With limited resources for habitat conservation, the accurate identification of high-value avian habitat is crucial. Habitat structure affects avian biodiversity but is difficult to quantify over broad extents. Our goal was to identify which measures of vertical and horizontal habitat structure are most strongly related to patterns of avian biodiversity across the conterminous United States and to determine whether new measures of vertical structure are complementary to existing, primarily horizontal, measures.

Accurate information about three-dimensional canopy structure and wildland fuel across the landscape is necessary for fire behaviour modelling system predictions. Remotely sensed data are invaluable for assessing these canopy characteristics over large areas; lidar data, in particular, are uniquely suited for quantifying three-dimensional canopy structure. Although lidar data are increasingly available, they have rarely been applied to wildland fuels mapping efforts, mostly due to two issues.

Increasing landscape heterogeneity and organic farming practices are known to enhance species richness in agroecosystems. However, little is known about the consequences of these management options on other biodiversity components such as community composition, phylogenetic structure and functional diversity which may be more closely linked to ecosystem functioning. We surveyed semi‐natural plant communities within the uncultivated field margins of 18 arable farms in Skåne, south Sweden.

We believe that conservation practice is sometimes inhibited by misguided respect for the cultural background in which conservation problems occur. This respect may be rooted in a philosophical standpoint asserting that culturally distinct values cannot be objectively judged against one another, and that those values are therefore equally valid. Here we consider the influence of this school of thought, known as “moral relativism”, in the context of the moral basis for biodiversity conservation as it is currently understood.

Surface mineral horizons from four ecosystems sampled in the northwestern Italian Alps were incubated at -3 and +3°C to simulate subnivial and early thaw period temperatures for a seasonally snow-covered area. The soil profiles at these sites represent extreme examples of management, grazed meadow (site M) and extensive grazing beneath larch (site L) or naturally disturbed by avalanche and colonized by alder (site A) and the expected forest climax vegetation beneath fir (site F).

This paper describes key linkages between land management activities and stream water quality for a 5230ha catchment used for intensive pastoral agriculture in southern New Zealand. Due to low annual rainfall and the wide coverage of soils with low available water-holding capacities, flood irrigation of the 2400ha of flat land within the catchment is an important feature impacting on farm business profitability and stream health. Water quality variables and nutrient and sediment yield estimates are reported for a four-year period.

The ongoing forest biodiversity protection programme in Finland (METSO) relies on voluntary participation of family forest owners. Even though the programme has gained wide acceptability among owners, compared to traditional conservation such as land acquisition, more owners need to be engaged. In this study, we examined how the new protection measures have diffused among forest owners. This analysis will help find means to promote the protection among owners who could but have not yet participated. The theoretical background is innovation diffusion.

The growth of landscape-scale land management necessitates the development of methods for large-scale vegetation assessment. Field data collection and analysis methods used to assess ecological condition for the 47165-h North Spring Valley watershed are presented. Vegetation cover data were collected in a stratified random design within 6 Great Basin vegetation types, and the probability of detecting change in native herbaceous cover was calculated using power analyses.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the changes in the fragmentation and ecological stability of the floodplain forest geobiocoenoses in the Protected Landscape Area Litovelske Pomoravi, Czech Republic. Using GIS methods, it was determined that the fragmentation within the study area had increased slightly and the ecological stability of the landscape had decreased slightly between the years 1938 and 2006, although the latter remained on a fairly high level.

The small playa-lakes and other saline wetlands of Monegros, scattered over a dry area with winter cereal monoculture, are threatened by the settlement of new irrigation districts and other kinds of human pressure. Enforcing the protection rules of European Union in these valuable habitats requires, first, their delimitation and monitoring. This article shows how these tasks can be undertaken using remote sensing in conjunction with field observations.