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...

Using landscape analysis and economic valuation, this article shows how valuation techniques can inform prioritization of private forestland for ecosystem service conservation and highlights the methodological challenges in doing so. We classify forests according to six ecological and social characteristics. If ecosystem service priorities are known a priori, this landscape analysis might be su...

Many studies have explored the value of using more sophisticated coastal impact models and higher resolution elevation data in sea-level rise (SLR) adaptation planning. However, we know little about to what extent the improved models and data could actually lead to better conservation outcomes under SLR. This is important to know because high-resolution data are likely to not be available in so...

Monitoring and research activities may hinder rather than improve conservation in tropical countries. Those concerned with conservation—particularly academics and aid agencies—too often overlook the practical realities of achieving conservation in the tropics. As a result, many initiatives divert scarce resources away from fundamental management priorities. I identify some critical threats to b...

(To appear as a chapter in " Research priorities for nature conservation " in 2001 – a book sponsored by the Society for Conservation Biology and edited by Soule, Orians and Kohm)

To counteract global species decline, modern biodiversity conservation engages in large projects, spends billions of dollars, and includes many organizations working simultaneously within regions. To add to this complexity, the conservation sector has hierarchical structure, where conservation actions are often outsourced by funders (foundations, government, etc.) to local organizations that wo...

BACKGROUND How do national-level actions overlap with global priorities for conservation? Answering this question is especially important in countries with high and unique biological diversity like Colombia. Global biodiversity schemes provide conservation guidance at a large scale, while national governments gazette land for protection based on a combination of criteria at regional or local sc...

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...

BACKGROUND Private land conservation is an essential strategy for biodiversity protection in the USA, where half of the federally listed species have at least 80% of their habitat on private lands. We investigated the alignment between private land protection conducted by the world's largest land trust (The Nature Conservancy) and the science driven identification of priority areas for conserva...