Previous national and global conservation assessments have relied on habitat conversion data to quantify conservation risk. However, in addition to habitat conversion to crop production or urban uses, ecosystem alteration (e.g., from logging, conversion to plantations, biological invasion, or fire suppression) is a large source of conservation risk. We add data quantifying ecosystem alteration ...

10 Environmentalists, scientists, and land managers have long debated the role of ranching in landscape conservation with some contending that ranching represents the major threat to ecological systems, while others believe it is key to long-term conservation. We contrast the impacts of livestock grazing with those of the major alternative land use at this time, suburban and ex-urban developmen...

BACKGROUND Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is an increasingly growing problem in young children. This is attributed to recreational noise being the most common cause of this problem. In young children, hearing problems can delay language development and reduce academic achievements. South Africa, in particular, has limited information and protective measures regarding the conservation of hear...

Urbanization and agriculture are two of the most important threats to biodiversity worldwide. The intensities of these land-use phenomena, however, as well as levels of biodiversity itself, differ widely among regions. Thus, there is a need to develop a quick but rigorous method of identifying where high levels of human threats and biodiversity coincide. These areas are clear priorities for bio...

Conservation prioritization at large scales is complex, combining biological, environmental, and social factors. While conservation scientists now more often aim to incorporate human-related factors, a critical yet unquantified challenge remains: to identify which areas people use for recreation outside urban centers. To address this gap in applied ecology and conservation, we developed a novel...

Biodiversity underlies many of the ecosystem services demanded by humans. For cities, the design of ‘green infrastructures’ or ‘nature-based solutions’ has been proposed to maintain the provisioning of these services and the preservation of biodiversity. It is unclear, however, how such green infrastructure can be implemented, given existing planning practices that generally ignore biodiversity...

urban design and landscape architecture are considered as modern art (knowledge) which are developed through integration of various art and science fields of studies. formal emergence of urban design in 60s and landscape design is occurred at the beginning of 20th century. the success of these two fields is because of their attention to environmental qualities upgrade in public and open spaces ...

The majority of the human population now lives in urban environments and that proportion is forecast to increase dramatically by 2050. As urbanization increases, environment will increasingly play a role biodiversity conservation. Floral visitors, often erroneously referred as pollinators, are integral maintenance ecosystem services function. Several floral visitors capable adapting environment...