Search results for "landscape conservation"
showing 10 items of 783 documents
Nutrient impoverishment and limitation of productivity after 20 years of conservation management in wet grasslands of north-western Germany
2009
Abstract European wet grasslands are characterized by high diversity of plant and animal species but are threatened by intensive land use. Although preservation or restoration of species-rich wet grasslands requires low nutrient availability that could be achieved by long-term management, studies monitoring nutrient removal are lacking. Our objective was to assess the long-term effect of management (mowing twice a year without or with PK fertilization for 20 years) on (i) productivity and nutrient removal with the harvest, (ii) the type of nutrient limitation, and (iii) plant species richness in wet grasslands in north-western Germany considering the differences between organic and mineral …
Tarsius tumpara: A New Tarsier Species from Siau Island, North Sulawesi
2008
Abstract: A new, critically endangered species of tarsier, one of the world's 25 most endangered primates, is described from the remote island of Siau, North Sulawesi, based on distinguishing characteristics of the tail tuft, pelage coloration, skull, and vocalizations. Siau is part of the Sangihe Island chain, a volcanic arc composed of islands that rise from the ocean floor. There is a single previous record of a tarsier from Siau; a skull in the Dresden Museum that Meyer (1897) classified with tarsiers from Sangihe Island as Tarsius sangirensis. Sangihe and Siau Islands are geologically separated by about 60 km of ocean that greatly exceeds 1,000 m in depth. Genetic data for the new spec…
The role of competition and rarity in the restoration of a dry grassland in Finland
2001
Semi-natural grasslands have become scarce throughout Europe. Preservation of their plant species requires either the maintenance of the existing grasslands or the creation of new ones. To study the establishment and regeneration ability of plant species typical of dry grasslands we laid out an experiment on a former arable field in central Finland. We compared the success of 13 grassland species both in a theoretical situation with minimal competition and in competition with weeds. More than half of the species used were regionally rare. As a group, grassland plants reached the highest cover in the experimental plots in which outside competition was minimised by weeding. However, the total…
Trophic cascades in benthic marine ecosystems: lessons for fisheries and protected-area management
2000
An important principle of environmental science is that changes in single components of systems are likely to have consequences elsewhere in the same systems. In the sea, food web data are one of the few foundations for predicting such indirect effects, whether of fishery exploitation or following recovery in marine protected areas (MPAs). We review the available literature on one type of indirect interaction in benthic marine ecosystems, namely trophic cascades, which involve three or more trophic levels connected by predation. Because many indirect effects have been revealed through fishery exploitation, in some cases we include humans as trophic levels. Our purpose is to establish how wi…
Comparison of social-ecological resilience between two grassland management patterns driven by grassland land contract policy in the Maqu, Qinghai-Ti…
2018
Embraced for decision-making, resilience has evolved as a meaningful term in areas such as ecology, the economy and society. After a policy of grassland contracts was implemented on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, two grassland management patterns evolved: the multi-household management pattern (MMP) and the single-household management pattern (SMP). Within a resilience-driven perspective, this study compared the outcomes of these grassland management patterns by measuring their effects on the resilience of grazing, ecological, economic and social systems. Resilience indicators for each of the four systems were: grazing system (grazing space, transhumance, water source and reproduction); ecolo…
Distribution patterns, ecological characteristic and conservation status of endemic plants of Tadzhikistan – A global hotspot of diversity
2011
Abstract Based on literature data and own fieldwork in Tadzhikistan (Middle Asia), the taxonomic structure, distribution, habitat preferences as well as conservation state of a group of 1486 species of vascular plants of endemic and sub-endemic character are presented. In addition to verifying the number of endemics, the present study has shown that Tadzhik endemics are the most numerous in the northwest of the country, in the Gissar-Darvasian and Zeravshan regions. An analysis of average richness of endemics per surface unit has revealed that Gissar-Darvasian F is the richest area. An assessment of the taxonomic similarity of geobotanical regions based on endemic species composition has sh…
The effect of vegetation structure on seasonal density of Sylvia warblers in the eastern Iberian Peninsula
2021
Vegetation characteristics determine seasonal habitat selection by Eurasian Blackcaps Sylvia atricapilla, Dartford Warblers Sylvia undata, and Sardinian Warblers Sylvia melanocephala, and changes i...
Transitions in European land-management regimes between 1800 and 2010
2015
Land use is a cornerstone of human civilization, but also intrinsically linked to many global sustainability challenges—from climate change to food security to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Understanding the underlying technological, institutional and economic drivers of land-use change, and how they play out in different environmental, socio-economic and cultural contexts, is therefore important for identifying effective policies to successfully address these challenges. In this regard, much can be learned from studying long-term land-use change. We examined the evolution of European land management over the past 200 years with the aim of identifying (1) key episodes of changes in land …
Probabilistic maturation reaction norms assessed from mark-recaptures of wild fish in their natural habitat
2014
Published version of an article in the journal: Ecology and Evolution. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1044 Open Access Reaction norms are a valuable tool in evolutionary biology. Lately, the probabilistic maturation reaction norm approach, describing probabilities of maturing at combinations of age and body size, has been much applied for testing whether phenotypic changes in exploited populations of fish are mainly plastic or involving an evolutionary component. However, due to typical field data limitations, with imperfect knowledge about individual life histories, this demographic method still needs to be assessed. Using 13 years of direct mark-recap…
Energy and speleogenesis: Key determinants of terrestrial species richness in caves
2017
Abstract The aim of this study was to unravel the relative role played by speleogenesis (i.e., the process in which a cave is formed), landscape‐scale variables, and geophysical factors in the determination of species richness in caves. Biological inventories from 21 caves located in the southeastern Iberian Peninsula along with partial least square (PLS) regression analysis were used to assess the relative importance of the different explanatory variables. The caves were grouped according to the similarity in their species composition; the effect that spatial distance could have on similarity was also studied using correlation between matrices. The energy and speleogenesis of caves account…