Outside of protected areas, environmental regulation is a vital policy tool for conserving at-risk species. An underappreciated potential for citizen science is to augment locality databases used in regulatory review to provide greater certainty to regulatory decisions.
This chapter assesses scenarios of future land degradation and restoration in terms of change in: (i) soil properties; (ii) biodiversity; and (iii) ecosystem services as a result of human activities up to 2050.
The objectives of this project are to understand current trends in climate change across the western conterminous United States, assess the potential impact of these changes on major vegetation types of high importance to BLM management, and interpret these changes to assist BLM in determining climate smart management strategies.
The objectives of this project are to understand current trends in climate change across the western conterminous United States, assess the potential impact of these changes on major vegetation types of high importance to BLM management, and interpret these changes to assist BLM in determining climate smart management strategies.
Targeting conservation actions efficiently requires information on vulnerability of and threats to conservation targets, but such information is rarely included in conservation plans.
Conservation status and threat assessments evaluate species’ relative risks of extinction globally, regionally, nationally, or locally and estimate the degree to which populations of species are already safeguarded in existing conservation systems, with the aim of exposing the critical gaps in current conservation.
NatureServe and the U.S. Geological Survey organized and hosted a biodiversity and ecological informatics workshop at the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. The workshop objective was to identify user-driven future directions and areas of collaboration in advanced applications of environmental data applied to forecasting and decision making for the sustainability of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Preserving the evolutionary history and ecological functions that different species embody, in addition to species themselves, is a growing concern for conservation. Recent studies warn that conservation priority regions identified using species diversity differ from those based on phylogenetic or functional diversity.