Abstract If human population growth is not controlled, natural areas must be sacrificed. An alternative to create more habitat, terraforming Mars. However, this requires establishment of essential, ecosystem services on a planet currently unamenable Terran species. Shorter term, assembling Terran-type ecosystems within contained environments conceivable if mutually supportive species complement...

Nature reserves are widely considered as one available strategy for protecting biodiversity, which is threatened by habitat fragmentation, and wildlife extinction. The Chinese government has established a goal of protecting 15% of its land area by 2015. We quantitated the characteristics and distribution of nature reserves in mainland China and evaluated the expansion process for national natur...

Nature reserves are established to protect ecosystems and rare flora and fauna. However, with the rapid development of the social economy, many nature reserves are facing enormous pressures from human activities. The assessment of the sustainability of nature reserves is a fundamental task for the planning and management of such areas. In this study, the sustainability of China’s 319 national n...

Managing landscapes In a 2008 review, David Lindenmayer and a long list of distinguished conservation biologists review two decades of research on landscape management [5]. They identify a set of 13 factors that anyone managing a landscape for conservation should consider, and they group those factors under four boad themes: setting goals, spatial issues, temporal issues, and management approac...

Climate change has the potential to alter the distributions of threatened plant species, and may therefore diminish the capacity of nature reserves to protect threatened plant species. Chinese nature reserves contain a rich diversity of plant species that are at risk of becoming more threatened by climate change. Hence, it is urgent to identify the extent to which future climate change may comp...