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The intensification of agricultural practices throughout the twentieth century has had large detrimental effects on biodiversity and these are likely to increase as the human population rises, with consequent pressure on land. To offset these negative impacts, agri-environment schemes have been widely implemented, offering financial incentives for land-owners to create or maintain favourable habitats that enhance or maintain biodiversity. While some evidence is available on the resulting species richness and abundance for groups such as natural predators, pollinating insects including butterflies and moths, this is costly to obtain and it is difficult to predict the effects of specific habitat designs. To alleviate this problem we here develop an individual-based model (IBM), modelling the detailed movement behaviour, foraging, and energy budget of a grassland butterfly Maniola jurtina Linn. in patches of varying dimensions and quality. The IBM is successfully validated against data on M. jurtina densities, movement behaviour, resource use, fecundity and lifespan in habitats of varying quality. We use the IBM to quantify the benefits for life-history outcomes of M. jurtina of increasing the quantity and the quality of field margins within agricultural landscapes. We find that increasing the quantity of field margin habitat from 1 to 3 ha per 100 ha, as recommended in agri-environment schemes, increases the average number of eggs laid across a two-week period by 60% and adds an extra day to the average lifespan. Similar effects are reported for variation in the quality of field margins. We discuss the implications of the result for modelling butterfly responses to management scenarios.

Understanding how environmental change affects ecosystem function delivery is of primary importance for fundamental and applied ecology. Current approaches focus on single environmental driver effects on communities, mediated by individual response traits. Data limitations present constraints in scaling up this approach to predict the impacts of multivariate environmental change on ecosystem functioning. We present a more holistic approach to determine ecosystem function resilience, using long‐term monitoring data to analyze the aggregate impact of multiple historic environmental drivers on species' population dynamics. By assessing covariation in population dynamics between pairs of species, we identify which species respond most synchronously to environmental change and allocate species into “response guilds.” We then use “production functions” combining trait data to estimate the relative roles of species to ecosystem functions. We quantify the correlation between response guilds and production functions, assessing the resilience of ecosystem functioning to environmental change, with asynchronous dynamics of species in the same functional guild expected to lead to more stable ecosystem functioning. Testing this method using data for butterflies collected over four decades in the United Kingdom, we find three ecosystem functions (resource provisioning, wildflower pollination, and aesthetic cultural value) appear relatively robust, with functionally important species dispersed across response guilds, suggesting more stable ecosystem functioning. Additionally, by relating genetic distances to response guilds we assess the heritability of responses to environmental change. Our results suggest it may be feasible to infer population responses of butterflies to environmental change based on phylogeny—a useful insight for conservation management of rare species with limited population monitoring data. Our approach holds promise for overcoming the impasse in predicting the responses of ecosystem functions to environmental change. Quantifying co‐varying species' responses to multivariate environmental change should enable us to significantly advance our predictions of ecosystem function resilience and enable proactive ecosystem management., Current approaches to understand how environmental change affects ecosystem function delivery have reached an impasse due to data limitations and scaling constraints. Here, we present a more holistic approach using long‐term monitoring data to analyze the aggregate impact of multiple historic environmental drivers on species' population dynamics and what effects these have on ecosystem functioning. Quantifying co‐varying species' responses to multivariate environmental change should enable us to significantly advance our predictions of ecosystem function resilience and to enable proactive ecosystem management.

Supplementary materials 1, 2, 3 and 4. (DOCX 3035 kb)

The challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change, achieving inclusive food, water, energy and health security, addressing urban vulnerabilities, and the unequal burdens of nature deterioration, are not only predicaments on their own right. Because they interact, often exacerbating each other, they create new risks and uncertainties for people and nature. It is now evident that the rapid deterioration of nature, including that of the global environmental commons on land, ocean, atmosphere and biosphere, upon which humanity as a whole depends, are interconnected and their cascading effects compromise societal goals and aspirations from local to global levels. Growing efforts to respond to these challenges and awareness of our dependence on nature have opened new opportunities for action and collaboration towards fairer and more sustainable futures.The global assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services (GA) has been designed to be a comprehensive and ambitious intergovernmental integrated assessment of recent anthropogenic transformations of Earth?s living systems, the roots of such transformations, and their implications to society. In the chapters that follow, our mandate is to critically assess the state of knowledge on recent past (from the 1970s), present and possible future trends in multi-scale interactions between people and nature, taking into consideration different worldviews and knowledge systems, including those representing mainstream natural and social sciences and the humanities, and indigenous and local knowledge systems. In doing so, the GA also assesses where the world stands in relation to several international agreements related to biodiversity and sustainable development. Fil: Brondizio, Eduardo. No especifíca; Fil: Díaz, Sandra Myrna. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina Fil: Settele, Josef. No especifíca; Fil: Ngo, Hien. No especifíca; Fil: Guèze, Maximilien. No especifíca; Fil: Aumeeruddy-Thomas, Y. No especifíca; Fil: Bai, Xuemei. No especifíca; Fil: Geschke, Arne. No especifíca; Fil: Molnár, Zsolt. No especifíca; Fil: Niamir, Aidin. No especifíca; Fil: Pascual, Unai. No especifíca; Fil: Simcock, Alan. No especifíca; Fil: Jaureguiberry, Pedro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina Fil: Hien, Ngo,. No especifíca; Fil: Brancalion, Pedro. No especifíca; Fil: Chan, Kai M. A.. No especifíca; Fil: Dubertret, Fabrice. No especifíca; Fil: Hendry, Andrew. No especifíca; Fil: Liu, Jianguo. No especifíca; Fil: Martin, Adrian. No especifíca; Fil: Martín López, Berta. No especifíca; Fil: Midgley, Guy F.. No especifíca; Fil: Obura, David. No especifíca; Fil: Oliver, Tom. No especifíca; Fil: Scheffran, Jürgen. No especifíca; Fil: Seppelt, Ralf. No especifíca; Fil: Strassburg, Bernardo. No especifíca; Fil: Spangenberg, Joachim H.. No especifíca; Fil: Stenseke, Marie. No especifíca; Fil: Turnhout, Esther. No especifíca; Fil: Williams, Meryl J.. No especifíca; Fil: Zayas, Cynthia. No especifíca

Through a university-community collaborative partnership, the perceived needs of evidence-based practices (EBPs) among school social workers (SSWs) in a large school district in central Florida was assessed. A survey (response rate = 83.6%) found that although 70% of SSWs claim to use EBPs in their everyday practice, 40% do not know where to find them, which may partially explain why 78% of respondents claim to spend 1 to 4 h every week looking for adequate EBPs. From this needs assessment, the translational model was used to address these perceived needs. A systematic review of the literature found 40 tier 2 EBPs, most of which (23%) target substance use, abuse, and dependence. After discussion with academic and community partners, the stakeholders designed, discussed, and implemented a searchable, online, password-protected, interface of these tier 2 EBPs, named Evidence-Based Intervention Toolkit (eBIT). Lessons learned, future directions, and implications of this "one-stop shop" for behavioral health are discussed.

Abundance data are the foundation for many ecological and conservation projects, but are only available for a few taxonomic groups. In contrast, distribution records (georeferenced presence records) are more widely available. Here we examine whether year-to-year changes in numbers of distribution records, collated over a large spatial scale, can provide a measure of species' population variability, and hence act as a metric of abundance changes.\ud We used 33 British butterfly species to test this possibility, using distribution and abundance data (transect counts) from 1976 to 2012.\ud Comparing across species, we found a strong correlation between mean year-to-year changes in total number of distribution records and mean year-to-year changes in abundance (N = 33 species; r2 = 0.66). This suggests that annual distribution data can be used to identify species with low versus high population variability.\ud For individual species, there was considerable variation in the strength of relationships between year-to-year changes in total number of distribution records and abundance. Between-year changes in abundance can be identified from distribution records most accurately for species whose populations are most variable (i.e. have high annual variation in numbers of records).\ud We conclude that year-to-year changes in distribution records can indicate overall population variability within a taxon, and are a reasonable proxy for year-to-year changes in abundance for some types of species. This finding opens up more opportunities to inform ecological and conservation studies about population variability, based on the wealth of citizen science distribution records that are available for other taxa.

The current configuration of our global food system is undermining many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), leading to calls for major food system reform and transformation. Concurrently, other science-policy and business initiatives call for a food system more resilient to economic and environmental shocks, for example, by improving the economic resilience of current supply chains. Prioritization of short-term security to a subset of vested interests, however, can undermine the resilience of longer term beneficial outcomes for society. Here we advocate a more inclusive and farsighted approach focussing on the resilience of positive outcomes for the whole of society, that is, capturing the aim to promote resilient delivery of multiple UN SDGs. A significant challenge is to prioritize suites of interventions that can effectively transform the global food system to deliver these goals. Here, we use a transdisciplinary lens to identify 'lock-in' mechanisms that span four key areas - knowledge-based, economic/regulatory, sociocultural and biophysical constraints - which will help avoid ineffective siloed solutions to food system reform. Furthermore, we show how emergent system dynamics need to be considered using a more holistic approach. We highlight the importance of well-coordinated actions on multiple leverage points during windows of opportunity for food system transformation.

It is important for conservationists to be able to assess the risks that climate change poses to species, in order to inform decision making. Using standardised and repeatable methods, we present a national-scale assessment of the risks of range loss and opportunities for range expansion that climate change could pose for over 3000 plants and animals. Species were selected by their occurrence in England, the primary focus of the study, but climate change impacts were assessed across Great Britain, widening their geographical relevance. A basic risk assessment that compared projected future changes in potential range with recently observed changes classified 21% of species as being at high risk and 6% at medium risk of range loss under a B1 climate change scenario. A greater number of species were classified as having a medium (16%) or high (38%) opportunity to potentially expand their distribution. A more comprehensive assessment, incorporating additional ecological information, including potentially confounding and exacerbating factors (e.g. dispersal, habitat availability and other constraints), was applied to 402 species, of which 35% were at risk of range loss and 42% may expand their range extent. This study covers a temperate region with a significant proportion of species at their poleward range limit; the balance of risks and opportunities from climate change may be different elsewhere. The outcome of both risk assessments varied between taxonomic groups, with bryophytes and vascular plants containing the greatest proportion of species at risk from climate change. Upland habitats contained more species at risk than other habitats. Whilst the overall pattern was clear, confidence was generally low for individual assessments, with the exception of well-studied taxa such as birds. In response to climate change, nature conservation needs to plan for changing species distributions and an uncertain future.

1. Measuring functional connectivity, the ability of species to move between resource patches, is essential for conservation in fragmented landscapes. However, current methods are highly time consuming and expensive. 2. Population synchrony- the correlation in time series of counts between two long-term population monitoring sites, has been suggested as a possible proxy measure of functional connectivity. To date, population synchrony has been shown to correlate with proxies for movement frequency such as the coverage of suitable habitat types in intervening landscapes, and also least cost distances around hostile land cover types. 3. This provides tentative evidence that synchrony is directly driven by movements of the focal species, but an alternative explanation is that these land cover types affect the movement of interacting species (e.g. natural enemies of the focal species) which can also drive synchronous population dynamics. Therefore, what is needed is a test directly relating population synchrony to movement frequencies of a focal species. 4. Here we use data from a 21 year mark-release-recapture study and show that population synchrony does indeed predict movements of a focal butterfly species Boloria eunomia (Esper). 5. There is growing evidence that population synchrony can be a useful conservation tool to measure functional connectivity.

International audience; 1. Measuring functional connectivity, the ability of species to move between resource patches, is essential for conservation in fragmented landscapes. However, current methods are highly time consuming and expensive.2. Population synchrony‐ the correlation in time series of counts between two long‐term population monitoring sites, has been suggested as a possible proxy measure of functional connectivity. To date, population synchrony has been shown to correlate with proxies for movement frequency such as the coverage of suitable habitat types in intervening landscapes, and also least cost distances around hostile land cover types.3. This provides tentative evidence that synchrony is directly driven by movements of the focal species, but an alternative explanation is that these land cover types affect the movement of interacting species (e.g. natural enemies of the focal species) which can also drive synchronous population dynamics. Therefore, what is needed is a test directly relating population synchrony to movement frequencies of a focal species.4. Here we use data from a 21 year mark‐release‐recapture study and show that population synchrony does indeed predict movements of a focal butterfly species Boloria eunomia (Esper).5. There is growing evidence that population synchrony can be a useful conservation tool to measure functional connectivity.

Community–university partnerships are frequently used to enhance translational research efforts while benefiting the community. However, challenges remain in evaluating such efforts. This article discusses the utility of applying the contextual and interactive model of community–university collaboration to a translational research education program, the Institute for Translational Research in Adolescent Behavioral Health, to guide programmatic efforts and future evaluations. Institute stakeholders from academia and the community completed in-depth interviews querying their expectations and experiences in this collaboration. Key quotes and themes were extracted and analyzed based on the constructs within the 3 phases of the model. The findings note specific themes for future evaluations. Overall, the contextual and interactive model of community–university collaboration proved a useful framework to guide the process evaluation of the Institute. Findings suggest possible strategies for the successful development, evaluation, and sustainability of community–university partnerships.

Risky decision making carries many of our behaviors in everyday life. Behavioral researchers have been perpetually probing risky decision making using a plethora of different measures and since over two hundred years, different models have been integrating the results of these measures. Despite this effort, it remains elusive how determinants of risk taking, probed in the enclosed space of the behavioral laboratory, map to actual everyday decisions in the wild. What is the structure of these determinants? Do people have stable preferences for risky decision making over various domains? And how is the perception of risk influencing the process of decision making? This dissertation focuses on two major determinants of risky decision making; risk preferences, and risk perceptions. The first part includes two manuscripts focusing on quantifying risk preferences that are relevant in real-life. The second part of the dissertation investigates risk perceptions, which come into action especially when people do not have full information about decision-options, which defines most everyday-behavior. Manuscript one probes different existing and newly developed risk-preference measures in terms of retest-reliability and validity. The new measure builds advantages of various existing measures and proves to be more reliable than existing measures of its kind. In manuscript two, we provide an example of how specific and general risk-preference measures boost the predictive power of risky decision making in actual street crossing behavior. Finally, in part two, manuscript three quantifies risk perceptions in a sequential risk task and shows that when knowledge about decision options is incomplete, people rely strongly on their subjective probabilities to make decisions in the task. In turn, these subjective probabilities are very vulnerable to initial experience. Harnessing decades of research on risky decision making, the results of this dissertation build on over 50 different risk measures to target the gap between decision-theory and everyday behavior. Results from these measures are evaluated using mathematical models of decision making, to make assumptions about the cognitive determinants of risky decision making in the wild.

Recognizing the growing need for information on how to better prepare for and respond to climate-related impacts on the nation’s living marine resources and resource-dependent communities, NOAA Fisheries developed a Climate Science Strategy (Link et al. 2015) to provide a national framework designed to be customized and implemented at regional and national levels by NMFS Science Centers, Regional Offices, Programs, and partners. The development of Regional Action Plans (RAPs) addresses the unique combination of ecosystem conditions, climate-related challenges, capabilities, and information needs that will need to be considered to implement the Strategy in each region. The Pacific Islands Regional Action Plan presented here begins by reviewing the region’s current or recent climate activities and results, noting strengths, weakness, and opportunities. The second part of the Plan outlines directions for the region’s climate activities over the next 5 years following the seven (7) research objectives identified in the NOAA Fisheries Climate Science Strategy.

A cornerstone of conservation is the designation and management of protected areas (PAs): locations often under conservation management containing species of conservation concern, where some development and other detrimental influences are prevented or mitigated. However, the value of PAs for conserving biodiversity in the long term has been questioned given that species are changing their distributions in response to climatic change. There is a concern that PAs may become climatically unsuitable for those species that they were designated to protect, and may not be located appropriately to receive newly-colonizing species for which the climate is improving. In the present study, we analyze fine-scale distribution data from detailed resurveys of seven butterfly and 11 bird species in Great Britain aiming to examine any effect of PA designation in preventing extinctions and promoting colonizations. We found a positive effect of PA designation on species' persistence at trailing-edge warm range margins, although with a decreased magnitude at higher latitudes and altitudes. In addition, colonizations by range expanding species were more likely to occur on PAs even after altitude and latitude were taken into account. PAs will therefore remain an important strategy for conservation. The potential for PA management to mitigate the effects of climatic change for retracting species deserves further investigation.