In 2002, world leaders committed, through the Convention on Biological Diversity, to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. We compiled 31 indicators to report on progress toward this target. Most indicators of the state of biodiversity (covering species' population trends, extinction risk, habitat extent and condition, and community composition) showed declin...

Direct contact with biodiversity is culturally important in a range of contexts. Many people even join conservation organisations to protect biodiversity that they will never encounter first-hand. Despite this, we have little idea how biodiversity affects people's well-being and health through these cultural pathways. Human health is sensitive to apparently trivial psychological stimuli, negati...

Subtropical and tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots, and untangling the spatial scaling of their diversity is fundamental for understanding global species richness and conserving biodiversity essential to human well-being. However, scale-dependent diversity distributions among coexisting taxa remain poorly understood for heterogeneous environments in biodiverse regions. We show that dive...

A Spatio-temporal data model for biodiversity is growing importance to the biodiversity data management, forest and environment control. Spatio-temporal data models have received much attention in the database research community because of their practical importance and interesting challenges they pose. This paper is discussed upon the research activities of selecting, designing, implementing t...

special sites or areas that have one or more attributes which distinguish them as somehow extraordinary, usually in a religious or spiritual sense, are called sacred places. they tend to evoke a feeling of some awesome, mysterious, and transcendent power that merits special reverence and treatment. sacred groves are stands of trees or patches of forest that local communities conserve primarily ...

DNA sampled from the environment (eDNA) is a useful way to uncover biodiversity patterns. By combining a conceptual model and empirical data, we test whether eDNA transported in river networks can be used as an integrative way to assess eukaryotic biodiversity for broad spatial scales and across the land-water interface. Using an eDNA metabarcode approach, we detect 296 families of eukaryotes, ...

notion of biodiversity and form a concrete definition by which conservationists can define what exactly it is that they value and wish to preserve. A review of biodiversity definitions will accompany a growing and exhaustive list of components which make up the sort of phenomena which create biological variation, resulting ultimately in an inclusive list of biodiversity components and the manne...

Critical processes at the ecosystem level influence plant productivity, soil fertility, water quality, atmospheric chemistry, and many other local and global environmental conditions that ultimately affect human welfare. These ecosystem processes are controlled by both the diversity and identity of the plant, animal, and microbial species living within a community. Human modifications to the li...

“Biodiversity offsetting” is a novel approach to nature conservation, through which it is intended to dissociate economic development from negative biodiversity impacts. Biodiversity offsets involve the quantification of the predicted biodiversity losses associated with a given development project, and subsequently, the provision of full ecological compensation measures elsewhere by the associa...

Diversity is mainly determined by climate and environment. In addition, topography is a complex factor, and the relationship between topography and biodiversity is still poorly understood. To understand the role of topography, i.e., altitude and slope, in biodiversity, we selected Jinggangshan Mountain (JGM), an area with unique topography, as the study area. We surveyed plant and animal specie...