Identifying Major Factors for Success and Failure of Conservation Programs in Europe.

In Europe, various conservation programs adopted to maintain or restore biodiversity have experienced differing levels of success. However, a synthesis about major factors for success of biodiversity-related conservation programs across ecosystems and national boundaries, such as incentives, subsidies, enforcement, participation, or spatial context, is missing. Using a balanced scorecard survey among experts, we analyzed and compared factors contributing to success or failure of three different conservation programs: two government programs (Natura 2000 and the ecological measures of the Water Framework Directive) and one conservation program of a non-governmental organization (NGO; Rewilding Europe), all focusing on habitat and species conservation.

Feasibility of using vertical farming in northern Iran: A multiple necessity.

Agricultural production in vertical farms (VF) will play a prominent role in preventing environmental crises, its good governance and maintaining food security for everyone in the world. The ecological footprint in Guilan province significantly exceeds its biological capacity, indicating considerable pressure on its natural resources and ecosystems. This problem, which is mostly due to the use of traditional production methods in the agricultural sector, requires a change in lifestyle and production methods.

Modeling of land use/land cover dynamics using artificial neural network and cellular automata Markov chain algorithms in Goang watershed, Ethiopia.

Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) change has inhibited sustainable development for the last millennia by affecting climate, biological cycles, and ecosystem services and functions. In this regard, understanding the historical and future patterns of LULC change plays a crucial role in implementing effective natural resource management. This study aimed to model and characterize the spatiotemporal trajectories of landscape change between the 1984 and 2060 periods.

Agriculture and food security under a changing climate: An underestimated challenge.

Pathways to eradicate global hunger while bending the curve of biodiversity loss unanimously suggest changing to less energy-rich diets, closing yield gaps through agroecological principles, adopting modern breeding technologies to foster stress resilience and yields, as well as minimizing harvest losses and food waste. Against the background of a brief history of global agriculture, we review the available evidence on how the global food system might look given a global temperature increase by 3°. We show that a moderate gain in the area suitable for agriculture is confronted with substantial yield losses through strains on crop physiology, multitrophic interactions, and more frequent extreme events.

Exploring the trend in religious diversity: Based on the geographical perspective.

The formation and development of religious diversity is a manifestation of the free expression of human thought, belief, and practice, as well as a historical premise and ideological condition for the gradual recognition and integration of modern religions into modern political values. This study examines the spatial characteristics of the development of the global religious diversity index (RDI) and the evolution trend through a geographical perspective by the LISA space-time transition and convergence test. The results show that: (1) At the temporal level, RDI showed a fast and then slow increase after WWII, with an increase of 61.

Warning about conservation status of forest ecosystems in tropical Andes: National assessment based on IUCN criteria.

World ecosystems are suffering from anthropogenic and natural pressure. The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) has developed analogous criteria for the Red List of Threatened Species in order to perform similar risk assessments on ecosystems, creating the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) methodology. One of the most significant challenges for the construction of these lists is gathering the available information to apply the criteria.

Human-wildlife coexistence in a changing world.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a key topic in conservation and agricultural research. Decision makers need evidence-based information to design sustainable management plans and policy instruments. However, providing objective decision support can be challenging because realities and perceptions of human-wildlife interactions vary widely between and within rural, urban, and peri-urban areas.

On the functional relationship between biodiversity and economic value.

Biodiversity's contribution to human welfare has become a key argument for maintaining and enhancing biodiversity in managed ecosystems. The functional relationship between biodiversity () and economic value () is, however, insufficiently understood, despite the premise of a positive-concave relationship that dominates scientific and political arenas. Here, we review how individual links between biodiversity, ecosystem functions (), and services affect resulting relationships.

A framework to assess landscape structural capacity to provide regulating ecosystem services in West Africa.

The Sudanian savanna landscapes of West Africa are amongst the world's most vulnerable areas to climate change impacts. Inappropriate land use and agriculture management practices continuously impede the capacity of agricultural landscapes to provide ecosystem services (ES). Given the absence of practical assessment techniques to evaluate the landscape's capacity to provide regulating ES in this region, the goal of this paper is to propose an integrative assessment framework which combines remote sensing, geographic information systems, expert weighting and landscape metrics-based assessment.

Assessing driving forces of land use and land cover change by a mixed-method approach in north-eastern Ghana, West Africa.

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) is the result of complex human-environmental interactions. The high interdependencies in social-ecological systems make it difficult to identify the main drivers. However, knowledge of key drivers of LULCC, including indirect (underlying) drivers which cannot be easily determined by spatial or economic analyses, is essential for land use planning and especially important in developing countries.