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Looking at entrance to the Presbyterian Church., creation/production credits: 1900-1920, provenance history: Purchase or donation, reproduction: Scanned with HP Scanjet 4670 at 600 ppi. Archival master image available in tiff format.

4 x 6 photograph, a small square church with a short tower on the roof, raised basement, few windows on the side and a cross gable roof, H2010-041 Vernell Johnson Coll. Churches, Old County Farms, Houses, Vanishing Country Scene Box 1 5607A, [stamp ] No. 11A 557 [photographer stamp] Photo By: Vernell Johnson, Lyons, S. D. Presbyterian Roscoe, S. D.

The Regional Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Europe and Central Asia produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides a critical analysis of the state of knowledge regarding the importance, status, and trends of biodiversity and nature's contributions to people. The assessment analyses the direct and underlying causes for the observed changes in biodiversity and in nature's contributions to people, and the impact that these changes have on the quality of life of people. The assessment, finally, identifies a mix of governance options, policies and management practices that are currently available to reduce the loss of biodiversity and of nature's contributions to people in that region. The assessment addresses terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal biodiversity and covers current status and trends, going back in time several decades, and future projections, with a focus on the 2020-2050 period.

This work studied protein conformations in solution and at the inorganic interface via the use of state of the art molecular simulation techniques. Results suggested that distinct coordination of calcium may be crucial to folding in some proteins, an important observation crucial to future advancements in materials research.

Published in 2005, the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) stressed that influencing governments, businesses and communities to address the supra-national challenge of limiting biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation requires a fuller understanding of the range of values and benefits people derive from ecosystems, including tourism. The MA was informed by, and has shaped, several conceptually and methodologically distinctive sub-global assessments (SGAs) of ecosystem services. Through content analysis, this paper is the first detailed examination of how tourism features in 14 extant SGAs identified in a database held by a major supra-national environmental organization. Although the SGAs should have incorporated the widest range of specialist subject expertise, tourism scholars played only peripheral roles in producing them even for territories where tourism is a significant land use. The SGAs examined did not benefit from the extensive body of knowledge relating to sustainable tourism. Limited portrayals of tourism restrict the capacity of SGAs in their current format as management solutions. It is also contradictory to the ethos, principles and purpose of ecosystem assessments. With the ecosystem services perspective set to become more important to policy and decision making, the paper argues for greater incorporation of recent progress in sustainable tourism in ecosystem assessment.

The construction of culture as a class of ecosystem service presents a significant test of the holistic ambitions of an ecosystems approach to decision making. In this paper we explore the theoretical challenges arising from efforts to understand ecosystems as objects of cultural concern and consider the operational complexities associated with understanding how, and with what consequences, knowledge about cultural ecosystem services are created, communicated and accounted for in real world decision making. We specifically forward and develop a conceptual framework for understanding cultural ecosystem services and related benefits in terms of the environmental spaces and cultural practices that arise from interactions between humans and ecosystems. The types of knowledge, and approaches to knowledge production, presumed by this relational, non-linear and place-based perspective on cultural ecosystem services are discussed and reviewed. The framework not only helps navigate more fully the challenge of operationalising ‘cultural ecosystem services’ but points to a more relational understanding of the ecosystem services framework as a whole. Extending and refining understanding through more ambitious engagements in interdisciplinarity remains important.