Landscapes

The Effect of Carbon Credits on Savanna Land Management and Priorities for Biodiversity Conservation

BACKGROUND:

Investing in habitat protection and sustainable management is crucial to curb the rapid decline in biodiversity. A carbon market offers financial incentives to modify land use or management practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the effects of such market-based conservation strategies in ecosystems like tropical savannas are still largely unexplored. The paper highlights the potential of emerging carbon markets as a means to fund improved land management practices that could benefit both biodiversity and carbon sequestration.

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Reforesting Bare Hills in Vietnam: Social and Environmental Consequences of the 5 Million Hectare Reforestation Program

Background

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Developing a framework for sustainable development indicators for the mining and minerals industry

BACKGROUND:

Minerals are essential to a variety of industries that help in everyday life. However, the extraction of minerals is often associated with numerous negative environmental impacts. The mining industry is responsible for more pressing sustainability challenges than any other industry. The mining industry must address these challenges by addressing the concerns of different stakeholders, as demonstrated by the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development project.

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Restoration of plant-animal interactions in terrestrial ecosystems

Background

Plant-animal interactions are understudied within ecosystem restoration contexts. They are crucial to restoration success, with valuable processes like pollination, seed dispersal, and herbivory. The potential of animal reintroductions in restoration practices is understudied as well. Understanding these interactions is an important piece for future restoration efforts.

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Tree diversity in a tropical agricultural‑forest mosaic landscape in Honduras

Background

Tropical forests hold high biodiversity values, but are also valued for agricultural land uses. Particularly in Central America, a region with particularly high biodiversity, intensive land management practices have reduced and continue to reduce forest and species abundance. There is a push to change land use practices in order to restore and promote biodiversity, though the potential for biodiversity on agricultural landscapes is an understudied subject.

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Listening for change: quantifying the impact of ecological restoration on soundscapes in a tropical dry forest

Background

Tropical forest host a large portion of global biodiversity and carbon reserves. Heavy loss of these landscapes calls for restoration projects to conserve biodiversity as well as other ecosystem services related to human livelihood. Tropical dry forests are understudied compared to tropical wet forests, though they contain similar quantities of biodiversity, carbon, and sources for livelihood. One threat to tropical forest restoration is species invasion, which is linked to reduced native vegetation and habitat.

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Lightly-harvested rustic cocoa is a valuable land cover for amphibian and reptile conservation in human-modified rainforest landscapes

Background

Tropical biodiversity is impacted by anthropogenic land covers such as agriculture. Land use has the ability to both negatively and positively impact tropical biodiversity. In the tropics, important crops are grown in tropical forested landscapes such as coffee and cocoa. These forest understories are also important habitats for highly sensitive and ecologically vulnerable amphibian species. Amphibians and reptiles are an understudied taxa in conservation ecology and targeted in this study.

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Edaphic factors and initial conditions influence successional trajectories of early regenerating tropical dry forests

Background

Edaphic factors include soil characteristics and topography of a landscape. These factors are thought to have strong impacts on forest communities and can predict the trajectory of forest regeneration. Differing soil conditions and slopes result in varying species assemblages, growth rates, and overall tree cover.

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Safeguarding sloths and anteaters in the future: Priority areas for conservation under climate change

Background

Sloths and anteaters come from the order Pilosa which has very little species richness and a high rate of species loss in recent years, making this order highly vulnerable to extinction. This order is distributed endemically in the Neotropics. Conservation concerns are high due to the high levels of habitat fragmentation and loss in Neotropical landscapes and conservation areas need to be prioritized to ensure Pilosa species survival.

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Forest ecosystem services at landscape level – Why forest transition matters?

Background

Forest transition theory describes patterns of forest decline and recovery. This theory explains what services change as forested landscapes shift in the three stages of recovery. This model covers both forest-type gradients (diversity and usage) and landscape gradients (connectivity and coverage). It is not yet understood how these forest transition stages influence the quantity and quality of ecosystem services.

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