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Sustainable water resource management is a wicked problem, fraught with uncertainties, an indeterminate scope, and divergent social values and interests among stakeholders. To facilitate better management of Southeast Asia&rsquo, s transboundary Sesan, Sekong and Srepok (3S) River basin, we used the Freshwater Health Index (FHI) to diagnose the basin&rsquo, s current and likely future level of freshwater health. We used the conditions for December 2016 as a baseline, where Ecosystem Vitality and Ecosystem Services scored 66 and 80, respectively, out of a possible 100, whilst Governance &amp, Stakeholders scored 43. Thus, the 3S provided a range of desired ecosystem services, but there were signs of environmental stress as well as undeveloped water governance systems and limited stakeholder engagement. We also modelled four hydropower development scenarios and found that increasing development reduced the scores of a subset of indicators. This compromised the future ability of the 3S basin&rsquo, s ecosystem to provide its current range of services. The FHI helped identify data deficiencies, illuminated important social dynamics, made ecosystem&ndash, human&ndash, water dynamics more understandable to stakeholders, and examined the long-term dynamics of the basin.

Aim: Identifying the underlying drivers of species’ distributional dynamics is critical for predicting change and managing biological diversity. While anthropogenic factors such as climate change can affect species distributions through time, other naturally occurring ecological processes can also have an influence. Theory predicts that interactions between species can influence distributional dynamics, yet empirical evidence remains sparse. A powerful approach is to monitor and model local colonization and extinction—the processes that generate change in distributions over time—and to identify their abiotic and biotic associations. Intensive camera-trap monitoring provides an opportunity to assess the role of temperature and species interactions in the colonization and extinction dynamics of tropical mammals, many of which are species of conservation concern. Using data from a pan-tropical monitoring network, we examined how short-term local temperature change and ecological similarity between species (a proxy for the strength of species interactions) influenced the processes that drive distributional shifts. Location: Tropical forests worldwide. Time period: 2007–2016. Major taxa studied: Terrestrial mammals. Methods: We used dynamic occupancy models to assess the influence of the abiotic and biotic environment on the distributional dynamics of 42 mammal populations from 36 species on 7 tropical elevation gradients around the world. Results: Overall, temperature, ecological similarity, or both, were linked to colonization or extinction dynamics in 29 populations. For six species, the effect of temperature depended upon the local mammal community similarity. This result suggests that the way in which temperature influences local colonization and extinction dynamics depends on local mammal community composition. Main conclusions: These results indicate that varying temperatures influence tropical mammal distributions in surprising ways and suggest that interactions between species mediate distributional dynamics.

"We provide a synthesis of what regional scientific research networks in less developed regions of the world can do and why they might be relevant for societal decisions and practice. We do so through a focus on three regional science network initiatives that aim to enhance understanding of the multiscalar dynamics of global environmental change (GEC) regionally and globally, namely the Southern Africa Regional Science Initiative (SAFARI 2000), the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change (IAI). With a view to aiding future efforts at regional research network formation, we assess whether and how these three networks enhanced regional science, and the extent to which they sought and managed to bridge the science-policy gap that challenges GEC science as a whole. Identifying key decisions and attributes bearing on their successes, the analysis attends specifically to how the three networks sought to build capacity, how differences and similarities between them affected their level of autonomy from governments, and how this and other factors influenced their functioning and achievements."