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An emerging planning framework for climate adaptation focuses on interactions among societal values, institutional rules and scientific and experiential knowledge about biophysical impacts of climate change and adaptation options. These interactions shape the decision context that can enable or constrain effective adaptation. To illustrate the operationalisation of this ‘values-rules-knowledge’ (VRK) framework we developed biophysical adaptation pathways for agricultural landscapes of south-eastern Australia, which are expected to become warmer and drier under climate change. We used the VRK framework to identify potential constraints to implementing the pathways. Drawing on expert knowledge, published literature, biodiversity modelling and stakeholder workshops we identified potential adaptation pathways for (1) the production matrix, (2) high conservation value remnant eucalypt woodlands, and (3) woodland trees. Adaptation options included shifts from mixed cropping-grazing to rangeland grazing or biomass enterprises; promoting re-assembly of native ecological communities; and maintaining ecosystem services and habitat that trees provide. Across all pathways, applying the VRK framework elucidated fifteen key implementation constraints, including limits to farm viability, decreasing effectiveness of environmental legislation and conflicting values about exotic plants. Most of the constraints involved interactions among VRK; 13 involved rules, eight involved values, and seven involved knowledge. Value constraints appeared most difficult to address, whereas those based on rules or knowledge were more tangible. The lower number of knowledge constraints may reflect the scale of our analysis (which focused on decision points in pre-defined pathways); new knowledge and participatory approaches would likely yield a richer set of scenarios. We conclude that the VRK framework helps connect the biophysical knowledge-based view of adaptation with a perspective on the need for

Ecosystem services are typically valued for their immediate material or cultural benefits to human wellbeing, supported by regulating and supporting services. Under climate change, with more frequent stresses and novel shocks, 'climate adaptation services', are defined as the benefits to people from increased social ability to respond to change, provided by the capability of ecosystems to moderate and adapt to climate change and variability. They broaden the ecosystem services framework to assist decision makers in planning for an uncertain future with new choices and options. We present a generic framework for operationalising the adaptation services concept. Four steps guide the identification of intrinsic ecological mechanisms that facilitate the maintenance and emergence of ecosystem services during periods of change, and so materialise as adaptation services. We applied this framework for four contrasted Australian ecosystems. Comparative analyses enabled by the operational framework suggest that adaptation services that emerge during trajectories of ecological change are supported by common mechanisms: vegetation structural diversity, the role of keystone species or functional groups, response diversity and landscape connectivity, which underpin the persistence of function and the reassembly of ecological communities under severe climate change and variability. Such understanding should guide ecosystem management towards adaptation planning.

The seed collection of the species of the Gesneriaceae on which this study is based was obtained, for the most part, during a number of visits to the herbaria of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Royal Botanical Garden of Kew, London, and Edinburgh, Scotland. The seed collection comprises well over 800 samples of about 700 species of the Gesneriaceae, representing 113 genera of the 127 in the family, and provides a good taxonomic representation of the Gesneriaceae. Following an examination of all the samples in the seed collection, over 300 species of the 113 genera were selected to represent the wide range of seed morphology characters observed among the examined species of the Gesneriaceae. A system with which to analyze and diagnose seed surface morphology, designed by the author, is based on a format of six major categories and 60 tertiary terms of seed morphology characters and a companion diagnostic table. The categories are arranged in a sequence of increasingly smaller seed characters, ranging from seed shape to the ultrastructural characters of the individual cells. To ensure that the system would also apply to seed plants in general, the seeds, achenes and nutlets of a wide variety of species from families other than the Gesneriaceae were examined. Twenty species from 13 families other than the Gesneriaceae were then selected and are included in this study and, together with the Gesneriaceae, represent eight of the ten subclasses of the flowering plants (Cronquist 1968). The seeds, achenes and nutlets of all the species included in this study are illustrated with SEM photomicrographs on the 54 plates of the Seed Atlas, and the seed morphology data of each species are recorded on the diagnostic tables that face each of the Atlas Plates. To facilitate the comparison of the taxa of the Gesneriaceae, and to assist in the identification of the seeds of the examined species of the Gesneriaceae, the seed morphology data are also recorded on a