The context and development of a global framework for plant conservation

A new international initiative for plant conservation was first called for as a resolution of the International Botanical Congress in 1999. The natural home for such an initiative was considered to be the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD agreed to consider a Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) at its 5th meeting in 2000. It was proposed that the GSPC could provide an innovative model approach for target setting within the CBD and, prior to COP5, a series of inter-sessional papers on proposed targets and their justification were developed by plant conservation experts. Key factors that ensured the adoption of the GSPC by the CBD in 2002 included: (1) ensuring that prior to and during COP5, key Parties in each region were supportive of the Strategy; (2) setting targets at the global level and not attempting to impose these nationally; and (3) the offer by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) to support a GSPC position in the CBD Secretariat for 3 years, which provided a clear indication of the support for the GSPC from non-governmental organizations (NGO).     

生态系统管理学的概念框架及其生态学基础

系统地要领了生态系统管理学产生的历史背景和发展进程,讨论了生态系统管理的一些基本概念,生态学基础,管理目标及管理体制与实施方式,详细地论述了生态系统的生态学完整性与边界和时空尺度,生态系统的结构,功能与生态系统整体性,生态系统演替与系统动力学特性,生态系统的干扰与系统稳定性,生态系统的复杂性与不确定性,生态系统多样性与可持续生态系统,生态模型与数据收集和监测,人类活动对环境影响的双重性等生态学基础问题,阐述了在维持生态系统产品和服务功能的可持续性总体目标下,各类生态系统管理的具体目标。     

A conceptual framework for ecosystem management based on tradeoff analysis

Three dimensions (natural, social and economic factors) in tradeoff analysis have not been focused in ecology. It is necessary to consider the multi-dimensions through a tradeoff analysis of disturbances to find their positive and negative effects (referred to as two-sidedness). We proposed an 11-step approach to integrate the concepts, methods and examples to understand ecological two-sidedness. We recommend that: (1) ecological complexity and large-scale systematic perspectives need to be integrated; (2) disparate disciplines should be integrated to classify the two-sidedness indicators; (3) models should be adopted to define the characteristic metrics of disturbed ecosystems; (4) researchers need to reconsider evaluation standards and for each indicator with marginal changes; and (5) initial decision-making should refer to the two-sidedness value and that final decision-making should be subject to debate. This approach has great significance for ecosystem management because decision-makers can obtain the superiority and inferiority of disturbance strategies and select optimal strategy.     

Conceptual framework for assessment and management of ecosystem impacts of climate change

A conceptual framework is proposed for assessing and managing the ecosystem impacts of climate change. The framework can be used by ecosystem managers to systematically assess the potential adverse impacts of future climate change on ecosystems, and identify best adaptation strategies for alleviating those impacts. The proposed framework: (1) determines the acceptability of the current state of the ecosystem; (2) specifies climate change scenarios; (3) assesses the ecosystem impacts of the scenarios; and (4) identifies the best adaptation strategies for alleviating unacceptable impacts of the climate change scenarios. Concepts and methods employed in the framework include: (1) limits of acceptable change; (2) scenario analysis; (3) simulation; (4) Delphi method; (5) decision making under risk and uncertainty; (6) stochastic dominance; (7) multiple attribute evaluation; (8) Bayesian statistical inference; and (9) adaptive management. Implementation of the framework requires considerable technical, scientific, and other data/information that may not be available at this time, but is likely to become available in the future. It is recommended that a pilot program be initiated to test the proposed framework in a few targeted publicly managed ecosystems for which the requisite ecosystem data/information are available or can be readily obtained. Results of the pilot program would provide insights into the pros and cons of the framework and the conditions under which it is likely to be feasible.     

Phytodiversity of temperate permanent grasslands: ecosystem services for agriculture and livestock management for diversity conservation

Plant diversity has been reported to increase productivity. Farming practices aiming at conserving or increasing plant diversity are, however, usually less profitable than conventional ones. In this review, we aim to find reasons for this discrepancy, discuss ecosystem services of grassland phytodiversity that are useful for farmers, and ways of livestock management most beneficial for diversity. Under agricultural conditions, a clear effect of species richness on a site’s primary or secondary production has not yet been demonstrated. Reasons could be that species numbers in permanent grassland are above the threshold of five species found effective in experimental plots or that the conditions are more in equilibrium with management than in weeded experimental plots. Other diversity effects on production stability, nutrient and water retention or product quality might convince farmers to increase diversity. However, these should be tested in agricultural situations, as most research has again been carried out in experimental plots. To enhance phytodiversity, grazing has been found superior over mowing, as selective grazing, treading and excreta deposition increase the heterogeneity of a sward and thus the niches available. Especially rotational grazing with intermediate intensity may be advantageous for phytodiversity. However, complex interactions between environmental conditions, sward composition, management and livestock behaviour make it difficult to forecast grazing effects. Thus, ecological and agricultural researchers should cooperate more, e.g. either in interdisciplinary projects or by hiring researchers from the respective other profession and thus diversifying research groups, in order to integrate agricultural management into biodiversity research and biodiversity measurements into agricultural research to advance our understanding of how to make conservation and enhancement of grassland phytodiversity both feasible and sustainable.     

Towards a theoretical basis for ecosystem conservation

Humans have altered the environment so severely that extinction events are now occurring at rates unprecedented in modern history. In order to slow this trend, conservation actions must be taken to protect biodiversity, beyond just saving flagship species. Some governmental and conservation organizations have responded by committing to ecosystem conservation but, as yet, there is no coherent strategy for how this can be carried out. This report introduces many of the theoretical aspects that will need to be considered for the development of a coherent ecosystem conservation policy. The approach includes analyzing a hierarchy of interaction-based local coexistence mechanisms within a regional and historical context. This approach points toward the need for prioritizing sensitive habitats using local interaction models; considering the effects of historical exploitation mechanisms, which are now often missing; and evaluating regional diversity influences further to identify circumstances where system-wide habitat improvements deserve more emphasis.     

A community-based framework for aquatic ecosystem models

Here, we communicate a point of departure in the development of aquatic ecosystem models, namely a new community-based framework, which supports an enhanced and transparent union between the collective expertise that exists in the communities of traditional ecologists and model developers. Through a literature survey, we document the growing importance of numerical aquatic ecosystem models while also noting the difficulties, up until now, of the aquatic scientific community to make significant advances in these models during the past two decades. Through a common forum for aquatic ecosystem modellers we aim to (i) advance collaboration within the aquatic ecosystem modelling community, (ii) enable increased use of models for research, policy and ecosystem-based management, (iii) facilitate a collective framework using common (standardised) code to ensure that model development is incremental, (iv) increase the transparency of model structure, assumptions and techniques, (v) achieve a greater understanding of aquatic ecosystem functioning, (vi) increase the reliability of predictions by aquatic ecosystem models, (vii) stimulate model inter-comparisons including differing model approaches, and (viii) avoid ??re-inventing the wheel??, thus accelerating improvements to aquatic ecosystem models. We intend to achieve this as a community that fosters interactions amongst ecologists and model developers. Further, we outline scientific topics recently articulated by the scientific community, which lend themselves well to being addressed by integrative modelling approaches and serve to motivate the progress and implementation of an open source model framework.     

Matchmaking: An extensible framework for distributed resource management

Federated distributed systems present new challenges to resource management. Conventional resource managers are based on a relatively static resource model and a centralized allocator that assigns resources to customers. Distributed environments, particularly those built to support high-throughput computing (HTC), are often characterized by distributed management and distributed ownership. Distributed management introduces resource heterogeneity: Not only the set of available resources, but even the set of resource types is constantly changing. Distributed ownership introduces policy heterogeneity: Each resource may have its own idiosyncratic allocation policy. To address these problems, we designed and implemented the Matchmaking resource management framework. Customers and resources are all described by classified advertisements (classads) written in a simple but powerful formal language that describes their attributes and allocation policies. A Matchmaker server uses a policy-independent matching operation to discover pairings. It notifies the parties to the match, which use a separate, bilateral claiming protocol to confirm the allocation. The resulting framework is robust, scalable and flexible, and can evolve with changing resources. Matchmaking is the core of the Condor High Throughput Computing System developed at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. Condor is a production-quality system used by scientists and engineers at sites around the world. Condor derives much of its flexibility, robustness and efficiency from the matchmaking architecture. We describe the use of matchmaking in Condor, presenting several examples that illustrate its flexibility and expressiveness. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Questioning the ecosystem services argument for biodiversity conservation

One of the central justifications for the conservation of biodiversity is the notion that species diversity is essential for the maintenance of ecosystem services. However, an important observation overlooked by proponents of this argument is that most ecosystem services are provided not by whole ecosystems, but by any group of species that fulfils certain basic functional criteria. Distinguishing between services that are resilient in response to species decline, and those that are not, is a far less challenging task than identifying the precise influence on ecosystem functioning of rare species. Conservationists have been almost unanimous in their failure to acknowledge this distinction between resilient and sensitive ecosystem services. Not only does this threaten the credibility of conservation science, but also increases the likelihood that natural area management becomes hijacked by the demand that ecosystem service provision be made the dominant management criteria.     

Landscape evaluation for ecosystem planning

Landscape evaluation is important in the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. The objective of this paper is to review and explore methods for evaluation of landscapes for ecosystem planning. Ecosystem planning is the process of land use decision-making that considers organisms and processes that characterize the ecosystem as a whole. Risk assessments, precautionary principles, adaptive management and scenario approaches are adopted to cope with the uncertainty of nature, which is an obstacle in ecosystem planning. Special attention is needed in the analysis of status and troubleshooting in the planning scheme, which is a selection of the appropriate approach and model to find problems in the present situation. There are two approaches to set targets in ecosystem planning, the species approach and the ecosystem approach. The species approach aims to protect particular species, and the ecosystem approach aims to protect total ecosystems including the species. In Europe, ecotope or biotope mapping has been developed in ecosystem planning. An ecotope is often identified by vegetation that represents a group of wildlife, but many species require combinations of different ecotopes. Landscapes have come to be recognized as a unit for ecosystem planning. Potential assessment is a method to estimate a potential of a local space or a landscape to realize an ecosystem or species habitat, and this method has been used in HEP and GAP analysis in the USA and Ecological Networks in Europe. Some examples of ecosystem planning of national and regional scales in Japan are introduced.     

Residency and spatial use by reef sharks of an isolated seamount and its implications for conservation

Although marine protected areas (MPAs) are a common conservation strategy, these areas are often designed with little prior knowledge of the spatial behaviour of the species they are designed to protect. Currently, the Coral Sea area and its seamounts (north-east Australia) are under review to determine if MPAs are warranted. The protection of sharks at these seamounts should be an integral component of conservation plans. Therefore, knowledge on the spatial ecology of sharks at the Coral Sea seamounts is essential for the appropriate implementation of management and conservation plans. Acoustic telemetry was used to determine residency, site fidelity and spatial use of three shark species at Osprey Reef: whitetip reef sharks Triaenodon obesus, grey reef sharks Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos and silvertip sharks Carcharhinus albimarginatus. Most individuals showed year round residency at Osprey Reef, although five of the 49 individuals tagged moved to the neighbouring Shark Reef (~14 km away) and one grey reef shark completed a round trip of ~250 km to the Great Barrier Reef. Additionally, individuals of white tip and grey reef sharks showed strong site fidelity to the areas they were tagged, and there was low spatial overlap between groups of sharks tagged at different locations. Spatial use at Osprey Reef by adult sharks is generally restricted to the north-west corner. The high residency and limited spatial use of Osprey Reef suggests that reef sharks would be highly vulnerable to targeted fishing pressure and that MPAs incorporating no-take of sharks would be effective in protecting reef shark populations at Osprey and Shark Reef.     

A tiered framework for assessing groundwater ecosystem health

The notion of ecosystem health has been widely adopted in environmental policy, particularly in the management of river systems. Despite this, even a notional understanding of ecosystem health and its assessment in connected aquifer ecosystems remains elusive. In this article, we propose a definition and provide a tiered framework for the assessment of ecosystem health in groundwater. From the literature we identify general attributes of a healthy groundwater ecosystem and from these develop primary (Tier 1) indicators of health. Where Tier 1 benchmarks are exceeded or more detailed assessment is required, we discuss a range of indicators (Tier 2) that may together generate a multimetric index of groundwater health. Our case study using samples from an alluvial aquifer in north-western New South Wales, Australia, demonstrates the utility of both tiers of the framework, and the ability of the approach to separate disturbed and undisturbed sites. The process of multimetric development is simple and our Tier 2 benchmarks determined from limited data. Nevertheless, our framework will be applicable and readily adaptable to site-specific contexts.     

Effects of plant traits on ecosystem and regional processes: a conceptual framework for predicting the consequences of global change

Human activities are causing widespread changes in the species composition of natural and managed ecosystems, but the consequences of these changes are poorly understood. This paper presents a conceptual framework for predicting the ecosystem and regional consequences of changes in plant species composition. Changes in species composition have greatest ecological effects when they modify the ecological factors that directly control (and respond to) ecosystem processes. These interactive controls include: functional types of organisms present in the ecosystem; soil resources used by organisms to grow and reproduce; modulators such as microclimate that influence the activity of organisms; disturbance regime; and human activities. Plant traits related to size and growth rate are particularly important because they determine the productive capacity of vegetation and the rates of decomposition and nitrogen mineralization. Because the same plant traits affect most key processes in the cycling of carbon and nutrients, changes in plant traits tend to affect most biogeochemical cycling processes in parallel. Plant traits also have landscape and regional effects through their effects on water and energy exchange and disturbance regime.     

Future battlegrounds for conservation under global change

Global biodiversity is under significant threat from the combined effects of human-induced climate and land-use change. Covering 12% of the Earth's terrestrial surface, protected areas are crucial for conserving biodiversity and supporting ecological processes beneficial to human well-being, but their selection and design are usually uninformed about future global change. Here, we quantify the exposure of the global reserve network to projected climate and land-use change according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and set these threats in relation to the conservation value and capacity of biogeographic and geopolitical regions. We find that geographical patterns of past human impact on the land cover only poorly predict those of forecasted change, thus revealing the inadequacy of existing global conservation prioritization templates. Projected conservation risk, measured as regional levels of land-cover change in relation to area protected, is the greatest at high latitudes (due to climate change) and tropics/subtropics (due to land-use change). Only some high-latitude nations prone to high conservation risk are also of high conservation value, but their high relative wealth may facilitate additional conservation efforts. In contrast, most low-latitude nations tend to be of high conservation value, but they often have limited capacity for conservation which may exacerbate the global biodiversity extinction crisis. While our approach will clearly benefit from improved land-cover projections and a thorough understanding of how species range will shift under climate change, our results provide a first global quantitative demonstration of the urgent need to consider future environmental change in reserve-based conservation planning. They further highlight the pressing need for new reserves in target regions and support a much extended 'north-south' transfer of conservation resources that maximizes biodiversity conservation while mitigating global climate change.     

Regional management units for marine turtles: a novel framework for prioritizing conservation and research across multiple scales

Background

Resolving threats to widely distributed marine megafauna requires definition of the geographic distributions of both the threats as well as the population unit(s) of interest. In turn, because individual threats can operate on varying spatial scales, their impacts can affect different segments of a population of the same species. Therefore, integration of multiple tools and techniques — including site-based monitoring, genetic analyses, mark-recapture studies and telemetry — can facilitate robust definitions of population segments at multiple biological and spatial scales to address different management and research challenges.

Methodology/Principal Findings

To address these issues for marine turtles, we collated all available studies on marine turtle biogeography, including nesting sites, population abundances and trends, population genetics, and satellite telemetry. We georeferenced this information to generate separate layers for nesting sites, genetic stocks, and core distributions of population segments of all marine turtle species. We then spatially integrated this information from fine- to coarse-spatial scales to develop nested envelope models, or Regional Management Units (RMUs), for marine turtles globally.

Conclusions/Significance

The RMU framework is a solution to the challenge of how to organize marine turtles into units of protection above the level of nesting populations, but below the level of species, within regional entities that might be on independent evolutionary trajectories. Among many potential applications, RMUs provide a framework for identifying data gaps, assessing high diversity areas for multiple species and genetic stocks, and evaluating conservation status of marine turtles. Furthermore, RMUs allow for identification of geographic barriers to gene flow, and can provide valuable guidance to marine spatial planning initiatives that integrate spatial distributions of protected species and human activities. In addition, the RMU framework — including maps and supporting metadata — will be an iterative, user-driven tool made publicly available in an online application for comments, improvements, download and analysis.     

A proposed framework for developing indicators of ecosystem health

Considerations involved in developing a suite of indicators to monitor regional environmental health, similar in conception to management use of leading economic indicators, are described. Linkages between human activities and well being and the state of the environment are considered essential to the evaluation of general environmental health. Biogeochemical and socioeconomic indicators are mutually affected by environmental degradation and examples of both categories of indicators are described. Desirable properties in indicators of environmental health vary with their specific management use. Different indicators are called for when collecting data to assess the adequacy of the environment, monitor trends over time, provide early warning of environmental degradation, or diagnose the cause of an existing problem. Tradeoffs between desirable characteristics, costs, and quality of information are inevitable when choosing indicators for management use. Decisions about what information to collect for which purpose can be made more rationally when available indicators are characterized and matched to management goals.     

A framework for understanding physical ecosystem engineering by organisms

While well‐recognized as an important kind of ecological interaction, physical ecosystem engineering by organisms is diverse with varied consequences, presenting challenges for developing and using general understanding. There is also still some uncertainty as to what it is, and some skepticism that the diversity of engineering and its effects is amenable to conceptual integration and general understanding. What then, are the key cause/effect relationships and what underlies them? Here we develop, enrich and extend our extant understanding of physical ecosystem engineering into an integrated framework that exposes the essential cause/effect relationships, their underpinnings, and the interconnections that need to be understood to explain or predict engineering effects. The framework has four cause/effect relationships linking four components: 1. An engineer causes structural change; 2. Structural change causes abiotic change; 3. Structural and abiotic change cause biotic change; 4. Structural, abiotic and biotic change can feedback to the engineer. The first two relationships describe an ecosystem engineering process and abiotic dynamics, while the second two describe biotic consequence for other species and the engineer. The four relationships can be parameterized and linked using time‐indexed equations that describe engineered system dynamics. After describing the relationships we discuss the utility of the framework; how it might be enriched; and briefly how it can be used to identify intersections of ecosystem engineering with fields outside ecology.