Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment最新文献

Achieving “nature positive” development within existing regulatory frameworks will be challenging. Halting and reversing biodiversity loss requires protection, restoration, and enhancement of ecosystems alongside a fundamental shift in how biodiversity is valued and quantifiable improvements are assessed. A new approach is needed because traditional Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) focused on mitigating negative impacts will not promote positive outcomes. We propose an additional EIA pathway that assesses the potential for biodiversity gains at development sites, reframing biodiversity as an asset to be enhanced, rather than as a problem to avoid. By adding the identification of biodiversity-enhancing opportunities to development planning, this approach encourages actions that support sustainable and resilient ecosystems, providing a clearer link to the social and economic benefits that can also be accumulated. Through two hypothetical case studies, we illustrate how this nature positive pathway identifies biodiversity potential. We also discuss how developers may be incentivized to align with the global nature positive agenda.

Decades of conservation action have failed to stem biodiversity loss, stimulating heated debates over which conservation strategies are the most effective. Do we focus on preserving sufficient wilderness, maintaining services from nature for societal well-being, or protecting vulnerable socioecologies from injustice? Despite the apparent rivalry between these three agendas, their underlying values—ecological resilience, social prosperity, and freedom from harm—are not mutually exclusive. In this study, the X-curve framework is used to help imagine a transformation pathway for a future that not only protects but also systemically advances all three of these goals. Doing so demonstrates the potential complementarity between approaches, as well as the need for coordinated engagement with other transformative agendas, such as environmental justice movements. Outcomes can be supported through decentralized environmental governance and a more equitable political economy, highlighting that the protection of land and land rights is only the first step.

We investigated how a discriminatory housing policy—redlining—has shaped the spatial patterns and configurations of greenspaces throughout 177 cities in the contiguous US. Housing segregation has been a long-term development practice that has sequestered communities of color to areas with elevated environmental and public health risks. Although the lasting environmental, social, and economic impacts of redlining are clear, the impact of redlining on landscapes is still unfolding. In neighborhoods that were historically redlined, we found that (i) less overall greenspace was available, (ii) individual greenspaces were smaller and less connected, and (iii) residents belonged predominantly to communities of color and/or households had lower income. Thus, the legacy of redlining can be seen in the modern spatial patterns of urban greenspaces, and ecosystem services provided by greenspaces have been systematically absent from redlined communities for decades.

By acting as potential candidates for other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), village fengshui forests demonstrate how community-based management sustains regional biodiversity in China. Nevertheless, limited information on the nationwide distribution and biodiversity conservation effectiveness of these forests has hindered their integration as OECMs. We compiled a national database of 811 village fengshui forests, detailing their geographical coordinates, species composition, and areal extents. We found that these forests were widely distributed across southern China and were mostly independent from formal nature reserves. Although village fengshui forests exhibited higher human footprint indices and were smaller in area than formal nature reserves, they harbored diverse plant communities, primarily remnant patches of evergreen broadleaf forests. They also provided refugia for 60 rare and endangered tree species, including 24 relict species in subtropical humid habitats. Our findings highlight the potential role of village fengshui forests in biodiversity conservation outside of formal nature reserves, and how they contribute to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Ecologists often aim to reduce conceptual ambiguity by attempting to create rigid shared lexicons. These efforts imply that ambiguity is undesirable. In some contexts, however, conceptual flexibility comes with under-discussed benefits. Here, we use the lens of pollinator gardening to explore how conceptual flexibility is built into participatory conservation practices, and how this flexibility is central to the effectiveness of these practices. Grassroots conservation movements like pollinator gardening often have diffuse, bottom-up origins, producing a cloud of heterogeneous practices under an umbrella definition. We posit that conceptual flexibility provides key benefits in participatory conservation by attracting a larger, more diverse set of voluntary participants and experts, each of whom takes small actions that scale-up to large impacts in a process of conservation coproduction. We also suggest a flexible operational framework for ecologists studying participatory conservation, with the aim of enabling rigorous research without the need for rigid global definitions.

The range of datasets, methods, and other tools available for environmental research and decision-making is rapidly expanding. How should the quality of these tools be evaluated? When are new resources better than existing resources? We advocate an adequacy-for-purpose perspective, according to which the quality of environmental research tools depends on both research aims and context of use: a good tool is one that will allow its users—given their knowledge, expertise, and practical resources—to achieve their aims. The adequacy-for-purpose approach to assessment differs in various ways from standard practice and, we argue, has several advantages. It can help researchers and environmental managers avoid using “best available” datasets and models for purposes for which they are ill-suited. It can also help researchers recognize the value of tools that are not state-of-the-art. We illustrate the adequacy-for-purpose approach with examples from lake and reservoir forecasting.

Combined effects of global change, including land conversion, biological invasions, and overexploitation, have degraded the resilience of ecosystems and the services they provide. Here, we identify key ecological structures and processes that can be targeted by management to improve resilience at scales ranging from single species to entire landscapes. We highlight portfolio effects as a resilience-promoting process that both stabilizes and increases yield within food webs. We then discuss how habitat heterogeneity propagates portfolio effects across trophic levels and spatial scales to generate resilient ecosystems. Using examples from the North American Great Lakes Basin, we show that human-driven global change has broadly eroded portfolio effects and habitat heterogeneity, thereby increasing ecosystem vulnerability to future disturbances. Fortunately, strategic management actions can amplify resilience-promoting processes and dampen instabilities. Our synthesis supports the incorporation of whole-ecosystem resilience indices into conventional natural resource management and the structured, landscape-scale restoration of habitat heterogeneity to promote across-scale portfolio effects.