Many services generated by forest ecosystems provide essential support for human well-being. However, the vulnerability of these services to environmental change such as forest fragmentation are still poorly understood. We present spatial modeling of the generation of ecosystem services in a human-dominated landscape where forest habitat patches, protected by local taboos, are located in a matr...

A number studies reported in literature have highlighted the role of road traffic in pushing up the levels of ambient particulate matter as well as the contribution of particulate matter in increasing the incidence of certain respiratory health endpoints. This study investigates the evidence of the impacts of traffic by looking at the situation at the city-level through the assessment of the re...

In the fall of 2002, approximately sixty undergraduate students from a broad range of disciplines at Acadia University enrolled in an interdisciplinary course entitled Sustainable Nova Scotia. While the theoretical and practical implications of this pedagogical approach are to be discussed elsewhere, this paper focuses on one course project that tested the feasibility of the Rapid Management As...

This paper describes practical ways that planners, landscape architects, and related professionals can help communities shape their new development patterns more effectively, so that features that are noteworthy or significant at the local or neighborhood level (but which are rarely protected under current codes) will become the central organizing elements around which each development is desig...

Long-distance migrations of wildlife have been identified as important biological phenomena, but their conservation remains a major challenge. The Mongolian Gobi is one of the last refuges for the Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) and other threatened migratory mammals. Using historic and current distribution ranges, population genetics, and telemetry data we assessed the connectivity of the wi...

The lion Panthera leo is Critically Endangered in West Africa and is known to occupy only four protected areas within the region. The largest population persists in the trans-boundary W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) ecosystem, in the border region of Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger. WAP harbors an estimated 350 individuals, or 90% ofWest Africa’s lions. We modeled lion occupancy across WAP using systemati...

Viet Nam’s landscape is constantly changing as land use changes. Sometimes the resources base benefits where forests are protected and allowed to regenerate naturally, bare land is reforested, or where swidden land is converted to more intensive agriculture. Sometimes resources are lost where forests are exploited for timber, cleared for agricultural or grazing, or burnt by spreading wildfires.

Quantifying the degree to which natural or protected areas are representative of a specified baseline provides critical information to conservation prioritization schemes. We report results on southeastern Vancouver Island, Canada, where we compared environmental conditions represented across the entire landscape, in oak savanna habitats prior to European settlement (<1850), and in both protect...

Abstract National parks and other large protected areas play an increasingly important role in the context of global social environmental challenges. Nevertheless, they continue to be rooted local places cannot separated out from their socio-cultural historical context. Protected furthermore are understood constitute critical sites struggle whereby very meanings nature, landscape, nature-societ...

We examined patterns of non-native plant diversity in protected and managed ponderosa pine/Douglas-®r forests of the Colorado Front Range. Cheesman Lake, a protected landscape, and Turkey Creek, a managed landscape, appear to have had similar natural disturbance histories prior to European settlement and ®re protection during the last century. However, Turkey Creek has experienced logging, graz...