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International agreements aim to conserve 17% of Earth's land area by 2020 but include no area‐based conservation targets within the working landscapes that support human needs through farming, ranching, and forestry. Through a review of country‐level legislation, we found that just 38% of countries have minimum area requirements for conserving native habitats within working landscapes. We argue for increasing native habitats to at least 20% of working landscape area where it is below this minimum. Such target has benefits for food security, nature's contributions to people, and the connectivity and effectiveness of protected area networks in biomes in which protected areas are underrepresented. We also argue for maintaining native habitat at higher levels where it currently exceeds the 20% minimum, and performed a literature review that shows that even more than 50% native habitat restoration is needed in particular landscapes. The post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework is an opportune moment to include a minimum habitat restoration target for working landscapes that contributes to, but does not compete with, initiatives for expanding protected areas, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Biological invasions are major threats to global biodiversity, and mapping their distribution is essential to prioritizing management efforts. The Pinaceae family (hereafter pines) includes invasive trees, particularly in Southern Hemisphere regions where they are non-native. These invasions can increase the severity of fires in wildland–urban interfaces (WUIs). We mapped pine invasion in the Bariloche WUI (≈150,000 ha, northwest Patagonia, Argentina) using supervised land cover classification of Sentinel-2 imagery with a Random Forest algorithm on Google Earth Engine, achieving 90% overall accuracy but underestimating the pine invasion area by about 25%. We then assessed in which main vegetation context pine invasions occurred relying on major vegetation units across the precipitation gradient of our study area. Invasions cover 2% of the study area, mainly in forests (61%), steppes (25.4%), and shrublands (13.4%). Most invaded areas (89.1%) are on private land; nearly 70% are on large properties (>10 ha), where state financial incentives could support removal. Another 13.5% occur on many small properties (<1 ha), where awareness campaigns could enable decentralized, low-effort control. Our land cover map can be developed further to integrate invasion dynamics, inform fire risk and behavior models, optimize management actions, and guide territorial planning. Overall, it provides a valuable tool for targeted, scale-appropriate strategies to mitigate ecological and fire-related impacts of invasive pines.

Questions: Do remaining mesophytic grasslands on soils with agricultural potential respond to a latitudinal gradient? Are climatic or land-use factors the principal drivers of regional and local diversity of these grasslands? Location: Mesophytic grasslands, Argentine Pampas, Rio de la Plata grasslands. Methods: The species presence and cover was recorded in each of 96 remnant grasslands on soils suitable for cropping, grouped into five sampling locations. In each region, CIs for γ-diversity and for the slope of species/area curves were estimated. Unconstrained ordination was applied to detect the principal gradients in floristic composition and correlation analysis to identify their main drivers. Mantel test was used to evaluate the correlation between floristic similarity and geographic distance, and with Euclidean distance in fragmentation and climatic variables. To rank the climatic and land-use factors that account for local species richness and percentge of exotics, we applied correlation analysis and regression models. Results: Community composition (73% native species) was mainly related to climatic variables determined by latitude, with a slight influence of fragmentation variables. Regional species richness responded to latitude: γ-diversity decreased linearly with increasing distance from the Equator, as did the rate of species accumulation with expanding area. Alpha-diversity did not vary in a systematic way with latitude, being associated with landscape fragmentation and mean annual precipitation. Relative importance of C4 grasses and mean percentage exotics showed opposite latitudinal tendencies, the former decreasing and the latter increasing towards the south. Conclusions: Latitude was a strong determinant of regional diversity and community composition, but a partial driver for local species richness, mainly influenced by landscape fragmentation. While climatic and geographic drivers determined gradual latitudinal turnover in regional species pools, within regions land-use history, stochastic processes and biotic interactions were also important. All these patterns need to be considered together when delimiting grassland nature reserves for conservation of the most diverse ecosystems of this region, currently threatened by agricultural expansion and intensification.

Fil: Huaylla, Claudia Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Sede Andina. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte; Argentina