Promoting biodiversity values of small forest patches in agricultural landscapes: Ecological drivers and social demand

Biodiversity in the Neotropics: ecological, economic and social values.

Biodiversity in the neotropical region is of enormous importance, specially related to the future exploitation of this natural resource for food production, medical applications and restoration ecology and technology. Knowledge of this biodiversity and its conservation represents an important step from the scientific and applied point of view. Neotropical biodiversity is endangered by human int...

Ecological Restoration and Sustainable Agricultural Landscapes

Measuring biodiversity and sustainable management in forests and agricultural landscapes.

Most of the world's biodiversity will continue to exist outside protected areas and there are also managed lands within many protected areas. In the assessment of millennium targets, there is therefore a need for indicators to measure biodiversity and suitability of habitats for biodiversity both across the whole landscape/seascape and in specific managed habitats. The two predominant land uses...

Functional landscape heterogeneity and animal biodiversity in agricultural landscapes.

Biodiversity in agricultural landscapes can be increased with conversion of some production lands into 'more-natural'- unmanaged or extensively managed - lands. However, it remains unknown to what extent biodiversity can be enhanced by altering landscape pattern without reducing agricultural production. We propose a framework for this problem, considering separately compositional heterogeneity ...

Quantifying and sustaining biodiversity in tropical agricultural landscapes.

Decision-makers increasingly seek scientific guidance on investing in nature, but biodiversity remains difficult to estimate across diverse landscapes. Here, we develop empirically based models for quantifying biodiversity across space. We focus on agricultural lands in the tropical forest biome, wherein lies the greatest potential to conserve or lose biodiversity. We explore two questions, dra...