Climatic change, conservation biology

This open access book identifies and discusses biodiversity’s contribution to physical, mental and spiritual health and wellbeing. Furthermore, the book identifies the implications of this relationship for nature conservation, public health, landscape architecture and urban planning – and considers the opportunities of nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation. This transdisciplinary book will attract a wide audience interested in biodiversity, ecology, resource management, public health, psychology, urban planning, and landscape architecture. The emphasis is on multiple human health benefits from biodiversity - in particular with respect to the increasing challenge of climate change. This makes the book unique to other books that focus either on biodiversity and physical health or natural environments and mental wellbeing. The book is written as a definitive ‘go-to’ book for those who are new to the field of biodiversity and health.

climate changes have had dramatic repercussions, including large numbers of extinctions and extensive shifts in species ranges

This data-rich book demonstrates the value of existing national long-term ecological research in Australia for monitoring environmental change and biodiversity. Long-term ecological data are critical for informing trends in biodiversity and environmental change. The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) is a major initiative of the Australian Government and one of its key areas of investment is to provide funding for a network of long-term ecological research plots around Australia (LTERN). LTERN researchers and other authors in this book have maintained monitoring sites, often for one or more decades, in an array of different ecosystems across the Australian continent – ranging from tropical rainforests, wet eucalypt forests and alpine regions through to rangelands and deserts. This book highlights some of the temporal changes in the environment that have occurred in the various systems in which dedicated field-based ecologists have worked. Many important trends and changes are documented and they often provide new insights that were previously poorly understood or unknown. These data are precisely the kinds of data so desperately needed to better quantify the temporal trajectories in the environment in Australia. By presenting trend patterns (and often also the associated data) the authors aim to catalyse governments and other organisations to better recognise the importance of long-term data collection and monitoring as a fundamental part of ecologically-effective and cost-effective management of the environment and biodiversity.

CONSERVATION BIOGEOGRAPHY The Earth’s ecosystems are in the midst of an unprecedented period of change as a result of human action. Many habitats have been completely destroyed or divided into tiny fragments, others have been transformed through the introduction of new species, or the extinction of native plants and animals, while anthropogenic climate change now threatens to completely redraw the geographic map of life on this planet. The urgent need to understand and prescribe solutions to this complicated and interlinked set of pressing conservation issues has lead to the transformation of the venerable academic discipline of biogeography – the study of the geographic distribution of animals and plants. The newly emerged sub-discipline of conservation biogeography uses the conceptual tools and methods of biogeography to address real world conservation problems and to provide predictions about the fate of key species and ecosystems over the next century. This book provides the first comprehensive review of the field in a series of closely interlinked chapters addressing the central issues within this exciting and important subject.

First of its kind and unique in its blend of theoretical and practical approaches for mainstreaming biodiversity in impact assessment.

Ecological indicators and surrogates are used widely by resource managers to monitor and understand complex biota and ecosystem processes. Their potential to guide complex resource management has meant they have been proposed for use in all ecosystems worldwide. Despite extensive research into indicators and surrogates, there remains much controversy about their use, in addition to major issues and knowledge gaps associated with their identification, testing and application. Indicators and Surrogates of Biodiversity and Environmental Change provides insights into the use of indicators and surrogates in natural resource management and conservation – where to use them, where not to use them, and how to use them. Using an ecological approach, the chapters explore the development, application and efficacy of indicators and surrogates in terrestrial, aquatic, marine and atmospheric environments. The authors identify current gaps in knowledge and articulate the future directions for research needed to close those gaps. This book is written by the world’s leading thinkers in the area of indicators and surrogates. It is the first major synthesis of learnings about indicators and surrogates and will be a critical resource for the vast number of people developing and applying them in ecosystems around the world. It will be an essential resource for scientists, policy makers and students with interests in surrogates and indicators.