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