Protected areas' chief conservation objectives are to include species within their boundaries and protect them from negative external pressures. Many protected areas are not achieving these goals, perhaps in part due to land development inside and outside protected areas. We conducted spatial analyses to evaluate the ability of Canadian protected areas to mitigate the effects of nearby land dev...

Willis et al. (1) concluded that climate change significantly contributed to plant species decline in the Concord, MA, area. An alternative explanation is that herbivory by whitetailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) may have been responsible for many of the decreases in species abundance that they observed, and this is a more powerful and parsimonious explanation than increased local temperature...

Landscape-scale ecological networks (ENs) are interconnected conservation corridors of high-quality habitat used to mitigate the adverse effects of landscape fragmentation and to connect with protected areas. The effectiveness of ENs for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem function has been challenged. Here we show how an extensive system of ENs of remnant historic land was put in place at ...

An annotated list of mossy species the museum-reserve “S. N. Khudekov’s Estate”, including 71 species, as well data on analysis occurrence and ecological-substrate distribution, is given. The level biodiversity proportion rare are estimated quite high. conclusion about essential role in preservation moss component natural ecosystems northern forest-steppe landscape gardening substantiated. In o...