Protected areas' chief conservation objectives are to include species within their boundaries and protect them from negative external pressures. Many protected areas are not achieving these goals, perhaps in part due to land development inside and outside protected areas. We conducted spatial analyses to evaluate the ability of Canadian protected areas to mitigate the effects of nearby land dev...

Willis et al. (1) concluded that climate change significantly contributed to plant species decline in the Concord, MA, area. An alternative explanation is that herbivory by whitetailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) may have been responsible for many of the decreases in species abundance that they observed, and this is a more powerful and parsimonious explanation than increased local temperature...

Landscape-scale ecological networks (ENs) are interconnected conservation corridors of high-quality habitat used to mitigate the adverse effects of landscape fragmentation and to connect with protected areas. The effectiveness of ENs for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem function has been challenged. Here we show how an extensive system of ENs of remnant historic land was put in place at ...

The objective of this paper was to elaborate the application of Geo-informatics for trans-boundary biodiversity conservation across Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia under the Pha Taem Protected Forests Complex (PPFC) Project Phase I (2001-2004). This involved monitoring land use/land cover change, mapping distributions of selected wildlife species, and defining management zones. The results pred...

BACKGROUND International recognition that people with disabilities were excluded from the Millennium Development Goals has led to better inclusion of people with disabilities in the recently agreed Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs) 2015-2030. Given the current global agenda for disability inclusion, it is crucial to increase the understanding of the situation of people with disabi...

The European Landscape Convention (2000) obligates European Union countries to identify and implement landscape quality objectives (LQOs) understood as the specification of public expectations and preferences concerning the landscape of a given area, expressed by competent public authorities. The convention emphasizes the important role of local community representatives in this field. In Polan...

The newly adopted Green Infrastructure Strategy is a key step in implementing targets of the European Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 (EBS). This study responds to policy needs for target 2 on ecosystems conditions and services, target 1 on implementing and enhancing coherence of the Natura 2000 network and sub-target 3b on integrating environmental concerns in forest management. Protected areas ...