Habitat loss is a primary cause of loss of biodiversity but conserving habitat for species presents challenges. Land parcels differ in their ability to produce returns for landowners and landowners may have private information about the value of the land to them. Land parcels also differ in the type and quality of habitat and the spatial pattern of land use across multiple landowners is importa...

Viet Nam’s landscape is constantly changing as land use changes. Sometimes the resources base benefits where forests are protected and allowed to regenerate naturally, bare land is reforested, or where swidden land is converted to more intensive agriculture. Sometimes resources are lost where forests are exploited for timber, cleared for agricultural or grazing, or burnt by spreading wildfires.

To what extent can private-sector bioprospecting incentives be relied upon for the protection of biological diversity? The literature contains dramatically different estimates of these incentives, from trivial to quite large. We resolve this controversy by isolating the fundamental source of the discrepancy and then providing empirically defensible estimates based on that analysis. Results demo...

F or far too long, conservation scientists and practitioners have depended on intuition and anecdote to guide the design of conservation investments. If we want to ensure that our limited resources make a difference, we must accept that testing hypotheses about what policies protect biological diversity requires the same scientifi c rigor and state-of-the-art methods that we invest in testing e...

Protected areas (PAs) are often considered the most important biodiversity conservation areas in national plans, but PAs often do not represent national-scale biodiversity. We evaluate the current conservation status of plant biodiversity within current existing PAs, and identify potential additional PAs for South Korea. We modeled species ranges for 2,297 plant species using Multivariate Adapt...

The views expressed and the conclusions reached in this publication are those of the author and not necessarily those of persons consulted. RIRDC shall not be responsible in any way whatsoever to any person who relies in whole or in part on the contents of this report. iii Foreword Large areas of Australia are dedicated to plantation forestry – both non-native and native tree species. The size ...

To conserve biodiversity, it is necessary not only to maximize the number of taxa that are saved today, but also to guarantee the maintenance of high levels of biological diversity in the future. A recent analysis argues that, to achieve this, consideration of phylogeny is essential.

• Although there is a worldwide surge of interest in conservation, many justifications rest on shaky or ephemeral grounds. • Arguments for conservation of biodiversity often include strong ethical or aesthetic components which are superficially attractive but depend on potentially changeable social circumstances. • Economic justifications based on undiscovered potential are susceptible to chang...