Visiting mine reclamation: How field experience shapes perceptions of mining.

Recognizing the prevailing negative public opinion on mining, it is important to understand how firsthand encounters with mining activities might influence these perceptions. This study investigates how field trips to open pit coal mines and their reclamation sites in the Czech Republic affected the attitudes of 148 university students toward mining and mine reclamation. Using pre and post trip questionnaires, we observed significant changes: Students became less neutral about mining, saw it as a temporary disruptive activity, expressed reduced concern for social conflicts in mining areas, and showed increased support for the ecological restoration of post mining sites.

The relationship between remotely-sensed spectral heterogeneity and bird diversity is modulated by landscape type.

To identify areas of high biodiversity and prioritize conservation efforts, it is crucial to understand the drivers of species richness patterns and their scale dependence. While classified land cover products are commonly used to explain bird species richness, recent studies suggest that unclassified remote-sensed images can provide equally good or better results. In our study, we aimed to investigate whether unclassified multispectral data from Landsat 8 can replace image classification for bird diversity modeling.

Performance of landscape composition metrics for predicting water quality in headwater catchments.

Land use is a predominant threat to the ecological integrity of streams and rivers. Understanding land use-water quality interactions is essential for the development and prioritization of management strategies and, thus, the improvement of water quality. Weighting schemes for land use have recently been employed as methods to advance the predictive power of empirical models, however, their performance has seldom been explored for various water quality parameters.

Multiple drivers of plant diversity in coastal dunes: A Mediterranean experience.

In light of the global biodiversity loss, syntheses of the available knowledge about drivers of biodiversity are becoming increasingly important. However, despite the high number of studies analyzing patterns of plant species diversity, few attempts have been made to synthesize findings within different ecosystems. In this work, the relative role of a wide set of predictors imputable to three conceptual-methodological domains (abiotic, human-mediated disturbance and landscape domain, hereafter AD, DD and LD) was simultaneously analyzed in 644 random plots distributed along the coastal dunes of Central Italy.

Spatial spread of Eurasian beavers in river networks: a comparison of range expansion rates.

1. Accurately measuring the rate of spread for expanding populations is important for reliably predicting their future spread, as well as for evaluating the effect of different conditions and management activities on that rate of spread. 2.