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Biodiversity offsetting involves trying to compensate for the damage to species and habitats caused by development such as expanding cities, constructing mines and building dams, by creating an 'ecologically equivalent' [...]

There is growing interest in using ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) to maintain or restore ecosystem services to increase human resilience to climate change. However, to date, the focus on EbA has been on conceptualising the approach and encouraging its use, rather than understanding EbA in practice. We review the EbA literature to synthesise where, why and how marine and coastal EbA projects have been implemented and examine how EbA has been integrated with marine spatial planning. We focus specifically on EbA projects in Asia and Oceania, where climate variability and dependence on marine and coastal ecosystems is high. Most projects were found in the grey literature, implemented in developing countries, and targeted extreme events and sea level rise. Mangroves, particularly mangrove restoration, was the most common ecosystem used, followed by coral reefs. EbA across ecosystems commonly targeted capacity building and livelihood enhancement, and maintenance of wildlife, alongside shoreline protection for mangroves and food security for coral reefs. Integrated EbA and marine spatial planning projects were participatory, implemented at local–regional scales, displayed adaptive management, and community-based or shared governance. Our research helps to build an understanding of EbA in practice and a knowledge base to assist coastal communities in adapting to climate change. We reviewed marine and coastal ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) termed projects across Asia and Oceania. Our aim was to clarify where, why and how EbA has been implemented and examine the degree to which EbA has been integrated with marine spatial planning (MSP). We found that EbA was widely used in developing countries, largely in mangroves and commonly implemented to target ecosystem services that help people adapt to extreme events and sea level rise. We also identify and discuss common features in EbA projects that incorporate best practice MSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth is often in conflict with environmental goals. Biodiversity offsetting attempts to resolve this conflict by requiring industries to compensate for the biodiversity loss they cause, by generating an equivalent biodiversity gain elsewhere. Offsets for environmental impacts are increasingly being seen as a way to help meet preexisting conservation targets, such as those relating to the establishment and management of protected areas. We examine how using offsets to meet a state or organization's genuine commitments, which are not contingent on the offsets, results in no additional conservation benefit. In this case, either the offset or the preexisting commitment is invalid. For example, the use of offsets to meet commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity requires an admission that those commitments would otherwise not be met. This interaction between international agreements around protected areas and offset policy can generate perverse incentives, which must be carefully managed to avoid poor conservation outcomes. We propose separate accounting for conservation gains generated using offsets, and that future conservation agreements and targets should explicitly separate commitments met using offset gains from those which are not reliant on equivalent losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Heritage Convention could make a bigger and more systematic contribution to global wilderness conservation by: (1) ensuring the World Heritage List includes full coverage of Earth's wilderness areas with outstanding universal value and (2) more effectively protecting the ecological integrity of existing World Heritage sites. Here, we assess current coverage of global-scale wilderness areas within natural World Heritage sites and identify broad gaps where new wilderness sites should be identified for inclusion in the World Heritage List. We also consider how existing mechanisms under the Convention can improve the ecological integrity of existing sites by expanding or buffering them, and by promoting connectivity between World Heritage sites, between World Heritage sites and other protected areas, or both. We suggest that the Convention should consider a new mechanism called a 'World Heritage Wilderness Complex' to facilitate a wilderness approach. Finally, we map three landscapes and one seascape to illustrate how World Heritage Wilderness Complexes might be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effectiveness of revegetation in providing habitat for fauna is expected to be determined both by within-site factors and attributes of the landscape in which a revegetation site occurs. Most studies of fauna in revegetation have been conducted in landscapes that have been extensively cleared, modified or fragmented, and in Australia, predominantly in the southern temperate zone. We investigated how within-site vegetation attributes and landscape context attributes were related to bird species richness and composition in a chronosequence of post-mining rehabilitation sites within an otherwise intact landscape in tropical northern Australia. Our working hypothesis was that bird species richness in rehabilitating sites would be positively related to site vegetation structure and landscape context including (1) proximity to woodland and (2) the proportion of woodland within a 500-m buffer of rehabilitation sites. Within each of 67 sites, we sampled vegetation once and surveyed for birds eight times over 16 months. Landscape context variables were calculated using GIS. There were large differences between bird assemblages of woodland and rehabilitation sites and between age classes of rehabilitation. Bird assemblages were strongly related to site vegetation attributes across all rehabilitation sites. Proximity to woodland was only related to bird assemblages in rehabilitation sites older than 4 years old. We conclude that the relative importance of landscape context and site variables at any point in time will be a function of how closely vegetation within the revegetation site matches the habitat resource requirements of individual species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tools for exploring and communicating the impact of uncertainty on spatial prediction are urgently needed, particularly when projecting species distributions to future conditions., We provide a tool for simulating uncertainty, focusing on uncertainty due to data quality. We illustrate the use of the tool using a Tasmanian endemic species as a case study. Our simulations provide probabilistic, spatially explicit illustrations of the impact of uncertainty on model projections. We also illustrate differences in model projections using six different global climate models and two contrasting emissions scenarios., Our case study results illustrate how different sources of uncertainty have different impacts on model output and how the geographic distribution of uncertainty can vary., Synthesis and applications: We provide a conceptual framework for understanding sources of uncertainty based on a review of potential sources of uncertainty in species distribution modelling; a tool for simulating uncertainty in species distribution models; and protocols for dealing with uncertainty due to climate models and emissions scenarios. Our tool provides a step forward in understanding and communicating the impacts of uncertainty on species distribution models under future climates which will be particularly helpful for informing discussions between researchers, policy makers, and conservation practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon stock change due to forest management and disturbance must be accounted for in UNFCCC national inventory reports and for signatories to the Kyoto Protocol. Impacts of disturbance on greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories are important for many countries with large forest estates prone to wildfires. Our objective was to measure changes in carbon stocks due to short-term combustion and to simulate longer-term carbon stock dynamics resulting from redistribution among biomass components following wildfire. We studied the impacts of a wildfire in 2009 that burnt temperate forest of tall, wet eucalypts in south-eastern Australia. Biomass combusted ranged from 40 to 58 tC ha−1, which represented 6–7% and 9–14% in low- and high-severity fire, respectively, of the pre-fire total biomass carbon stock. Pre-fire total stock ranged from 400 to 1040 tC ha−1 depending on forest age and disturbance history. An estimated 3.9 TgC was emitted from the 2009 fire within the forest region, representing 8.5% of total biomass carbon stock across the landscape. Carbon losses from combustion were large over hours to days during the wildfire, but from an ecosystem dynamics perspective, the proportion of total carbon stock combusted was relatively small. Furthermore, more than half the stock losses from combustion were derived from biomass components with short lifetimes. Most biomass remained on-site, although redistributed from living to dead components. Decomposition of these components and new regeneration constituted the greatest changes in carbon stocks over ensuing decades. A critical issue for carbon accounting policy arises because the timeframes of ecological processes of carbon stock change are longer than the periods for reporting GHG inventories for national emissions reductions targets. Carbon accounts should be comprehensive of all stock changes, but reporting against targets should be based on human-induced changes in carbon stocks to incentivise mitigation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in animal body size have been widely reported as a correlate of contemporary climate change. Body size affects metabolism and fitness, so changing size has implications for resilience, yet the climatic factors that drive size variation remain poorly understood. We test the role of mean and extreme temperature, rainfall, and remotely sensed primary productivity ( NDVI) as drivers of body size in a sedentary, semi-arid Australian passerine, Ptilotula ( Lichenostomus) penicillatus, over 23 years. To distinguish effects due to differential growth from changes in population composition, we analysed first-year birds and adults separately and considered climatic variation at three temporal scales (current, previous, and preceding 5 years). The strongest effects related to temperature: in both age classes, larger size was associated with warmer mean temperatures in the previous year, contrary to Bergmann's Rule. Moreover, adults were larger in warmer breeding seasons, while first years was larger after heatwaves; these effects are more likely to be mediated through size-dependent mortality, highlighting the role of body size in determining vulnerability to extinction. In addition to temperature, larger adult size was associated with lower primary productivity, which may reflect a trade-off between vegetative growth and nectar production, on which adults rely. Finally, lower rainfall was associated with decreasing size in first year and adults, most likely related to decreased food availability. Overall, body size increased over 23 years, strongly in first-year birds (2.7%) compared with adults (1%), with size outcomes a balance between competing drivers. As rainfall declined over time and productivity remained fairly stable, the temporal increase in body size appears largely driven by rising mean temperature and temperature extremes. Body size responses to environmental change are thus complex and dynamic, driven by effects on growth as well as mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Western Woodlands in S.W. Australia is the largest remaining expanse of temperate woodland on the continent and globally, providing habitat for a significance number of bird species. Conservation planning needs information about bird distributions and habitat resource requirements. Using published information, bird habitat functional groups were identified based upon species that use similar vegetation-based resources. Data from four satellite-borne sensors were analysed to model the distribution of a subset of the key vegetation variables. These results were then used to predict the potential distribution of the functional groups. Field validation suggests ongoing advances in satellite data will enhance the model's accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A common approach to nature conservation is to identify and protect natural ‘assets’ such as ecosystems and threatened species. While such actions are essential, protection of assets will not be effective unless the ecological processes that sustain them are maintained. Here, we consider the role of ecological processes and the complementary perspective for conservation arising from an emphasis on process. Many kinds of ecological processes sustain biodiversity: including climatic processes, primary productivity, hydrological processes, formation of biophysical habitats, interactions between species, movements of organisms and natural disturbance regimes. Anthropogenic threats to conservation exert their influence by modifying or disrupting these processes. Such threats extend across tenures, they frequently occur offsite, they commonly induce non-linear responses, changes may be irreversible and the full consequences may not be experienced for lengthy periods. While many managers acknowledge these considerations in principle, there is much scope for greater recognition of ecological processes in nature conservation and greater emphasis on long time-frames and large spatial scales in conservation planning. Practical measures that promote ecological processes include: monitoring to determine the trajectory and rate of processes; incorporating surrogates for processes in conservation and restoration projects; specific interventions to manipulate and restore processes; and planning for the ecological future before options are foreclosed. The long-term conservation of biodiversity and the well-being of human society depend upon both the protection of natural assets and maintaining the integrity of the ecological processes that sustain them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We apply a method for forecasting carbon sequestration at the landscape-level, accounting for spatial and temporal scaling issues and develop formulae to incorporate spatial variability in growth and senescence functions. The effect of environmental variability was modelled by: (a) using a relationship between stand height at age 50 years and environmental characteristics; (b) adjusting the apparent age for different environments to reflect effects on growth rate; (c) adjusting age-dependent volume to reflect effects on potential biomass. Carbon sequestration for the next 250 years was forecast for a Eucalyptus regnans—dominated water catchment reserve in Australia; stand ages ranged from 20 to 450 years.In the absence of fire or succession after 2003, the total carbon sequestered in the E. regnans stands increased by 130(±65) t-C/ha (10.3%) to a peak of 1275(±130) t-C/ha in the year 2130(±50), followed by a net efflux of carbon. However, with fire or species succession, the mixture of young and old stands maintains a long term, stable amount of sequestered carbon. A gauge of the magnitude of the bias in the landscape-level carbon accounts arising from spatial averaging of the model’s input data was obtained. Comparison of results using different parameter settings for characteristics such as senescence and understorey biomass, revealed where more field data would allow both the timing and size of the maximal carbon sequestration, and the size of the ensuing net efflux of carbon, to be determined more accurately. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A study was undertaken to explore the relationship between backscattering coefficients from a Japanese Earth Resources Satellite synthetic aperture radar (JERS-1 SAR) image and aboveground biomass sampled at 12 field plots located in Murramarang National Park, New South Wales, Australia. This is the first such investigation in Australian Eucalyptus forests. From the field survey we obtained tree and coarse woody debris (CWD) measurements for eight forested, two paddock tree and two grass (effectively zero biomass) plots. Total aboveground and component biomass were estimated for all plots using allometric equations. Live aboveground woody biomass ranged from 0 to 610 t ha−1. The mean JERS-1 SAR backscattering coefficients for the field plot areas ranged from −12.4 to −7.0 dB. The results show positive linear trends between backscattering coefficients and the biomass components of dry Eucalyptus forest. The strongest trend was produced with small branch (2 cm) biomass estimates (r2=0.84). The biomass saturation level for the JERS-1 SAR data may be higher than estimated by other studies (possibly up to 600 t ha−1), although this trend was not statistically confirmed due to the small sample size (n=8). The results suggest that estimation of forest biomass for biomass inventories in Australia might be possible using satellite radar data when landscape characteristics such as topography, surface water, and forest structure are taken into account. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The management of forest ecosystems for sustainabil-ity requires knowledge of the abundance and distribution of all resources, including wood and wildlife, and the ability to predict the impact of management on these resources. Spatially explicit inventories for wildlife are lacking for the vast majority of species. We propose, with example, a method of rapid habitat assessment which can be conducted with available data to produce a spatially explicit inventory of habitat for a species. Information from the literature and some census data were used to construct a simple model of potential habitat for a boreal forest songbird. Available spatial data, including landcover from Landsat TM data, and a digital elevation model, were used to map the distribution of key habitat characteristics onto the landscape. We argue for the development of these preliminary wildlife habitat models using habitat characteristics that are map-pable with currently available remotely sensed data. Given the current trend toward the development of large scale databases of topography and extant land cover, spatially explicit potential habitat models can be efficiently and inexpensively developed to provide a framework for incorporating wildlife habitat into forest management. The relationships between rapid habitat assessment, long-term studies, monitoring, and population viability analysis are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SRAD, a spatially-distributed solar radiation model, was applied to a Canadian boreal forest environment in north-western Ontario. SRAD is grid based, and factors in both topo- and meso-scaled processes using a digital elevation model (DEM) and local monthly atmospheric parameters as inputs. SRAD generates estimates of incident, outgoing, and net irradiance, as well as surface and air temperatures for each point in the DEM, over any time period ranging from one day to one year. Cloudiness and other atmospheric conditions are factored into the shortwave irradiance estimates. From the DEM, the terrain effects of slope angle, aspect, and topographic shading are calculated and used to modify the estimates of shortwave irradiance. The SRAD-generated irradiance estimates for the study region were found to be consistent with irradiance data from other sources. Estimates of irradiance were most sensitive to the parameters of sunshine fraction and cloudiness. Radiation estimates were generated and compared using both a 20 m and a 100 m resolution DEM. Extremely low irradiance estimates generated at the fine scale were absent at the coarser scale. However the mean value of irradiance at both scales was estimated to be the same at 12.4 MJm-2 day-1 annually. Radiation estimates were also determined at the two scales for a series of forest research plots. For 91% of the plots, the irradiance estimates during the growing season differed by less than 0.5 MJm-2 day-1 between the two scales. Results presented here suggest that SRAD can provide useful input for predictive spatial models in boreal forest ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of forest ecosystems for sustainability requires knowledge of the abundance and distribution of all resources, including wood and wildlife, and the ability to predict the impact of managementon these resources. Spatially explicit inventories for wildlife are lacking for the vast majority of species. We propose, with example, amethod of rapid habitat assessment which can be conducted with available data to produce a spatially explicit inventory of habitat for a species. Information from the literature and some census data were used to construct a simple model of potential habitat for a boreal forest songbird. Available spatial data, including landcover from LandsatTM data, and a digital elevation model, were used to map the distribution of key habitat characteristics onto the landscape. We argue forthe development of these preliminary wildlife habitat models using habitat characteristics that are mappable with currently available remotely sensed data. Given the current trend toward the development of large scale databases of topography and extant land cover, spatially explicit potential habitat models can be efficiently and inexpensively developed to provide a framework for incorporating wildlife habitatinto forest management. The relationships between rapid habitat assessment, long-term studies, monitoring, and population viability analysis are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]