The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity to celebrate biodiversity, increase understanding about how biodiversity is critical for sustaining life on Earth, and to highlight the ongoing and increasing loss of biodiversity. The emphasis of this campaign is on people and biodiversity, and the monetary value of biodiversity in terms of goods and services, rather...

Conservation tillage (CT) systems have a number of potential benefits including lower crop production costs and the ability to reduce soil erosion that have made them common in several regions of the world. Although CT systems have been researched and successfully implemented on some farms in California's San Joaquin Valley (SJV), overall adoption is low and the reasons for the region's compara...

The conservation of biodiversity poses an exceptionally difficult problem in that it needs to be effective in a context of double uncertainty: scientific (i.e., how to conserve biodiversity) and normative (i.e., which biodiversity to conserve and why). Although adaptive management offers a promising approach to overcome scientific uncertainty, normative uncertainty is seldom tackled by conserva...

The perspective of 'biocomplexity' in the form of 'coupled natural and human systems' represents a resource for the future conservation of biodiversity hotspots in three direct ways: (i) modelling the impact on biodiversity of private land-use decisions and public land-use policies, (ii) indicating how the biocultural history of a biodiversity hotspot may be a resource for its future conservati...

By addressing several key features overlooked in previous studies, i.e. human disturbance, integration of ecosystem- and species-level conservation features, and principles of complementarity and representativeness, we present the first national-scale systematic conservation planning for China to determine the optimized spatial priorities for biodiversity conservation. We compiled a spatial dat...

In this paper we explore the role that biosystematists can play in conservation planning. Conservation planning concerns the location and design of reserves that both represent the biodiversity of a region and enable the persistence of that biodiversity by maintaining key ecological and evolutionary processes. For conservation planning to be effective, quantitative targets are needed for the sp...

Rapid biodiversity assessment and conservation planning require the use of easily quantified and estimated surrogates for biodiversity. Using data sets from Québec and Queensland, we applied four methods to assess the extent to which environmental surrogates can represent biodiversity components: (1) surrogacy graphs; (2) marginal representation plots; (3) Hamming distance function; and (4) Syr...

1. Intensive agricultural practices drive biodiversity loss with potentially drastic consequences for ecosystem services. To advance conservation and production goals, agricultural practices should be compatible with biodiversity. Traditional or less intensive systems (i.e. with fewer agrochemicals, less mechanisation, more crop species) such as shaded coffee and cacao agroforests are highlight...

Deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics is a major source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The tropics also harbour more than half the world's threatened species, raising the possibility that reducing GHG emissions by curtailing tropical deforestation could provide substantial co-benefits for biodiversity conservation. Here we explore the potential for such co-benefits in I...