Conservation easements have increased dramatically but their social and ecological outcomes are largely unknown. To examine the influence of social relations and institutional structure on easement design and conservation outcomes, we compared two regions where land trusts hold conservation easements protecting large areas of private rangeland: Lassen Foothills, California, and Malpai Borderlan...

Objective: The aim of this study is to provide a management plan for the Sykan watershed of Darre shahr city located in Ilam province using GIS in land use planning. Methods: For land using of Sykan watershed of Ilam province with about 9 hectares area, map of classes, elevation, percent slope, geographical aspects, soil characteristics, vegetation density and the final map units were combined ...

The ecosystem services conservation zoning framework offers an alternative to current land use decision processes that present incomplete, misinformed, and unaccountable land use options and alternatives. The framework presents holistic tools to make more informed land use decisions, and begins to integrate ecosystem services into the existing polices that govern land development. The principal...

Biodiversity is severely declining in intensively managed agriculture worldwide. In response, land-management strategies for biodiversity conservation on farmland are in debate, namely ecological intensification and land sparing vs. land sharing. In parallel, there is a recent food vs. energy debate stimulated by an increasing competition for land resources. Despite clear overlaps between these...

Competing interests in land for agriculture and commodity production in tropical human-dominated landscapes make forests and biodiversity conservation particularly challenging. Establishment of protected areas in this regard is not functioning as expected due to exclusive ecological focus and poor recognition of local people’s traditional forest use and dependence. In recent years, multifunctio...

Land use intensity is an important indicator of human activities, so we quantified the land use intensity and five ecosystem services (soil conservation, water conservation, carbon storage, net primary productivity (NPP), and crop production) in 13 subbasins of the Tabu River Basin in an agro-pastoral ecotone in central Inner Mongolia. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationships among ecosystem ...

Aldo Leopold, in "The Land Ethic," made 2 important contributions to conservation ethics: he emphasized the community and ecosystem levels of organization and he explicitly included people as members of the biotic community. Leopold's writings remain eloquent, inspirational, and influential, but the ideas he describes are inherently complex, and ecological science has continued to evolve since ...

Conservation biologists are devoting an increasing amount of energy to debating whether land sparing (high-yielding agriculture on a small land footprint) or land sharing (low-yielding, wildlife-friendly agriculture on a larger land footprint) will promote better outcomes for local and global biodiversity. In turn, concerns are mounting about how to feed the world, given increasing demands for ...

BACKGROUND The numerous studies examining where efforts to conserve biodiversity should be targeted are not matched by comparable research efforts addressing how conservation investments should be structured and what balance of conservation approaches works best in what contexts. An obvious starting point is to examine the past allocation of effort among conservation approaches and how this has...