Biodiversity Islands Strategies For Conservation In Human Dominated Environments

This book is intended to provide an overview for the identification and establishment of biodiversity islands. It presents examples and case studies where the biodiversity islands approach is being used in a variety of locations and contexts worldwide. It will contribute to design parameters on appropriate sizing and spatial distribution of biodiversity islands in order to be effective in conservation and regeneration across the landscape, using integrated landscape management approaches. This book is essential given the current worldwide trend of habitat destruction and the need to preserve biodiversity and its values. The chapters are organized in five sections. The first section provides the introduction. Section 2,3 and 4 discuss the challenges and alternatives of establishment and management, case studies across the globe, safeguarding of the environmental, economic, and social benefits, and the final section offers a conclusion. The contributing authors present views from the academic, the practitioner and the policymaker perspectives, offering alternatives and suggestions for promoting strategies that support biodiversity conservation through intentionally designed frameworks for sustainable forest landscapes. Readers will discover suggestions and concrete examples that can be used by a variety of stakeholders in various settings throughout the world. This book is useful to researchers, farmers, foresters, landowners, land managers, city planners, and policy makers alike.

This book is intended to provide an overview for the identification and establishment of biodiversity islands. It presents examples and case studies where the biodiversity islands approach is being used in a variety of locations and contexts worldwide. It will contribute to design parameters on appropriate sizing and spatial distribution of biodiversity islands in order to be effective in conservation and regeneration across the landscape, using integrated landscape management approaches. This book is essential given the current worldwide trend of habitat destruction and the need to preserve biodiversity and its values. The chapters are organized in five sections. The first section provides the introduction. Section 2,3 and 4 discuss the challenges and alternatives of establishment and management, case studies across the globe, safeguarding of the environmental, economic, and social benefits, and the final section offers a conclusion. The contributing authors present views from the academic, the practitioner and the policymaker perspectives, offering alternatives and suggestions for promoting strategies that support biodiversity conservation through intentionally designed frameworks for sustainable forest landscapes. Readers will discover suggestions and concrete examples that can be used by a variety of stakeholders in various settings throughout the world. This book is useful to researchers, farmers, foresters, landowners, land managers, city planners, and policy makers alike.

A companion volume to The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Renewing the Conservation Promise, published by Island Press in fall 2005, this new book examines the key policy tools available for protecting biodiversity in the United States by revisiting some basic questions in conservation: What are we trying to protect and why? What are the limits of species-based conservation? Can we develop new conservation strategies that are more ecologically and economically viable than past approaches?

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is exceptionally biodiverse. It contains about half of the world’s remaining tropical forests, nearly one-fifth of its coastal habitats, and some of its most productive agricultural and marine areas. But agriculture, fishing and other human activities linked to rapid population and economic growth increasingly threaten that biodiversity. Moreover, poverty, weak regulatory capacity, and limited political will hamper conservation. Given this dilemma, it is critically important to design conservation strategies on the basis of the best available information about both biodiversity and the track records of the various policies that have been used to protect it. This rigorously researched book has three key aims. It describes the status of biodiversity in LAC, the main threats to this biodiversity, and the drivers of these threats. It identifies the main policies being used to conserve biodiversity and assesses their effectiveness and potential for further implementation. It proposes five specific lines of practical action for conserving LAC biodiversity, based on: green agriculture; strengthening terrestrial protected areas and co-management; improving environmental governance; strengthening coastal and marine resource management; and improving biodiversity data and policy evaluation.

Oceanic islands represent a set of systems in which biological diversity varies as a consequence of remoteness or size, not environment; they are also generally simpler than continental ecosystems. Islands therefore provide an opportunity to determine the direct effects of biological diversity on ecosystem function. The volume addresses the components of biological diversity on islands and their patterns of variation; the modern threats to the maintenance of biological diversity on islands; the consequences of island biology and its modification by humanity regarding aspects of ecosystem function; the global implications of islands for conservation; and how islands can help one to understand the processes inducing changes throughout the world.

The nature and value of biodiversity; Losses of biodiversity and their causes; The strategy for biodiversity conservation; Establishing a national policy framework for biodiversity conservation; Creating an international policy environmental that supports national biodiversity conservation; Creating conditions and incentives for local biodiversity conservation; Managing biodiversity throught the human environment; Strengthening protected areas; Conservings species, populations and genetic diversity; Exoanding human capacity to conserve biodiversity.

This book presents various aspects of agroforestry research and development, as well as the latest trends in degraded landscape management. Over the last four decades, agroforestry research (particularly on degraded landscapes) has evolved into an essential problem-solving science, e.g. in terms of sustaining agricultural productivity, improving soil health and biodiversity, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting carbon sequestration and mitigating climate change. This book examines temperate and tropical agroforestry systems around the world, focusing on traditional and modern practices and technologies used to rehabilitate degraded lands. It covers the latest research advances, trends and challenges in the utilization and reclamation of degraded lands, e.g. urban and peri-urban agroforestry, reclamation of degraded landscapes, tree-based multi-enterprise agriculture, domestication of high-value halophytes, afforestation of coastal areas, preserving mangroves and much more. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable asset for a broad range of stakeholders including farmers, scientists, researchers, educators, students, development/extension agents, environmentalists, policy/decision makers, and government and non-government organizations.

Island biogeography is the study of the distribution and dynamics of species in island environments. Due to their isolation from more widespread continental species, islands are ideal places for unique species to evolve, but they are also places of concentrated extinction. Not surprisingly, they are widely studied by ecologists, conservationists and evolutionary biologists alike. There is no other recent textbook devoted solely to island biogeography, and a synthesis of the many recent advances is now overdue. This second edition builds on the success and reputation of the first, documenting the recent advances in this exciting field and explaining how islands have been used as natural laboratories in developing and testing ecological and evolutionary theories. In addition, the book describes the main processes of island formation, development and eventual demise, and explains the relevance of island environmental history to island biogeography. The authors demonstrate the huge significance of islands as hotspots of biodiversity, and as places from which disproportionate numbers of species have been extinguished by human action in historical time. Many island species are today threatened with extinction, and this work examines both the chief threats to their persistence and some of the mitigation measures that can be put in play with conservation strategies tailored to islands.