Losing lemurs: Declining populations and land cover changes over space and time.

Forest loss and degradation due to land cover changes imperil biodiversity worldwide. Subtropical and tropical ecosystems experience high deforestation rates, negatively affecting species like primates. Madagascar's endemic lemurs face exceptionally high risks of population declines and extirpation.

What's on the horizon for community-based conservation? Emerging threats and opportunities.

Community-based conservation can support livelihoods and biodiversity, while reinforcing local and Indigenous values, cultures, and institutions. Its delivery can help address cross-cutting global challenges, such as climate change, conservation, poverty, and food security. Therefore, understanding trends in community-based conservation is pertinent to setting and implementing global goals.

Prioritizing species conservation programs based on IUCN Green Status and estimates of cost-sharing potential.

Over 1 million species around the world are at risk of extinction, and conservation organizations have to decide where to invest their limited resources. Cost-effectiveness can be increased by leveraging funding opportunities and increasing collaborative partnerships to achieve shared conservation goals. We devised a structured decision-making framework to prioritize species' conservation programs based on a cost-benefit analysis that takes collaborative opportunities into account in an examination of national and global conservation return on investment.

Standardizing the evaluation of community-based conservation success.

Community-based conservation, which strives to simultaneously improve nature conservation and alleviate poverty, must provide biological and socioeconomic benefits that are linked through effective resilience mechanisms. To date, few community-based conservation initiatives have published comprehensive assessments that track performance in these elements of success. With 45% of the world's protected areas in comanagement with local communities, standardized measures to effectively evaluate the dual goals of community-based conservation are needed.

Limited contributions of released animals from zoos to North American conservation translocations.

With the loss of biodiversity accelerating, conservation translocations such as reintroductions are becoming an increasingly common conservation tool. Conservation translocations must source individuals for release from either wild or captive-bred populations. We asked what proportion of North American conservation translocations rely on captive breeding and to what extent zoos and aquaria (hereafter zoos) fulfill captive breeding needs.

Environmental conditions and herbivore biomass determine coral reef benthic community composition: implications for quantitative baselines.

Our ability to understand natural constraints on coral reef benthic communities requires quantitative assessment of the relative strengths of abiotic and biotic processes across large spatial scales. Here, we combine underwater images, visual censuses and remote sensing data for 1566 sites across 34 islands spanning the central-western Pacific Ocean, to empirically assess the relative roles of abiotic and grazing processes in determining the prevalence of calcifying organisms and fleshy algae on coral reefs. We used regression trees to identify the major predictors of benthic composition and to test whether anthropogenic stress at inhabited islands decouples natural relationships.

Climate change impacts on the conservation outlook of populations on the poleward periphery of species ranges: A case study of Canadian black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus).

Given climate change, species' climatically suitable habitats are increasingly expected to shift poleward. Some imperilled populations towards the poleward edge of their species' range might therefore conceivably benefit from climate change. Interactions between climate and population dynamics may be complex, however, with climate exerting effects both indirectly via influence over food availability and more directly, via effects on physiology and its implications for survival and reproduction.

Marine Socio-Environmental Covariates: queryable global layers of environmental and anthropogenic variables for marine ecosystem studies.

Biophysical conditions, including climate, environmental stress, and habitat availability, are key drivers of many ecological processes (e.g., community assembly and productivity) and associated ecosystem services (e.

Re-creating missing population baselines for Pacific reef sharks.

Sharks and other large predators are scarce on most coral reefs, but studies of their historical ecology provide qualitative evidence that predators were once numerous in these ecosystems. Quantifying density of sharks in the absence of humans (baseline) is, however, hindered by a paucity of pertinent time-series data. Recently researchers have used underwater visual surveys, primarily of limited spatial extent or nonstandard design, to infer negative associations between reef shark abundance and human populations.

Integrating biodiversity distribution knowledge: toward a global map of life.

Global knowledge about the spatial distribution of species is orders of magnitude coarser in resolution than other geographically-structured environmental datasets such as topography or land cover. Yet such knowledge is crucial in deciphering ecological and evolutionary processes and in managing global change. In this review, we propose a conceptual and cyber-infrastructure framework for refining species distributional knowledge that is novel in its ability to mobilize and integrate diverse types of data such that their collective strengths overcome individual weaknesses.