The Convention on Biological Diversity commits the 177 signatory countries to conserve and sustainably use biological diversity. The long-term conservation of biodiversity requires an understanding of the processes that allow species to persist in natural as well as human-dominated ecosystems. During most of the 20th century, nature reserves and national parks have been a cornerstone in the pre...

to apply scientific and proper management of rangeland ecosystems, having information on health and functions indices of ecosystem is required. using landscape function analysis, the present study deals with assessing and comparing of ecological indices in northern and southern landscapes, darehkonari khashab of gachsaran. length and width for ecological patches in northern landscapes  in speci...

■ Abstract Although human-induced changes to the global environment and natural biotic resources, collectively labeled “global change” and the “biodiversity crisis,” have accelerated with industrialization over the past 300 years, such changes have a much longer history. Particularly since the rise of agriculturally based societies and associated population expansion during the early Holocene, ...

PREMISE OF STUDY Plant functional traits are commonly used as proxies for plant responses to environmental challenges, yet few studies have explored how functional trait distributions differ across gradients of land-use change. By comparing trait distributions in intact forests with those across land-use change gradients, we can improve our understanding of the ways land-use change alters the d...

Predation is increasingly pointed out as one of the factors contributing to population declines of groundnesting farmland birds, though it remains poorly understood how ongoing transformations of agricultural landscapes affect predator assemblages. This study addressed this issue, estimating the contribution of landscape composition and configuration to spatial variation in species richness and...

Farms benefit from pest control services provided by nature, but management of these services requires an understanding of how habitat complexity within and around the farm impacts the relationship between agricultural pests and their enemies. Using cage experiments, this study measures the effect of habitat complexity across scales on pest suppression of the cabbage aphid Brevicoryne brassicae...

ecological destruction in human-dominated landscapes has significant impacts on environment sustainability internationally. landscape planning can play a role in mitigating the effects of human-related activities. one element of landscape planning involves the analysis of the biological, spatial and social arrangement of areas in an urban environment and identifying characteristics that are und...

Transformation of natural land cover (LC) into modified LC has become inevitable due to growing human needs. Nevertheless, landscape transformational patterns during reclamation of mine damaged lands remain vague. Our hypothesis was that post-mining landscapes with different ages since dumping become more diverse in LC transformation over time. The aim was to study the impact of landscape recla...

Models of species' distributions are commonly used to inform landscape and conservation planning. In urban and semiurban landscapes, the distributions of species are determined by a combination of natural habitat and anthropogenic impacts. Understanding the spatial influence of these two processes is crucial for making spatially explicit decisions about conservation actions. We present a logist...