Socio-economic and environmental trade-offs in Amazonian protected areas and Indigenous territories revealed by assessing competing land uses.

Protected area (PA) assessments rarely evaluate socio-economic and environmental impacts relative to competing land uses, limiting understanding of socio-environmental trade-offs from efforts to protect 30% of the globe by 2030. Here we assess deforestation and poverty outcomes (fiscal income, income inequality, sanitation and literacy) between 2000 and 2010 of strict PAs (SPAs), sustainable-use PAs (SUPAs) and Indigenous territories (ITs) compared with different land uses (agriculture and mining concessions) across ~5,500 census tracts in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. ITs reduced deforestation relative to all alternative land uses (48-83%) but had smaller socio-economic benefits compared with other protection types and land uses (18-36% depending on outcome), indicating that Indigenous communities experience socio-economic trade-offs.

Spatial Heterogeneity in Hedonic Price Effects for Lake Water Quality.

This study uses Zillow's ZTRAX property transaction database to investigate variation in hedonic price effects of water clarity on single-family houses throughout the United States. We consider five spatial scales and estimate models using different sample selection criteria and model specifications. Our results indicate considerable spatial heterogeneity both within and across the four U.

Understanding variation in impacts from private protected areas across regions and protection mechanisms to inform organizational practices.

Private land protection is an important and growing tool to address biodiversity loss and climate change. Thus, better empirical evidence on the effectiveness of private land protection and organizational practices, such as targeting of lands for protection and choice of protection mechanism (i.e.

Expanding the coverage and accuracy of parcel-level land value estimates.

Planning for cost-effective conservation requires reliable estimates of land costs, spatially-differentiated at high resolution. Nolte (2020) provides a county-by-county, parcel-level estimation approach that dramatically improves estimates of fair market value for undeveloped land across the contiguous Unites States. Much undeveloped land of conservation interest is under threat of conversion to agricultural use or is already agricultural.

Anticipating anthropogenic threats in acquiring new protected areas.

Biodiversity continues to decline despite protected area expansion and global conservation commitments. Biodiversity losses occur in existing protected areas, yet common methods used to select protected areas ignore postimplementation threats that reduce effectiveness. We developed a conservation planning framework that considers the ongoing anthropogenic threats within protected areas when selecting sites and the value of planning for costly threat-mitigating activities (i.

Valuing water quality in the United States using a national dataset on property values.

High-quality water resources provide a wide range of benefits, but the value of water quality is often not fully represented in environmental policy decisions, due in large part to an absence of water quality valuation estimates at large, policy relevant scales. Using data on property values with nationwide coverage across the contiguous United States, we estimate the benefits of lake water quality as measured through capitalization in housing markets. We find compelling evidence that homeowners place a premium on improved water quality.

Risks to global biodiversity and Indigenous lands from China's overseas development finance.

China has become one of the world's largest lenders in overseas development finance. Development projects, such as roads, railways and power plants, often drive biodiversity loss and infringe on Indigenous lands, yet the risks implicit in China's overseas development finance are poorly understood. Here we examine the extent to which projects financed by China's policy banks between 2008 and 2019 occur within and adjacent to areas where large-scale investment can present considerable risks to biodiversity and Indigenous peoples.

High-resolution land value maps reveal underestimation of conservation costs in the United States.

The justification and targeting of conservation policy rests on reliable measures of public and private benefits from competing land uses. Advances in Earth system observation and modeling permit the mapping of public ecosystem services at unprecedented scales and resolutions, prompting new proposals for land protection policies and priorities. Data on private benefits from land use are not available at similar scales and resolutions, resulting in a data mismatch with unknown consequences.

Ongoing forest disturbance in Guatemala's protected areas.

Protected areas in Guatemala provide habitat for diverse tropical ecosystems, contain ancient archeological sites, sequester carbon, and support economic activity through eco-tourism. However, many of the forests in these protected areas have been converted to other uses or degraded by human activity, and therefore are considered "paper parks". In this study, we analyzed time series of satellite data to monitor deforestation, degradation, and natural disturbance throughout Guatemala from 2000 to 2017.

Allocating resources for land protection using continuous optimization: biodiversity conservation in the United States.

Spatial optimization approaches that were originally developed to help conservation organizations determine protection decisions over small spatial scales are now used to inform global or continental scale priority setting. However, the different decision contexts involved in large-scale resource allocation need to be considered. We present a continuous optimization approach in which a decision-maker allocates funding to regional offices.

Assessing the local economic impacts of land protection.

Land protection, whether public or private, is often controversial at the local level because residents worry about lost economic activity. We used panel data and a quasi-experimental impact-evaluation approach to determine how key economic indicators were related to the percentage of land protected. Specifically, we estimated the impacts of public and private land protection based on local area employment and housing permits data from 5 periods spanning 1990-2015 for all major towns and cities in New England.

Measuring impact of protected area management interventions: current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness.

Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world's land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to help measure the conservation impact of PA management interventions is high.

Estimating the impacts of conservation on ecosystem services and poverty by integrating modeling and evaluation.

Scholars have made great advances in modeling and mapping ecosystem services, and in assigning economic values to these services. This modeling and valuation scholarship is often disconnected from evidence about how actual conservation programs have affected ecosystem services, however. Without a stronger evidence base, decision makers find it difficult to use the insights from modeling and valuation to design effective policies and programs.

Ion-pairing of phosphonium salts in solution: C-H⋅⋅⋅halogen and C-H⋅⋅⋅π hydrogen bonds.

The (1) H NMR chemical shifts of the C(α)H protons of arylmethyl triphenylphosphonium ions in CD2 Cl2 solution strongly depend on the counteranions X(-) . The values for the benzhydryl derivatives Ph2 CHPPh3 (+)  X(-) , for example, range from δH =8.25 (X(-) =Cl(-) ) over 6.

A comprehensive microscopic picture of the benzhydryl radical and cation photogeneration and interconversion through electron transfer.

Bond cleavage and bond formation are central to organic chemistry. Carbocations play a key role in our understanding of nucleophilic substitution reactions that involve both processes. The precise understanding of the mechanism and dynamics of the photogeneration of carbocations and carbon radicals is therefore an important quest.

Governance regime and location influence avoided deforestation success of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon.

Protected areas in tropical countries are managed under different governance regimes, the relative effectiveness of which in avoiding deforestation has been the subject of recent debates. Participants in these debates answer appeals for more strict protection with the argument that sustainable use areas and indigenous lands can balance deforestation pressures by leveraging local support to create and enforce protective regulations. Which protection strategy is more effective can also depend on (i) the level of deforestation pressures to which an area is exposed and (ii) the intensity of government enforcement.

Linking management effectiveness indicators to observed effects of protected areas on fire occurrence in the Amazon rainforest.

Management-effectiveness scores are used widely by donors and implementers of conservation projects to prioritize, track, and evaluate investments in protected areas. However, there is little evidence that these scores actually reflect the capacity of protected areas to deliver conservation outcomes. We examined the relation between indicators of management effectiveness in protected areas and the effectiveness of protected areas in reducing fire occurrence in the Amazon rainforest.

Free energy relationships for reactions of substituted benzhydrylium ions: from enthalpy over entropy to diffusion control.

Second-order rate constants k(2) for the reactions of various donor- and acceptor-substituted benzhydrylium ions Ar(2)CH(+) with π-nucleophiles in CH(2)Cl(2) were determined by laser flash irradiation of benzhydryl triarylphosphonium salts Ar(2)CH-PAr(3)(+)X(-) in the presence of a large excess of the nucleophiles. This method allowed us to investigate fast reactions up to the diffusional limit including reactions of highly reactive benzhydrylium ions with m-fluoro and p-(trifluoromethyl) substituents. The rate constants determined in this work and relevant literature data were jointly subjected to a correlation analysis to derive the electrophilicity parameters E for acceptor-substituted benzhydrylium ions, as defined by the linear free energy relationship log k(2)(20 °C) = s(N)(N + E).

Nucleofugality and nucleophilicity of fluoride in protic solvents.

A series of p-substituted benzhydryl fluorides (diarylfluoromethanes) were prepared and subjected to solvolysis reactions, which were followed conductometrically. The observed first-order rate constants k(1)(25 °C) were found to follow the correlation equation log k(1)(25 °C) = s(f)(N(f) + E(f)), which allowed us to determine the nucleofuge-specific parameters N(f) and s(f) for fluoride in different aqueous and alcoholic solvents. The rates of the reverse reactions were measured by generating benzhydrylium ions (diarylcarbenium ions) laser flash photolytically in various alcoholic and aqueous solvents in the presence of fluoride ions and monitoring the rate of consumption of the benzhydrylium ions by UV-vis spectroscopy.

Can one predict changes from S(N)1 to S(N)2 mechanisms?

The reactions of substituted benzhydryl bromides Ar(2)CHBr with primary and secondary amines in DMSO yield benzhydryl amines Ar(2)CHNRR', benzophenones Ar(2)C=O, and benzhydrols Ar(2)CHOH. Kinetic investigations at 20 degrees C revealed the rate law -d[Ar(2)CHBr]/dt = (k(1) + k(2)[HNRR'])[Ar(2)CHBr], where the amine independent term k(1) gave rise to the formation of Ar(2)C=O and Ar(2)CHOH and the amine-dependent term k(2)[HNRR'] was responsible for the formation of Ar(2)CHNRR'. Clear evidence for concomitant S(N)1 and S(N)2 processes was obtained.