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Summary: This paper provides a critical analysis of the development and current outcomes of Australia's first endorsed strategic assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, namely, the Melbourne Strategic Assessment. It covers progress towards protection of a number of Nationally Significant Species and Ecological Communities – most notably, the native grassland communities immediately adjacent to Melbourne's Urban Growth Boundary. The Commonwealth approval to protect biodiversity and allow urban development was made in 2010 and it aimed to achieve its outcomes by 2020. These outcomes included providing new land for homes, for new transport corridors, and for conservation of biodiversity. Natural Temperate Grassland (4,667 ha), Grassy Eucalypt Woodland (709 ha) and seven other Matters of National Environmental Significance will be impacted. Mitigation for this is establishment of 15,000 ha of grassland reserves, 1,200 ha of grassy woodland reserves, over 4,000 ha of other land zoned for conservation and 300 ha of wetland restoration. We conclude that the Melbourne Strategic Assessment has been a success in terms of the elegance and comprehensiveness of the approach, in cooperation between the levels of government, in the economic benefits, and in some aspects of social engagement of the agreement. However, the achievement of environmental outcomes must be currently considered a failure due to poor implementation. This failure includes not meeting the agreed 10 year deadline for land acquisition and management, poor monitoring and protection of set‐aside areas, and in reporting. We offer suggestions for how these current shortcomings could be overcome. These align well with the recommendations of the review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (The independent statutory review of the Act in 2020) and include the establishment of the proposed Office of Compliance and Enforcement, the adoption of National Environmental Standards and the reforms regarding the role of Indigenous Australians in strategic assessments. If these were adopted, we conclude that the strategic assessment approach should be more widely used because of the more holistic approach and efficiencies that it envisages compared with site by site approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the analysis of both historical and recent collections, this paper reports an annotated list of taxa which are new to the lichen biota of Italy or of its administrative regions. Specimens were identified using a dissecting and a compound microscope; routine chemical spot tests and standardized thin-layer chromatography (TLC or HPTLC). The list includes 225 records of 153 taxa. Twenty taxa are new to Italy, the others are new to one or more administrative regions, with 15 second records and 5 third records for Italy. Some of the species belong to recently-described taxa, others are poorly known, sterile or ephemeral lichens which were largely overlooked in Italy. Several species are actually rare, either because of the rarity of their habitats (e.g. old-growth forests), or because in Italy they are at the margins of their bioclimatic distribution. The picture of the lichen biota of Italy has now new pixels, but its grain is still coarse. Further analysis of historical collections, increased efforts in the exploration of some areas, and the taxonomic revision of critical groups are still necessary to provide more complete distributional data for new biogeographic hypotheses, taxonomic and ecological research, and biodiversity conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wetlands are rich biodiversity ecosystems, with a potential for biodiversity conservation, the main support for a sustainable development. The embankment works in conjunction with drainage arrangements within the embanked enclosures have changed the natural ecosystems in the floodplain of the rivers: the transversal connectivity was interrupted between river and floodplain and, hence, the wetland areas have decreased. This paper presents some solutions applicable for the rehabilitation, the modernization and the expansion of wetlands in the embanked enclosures, within the floodplain, in order to reactivate the capacity of these ecosystems for biodiversity conservation and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, most ecological network analyses investigating the effects of species' declines and extinctions have focused on a single type of interaction (e.g. feeding). In nature, however, diverse interactions co-occur, each of them forming a layer of a 'multilayer' network. Data including information on multiple interaction types has recently started to emerge, giving us the opportunity to have a first glance at possible commonalities in the structure of these networks. We studied the structural features of 44 tripartite ecological networks from the literature, each composed of two layers of interactions (e.g. herbivory and pollination), and investigated their robustness to species losses. Considering two interactions simultaneously, we found that the robustness of the whole community is a combination of the robustness of the two ecological networks composing it. The way in which the layers of interactions are connected to each other affects the interdependence of their robustness. In many networks, this interdependence is low, suggesting that restoration efforts would not automatically propagate through the whole community. Our results highlight the importance of considering multiple interactions simultaneously to better gauge the robustness of ecological communities to species loss and to more reliably identify key species that are important for the persistence of ecological communities. Author summary: In the face of the current biodiversity crisis, predicting how species loss will affect ecological communities is becoming increasingly relevant. Previous studies including only one type of ecological interactions (e.g. feeding or pollination) revealed the relevance of the structure of ecological networks for the persistence of ecological communities. However, there is mounting evidence that considering multiple interactions simultaneously can alter the results based on a single interaction. Here, we study the robustness of ecological networks with two interaction types to the loss of plant species, and we show that it is a combination of the robustness of the two bipartite ecological networks composing the ecological community. By analyzing networks from multiple communities, we are able to identify commonalities across interaction types, as well as singularities specific to a given interaction type, caused by underlying biological constraints. Our results highlight that a multi-interaction approach is crucial to better gauge the overall robustness of ecological communities, and to correctly determine the relative importance of different plants species at the whole community level, which can be key for biodiversity conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes rich, a new R package to perform species richness estimation and comparison. Species richness is the simplest surrogate for the more complex concept of species biodiversity. It is relatively easy to assess although estimations strongly depend on sampling intensity with the consequence that richness estimations should be standardized to perform valid comparisons. The R package rich allows such corrections as well as the computation of various statistics and implements different randomization tests to compare cumulative and average species richness of two communities. These tests are useful for ranking sites or communities which is a classical goal in restoration ecology and conservation biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the contribution of community members to functional diversity is a key question of conservation ecology, its measurement and interpretation are rather problematic. In this paper, we suggest a novel method for decomposing functional diversity. To do this we consider functional units (i.e. species or a group of species with identical traits) as the functional building blocks of communities. Then we propose the use of a recently developed measure of functional diversity (called modified functional attribute diversity or MFAD) and suggest additive decomposition of MFAD into functional values contributed by the functional units. We point out that functional values are related to changes in MFAD if the functional unit is removed from the community. This property of decomposition allows the quantification of the contribution of community members to functional diversity. By studying artificial and actual communities we compare the performance of our new method with other recently developed contribution measures, which are based on dendrograms and ordinations. Both theoretical considerations and analyses of artificial and actual data sets suggest that the proposed method of calculating functional values expresses more explicitly the contribution of community members to functional diversity and hereby can be used as a simple, yet efficient method for searching for functional keystones in ecological communities or for quantifying the contribution of community members to functional diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was developed in the context of the research project entitled GEMCONBIO (Governance and Ecosystems Management for the Conservation of Biodiversity), which is a European FP6-funded project under Priority 7 — Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-Based Society. The projects strategic objective is, through the elaboration of certain case studies, to explore the interactions between governance modes and sustainable development objectives in view of identifying which governance processes and institutions can contribute best to the conservation of biodiversity. The case study of Kerkini Lake was selected along with approximately 27 case studies across Europe, the United States and third countries because of the area's very important ecosystem. It is one of the 10 most important wetlands in Greece, a declared National Park and one of the most important wetlands for birds in Europe. There is a plethora of national, European and international laws and regulations as well as administrative decisions regarding the study area. However, problems of implementation and compliance appear to be very strong causing severe implications in the area's sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dispersal is universally considered important for biodiversity conservation. However, the significance of long- as opposed to short-distance dispersal is insufficiently recognized in the conservation context. Long-distance dispersal (LDD) events, although typically rare, are crucial to population spread and to maintenance of genetic connectivity. The main threats to global biodiversity involve excessive LDD of elements alien to ecosystems and insufficient dispersal of native species, for example, because of habitat fragmentation. In this paper, we attempt to bridge the gap in the treatment of LDD by reviewing the conservation issues for which LDD is most important. We then demonstrate how taking LDD into consideration can improve conservation management decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue ofDiversity and Distributionspresents six papers that contribute to the assembly of a general research agenda for studying long-distance dispersal (LDD) across a variety of taxonomic groups (e.g. birds, fish, aquatic invertebrates and plants), ecosystems (e.g. terrestrial and marine ecosystems, wetlands and grasslands) and thematic fields (e.g. biological transport, marine biology, biogeochemistry and biodiversity conservation). This editorial emphasizes the need to develop a network integrating different research approaches (‘yellow brick roads’) to address the great challenge (‘finding the end of the rainbow’) of quantifying, understanding and predicting LDD and its implications. I review the key avenues for future research suggested in the special issue contributions, and stress the critical importance of properly considering the spatial and temporal scales relevant to the process and system of interests. I propose combining absolute and proportional definitions of LDD as a default practice in any investigation of LDD processes. When LDD is defined primarily by an absolute critical distance that characterizes key feature(s) of the system of interest, a quantitative assessment of the proportion of dispersal events expected to move beyond this critical threshold distance should also be provided. When LDD is defined primarily by a certain small fraction of dispersal events that travel longer than all others, an estimate of the absolute distance associated with this high percentile at the tail of the dispersal curve should also be added. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly the importance of Indigenous participation is acknowledged as central to effective biodiversity conservation. Traditional management emphasizes the importance of a holistic, integrated approach to safeguard species and ecological communities of cultural significance. This is discordant with many instruments for biodiversity conservation. Indigenous Australians have consistently lobbied for domestic laws to be amended to establish comanagement as the preferred approach to managing significant species and ecological communities – an approach that aligns with international obligations such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We describe amendments to Australia's biodiversity legislation and the use of biocultural indicators that would support Traditional management of Culturally Significant Entities (species and ecological communities), and in turn, assist Australia to effectively conserve biodiversity and meet international obligations. The ongoing challenge will be in empowering Indigenous peoples and their governance structures to implement enduring change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The average biodiversity maintenance function in China is growing slowly, and regional degradation and improvement coexist. • China's ecological network community has increased, the structure is more stable, and the connectivity is stronger. • Integrate ecological space network and complex network theory, and divide ecological network community. • The higher the importance of the source in the network, the higher the biodiversity maintenance function. • Adjusting the ecological network topology can improve biodiversity maintenance function. Enhancing and protecting biodiversity is a prerequisite for achieving "harmony between human beings and nature". With the disturbance of human activities, the landscape pattern is constantly changing, changing the flow of species, information, and energy within the landscape, which in turn has a significant impact on biodiversity. Therefore, based on the InVEST model, this paper obtained the spatial distribution of biodiversity maintenance function and established a Chinese biodiversity conservation empowerment network through GIS spatial analysis. Based on the complex network theory, the dynamic evolution characteristics of the ecological spatial network structure were analyzed, and the relationship between its topological structure and the conservation of terrestrial biodiversity was revealed. The results show that: biodiversity maintenance function is high in south, southwest, and northeast China and low in the west, and ecological corridors also show a dense distribution in the east and sparse in the west. Over the past 20 years, the average biodiversity maintenance function has grown slowly, and the ecological community of the network has increased, the structure is more stable, and the connectivity is stronger. The weight degree, betweenness centrality, PageRank, and eigenvector centrality were significantly correlated with biodiversity maintenance function, indicating that ecological network structure plays a huge role in maintaining biodiversity. By focusing on building significant correlation sources, and constructing corridors to adjust network connections, the integrity and connectivity of important habitats will be gradually restored, so that ecological land biodiversity function can exert greater ecological benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using socioecological concepts and within a historical biodiversity conservation context, this research study reviews the main interactions between human communities and protected natural areas (PNAs) to describe their different stages over time and assess the implications arising from climate change. The review suggests that both society and governments have raised awareness and interest regarding the importance of biodiversity conservation. The interactions of human communities in these areas have had different effects on biodiversity use, management, and conservation. Local communities have historically developed traditional uses of natural resources that allow them to remain over time and conserve them. Thus, the interest in PNAs as a conservation instrument has increased worldwide. Regarding climate change, this study found evidence indicating that PNAs may act as buffer barriers to prevent biodiversity loss and mitigate the impacts of extreme events; nevertheless, a great variation can be expected. The magnitude of the impacts on human communities, levels of vulnerability, and resilience capacity of PNAs facing climate change (CC) rely on many factors, such as location, extent, composition, management, and ecology of a given protected area. Therefore, the new scenarios that CC may bring are challenging current systematic conservation planning and traditional management methods of the natural resources that are vital for people. Finally, the authors suggest that society is increasingly aware of PNAs as one of the best tools humans have to prevent biodiversity loss, and potentially buffer the effects of CC. These increases in social awareness of biodiversity conservation importance and PNAs are gratifying and spread optimism about the future that next generations may face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business activities play a major role in biodiversity loss so that firms are under increasing pressures from stakeholders to mitigate their negative impacts on ecosystems. As business attitudes, policies and behaviors regarding biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) progressively change, a better understanding of how business strategies may be framed and implemented is required. In the first part of this paper, we discuss how biodiversity is usually understood as an external environmental constraint on business activities, and how this perception influences arbitrages. We then discuss how assessing BES interdependencies (impacts and dependencies) may bring about new business strategies and needs: we explore the opportunities and challenges of emerging mechanisms of payments for ecosystem services and expose the need for standardized sets of indicators at different scales for the effective management of their BES dependencies and impacts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Humid tropical alpine environments are crucial ecosystems that sustain biodiversity, biological processes, carbon storage and surface water provision. They are identified as one of the terrestrial ecosystems most vulnerable to global environmental change. Despite their vulnerability, and the importance for regional biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development, they are among the least studied and described ecosystems in the world. This paper reviews the state of knowledge about tropical alpine environments, and provides an integrated assessment of the potential threats of global climate change on the major ecosystem processes. Humid tropical alpine regions occur between the upper forest line and the perennial snow border in the upper regions of the Andes, the Afroalpine belt and Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Climate change will displace ecosystem boundaries and strongly reduce the total area of tropical alpine regions. Displacement and increased isolation of the remaining patches will induce species extinction and biodiversity loss. Drier and warmer soil conditions will cause a faster organic carbon turnover, decreasing the below-ground organic carbon storage. Since most of the organic carbon is currently stored in the soils, it is unlikely that an increase in above-ground biomass will be able to offset soil carbon loss at an ecosystem level. Therefore a net release of carbon to the atmosphere is expected. Changes in precipitation patterns, increased evapotranspiration and alterations of the soil properties will have a major impact on water supply. Many regions are in danger of a significantly reduced or less reliable stream flow. The magnitude and even the trend of most of these effects depend strongly on local climatic, hydrological and ecological conditions. The extreme spatial gradients in these conditions put the sustainability of ecosystem management at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Market-based conservation instruments, such as payments, auctions or tradable permits, are environmental policies that create financial incentives for landowners to engage in voluntary conservation on their land. But what if ecological processes operate across property boundaries and land use decisions on one property influence ecosystem functions on neighboring sites? This paper examines how to account for such spatial externalities when designing market-based conservation instruments. We use an agent-based model to analyze different spatial metrics and their implications on land use decisions in a dynamic cost environment. The model contains a number of alternative submodels which differ in incentive design and social interactions of agents, the latter including coordinating as well as cooperating behavior of agents. We find that incentive design and social interactions have a strong influence on the spatial allocation and the costs of the conservation market. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Triggered by the unprecedented loss of biodiversity, the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the 2010 biodiversity target, that is, "to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional, and national level, as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth". This target is now being revised as a post-2010 target. Whatever the target may, be- 2010 or beyond, the challenge step is to put mechanisms in place to track progress towards the targets. There is a large body of trend indicators as well as response indicators for assessing progress towards the target. In this paper, based on a conceptual framework and available information, we reviewed the existing scenario on the biodiversity targets, which resulted in a set of criteria and a set of policy-relevant research questions to be further developed as policy- response indicators for assessing progress that the countries are making towards achieving the biodiversity targets. The criteria and research questions are grouped under four policy areas: implementation mechanism of global biodiversity conventions at the national level; integration of biodiversity into policies and programs of other sectors; public awareness and support, and availability of resources to work towards the targets. These indicators need to be measured at national level and monitored globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-adaptive management of biodiversity is largely based on a collective learning process. This collective learning concerns "instrumental policy learning," "social policy learning," and "political learning." This paper focuses on instrumental policy learning that has been launched in four West African biosphere reserves. It is based on a MAB-UNESCO/UNEP-GEF programme concerning the co-construction of interaction indicators (between development and conservation), inspired by the Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) methodology. Using this process, we were able to test conventional Pressure-State-Response indicators, highlight their limitations, and develop new indicators starting from stakeholders' stories and perceptions. These new indicators can also be tested through collective restitutions and simulations. We also discuss: a proposed framework for producing interaction indicators that are relevant to all stakeholders and enjoy a certain legitimacy; the importance of an ecosystem services approach to support discussions on biodiversity conservation; opportunities for using the indicators in an interactive, decentralized way at the ecosystem scale through simulation models; the costs of collecting, processing, and maintaining these interaction indicators, and how these costs may be offset using local knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provisioning of sustaining goods and services that we obtain from natural ecosystems is a strong economic justification for the conservation of biological diversity. Understanding the relationship between these goods and services and changes in the size, arrangement, and quality of natural habitats is a fundamental challenge of natural resource management. In this paper, we describe a new approach to assessing the implications of habitat loss for loss of ecosystem services by examining how the provision of different ecosystem services is dominated by species from different trophic levels. We then develop a mathematical model that illustrates how declines in habitat quality and quantity lead to sequential losses of trophic diversity. The model suggests that declines in the provisioning of services will initially be slow but will then accelerate as species from higher trophic levels are lost at faster rates. Comparison of these patterns with empirical examples of ecosystem collapse (and assembly) suggest similar patterns occur in natural systems impacted by anthropogenic change. In general, ecosystem goods and services provided by species in the upper trophic levels will be lost before those provided by species lower in the food chain. The decrease in terrestrial food chain length predicted by the model parallels that observed in the oceans following overexploitation. The large area requirements of higher trophic levels make them as susceptible to extinction as they are in marine systems where they are systematically exploited. Whereas the traditional species area curve suggests that 50% of species are driven extinct by an order-of-magnitude decline in habitat abundance, this magnitude of loss may represent the loss of an entire trophic level and all the ecosystem services performed by the species on this trophic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landforms determine the locations of particular biological communities based on their components and spatial positions. This study hierarchically classified the topographic spaces serving as habitats for biological communities in the Korean Peninsula and established the habitat types that occur on the classified landform types. We classified landform types by applying cell-based modeling, map algebra, and spatial query techniques to spatial data, including digital elevation model (DEM), Sentinel 2 image, land use, and field survey data to model their ecological characteristics. Landforms were classified into four categories (designated Category 1 through 4) according to their spatial scale based on topographical characteristics such as mountains, plains, alluvial landforms, coastal landforms, islands, and special areas (Baekdudaegan, DMZ), which are found throughout the Korean Peninsula. The landforms of the Korean Peninsula were classified into 47 subcategories in Category 1, 16 in Category 2, 36 in Category 3, and 63 in Category 4. There were 62 main types of habitats that were classified based on their topographic spatial units, and there were 437 types of sub-habitats, for which soil weathering, biodiversity, and geodiversity were combined with the main habitat types. When factor analysis was conducted for the environmental factors used to determine the main and sub-habitats, the first primary components were temperature-related factors, followed by biodiversity, geodiversity, aspect, and slope. When the indicator species were analyzed by habitat type, indicator species diversity was high in Jeju Province, Gangwon Province, and Gaema Plateau. Based on these results, landform elements for species habit conservation were assigned conservation values and classified into (I) absolute conservation areas, (II) transition areas, and (III) areas for coexistence with humans. Topographic spaces are being degraded as biological habitats as a result of climate change and human development; our proposed classifications can be applied to the conservation of landforms and biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turnover (i.e., species substitution) and nestedness (i.e., subsets of species from more diverse locations), the two main mechanisms used to explain the beta diversity of biological communities, have different implications for biodiversity conservation. To better understand how these mechanisms contribute to beta diversity, we tested the following hypotheses: (i) greater dissimilarity in community composition occurs between estuarine zones than other hierarchical level studied; (ii) beta diversity in these communities develops by turnover in estuaries with a lower degree of anthropogenic impact, but by nestedness in estuaries with a greater degree of anthropogenic impact; and (iii) the structuring mechanism is independent of season. We studied two tropical estuaries (dry and wet seasons) that vary in terms of land-use of the drainage basins. Subtidal benthic macroinvertebrates were sampled along the estuarine gradient in each of the two estuaries. The additive partitioning approach to species diversity was used to determine the hierarchical scale with the greatest dissimilarity in community composition. General beta diversity was measured using the Sorensen dissimilarity index, partitioning the turnover and nestedness components. The greatest dissimilarity in the composition of the communities occurred between the zones along the estuarine gradient in both seasons (dry = 58.6%; wet = 46.3%). In the estuary with a lower degree of anthropogenic influence, benthic macroinvertebrate diversity was generated by turnover regardless of the season. In the estuary with a greater degree of anthropogenic impact, beta diversity was structured by turnover during the dry season and a combination of both mechanisms during the wet season. We conclude that turnover is the principal mechanism responsible for beta diversity in benthic macroinvertebrate communities in tropical estuaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communities, policy actors and conservationists benefit from understanding what institutions and land management regimes promote ecosystem services like carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. However, the definition of success depends on local conditions. Forests' potential carbon stock, biodiversity and rate of recovery following disturbance are known to vary with a broad suite of factors including temperature, precipitation, seasonality, species' traits and land use history. Methods like tracking over-time changes within forests, or comparison with “pristine” reference forests have been proposed as means to compare the structure and biodiversity of forests in the face of underlying differences. However, data from previous visits or reference forests may be unavailable or costly to obtain. Here, we introduce a new metric of locally weighted forest intercomparison to mitigate the above shortcomings. This method is applied to an international database of nearly 300 community forests and compared with previously published techniques. It is particularly suited to large databases where forests may be compared among one another. Further, it avoids problematic comparisons with old-growth forests which may not resemble the goal of forest management. In most cases, the different methods produce broadly congruent results, suggesting that researchers have the flexibility to compare forest conditions using whatever type of data is available. Forest structure and biodiversity are shown to be independently measurable axes of forest condition, although users' and foresters' estimations of seemingly unrelated attributes are highly correlated, perhaps reflecting an underlying sentiment about forest condition. These findings contribute new tools for large-scale analysis of ecosystem condition and natural resource policy assessment. Although applied here to forestry, these techniques have broader applications to classification and evaluation problems using crowdsourced or repurposed data for which baselines or external validations are not available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the international symposium on "Genomics and Biodiversity" organized by Association for Promotion of DNA Fingerprinting (ADNAT) and Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) from February 23, 2011 to February 25, 2011. The author mentions the biological diversity to be very important as provides with natural services including ecosystem services and natural resources and the management and conservation of it. He adds the recent advances to conserve biodiversity.

The importance of deadwood in forest ecosystems is widely recognized today and it is used as indicator for the sustainable management of forests. The purpose of researches carried out in five natural reserves and managed Romanian forests was to determine and compare the amount, size, distribution and decay classes of their deadwood. The data obtained in the mixed beech coniferous and beech old growth forests can be used as reference values for the natural dynamic of deadwood and can contribute to set the rules for the restoration of deadwood in forest management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the ways in which human environmental modifications affect biodiversity is a key challenge in conservation planning, pest control and evolutionary ecology. Parasitoid communities, particularly those associated with agricultural pests, may be susceptible to such modifications. We document here changes in the larval parasitoid communities of Ostrinia nubilalis -- the main pest of maize -- and its sibling species O. scapulalis, based on two historical datasets, one collected from 1921-1928 and the other from 2001-2005. Each of these datasets encompasses several years and large geographical areas and was based on several thousands/millions of host larvae. The 80-year interval between the two datasets was marked by a decrease in O. nubilalis parasitism to about two thirds its initial level, mostly due to a decrease in the rate of parasitism by hymenopterans. However, a well balanced loss and gain of species ensured that species richness remained stable. Conversely, O. scapulalis displayed stable rates of parasitism over this period, with a decline in the species richness of its parasitoid community. Rates of parasitism and species richness in regions colonized by O. nubilalis during the 1950s were one half to one third those in regions displaying long-term colonisation by this pest. During the recent human activitydriven expansion of its range, O. nubilalis has neither captured native parasitoids nor triggered parasite spill back or spill over. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Environmental stress is widely considered to be an important factor in regulating whether changes in diversity will affect the functioning and stability of ecological communities. Methodology/Principal Findings: We investigated the effects of a major environmental stressor (a decrease in water volume) on diversity-abundance and diversity-stability relations in laboratory microcosms composed of temperate multitrophic rock pool communities to identify differences in community and functional group responses to increasing functional group richness along a gradient of environmental stress (low, medium, and high water volume). When a greater number of functional groups were present, communities were less temporally variable and achieved higher abundances. The stabilizing effect of increased functional group richness was observed regardless of the level of environmental stress the community was subjected too. Despite the strong consistent stabilizing effect of increased functional group richness on abundance, the way that individual functional groups were affected by functional group richness differed along the stress gradient. Under low stress, communities with more functional groups present were more productive and showed evidence of strong facilitative interactions. As stress increased, the positive effect of functional group richness on community abundance was no longer observed and compensatory responses became more common. Responses of individual functional groups to functional group richness became increasing heterogeneous are stress increased, prompting shifts from linear diversity-variability/abundance relations under low stress to a mix of linear and non-linear responses under medium and high stress. The strength of relations between functional group richness and both the abundances and temporal variability of functional groups also increased as stress increased. Conclusions/Significance: While stress did not affect the relation between functional group richness and stability per se, the way in which functional groups responded to changes in functional group richness differed as stress increased. These differences, which include increases in the heterogeneity of responses of individual functional groups, increases in compensatory dynamics, and increases in the strength of richness-abundance and richness-variability relations, may be critical to maintaining stability under increasingly stressful environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's first national assessment of spatial priorities for biodiversity conservation, released in 2005, aimed to identify conservation priority areas for mainstreaming into all sectors at national and provincial scales. This National Spatial Biodiversity Assessment (NSBA) was based on a planning for implementation approach in order to deliver defensible products useful to decision-makers. The NSBA aimed to produce a map of broad-scale priority areas for future finer-scale assessment and conservation action. This map summarized information on species, ecosystems, ecological processes, and the pressures they face from human activities. Owing to the complexity of the priority area map, two additional user-friendly products — maps of ecosystem status and protection levels — were developed. These products represented the habitat loss and protected area coverage of South Africa's ecosystems relative to their conservation targets. A year after release, we reflect on the NSBA process, products and uptake by implementing agencies (with a specific focus on the terrestrial biodiversity assessment) in order to contribute to the growing body of documented best practice in conservation planning. The ecosystem status product has been widely used at national and provincial scales due in large to its clear and compelling message. The protection level and overall priority map have also witnessed uptake, the former in guiding the expansion of protected areas and the latter as an integrated map of national biodiversity status. The strong collaboration of local planners and implementers with in-depth experience of biodiversity assessment, using a systematic approach and focusing on communicating a few high level messages, appears to have contributed to the initial, successful uptake of the NSBA. We conclude with a call to address data and monitoring shortcomings before the next NSBA in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a potential mechanism to explain how biodiversity loss may influence variability in ecosystem functioning, we examine the hypothesis that biodiversity loss lowers similarity in species composition among local communities and that this decreased similarity in turn lowers ecosystem reliability. Ecosystem reliability refers to the probability that a system will provide a consistent level of performance over a given unit of time. This hypothesis is compared with other hypotheses that make similar predictions, including the sampling effect, insurance, and resource use complementarity hypotheses. We provide evidence for the similarity hypothesis through a reanalysis of a recent experiment and show that a key assumption of the hypothesis may be robust through computer simulations. We also address problems and possible solutions regarding how to separately test the similarity and other hypotheses in biodiversity experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field stations should assume a more active role in the preservation of species diversity and intraspecific genetic variation. Because some field stations concentrate scientists in remote places far from major universities, they are often the only source of biological expertise in the area. Others, located in more densely populated regions, may contain the last surviving remnants of natural ecosystems there. Field stations should locate and identify local populations of rare or endangered species and take the necessary steps for their preservation, begin long-term research on the population biology of these species, and offer conservation-oriented courses to students and the general public. (Accepted for publication 23 February 1982) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several studies on the integration of ecosystems and production. Model evaluation of two regulatory strategies considered to increase egg production of fishes; Importance of remnants on farms for invertebrate biodiversity; Management system in the viticulture industry.