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Ecological restoration programs often attempt to maintain or enhance ecosystem services (ES), but fine-scale maps of multiple ES are rarely available to support prioritization among potential projects. Here we use agency reports, citizen science, and social media as data sources to quantify the spatial distribution of five recreational elements of cultural ES (CES) - sport fishing, recreational boating, birding, beach use, and park visitation - across North America's Laurentian Great Lakes, where current restoration investments exceed US$1.5 billion. These recreational CES are widely yet unevenly distributed, and spatial correlations among all except park visitation indicate that many locations support multiple CES benefits. Collectively, these five service metrics correlate with tourism gross domestic product, indicating that local economies benefit from ecosystem conditions that support CES. However, locations of high recreational CES delivery are often severely affected by environmental stressors, suggesting that either ecosystem condition or human enjoyment of these recreational CES is resilient even to substantial levels of stress. Our analyses show that spatial assessments of recreational CES are an informative complement to ecosystem stress assessments for guiding large-scale restoration efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key challenge in aquatic restoration efforts is documenting locations where ecological connectivity is disrupted in water bodies that are dammed or crossed by roads (road crossings). To prioritize actions aimed at restoring connectivity, we argue that there is a need for systematic inventories of these potential barriers at regional and national scales. Here, we address this limitation for the North American Great Lakes basin by compiling the best available spatial data on the locations of dams and road crossings. Our spatial database documents 38 times as many road crossings as dams in the Great Lakes basin, and case studies indicate that, on average, only 36% of road crossings in the area are fully passable to fish. It is therefore essential that decision makers account for both road crossings and dams when attempting to restore aquatic ecosystem connectivity. Given that road crossing structures are commonly upgraded as part of road maintenance, many opportunities exist to restore connections within aquatic ecosystems at minimal added cost by ensuring upgrade designs permit water flow and the passage of fish and other organisms. Our findings highlight the necessity for improved dam and road crossing inventories that traverse political boundaries to facilitate the restoration of aquatic ecosystem connectivity from local to global scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing demand for alternative energy sources has contributed to increased biofuel production, but the effects on biodiversity of land-use change to biofuel crops remain unclear. Using a meta-analysis for crops being used or considered in the US, we find that vertebrate diversity and abundance are generally lower in biofuel crop habitats relative to the non-crop habitats that these crops may replace. Diversity effects are greater for corn than for pine and poplar, and birds of conservation concern experience greater negative effects from corn than species of less concern. Yet conversion of row-crop fields to grasslands dedicated to biofuels could increase local diversity and abundance of birds. To minimize impacts of biofuel crops on biodiversity, we recommend management practices that reduce chemical inputs, increase heterogeneity within fields, and delay harvests until bird breeding has ceased. We encourage research that will move us toward a sustainable biofuels economy, including the use of native plants, development of robust environmental criteria for evaluating biofuel crops, and integrated cost-benefit analysis of potential land-use change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]