The selection of priority areas is an enormous challenge for biodiversity conservation. Some biogeographic methods have been used to identify the priority areas to conservation, and panbiogeography is one of them. This study aimed at the utilization of panbiogeographic tools, to identify the distribution patterns of aquatic insect genera, in wetland systems of an extensive area in the Neotropic...

Conservation genetics has been focused on the ecological and evolutionary persistence of targets (species or other intraspecific units), especially when dealing with narrow-ranged species, and no generalized solution regarding the problem of where to concentrate conservation efforts for multiple genetic targets has yet been achieved. Broadly distributed and abundant species allow the identifica...

The Brazilian Amazon in the past decades has been suffering severe landscape alteration, mainly due to anthropogenic activities, such as road building and land clearing for agriculture. Using a high-resolution time series of land cover maps (classified as mature forest, non-forest, secondary forest) spanning from 1984 through 2011, and four uncorrelated fragmentation metrics (edge density, clum...

Defining units of conservation below the species level is a widely accepted conservation priority, but is especially challenging for widespread taxa that have experienced diverse geographic histories and exist across heterogenous environments. The lake chub (Pisces: Couesius plumbeus) is a widespread freshwater fish in North America and occurs from the southcentral USA to northwestern Alaska an...

One of the major goals of the Sustainable Agriculture Farming initiatives at UC Davis is to provide information about the feasibility of adopting conservation tillage and cover cropping at the farm level. The project includes two tillage schemes: standard tillage (ST) and conservation tillage (CT), and three farming methods: conventional, organic, and winter legume cover crop. All three product...

Climate change has resulted in increased vulnerability of smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Zimbabwe where there is limited capacity to adapt to changing climate. One approach that has been used to adapt to changing climate is in-field water harvesting for improved crop yields in the semi- arid regions of Zimbabwe. This review analyses the history of soil and water conservation in Zimbab...

Taxonomy and species conservation are often assumed to be completely interdependent activities. However, a shortage of taxonomic information and skills, and confusion over where the limits to 'species' should be set, both cause problems for conservationists. There is no simple solution because species lists used for conservation planning (e.g. threatened species, species richness estimates, spe...

Informative conservation science is reliant on accurate, high quality and robust data. Floras and Faunas can often provide the baseline information which feeds into a wide variety of conservation decisions made at a national, regional and global level, particularly for species based conservation. Conservation priority-setting algorithms make increasing use of species distribution ranges and the...

Subspecies are often used in ways that require their evolutionary independence, for example as proxies for units of conservation. Mitochondrial DNA sequence data reveal that 97% of continentally distributed avian subspecies lack the population genetic structure indicative of a distinct evolutionary unit. Subspecies considered threatened or endangered, some of which have been targets of expensiv...

Despite their ambiguous historical record, conservation/development interventions the world over have remained a popular environmental governance tool. One of the latest global ‘trends’ are interventions to establish so-called ‘Transfrontier Conservation Areas’ (TFCAs): large contiguous spaces that are principally aimed at conserving biological diversity across national boundaries. In line with...