Evaluating natural medicinal resources and their exposure to global change.

Medicinal plants and their bioactive molecules are integral components of nature and have supported the health of human societies for millennia. However, the prevailing view of medicinal biodiversity solely as an ecosystem-decoupled natural resource of commercial value prevents people from fully benefiting from the capacity of nature to provide medicines and from assessing the vulnerability of this capacity to the global environmental crisis. Emerging scientific and technological developments and traditional knowledge allow for appreciating medicinal plant resources from a planetary health perspective.

Satellite sensor requirements for monitoring essential biodiversity variables of coastal ecosystems.

The biodiversity and high productivity of coastal terrestrial and aquatic habitats are the foundation for important benefits to human societies around the world. These globally distributed habitats need frequent and broad systematic assessments, but field surveys only cover a small fraction of these areas. Satellite-based sensors can repeatedly record the visible and near-infrared reflectance spectra that contain the absorption, scattering, and fluorescence signatures of functional phytoplankton groups, colored dissolved matter, and particulate matter near the surface ocean, and of biologically structured habitats (floating and emergent vegetation, benthic habitats like coral, seagrass, and algae).

Using Social Media to Measure the Contribution of Red List Species to the Nature-Based Tourism Potential of African Protected Areas.

Cultural ecosystem services are defined by people's perception of the environment, which make them hard to quantify systematically. Methods to describe cultural benefits from ecosystems typically include resource-demanding survey techniques, which are not suitable to assess cultural ecosystem services for large areas. In this paper we explore a method to quantify cultural benefits through the enjoyment of natured-based tourism, by assessing the potential tourism attractiveness of species for each protected area in Africa using the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species.

Current status and future prospects for the assessment of marine and coastal ecosystem services: a systematic review.

Background: Research on ecosystem services has grown exponentially during the last decade. Most of the studies have focused on assessing and mapping terrestrial ecosystem services highlighting a knowledge gap on marine and coastal ecosystem services (MCES) and an urgent need to assess them.

Methodology/principal Findings: We reviewed and summarized existing scientific literature related to MCES with the aim of extracting and classifying indicators used to assess and map them.

Landscape structure and diseases profile: associating land use type composition with disease distribution.

Human health and well-being presuppose environmental quality. Several studies have documented the indicative role of land use types in environmental quality. However, the exact role of land use composition on disease distribution has remained scientifically vague.

Human activities in Natura 2000 sites: a highly diversified conservation network.

The Natura 2000 network was established across the European Union's (EU) Member States with the aim to conserve biodiversity, while ensuring the sustainability of human activities. However, to what kind and to what extent Natura 2000 sites are subject to human activities and how this varies across Member States remains unspecified. Here, we analyzed 111,269 human activity records from 14,727 protected sites in 20 Member States.

Participation in the management of Greek Natura 2000 sites: evidence from a cross-level analysis.

The governance of protected areas has experienced rapid advancement over the last two decades with regard to the inclusion of stakeholders and local communities into the management process. During the same period Greek biodiversity governance has been characterized by a shift, at least on paper, towards the adoption of participatory approaches primarily through the establishment of management agencies. However, this has not been institutionalized for the majority of Natura 2000 sites, thus posing questions on the existence, nature, and effectiveness of participation in sites with no management agency.