With the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the European Union has established a legal framework for the protection of all aquatic ecological systems including groundwater. In this paper the economic impacts of the WFD for irrigated agriculture with regard to the reduction of water withdrawal permits and various scenarios are analyzed. The results show that decreasing water permits cause decreasi...

The question of whether ecosystem process studies can be made relevant to new, emerging management strategies to achieve ecosystem sustainability on U.S. Federal lands is addressed by examining a small sample of studies underway in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Processes being studied by many researchers—other than those directly associated with habitat creation— appear largely unrelated to...

Priorities for protecting ecosystem services must be identified to ensure future human well-being. Approaches to broad-scale spatial prioritization of ecosystem services are becoming increasingly popular and are a vital precursor to identifying locations where further detailed analyses of the management of ecosystem services is required (e.g., examining trade-offs among management actions). Pri...

As part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in Biscay, Basque Country, we described scenarios for Biscay through 2050 in an integrated and participatory way by downscaling the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) global scenarios, analyzed how ecosystem services and human well-being might change in a range of plausible futures, identified management strategies for the territory through a bac...

The theoretical underpinnings of various analyses of the social dimensions of ecosystem management are closely related to our mental models of human-nature relations. This article presents examples of eco-and anthropocentric, inter-disciplinary and complex system mind maps of human-nature relations. It shows that the interpretation of the social dimension in ecosystem management in each mind ma...

A central challenge for natural resource management is developing rigorous yet practical approaches for balancing the costs and benefits of diverse human uses of ecosystems. Economic theory has a long history of evaluating tradeoffs in returns from different assets to identify optimal investment strategies. There has been recent progress applying this framework to the delivery of ecosystem serv...

The Loess Plateau is well known for its deep loess deposits and serious soil erosion. This paper analyses the characteristic of soil erosion on the Plateau and reviews the small watershed management and ecosystem rehabilitation practice and development in the future. In the last 30 years, the government has paid great attention on the integrated small watershed management and restoration of the...

Conservation and environmental management are principal countermeasures to the degradation of marine ecosystems and their services. However, in many cases, current practices are insufficient to reverse ecosystem declines. We suggest that restoration ecology, the science underlying the concepts and tools needed to restore ecosystems, must be recognized as an integral element for marine conservat...

Th e popularity of community-based natural resource management has grown both within British Columbia’s forests and around the world. It is oft en assumed that increased local control of resources will enable more ecologically sensitive forestry practices, but this is not necessarily the case. Th rough case study examples of “earlier” community forest models in British Columbia and Mexico, the ...

In the marine realm, the rising popularity in recent years of the concept of ecosystem-based management — or, alternatively, ecosystem approaches to management — has been swift, with management organizations at multiple levels endorsing it worldwide. The concept involves applying a holistic approach to resource management rather than focusing on a single species or sector. The fundamental idea ...