Land-use frontiers, such as agriculture expanding into forests, remain a major driver of biodiversity loss, and often lead to conservation responses. To better understand the geographies conservation, connecting with tools used widely in Land System Science – particularly frontier concept allows assessing patterns, actors, drivers conservation. We propose that land can be analysed through three...

We show that if performance measures in stochastic and dynamic scheduling problems satisfy generalized conservation laws, then the feasible space of achievable performance is a polyhedron called an extended polymatroid that generalizes the usual polymatroids introduced by Edmonds. Optimization of a linear objective over an extended polymatroid is solved by an adaptive greedy algorithm, which le...

It’s been a busy twelve months for the group. Sadly, 2015 started with the terrible news that Peter Vogel had passed away. Peter was a global expert on shrews but he was a long-term member of the group due to his specialist knowledge of otter-shrews; he was one of the few biologists to capture and study these illusive afrotheres. We include an obituary to Peter on page 8 and send our condolence...

our food security, forests, water, land rights, farmers and indigenous peoples from the aggressive march of agrofuel developments, which are devouring our land and resources at an unbelievable scale and speed. " The petition describes the negative impact of agrofuel programs in several African states. In Tanzania, thousands of farmers have been evicted from their land to make way for large scal...

Local land-use policy is increasingly being recognized as fundamental to biodiversity conservation in the United States. Many planners and conservation scientists have called for broader use of planning and regulatory tools to support the conservation of biodiversity at local scales. Yet little is known about the pervasiveness of these practices. We conducted an on-line survey of county, munici...

The Field Veterinary Program (FVP) of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) was created in 1989 to combat the wildlife disease and health problems that increasingly complicate the process of wildlife conservation. The FVP provides veterinary services for the more than 300 WCS conservation projects located in more than 50 countries around the world. Most of these projects are in tropical regio...

Global change presents a huge and exciting challenge to the study of thermal physiology. The implication of thermoregulatory strategies and abilities for the survival of individuals and species, are of high importance for predicting species response to global change challenges and ways to mitigate them, and for conservation acts. A good example of such a study is the paper by Cooper and Withers...