A Conceptual Approach towards Improving Monitoring of Living Conditions for Populations Affected by Desertification, Land Degradation, and Drought.

Addressing the global challenges of desertification, land degradation, and drought (DLDD), and their impacts on achieving sustainable development goals for coupled human-environmental systems is a key component of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In particular, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15.3 aims to, ".

Geographic factors predict wild food and nonfood NTFP collection by households across four African countries.

Wild foods and other nonfood NTFPs are important for improving food security and supplementing incomes in rural peoples' livelihoods. However, studies on the importance of NTFPs to rural communities are often limited to a few select sites and are conducted in areas that are already known to have high rates of NTFP use. To address this, we examined the role of geographic and household level variables in determining whether a household would report collecting wild foods and other nonfood NTFP across 25 agro-ecological landscapes in Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana.

Limited carbon and biodiversity co-benefits for tropical forest mammals and birds.

The conservation of tropical forest carbon stocks offers the opportunity to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and simultaneously conserve biodiversity. However, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which carbon stock conservation will provide benefits to biodiversity in part because whether forests that contain high carbon density in their aboveground biomass also contain high animal diversity is unknown. Here, we empirically examined medium to large bodied ground-dwelling mammal and bird (hereafter "wildlife") diversity and carbon stock levels within the tropics using camera trap and vegetation data from a pantropical network of sites.

Standardized Assessment of Biodiversity Trends in Tropical Forest Protected Areas: The End Is Not in Sight.

Extinction rates in the Anthropocene are three orders of magnitude higher than background and disproportionately occur in the tropics, home of half the world's species. Despite global efforts to combat tropical species extinctions, lack of high-quality, objective information on tropical biodiversity has hampered quantitative evaluation of conservation strategies. In particular, the scarcity of population-level monitoring in tropical forests has stymied assessment of biodiversity outcomes, such as the status and trends of animal populations in protected areas.

Analyzing human-landscape interactions: tools that integrate.

Humans have transformed much of Earth's land surface, giving rise to loss of biodiversity, climate change, and a host of other environmental issues that are affecting human and biophysical systems in unexpected ways. To confront these problems, environmental managers must consider human and landscape systems in integrated ways. This means making use of data obtained from a broad range of methods (e.