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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' [...]

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 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]