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Appalachian Naturescape
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Well-connected landscapes are necessary to sustain many of the natural and cultural resources important to the Appalachian region. Appalachian NatureScape is a dynamic conservation planning resource that brings together data and perspectives of experts and committed stakeholders.
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Protected Areas: Goals, Limitations, and Design
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This reference focuses on the functions, design, and limitations of protected areas and the processes of conservation planning.
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Technical Resources
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Marxan Training Resources
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Marxan Training Suggested Readings
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Applying ecological criteria to marine reserve design: A case study from the California Channel Islands
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Reference which describes the steps involved in designing a network of marine reserves for conservation and fisheries management.
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Technical Resources
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Marxan Training Resources
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Marxan Training Suggested Readings
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Northeast Conservation Planning Atlas
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The Northeast Conservation Planning Atlas is a science-based mapping platform that provides access to high-quality geospatial datasets, maps and information to facilitate partner-driven conservation from Maritime Canada to the Appalachians. Produced by the Conservation Biology Institute.
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Apps, Maps, & Data
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Adaptive management of biological systems: A review
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Adaptive Management (AM) is widely considered to be the best available approach for managing biolog- ical systems in the presence of uncertainty. But AM has arguably only rarely succeeded in improving bio- diversity outcomes. There is therefore an urgent need for reflection regarding how practitioners might overcome key problems hindering greater implementation of AM. In this paper, we present the first structured review of the AM literature that relates to biodiversity and ecosystem management, with the aim of quantifying how rare AM projects actually are. We also investigated whether AM practitioners in terrestrial and aquatic systems described the same problems; the degree of consistency in how the term ‘adaptive management’ was applied; the extent to which AM projects were sustained over time; and whether articles describing AM projects were more highly cited than comparable non-AM articles. We found that despite the large number of articles identified through the ISI web of knowledge (n = 1336), only 61 articles (<5%) explicitly claimed to enact AM. These 61 articles cumulatively described 54 separate projects, but only 13 projects were supported by published monitoring data. The extent to which these 13 projects applied key aspects of the AM philosophy – such as referring to an underlying conceptual model, enacting ongoing monitoring, and comparing alternative management actions – varied enormously. Further, most AM projects were of short duration; terrestrial studies discussed biodiversity conservation significantly more frequently than aquatic studies; and empirical studies were no more highly cited than qualitative articles. Our review highlights that excessive use of the term ‘adaptive man- agement’ is rife in the peer-reviewed literature. However, a small but increasing number of projects have been able to effectively apply AM to complex problems. We suggest that attempts to apply AM may be improved by: (1) Better collaboration between scientists and representatives from resource-extracting industries. (2) Better communication of the risks of not doing AM. (3) Ensuring AM projects ‘‘pass the test of management relevance’’.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Bird population trends are linearly affected by climate change along species thermal ranges
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Beyond the effects of temperature increase on local population trends and on species distribution shifts, how populations of a given species are affected by climate change along a species range is still unclear. We tested whether and how species responses to climate change are related to the populations locations within the species thermal range. We compared the average 20 year growth rates of 62 terrestrial breeding birds in three European countries along the latitudinal gradient of the species ranges. After controlling for factors already reported to affect bird population trends (habitat specialization, migration distance and body mass), we found that populations breeding close to the species thermal maximum have lower growth rates than those in other parts of the thermal range, while those breeding close to the species thermal minimum have higher growth rates. These results were maintained even after having controlled for the effect of latitude per se. Therefore, the results cannot solely be explained by latitudinal clines linked to the geographical structure in local spring warming. Indeed, we found that populations are not just responding to changes in temperature at the hottest and coolest parts of the species range, but that they show a linear graded response across their European thermal range. We thus provide insights into how populations respond to climate changes. We suggest that projections of future species distributions, and also management options and conservation assessments, cannot be based on the assumption of a uniform response to climate change across a species range or at range edges only.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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A century of climate and ecosystem change in Western Montana: what do temperature trends portend?
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Abstract The physical science linking human-induced increases ingreenhouse gasses to the warming of the global climate system is well established, but the implications of this warming for ecosystem processes and services at regional scales is still poorly understood. Thus, the objectives of this work were to: (1) describe rates of change in temperature averages and extremes for western Montana, a region containing sensitive resources and ecosystems, (2) investigate associations between Montana temperature change to hemispheric and global temperature change, (3) provide climate analysis tools for land and resource managers responsible for researching and maintaining renewable resources, habitat, and threatened/endangered species and (4) integrate our findings into a more general assessment of climate impacts on ecosystem processes and services over the past century. Over 100 years of daily and monthly temperature data collected in western Montana, USA are analyzed for long-term changes in seasonal averages and daily extremes. In particular, variability and trends in temperature above or below ecologically and socially meaningful thresholds within this region (e.g., −17.8◦C (0◦F), 0◦C (32◦F), and 32.2◦C (90◦F)) are assessed. The daily temperature time series reveal extremely cold days (≤ −17.8◦C) terminate on average 20 days earlier and decline in number, whereas extremely hot days (≥32◦C) show a three-fold increase in number and a 24-day increase in seasonal window during which they occur. Results show that regionally important thresholds have been exceeded, the most recent of which include the timing and number of the 0◦C freeze/thaw temperatures during spring and fall. Finally, we close with a discussion on the implications for Montana’s ecosystems. Special attention is given to critical processes that respond non-linearly as temperatures exceed critical thresholds, and have positive feedbacks that amplify the changes.
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Climate Science Documents
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Editorial: The “New Conservation”
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EDITORIAL: OPENING PARAGRAPHS A powerful but chimeric movement is rapidly gaining recognition and supporters. Christened the “new conservation,” it promotes economic development, poverty alleviation, and corporate partnerships as surrogates or substitutes for endangered species listings, protected areas, and other mainstream conservation tools. Its proponents claim that helping economically disadvantaged people to achieve a higher standard of living will kindle their sympathy and affection for nature. Because its goal is to supplant the biological diversity–based model of traditional conservation with something entirely different, namely an economic growth–based or humanitarian movement, it does not deserve to be labeled conservation.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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DOES WOOD SLOW DOWN “SLUDGE DRAGONS?” THE INTERACTION BETWEEN RIPARIAN ZONES AND DEBRIS FLOWS IN MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPES
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Conservation measures for aquatic species throughout the Pacific Northwest rely heavily on maintaining forested riparian zones. A key rationale for this strategy is that the presence of standing and downed trees next to streams will provide a continuous source of wood, which is an important structural component of aquatic habitat. Yet little is known about the interactions between wood and debris flows, which are an important way that wood enters streams.Researchers from the PNW Research Station and Oregon State University created a physics-based simulation of debris flow dynamics in a headwater basin within the Oregon Coast Range. They found that the presence of wood funda- mentally changes the behavior of debris flows by reducing the momentum and distance that they travel. Because debris flow deposits are primary storage sites for sediment within headwater catchments, a shift toward shorter flows means that more sediment is stored higher up in watersheds. In addition, they found that zones with high densities of wood and sediment are relatively fixed in space and do not migrate downstream. This suggests that management strategies could specifically target achieving habitat objectives within these high accumulation zones, and there may be multiple management pathways for achieving these objectives.
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Climate Science Documents
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A dispersal-induced paradox: synchrony and stability in stochastic metapopulations
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Understanding how dispersal influences the dynamics of spatially distributed populations is a major priority of both basic and applied ecologists. Two well-known effects of dispersal are spatial synchrony (positively correlated population dynamics at different points in space) and dispersal-induced stability (the phenomenon whereby populations have simpler or less extinction-prone dynamics when they are linked by dispersal than when they are isolated). Although both these effects of dispersal should occur simultaneously, they have primarily been studied separately. Herein, I summarise evidence from the literature that these effects are expected to interact, and I use a series of models to characterise that interaction. In particular, I explore the observation that although dispersal can promote both synchrony and stability singly, it is widely held that synchrony paradoxically prevents dispersal-induced stability. I show here that in many realistic scenarios, dispersal is expected to promote both synchrony and stability at once despite this apparent destabilising influence of synchrony. This work demonstrates that studying the spatial and temporal impacts of dispersal together will be vital for the conservation and management of the many communities for which human activities are altering natural dispersal rates.
Keywords
Autoregressive model, correlated environmental stochasticity, dispersal, dispersal-induced stability, metapopulation, negative binomial model, Ricker model, spatial heterogeneity, synchrony.
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Climate Science Documents
