SCHOOL ECOLOGICAL MONITORING IN PROTECTED AREAS OF MOSCOW

Ecological mechanisms linking protected areas to surrounding lands.

Land use is expanding and intensifying in the unprotected lands surrounding many of the world's protected areas. The influence of this land use change on ecological processes is poorly understood. The goal of this paper is to draw on ecological theory to provide a synthetic framework for understanding how land use change around protected areas may alter ecological processes and biodiversity wit...

Protected areas – protected species?

Wild life: The elusive fosa (Cryptoprocta ferox) is the top predator in the dry deciduous forests of Madagascar, but very little was known about its biology until the 1990s. The presence of volunteer groups studying its role in the forest’s ecology has also helped to protect its habitat. (Photo: Earthwatch/ Luke Dollar.) The world’s latest national park has just been created in the east of Russ...

Delineating the Ecosystems Containing Protected Areas for Monitoring and Management

Park managers realized more than 130 years ago that protected areas are often subsets of larger ecosystems and are vulnerable to change in the unprotected portions of the ecosystem. We illustrate the need to delineate protected area–centered ecosystems (PACEs) by using comprehensive scientific methods to map and analyze land-use change within PACEs around 13 US national park units. The resultin...

Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics and history

Ecological degradation in protected areas: the case of Wolong Nature Reserve for giant pandas.

It is generally perceived that biodiversity is better protected from human activities after an area is designated as a protected area. However, we found that this common perception was not true in Wolong Nature Reserve (southwestern China), which was established in 1975 as a "flagship" protected area for the world-renowned endangered giant pandas. Analyses of remote sensing data from pre- and p...