Publications by authors named "Will Turner"

Addressing soil nutrient degradation and global warming requires novel solutions. Enhanced weathering using crushed basalt rock is a promising dual-action strategy that can enhance soil health and sequester carbon dioxide. This study examines the short-term effects of basalt amendment on spring oat (Avena sativa L.

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NOAA has developed a global reference evapotranspiration (ET) reanalysis using the UN Food and Agriculture Organization formulation (FAO-56) of the Penman-Monteith equation forced by MERRA phase 2 (MERRA2) meteorological and radiative drivers. The NOAA ET reanalysis is provided daily from January 1, 1980 to the near-present at a resolution of 0.5° latitude × 0.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Critical natural assets cover 30% of global land and 24% of national waters, fulfilling vital local NCP needs while also supporting global services like carbon storage and moisture recycling, often coinciding with areas of high cultural and biodiversity.
  • * While a significant portion of the world's population lives near these assets, many NCP are neglected in global conservation efforts; prioritizing these resources can help meet development, climate, and conservation objectives together.
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Helping the world's coastal communities adapt to climate change impacts requires evaluating the vulnerability of coastal communities and assessing adaptation options. This includes understanding the potential for 'natural' infrastructure (ecosystems and the biodiversity that underpins them) to reduce communities' vulnerability, alongside more traditional 'hard' infrastructure approaches. Here we present a spatially explicit global evaluation of the vulnerability of coastal-dwelling human populations to key climate change exposures and explore the potential for coastal ecosystems to help people adapt to climate change (ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA)).

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Better land stewardship is needed to achieve the Paris Agreement's temperature goal, particularly in the tropics, where greenhouse gas emissions from the destruction of ecosystems are largest, and where the potential for additional land carbon storage is greatest. As countries enhance their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement, confusion persists about the potential contribution of better land stewardship to meeting the Agreement's goal to hold global warming below 2°C. We assess cost-effective tropical country-level potential of natural climate solutions (NCS)-protection, improved management and restoration of ecosystems-to deliver climate mitigation linked with sustainable development goals (SDGs).

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Between August-December 2014, Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) patients from Tonkolili District were referred for care to two Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Ebola Management Centres (EMCs) outside the district (distant EMCs). In December 2014, MSF opened an EMC in Tonkolili District (district EMC). We examined the effect of opening a district-based EMC on time to admission and number of suspect cases dead on arrival (DOA), and identified factors associated with fatality in EVD patients, residents in Tonkolili District.

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Article Synopsis
  • The increasing recognition of ecosystems' importance for human well-being highlights the need for effective mapping and assessment of ecosystem services (ES), which provide various benefits from nature to people.
  • A new rapid spatial assessment framework was developed to efficiently identify sites offering multiple ES, which was applied in Madagascar to inform conservation investments in biodiversity priority areas.
  • Although the approach has limitations, such as reliance on proximity-based indicators, it can serve as a valuable tool for conservation planning and investment in regions lacking comprehensive data.
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The rising prominence of more rigorous approaches to measuring conservation outcomes has included greater adoption of impact evaluation by conservation non-governmental organizations (CNGOs). Within the scientific literature, however, little consideration has been given to the unique and specific roles of CNGOs in advancing impact evaluation. We explore these issues in the context of one CNGO-Conservation International (CI)-and its experiences producing, using and funding impact evaluations over the past decade.

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Recognizing the imperiled status of biodiversity and its benefit to human well-being, the world's governments committed in 2010 to take effective and urgent action to halt biodiversity loss through the Convention on Biological Diversity's "Aichi Targets". These targets, and many conservation programs, require monitoring to assess progress toward specific goals. However, comprehensive and easily understood information on biodiversity trends at appropriate spatial scales is often not available to the policy makers, managers, and scientists who require it.

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In recent decades, many marine populations have experienced major declines in abundance, but we still know little about where management interventions may help protect the highest levels of marine biodiversity. We used modeled spatial distribution data for nearly 12,500 species to quantify global patterns of species richness and two measures of endemism. By combining these data with spatial information on cumulative human impacts, we identified priority areas where marine biodiversity is most and least impacted by human activities, both within Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ).

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Human activity is rapidly transforming most of Earth's natural systems. How this transformation is impacting human health, whose health is at greatest risk, and the magnitude of the associated disease burden are relatively new subjects within the field of environmental health. We discuss what is known about the human health implications of changes in the structure and function of natural systems and propose that these changes are affecting human health in a variety of important ways.

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Protecting natural habitats in priority areas is essential to halt the loss of biodiversity. Yet whether these benefits for biodiversity also yield benefits for human well-being remains controversial. Here we assess the potential human well-being benefits of safeguarding a global network of sites identified as top priorities for the conservation of threatened species.

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There has been a dramatic increase in the number of conservation organizations worldwide. It is now common for multiple organizations to operate in the same landscape in pursuit of different conservation goals. New objectives, such as maintenance of ecosystem services, will attract additional funding and new organizations to conservation.

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Priorities for conservation investment at a global scale that are based on a single taxon have been criticized because geographic richness patterns vary taxonomically. However, these concerns focused only on biodiversity patterns and did not consider the importance of socioeconomic factors, which must also be included if conservation funding is to be allocated efficiently. In this article, we create efficient global funding schedules that use information about conservation costs, predicted habitat loss rates, and the endemicity of seven different taxonomic groups.

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The Red List Index uses information from the IUCN Red List to track trends in the projected overall extinction risk of sets of species. It has been widely recognised as an important component of the suite of indicators needed to measure progress towards the international target of significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. However, further application of the RLI (to non-avian taxa in particular) has revealed some shortcomings in the original formula and approach: It performs inappropriately when a value of zero is reached; RLI values are affected by the frequency of assessments; and newly evaluated species may introduce bias.

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Measuring the effectiveness of reserve networks is essential to ensure that conservation objectives such as species persistence are being met. We devised a new approach for measuring the effectiveness of land conservation in protecting rare and threatened species and applied it to an ecosystem of global significance. We compiled detailed global distributional data for 36 rare and threatened plants and animals found in the Lake Wales Ridge ecosystem in central Florida (U.

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Although reserve-design algorithms have shown promise for increasing the efficiency of conservation planning, recent work casts doubt on the usefulness of some of these approaches in practice. Using three data sets that vary widely in size and complexity, we compared various decision rules for acquiring reserve networks over multiyear periods. We explored three factors that are often important in real-world conservation efforts: uncertain availability of sites for acquisition, degradation of sites, and overall budget constraints.

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