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Adaptively managing marine protected areas (MPAs) requires accurately assessing whether established MPAs are achieving their goals of protecting and conserving biomass, especially for harvested populations. Ecological MPA assessments commonly compare inside of the MPA to a reference point outside of and/or before implementation (i.e., calculating "response ratios"). Yet, MPAs are not simple ecological experiments; by design, protected populations interact with those outside, and population dynamic responses can be nonlinear. This complicates assessment interpretations. Here, we used a two‐patch population model to explore how MPA response ratios (outside–inside, before–after, and before–after‐control‐impact [BACI]) for fished populations behave under different conditions, like whether the population is receiving a sustainable larval supply or if it is declining despite protection from harvest. We then conducted a Bayesian evaluation of MPA effects on fish and invertebrate populations based on data collected from 82 published studies on 264 no‐take MPAs worldwide, using the results of an earlier global meta‐analysis as priors. We considered the effects of calculating different summary metrics on these results, drawing on the theoretical insights from our population model as a comparative framework. We demonstrate that not all response ratio comparison types provide the same information: For example, outside–inside and BACI comparisons can fail to detect population decline within MPAs, whereas before–after comparisons likely detect that pattern. Considering these limitations, we nonetheless found that MPAs globally are producing positive outcomes, with on average greater biomass, density, and organism size within their boundaries than reference sites. However, only a small portion of studies (18 of 82) provided the temporal data necessary to determine that protection, on average, has led to increased abundance of populations within MPAs over time. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering the underlying system dynamics when assessing MPA effects. Assuming that large outside–inside or BACI response ratios always reflect large and net positive conservation effects may lead to misleading conclusions, we recommend that: (1) when assessing specific MPA effects, empirical findings be considered alongside theoretical knowledge relevant to that MPA system, and (2) management should respond to the local conditions and outcomes, rather than a blanket expectation for positive MPA effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forage availability has been suggested as one driver of the observed decline in honey bees. However, little is known about the effects of its spatiotemporal variation on colony success. We present a modeling framework for assessing honey bee colony viability in cropping systems. Based on two real farmland structures, we developed a landscape generator to design cropping systems varying in crop species identity, diversity, and relative abundance. The landscape scenarios generated were evaluated using the existing honey bee colony model BEEHAVE, which links foraging to in‐hive dynamics. We thereby explored how different cropping systems determine spatiotemporal forage availability and, in turn, honey bee colony viability (e.g., time to extinction, TTE) and resilience (indicated by, e.g., brood mortality). To assess overall colony viability, we developed metrics, PH and PP, which quantified how much nectar and pollen provided by a cropping system per year was converted into a colony's adult worker population. Both crop species identity and diversity determined the temporal continuity in nectar and pollen supply and thus colony viability. Overall farmland structure and relative crop abundance were less important, but details mattered. For monocultures and for four‐crop species systems composed of cereals, oilseed rape, maize, and sunflower, PH and PP were below the viability threshold. Such cropping systems showed frequent, badly timed, and prolonged forage gaps leading to detrimental cascading effects on life stages and in‐hive work force, which critically reduced colony resilience. Four‐crop systems composed of rye‐grass–dandelion pasture, trefoil–grass pasture, sunflower, and phacelia ensured continuous nectar and pollen supply resulting in TTE > 5 yr, and PH (269.5 kg) and PP (108 kg) being above viability thresholds for 5 yr. Overall, trefoil–grass pasture, oilseed rape, buckwheat, and phacelia improved the temporal continuity in forage supply and colony's viability. Our results are hypothetical as they are obtained from simplified landscape settings, but they nevertheless match empirical observations, in particular the viability threshold. Our framework can be used to assess the effects of cropping systems on honey bee viability and to develop land‐use strategies that help maintain pollination services by avoiding prolonged and badly timed forage gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Butterfly Monitoring Schemes (BMSs) engage the public in conservation and provide data sets that cover broad geographical areas over long timescales. Most existing BMSs are in temperate climates; however, the Israeli Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (BMS‐IL), established in 2009, is a notable exception as it encompasses a large climatic gradient from Euro‐Siberian through Mediterranean to hyper‐arid regions. Israel's climate poses challenges in analyzing data from year‐round butterfly activity, as in other tropical or arid countries. The Regional Generalized Additive Model (Regional GAM) is a butterfly phenology and abundance model based on repeat visits throughout species' flight season. We tested the applicability of Regional GAM for species with complex flight seasonality (e.g., multivoltine) by comparing estimated abundance and seasonal indices for the full data set and rarefied subsets. We assessed the reliability of modeled flight seasons and compared abundance estimates per site resulting from biologically plausible and unreliable seasonal models. The reliability of Regional GAM rises with the number of observations, and the model tends to produce more biologically plausible models for species with simple phenologies (e.g., univoltine with a single peak in activity). Abundance estimates based on unreliable models produce values with inter‐quartile ranges of 90%–153% compared with biologically plausible models, while peak time changes with an interquartile range of 0–22.5 d when comparing all rarefied models with the full data set. Regional GAM should be applied with great caution for rare species and those with a complex flight season, and the date of year start needs to be carefully chosen for species that are active year‐round. We identified the key sources of error and propose an operational workflow to address them. With few adaptations, Regional GAM can support new BMSs in analyzing data where butterflies are active year‐round, including tropical climates. We propose guidelines for analyzing BMS data for species or regions with long activity periods and complex phenologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine reserves are an increasingly important tool for the management of marine ecosystems around the world. However, the effects of proposed marine reserve configurations on sustainability and yield of populations are typically not estimated because of the computational intensity of direct simulation and uncertainty in larval dispersal and density-dependent recruitment. Here we develop a method for efficiently assessing a marine reserve configuration for persistence and yield of a population with sedentary adults and dispersing larvae. The method extends the familiar sustainability criteria of individual replacement for single populations based on eggs-per-recruit (EPR) to spatially distributed populations with sedentary adults, a dispersing larval phase, and limited carrying capacity in the settlement-recruit relationship. We refer to this approach as dispersal-per-recruit (DPR). In some cases, a single DPR calculation, based on the assumption that post-settlement habitat is saturated (i.e., at maximum recruitment), is sufficient to determine population persistence, while in other cases further iterative calculations are required. These additional calculations reach an equilibrium more rapidly than a full simulation of age- or size-structured populations. From the DPR result, fishery yield can be computed from yield-per-recruit (YPR) at each point. We assess the utility of DPR calculations by applying them to single reserves, uniformly distributed systems of reserves, and randomly sized and spaced systems of reserves on a linear coast line. We find that for low levels of EPR in fished areas (e.g., 10% or less of the natural, unfished EPR when post-settlement habitats are saturated by 35% of natural settlement), a single DPR calculation is sufficient to determine persistence of the population. We also show that, in uniform systems of reserves with finite reserve size, maximal fisheries yield occurs when the density of reserves is such that all post-settlement habitat is nearly saturated with settlers. Finally, we demonstrate the application of this approach to a realistic proposed marine reserve configuration.

Fire is an important tool in tropical forest management, as it alters forest composition, structure, and the carbon budget. The United Nations program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ( REDD+) aims to sustainably manage forests, as well as to conserve and enhance their carbon stocks. Despite the crucial role of fire management, decision-making on REDD+ interventions fails to systematically include fires. Here, we address this critical knowledge gap in two ways. First, we review REDD+ projects and programs to assess the inclusion of fires in monitoring, reporting, and verification ( MRV) systems. Second, we model the relationship between fire and forest for a pilot site in Colombia using near-real-time ( NRT) fire monitoring data derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS). The literature review revealed fire remains to be incorporated as a key component of MRV systems. Spatially explicit modeling of land use change showed the probability of deforestation declined sharply with increasing distance to the nearest fire the preceding year (multi-year model area under the curve [ AUC] 0.82). Deforestation predictions based on the model performed better than the official REDD early-warning system. The model AUC for 2013 and 2014 was 0.81, compared to 0.52 for the early-warning system in 2013 and 0.68 in 2014. This demonstrates NRT fire monitoring is a powerful tool to predict sites of forest deforestation. Applying new, publicly available, and open-access NRT fire data should be an essential element of early-warning systems to detect and prevent deforestation. Our results provide tools for improving both the current MRV systems, and the deforestation early-warning system in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the largest terrestrial carbon (C) sink on Earth; this pool plays a critical role in ecosystem processes and climate change. Given the cost and time required to measure SOC, and particularly changes in SOC, many signatory nations to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change report estimates of SOC stocks and stock changes using default values from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or country-specific models. In the United States, SOC in forests is monitored by the national forest inventory (NFI) conducted by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. The FIA program has been consistently measuring soil attributes as part of the NFI since 2001 and has amassed an extensive inventory of SOC in forest land in the conterminous United States and southeast and southcentral coastal Alaska. That said, the FIA program has been using country-specific predictions of SOC based, in part, upon a model using SOC estimates from the State Soil Geographic (STATSGO) database compiled by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Estimates obtained from the STATSGO database are averages over large map units and are not expected to provide accurate estimates for specific locations, e.g., NFI plots. To improve the accuracy of SOC estimates in U.S. forests, NFI SOC observations were used for the first time to predict SOC density to a depth of 100 cm for all forested NFI plots. Incorporating soil-forming factors along with observations of SOC into a new estimation framework resulted in a 75% (48 ± 0.78 Mg/ha) increase in SOC densities nationally. This substantially increases the contribution of the SOC pool, from approximately 44% (17 Pg) of the total forest ecosystem C stocks to 56% (28 Pg), in the forest C budget of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is expected to directly alter the composition of communities and the functioning of ecosystems across the globe. Improving our understanding of links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across large spatial scales and rapid global change is a major priority to help identify management responses that will retain diverse, functioning systems. Here we address this challenge by linking projected changes in plant community composition and functional attributes (height, leaf area, seed mass) under climate change across Tasmania, Australia. Using correlative community-level modeling, we found that projected changes in plant community composition were not consistently related to projected changes in community mean trait values. In contrast, we identified specific mechanisms through which alternative combinations of projected functional and compositional change across Tasmania could be realized, including loss/replacement of functionally similar species (lowland grasslands/grassy woodlands) and loss of a small number of functionally unique species (lowland forests). Importantly, we demonstrate how these linked projections of change in community composition and functional attributes can be utilized to inform specific management actions that may assist in maintaining diverse, functioning ecosystems under climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic models are pivotal for projecting forest dynamics in a changing climate, from the local to the global scale. They encapsulate the processes of tree population dynamics with varying resolution. Yet, almost invariably, tree mortality is modeled based on simple, theoretical assumptions that lack a physiological and/or empirical basis. Although this has been widely criticized and a growing number of empirically derived alternatives are available, they have not been tested systematically in models of forest dynamics. We implemented an inventory-based and a tree-ring-based mortality routine in the forest gap model ForClim v3.0. We combined these routines with a stochastic and a deterministic approach for the determination of tree status (alive vs. dead). We tested the four new model versions for two Norway spruce forests in the Swiss Alps, one of which was managed (inventory time series spanning 72 years) and the other was unmanaged (41 years). Furthermore, we ran long-term simulations (~400 years) into the future under three climate scenarios to test model behavior under changing environmental conditions. The tests against inventory data showed an excellent match of simulated basal area and stem numbers at the managed site and a fair agreement at the unmanaged site for three of the four empirical mortality models, thus rendering the choice of one particular model difficult. However, long-term simulations under current climate revealed very different behavior of the mortality models in terms of simulated changes of basal area and stem numbers, both in timing and magnitude, thus indicating high sensitivity of simulated forest dynamics to assumptions on tree mortality. Our results underpin the potential of using empirical mortality routines in forest gap models. However, further tests are needed that span other climatic conditions and mixed forests. Short-term simulations to benchmark model behavior against empirical data are insufficient; long-term tests are needed that include both nonequilibrium and equilibrium conditions. Thus, there is the potential to greatly improve the robustness of future projections of forest dynamics via more reliable tree mortality submodels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that estimates cyanobacterial bloom transport by coupling remotely sensed imagery and a hydrodynamic model. The study examines two scenarios from separate cyanobacterial blooms in western Lake Erie in Ontario. It calculates a geographic center or centroid and assigns to the bloom from observed satellite imagery. It also reveals the modeling techniques' capability to be incorporated into an operational forecasting system.

The article focuses on a proposed modeling framework to allow estimation of conservation program and practice effects on different ecosystem services at various temporal and spatial scales in the U.S. The modeling approach offers a wide view needed by decision-makers to prevent unintended negative environmental outcomes. The development of the Conservation Effects Assessment Projects-Wetlands National Component (CEAP-Wetlands) is discussed.

The article presents a study on the impact of biomanipulation on sprat to advance the recovery of Eastern Baltic cod. It uses a statistical food-web model that incorporates the internal interactions between the main fish species of the Baltic Sea cod and sprat to commercial fishing, zooplankton, and climate. Results show the ecological, operational, and economic effects on the recovery of cod. It adds that biomanipulation is an ineffective tool in promoting recovery and sustainable fishery.

The article presents a study which evaluates the response of ecosystem to nutrient load reduction and oyster restoration with a multispecies bioenergetics model. The study develops a network simulation model to examine the ecosystem-level responses to the management and restoration of highly reduced stocks of bivalve suspension feeders in Chesapeake Bay. The results of the study showed that reduction in nutrient inputs from the watershed can cause lower phytoplankton production.

The article discusses the restoration decision-support tool made to clarify important restoration trade-offs, makes location-specific recommendation and predicts benefits. It says that the tool was exemplified from the restoration effort of eastern oyster in Chesapeake Bay. It states that an optimization approach was used to identify locations where the restoration efforts that would maximize one or more benefits such as the decrease in seston, spawning stock enhancement and harvest.

The article presents a study which identifies the impact of organophosphate and carbamate insecticide classes on the wild and juvenile chinook salmon populations' productivity in the U.S. The study created a model which associates the reductions of acetylcholinesterase activity with feeding behavior, growth, food ration, and size during migration. It shows that short-term pesticide exposure can result in the reduction of chinook growth and size at its ocean entry.

The article provides information on a model-based approach to assess the contribution of a network of marine protected areas (MPA) to the persistence of fish populations with an adult phase and dispersing larval phase. According to the authors, the model integrates the effects of a patchy spatial distribution of habitat and the level of fishing outside of reserves into a calculation of the spatial distribution of equilibrium settlement. They also noted that the assessment method provides significant benchmarks and a transparent modeling approach for improving initial MPA configurations.

The article cites a study which examines the spatial occurrence of the beetle, Harminius undulatos in Sweden. It has first analyzed the beetle's occupancy pattern relative to the stand characteristics and the amounts of present and past habitat in the surrounding landscape. It utilized a metapopulation model to predict the probability of occurrence in each forest stand. It has investigated that the dead wood dependent organisms should include habitat dynamics. It has presented that an estimated 82% of the landscape-wide recruitment took place in managed stands which covered 87% of the forest area compared with the 18% in unmanaged stand which covered 13% of the forest area.

The article offers information on the denitrification models and approaches for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. A discussion on the current approaches used for modeling denitrification, as well as the nitrogen (N) cycling processes for both ecosystems are enumerated. The approaches described, creates predictions for microbial dynamics by representing an environment where denitrification is likely to occur. The models used in both ecosystems indicate the importance of denitrification of the N cycle. Further, current models need more development and testing to eliminate the uncertainties associated.

The article examines the use of taxonomic completeness in quantifying biological integrity of freshwater ecosystems in regional and global assessment. Large-scale assessments are constrained by the lack of consistency in the indicators used to assess biological integrity and inability to translate between indicators. In theory, assessments based on estimates of taxonomic completeness are directly comparable to one another and should therefore allow regionally and globally consistent summaries of the biological integrity of freshwater ecosystems.

The article reports on the development of a method that will assess the suitability of fisher resting habitat in California by employing standard forest vegetation inventory data. The data were obtained from the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) and was developed by comparing the vegetation and topographic data at 75 randomly selected fisher resting habitats in Sierra Nevada. Fishers are known to prefer a variety of structures for daily resting bouts that also include foraging and reproductive habitat. Foraging habitat can be assessed by employing vegetation data from FIA plots. Thus, consistently collected forest inventory data can have serious implications in creating wildlife habitat models when combined with samples of animal occurrence.

The article presents information on the ecological impact the land-use patterns have had on the U.S. Great Plains. Scientists are interested in understanding how changes in land use have shaped the carbon budget, trace gas fluxes, and nutrient cycling as well as the overall sustainability of ecosystems at local, regional, and global scales. The CENTURY Agroecosystem Model given by Parton and others in 1993 alongwith land-use data from four counties in the U.S. Great Plains was used to get information about temporal changes in historical and dominant land-use practices. The U.S. Agricultural Census Data contain county-level information about planted and harvested acreage and production for major crops. CENTURY ecosystem model studies the dynamics of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in grassland, forest and crop systems. The model includes plant production, nutrient cycling, water flow, and soil organic matter submodels. The model calculates potential plant production and nutrient uptake as a function of soil water stress, leaf area index and soil temperature. The results show that soil carbon increases when dead grass roots are added to the soil and then drops by 50% during the next 30 years. The nitrogen mineralization increases rapidly after plow-out and stays high for the next 10-15 years and then start decreasing. Irrigated cropping rotations reached near equilibrium levels of soil carbon and nitrogen mineralization rates sooner than dryland crop rotations.

This article discusses the regional application of an integrated biogeochemical model to northern New England and Maine. Concerns over acidic deposition and its widespread impacts on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems across Europe and North America have led to national and international legislation reducing emissions of acid forming substances. Northern New England and Maine are among the subregions of the United States that have been impacted, by acidic deposition. Many forests, soils, and surface waters in these two subregions are sensitive to acidic deposition. The objectives of this study were to investigate factors contributing to these trends in surface water chemistry and to determine whether acidification stress will continue under several future emission scenarios, exploring the extent of recovery that might occur over the next 50 years. The latitude, longitude, and elevation of the lake were used to estimate wet deposition for the entire lake watershed. Since the mid 1800s, there has been considerable change in SO2 emissions in the United States.

The article discusses a study which examines the diurnal variation in the basal emission patterns of the chemical compound isoprene in eastern cottonwood, red oak and eucalyptus plants. Topics include the influence of light and temperature on the diurnal patterns, the varied magnitude of diurnal increase in cottonwoods and the diurnal fluctuations in isoprene.

The article discusses the bioenergetic model assessment on economic impact on sunflower production on blackbirds (Icteridae) population consisting of three species including red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus), common grackles (Quiscalus quiscula), and yellow-headed blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus). The species damage affects sunflower harvest in the northern Great Plains of North America based on the analysis did.

The article discusses the development of a stochastic individual-based model, including environmental stochasticity and estimated the percentage of extinct populations, to predict the persistence of arboreal gecko Oedura reticulata in Western Australia. The model predicted a relationship between gecko persistence and remnant size driven by demographic stochasticity, as well as an incidence function for the distribution of populations in small remnants.

The article discusses a study on a Geographic Information System GIS-based assessment of an aquacultural nonpoint Source loading in an Atlantic bay in France. It states that development of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) and orthophosphorus (OP) loadings from aquatic earthen ponds, and mentions assessment of loading at sub-basin gauge stations. It notes the system reacted significantly to point source concentration changes, and cited development of a GIS database.

The article presents a study on the ecosystem gross primary productivity (GPP) of Duke Forest in North Carolina using a canopy model that consists of physiological measurements such as leaf area index, leaf nitrogen concentration and stomatal conductance. Canopy photosynthesis during drought period are found to be controlled by soil moisture and air vapor pressure.

The article presents a research study which focuses on the habitat requirements of threatened desert tortoises, also known as Gopherus agassizii. It states that in the research study, data derived from various spatial databases, including satellite imagery, was also used. It disusses the field surveys, which collected vegetation and tortoise relative density data.

The article focuses on a study on the effects of a low-head dam and water abstraction on migratory tropical stream biota. Topics discussed include effects of a water intake and low-head dam on the migration of amphidromous freshwater shrimps, accumulating directly downstream of the structure by postlarval shrimps, and nocturnal larval drift, upkeep of a functional fish ladder, and maintenance of minimum flow over the dam.

The article focuses on a study on the human or natural disturbance in landscape-scale dynamics of the tropical forest Luquillo Experimental Forest in Puerto Rico. Topics discussed include documenting historical changes in extent, cover, and type of forest vegetation and distribution of land use and hurricane impacts; ecological, conservation, and natural resource discussions.; and human land use, intense at low elevations and decreasing on steep for explaining vegetation dynamics.

More than a century of dam construction and water development in the western United States has led to extensive ecological alteration of rivers. Growing interest in improving river function is compelling practitioners to consider ecological restoration when managing dams and water extraction. We developed an Ecological Response Model (ERM) for the Cache la Poudre River, northern Colorado, USA, to illuminate effects of current and possible future water management and climate change. We used empirical data and modeled interactions among multiple ecosystem components to capture system‐wide insights not possible with the unintegrated models commonly used in environmental assessments. The ERM results showed additional flow regime modification would further alter the structure and function of Poudre River aquatic and riparian ecosystems due to multiple and interacting stressors. Model predictions illustrated that specific peak flow magnitudes in spring and early summer are critical for substrate mobilization, dynamic channel morphology, and overbank flows, with strong subsequent effects on instream and riparian biota that varied seasonally and spatially, allowing exploration of nuanced management scenarios. Instream biological indicators benefitted from higher and more stable base flows and high peak flows, but stable base flows with low peak flows were only half as effective to increase indicators. Improving base flows while reducing peak flows, as currently proposed for the Cache la Poudre River, would further reduce ecosystem function. Modeling showed that even presently depleted annual flow volumes can achieve substantially different ecological outcomes in designed flow scenarios, while still supporting social demands. Model predictions demonstrated that implementing designed flows in a natural pattern, with attention to base and peak flows, may be needed to preserve or improve ecosystem function of the Poudre River. Improved regulatory policies would include preservation of ecosystem‐level, flow‐related processes and adaptive management when water development projects are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize the global and multi‐dimensional nature of sustainability and thus require improving our capacity to articulate and trace the impact of ecosystem change to measures of human well‐being. Yet, the integrated nature of these goals is challenging to assess without similarly integrated assessment tools. We present a new modeling toolkit, "Mapping Ecosystem Services to Human well‐being" (MESH), that integrates commonly used, stand‐alone ecosystem services (ES) models from the InVEST suite of models to quantify and illustrate the trade‐offs and synergies across five ecosystem services and up to 10 associated SDGs. Development of the software and its functionality were informed by a broad stakeholder consultation with ministries, non‐governmental organizations and civil society groups in West Africa to identify common barriers to uptake and application of modeling tools in developing countries. In light of this process, key features included in MESH are (1) integration of multiple ecosystem service (ES) models into a common modeling framework supported by a curated base data set, (2) built‐in scenario generation capacity to support policy analysis, (3) visualization of outcomes and trade‐offs, and (4) mapping of ecosystem service change to SDG targets and goals. We illustrate the use of MESH in a case study in the Volta basin of West Africa comparing the effectiveness of three alternative conservation prioritization approaches: (1) land cover‐based, (2) topographic‐based, and (3) an ecosystem service‐based approach to minimize the impact of agricultural expansion. We evaluate these approaches by linking changes in service supply to potential impacts on achievement of specific SDG goals and targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although species‐specific approaches are necessary to understand the dynamics of individual species composing a community, they do not offer a framework for making optimal management decisions at the community level. Here, we present a simple framework for comparing the response of entire communities to multiple management scenarios. Our approach uses a weighted average of standardized species‐specific responses to produce a single integrative measure of the community response and employs mixed‐effect linear models to quantify the increase in the community response due to each management action, or combination of actions. We demonstrate our approach with a simulation study assessing the potential benefits of multiple management actions on the avian community of Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, Hawaiʻi, which is composed of eight native species with conservation status varying from endangered to least concern. Management actions considered included a reduction of avian malaria transmission risk, reducing rat predation, and increasing forest habitat. We used three different prioritization (weighting) schemes to assess whether the response to management actions differed along a conservation gradient (from endangered to least concern). We also investigated whether future changes in disease distribution as a result of climate change will alter the relationship between management practices and community response. Our community‐level analysis produced three important insights, highlighting the need to consider the response from multiple species to changing threats and management actions. First, increasing the amount of habitat always had the greatest positive impact on the avian community, regardless of the weighting scheme. Second, the community response to management was different under current vs. future conditions, with increased benefit in the future when disease risks were higher. Third, the response to management varied along the conservation gradient. Reducing malaria transmission risk in 2100 had the greatest benefit to endangered species, while increasing forest habitat had the greatest benefit to "least concern" species. However, reducing rat predation appeared to benefit a subset of species based on ecological factors unrelated to rarity, such as nest accessibility. Our approach is widely applicable using experimental, observational, or simulation‐based data, allowing managers to consider the response of all species while weighting their priority levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discerning the determinants of species occurrence across landscapes is fundamental to their conservation and management. In spatially and climatologically complex landscapes, explaining the dynamics of occurrence can lead to improved understanding of short‐ vs. long‐term trends and offer novel insight on local vs. regional change. We examined the changes in occupancy for two species of anurans with different life histories over a decade using hundreds of wetland sites in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. To account for the joint dynamics of wetland drying and amphibian breeding, we adopted a multistate occupancy model as a means to investigate mechanistic relationships of observed occurrence patterns with climatological drivers of wetland hydrologic variability. This approach allowed us to decompose occupancy dynamics into habitat changes caused by wetland drying and amphibian breeding activity, conditional on available water and previous breeding state. Over our 10‐yr time series, we observed considerable variability in climate drivers and the proportion of dry wetlands. Boreal chorus frogs (Pseudacris maculata) were more responsive to changes in wetland inundation status than Columbia spotted frogs (Rana luteiventris), as indicated by higher breeding colonization probabilities under favorable (wet) conditions. Both species had high probabilities of breeding persistence in permanently inundated wetlands with prior breeding. Despite the absence of multi‐year drought in our time series, mechanistic relationships described here offer insights on how future climate variation may result in reduced and/or shifted occurrence patterns for pond‐breeding anurans in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Further, our modeling approach may prove valuable in evaluating determinants of occurrence for other species that are dependent on wetlands or other dynamic habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on Atmospheric Chemistry and Hydrocarbon Emissions from Plants. It mentions that there is a great need to determine the amount of hydrocarbons emitted by plant material in urban setting where isoprene is a big problem in most ecosystems. It highlights that emissions from urban trees is important given the urban sources of nitrogen dioxide available to react with the hydrocarbons to form urban ozone.