The conflict between development and conservation concerns is a perennial topic in sustainable development, especially significant for marginalized social groups. In Nepal, fortress protected areas (PA) gave way to community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) narrative of inclusion participation so-called buffer zone (BZ) initiatives around national parks. Studies date show mixed outcome...

Both habitat filters and spatial processes can influence community structure. Space alone affects species immigration from the regional species pool, whereas habitat filters affect species distribution and inter-specific interactions. This study aimed to understand how the interplay between environmental and geographical processes influenced the structure of Neotropical snake communities in dif...

1 Although it is well established that nitrogen and light play major roles in structuring plant communities across the landscape, it is not as clear how they structure communities within forest stands. Virtually nothing is known about within-stand structure of understorey communities of herbs and small shrubs in near-boreal forests. 2 We tested the hypothesis that fine-scale (5–20 m) variabilit...

Two of the most significant threats to coral reefs worldwide are bleaching and disease. However, there has been a scarcity of research on coral disease in South-East Asia, despite the high biodiversity and the strong dependence of local communities on the reefs in the region. This study provides baseline data on coral disease frequencies within three national parks in Sabah, Borneo, which exhib...

Uganda's forests are globally important for their conservation values but are under pressure from increasing human population and consumption. In this study, we examine how conversion of natural forest affects soil bacterial and fungal communities. Comparisons in paired natural forest and human-converted sites among four locations indicated that natural forest soils consistently had higher pH, ...

This research examines the impact of forest management regimes, with various degrees of restriction, on forest conservation in a dry deciduous Indian forest landscape. Forest change is mapped using Landsat satellite images from 1977, 1990, 1999, and 2011. The landscape studied has lost 1478 km2 of dense forest cover between 1977 and 2011, with a maximum loss of 1002 km2 of dense forest between ...

1. The occurrence and distributions of wildlife populations communities are shifting as a result global changes. To evaluate whether these shifts negatively impacting biodiversity processes, it is critical to monitor the status, trends, effects environmental variables on entire communities. However, modeling dynamics multiple species simultaneously can require large amounts diverse data, few ap...

Biodiversity changes are lagging behind current climate warming. The underlying determinants of this climatic debt are unknown and yet critical to understand the impacts of climate change on the present biota and improve forecasts of biodiversity changes. Here we assess determinants of climatic debt accumulated in French forest herbaceous plant communities between 1987 and 2008 (that is, a 1.05...

Post-fire forest regeneration is strongly influenced by abiotic and biotic heterogeneity in the preand post-fire environments, including fire regimes, species characteristics, landforms, hydrology, regional climate, and soil properties. Assessing these drivers is key to understanding the long-term effects of fire disturbances on forest succession. We evaluated multiple factors influencing patte...