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Geodiversity—the variability of Earth's surface materials, forms, and physical processes—is an integral part of nature and crucial for sustaining ecosystems and their services. It provides the substrates, landform mosaics, and dynamic physical processes for habitat development and maintenance. By determining the heterogeneity of the physical environment in conjunction with climate interactions, geodiversity has a crucial influence on biodiversity across a wide range of scales. From a literature review, we identified the diverse values of geodiversity; examined examples of the dependencies of biodiversity on geodiversity at a site-specific scale (for geosites <1 km2 in area); and evaluated various human-induced threats to geosites and geodiversity. We found that geosites are important to biodiversity because they often support rare or unique biota adapted to distinctive environmental conditions or create a diversity of microenvironments that enhance species richness. Conservation of geodiversity in the face of a range of threats is critical both for effective management of nature's stage and for its own particular values. This requires approaches to nature conservation that integrate climate, biodiversity, and geodiversity at all spatial scales. La geodiversidad—la variabilidad de materiales, formas y procesos físicos de la superficie terrestre—es una parte integral de la naturaleza y es crucial para mantener a los ecosistemas y a sus servicios. Proporciona los sustratos, los mosaicos de accidentes geográficos y los procesos físicos dinámicos para el desarrollo y mantenimiento de los hábitats. Al determinar la heterogeneidad del ambiente físico en conjunto con las interacciones del clima, la geodiversidad ha sido una influencia importante sobre la biodiversidad a través de una gama amplia de escalas. A partir de una revisión bibliográfica, identificamos los valores diversos de la geodiversidad; examinamos ejemplos de las dependencias de la biodiversidad hacia la geodiversidad en una escala específica de sitio (para geositios < 1 Km2 de área); y evaluamos varias amenazas inducidas por humanos para los geositios y la geodiversidad. Encontramos que los geositios son importantes para la biodiversidad ya que generalmente mantienen una biota rara o única, la cual está adaptada a condiciones ambientales características o la cual crea una diversidad de microambientes que mejoran la riqueza de especies. La conservación de la geodiversidad de cara a una gama de amenazas es crítica tanto para el manejo efectivo del estado de la naturaleza como para sus propios valores particulares. Esto requiere de enfoques para la conservación de la naturaleza que integran al clima, a la biodiversidad y a la geodiversidad en todas las escalas espaciales.

In a rapidly changing climate, conservation practitioners could better use geodiversity in a broad range of conservation decisions. We explored selected avenues through which this integration might improve decision making and organized them within the adaptive management cycle of assessment, planning, implementation, and monitoring. Geodiversity is seldom referenced in predominant environmental law and policy. With most natural resource agencies mandated to conserve certain categories of species, agency personnel are challenged to find ways to practically implement new directives aimed at coping with climate change while retaining their species‐centered mandate. Ecoregions and ecological classifications provide clear mechanisms to consider geodiversity in plans or decisions, the inclusion of which will help foster the resilience of conservation to climate change. Methods for biodiversity assessment, such as gap analysis, climate change vulnerability analysis, and ecological process modeling, can readily accommodate inclusion of a geophysical component. We adapted others’ approaches for characterizing landscapes along a continuum of climate change vulnerability for the biota they support from resistant, to resilient, to susceptible, and to sensitive and then summarized options for integrating geodiversity into planning in each landscape type. In landscapes that are relatively resistant to climate change, options exist to fully represent geodiversity while ensuring that dynamic ecological processes can change over time. In more susceptible landscapes, strategies aiming to maintain or restore ecosystem resilience and connectivity are paramount. Implementing actions on the ground requires understanding of geophysical constraints on species and an increasingly nimble approach to establishing management and restoration goals. Because decisions that are implemented today will be revisited and amended into the future, increasingly sophisticated forms of monitoring and adaptation will be required to ensure that conservation efforts fully consider the value of geodiversity for supporting biodiversity in the face of a changing climate.

Climate change will require novel conservation strategies. One such tactic is a coarse‐filter approach that focuses on conserving nature's stage (CNS) rather than the actors (individual species). However, there is a temporal mismatch between the long‐term goals of conservation and the short‐term nature of most ecological studies, which leaves many assumptions untested. Paleoecology provides a valuable perspective on coarse‐filter strategies by marshaling the natural experiments of the past to contextualize extinction risk due to the emerging impacts of climate change and anthropogenic threats. We reviewed examples from the paleoecological record that highlight the strengths, opportunities, and caveats of a CNS approach. We focused on the near‐time geological past of the Quaternary, during which species were subjected to widespread changes in climate and concomitant changes in the physical environment in general. Species experienced a range of individualistic responses to these changes, including community turnover and novel associations, extinction and speciation, range shifts, changes in local richness and evenness, and both equilibrium and disequilibrium responses. Due to the dynamic nature of species responses to Quaternary climate change, a coarse‐filter strategy may be appropriate for many taxa because it can accommodate dynamic processes. However, conservationists should also consider that the persistence of landforms varies across space and time, which could have potential long‐term consequences for geodiversity and thus biodiversity.

Conservationists rarely consider the roles individuals, with their own unique behavior, physiology, and genome, play in shaping ecosystem processes and consequently ecosystem services, but this is changing. An ongoing surge in research on animal personalities (that is, behavioral differences among individuals that are consistent over time and across contexts) is exposing the ecological roles of individuals to scientific scrutiny. Here, we present four broad examples of ecosystem services that are likely to be shaped by personalities: (1) pollination and seed dispersal, (2) regulation of pest species, (3) ecotourism, and (4) maintenance of soil quality. Although researchers have suggested diverse links between animal personality and ecosystem function, very few have examined this association. We outline a four-step process for quantifying and validating these linkages, leading to application for conservation practitioners, and conclude by recommending that accounting for behavioral variation should be incorporated into the management of ecosystem services.

A divergence of values has become apparent in recent debates between conservationists who focus on ecosystem services that can improve human well‐being and those who focus on avoiding the extinction of species. These divergent points of view fall along a continuum from anthropocentric to biocentric values, but most conservationists are relatively closer to each other than to the ends of the spectrum. We have some concerns with both positions but emphasize that conservation for both people and all other species will be most effective if conservationists focus on articulating the values they all share, being respectful of divergent values, and collaborating on common interests. The conservation arena is large enough to accommodate many people and organizations whose diverse values lead them to different niches that can, with good will and foresight, be far more complementary than competitive. Los Nichos Complementarios de los Conservacionistas Antropocéntricos y Biocéntricos

Harvesting timber is a common form of land use that has the potential to cause declines in amphibian populations. It is essential to understand the behavior and fate of individuals and the resulting consequences for vital rates (birth, death, immigration, emigration) under different forest management conditions. We report on experimental studies conducted in three regions of the United States to identify mechanisms of responses by pond-breeding amphibians to timber harvest treatments. Our studies demonstrate that life stages related to oviposition and larval performance in the aquatic stage are sometimes affected positively by clearcutting, whereas effects on juvenile and adult terrestrial stages are mostly negative. Partial harvest treatments produced both positive and weaker negative responses than clearcut treatments. Mitigating the detrimental effects of canopy removal, higher surface temperature, and loss of soil-litter moisture in terrestrial habitats surrounding breeding ponds is critical to maintaining viable amphibian populations in managed forested landscapes.

Population viability often depends on conserving functional connectivity in fragmented landscapes. For pool‐breeding amphibians, population connectivity is largely maintained through juvenile dispersal, often through various vegetation types that may differ as filters or conduits to movement. We quantified the relative permeability of different types of open‐canopy vegetation to juvenile wood frogs Lithobates sylvaticus to determine whether this influences functional connectivity during dispersal. We conducted experimental releases of juveniles (n = 561) in ten runways representing five treatments: hayfield, moderate‐cover lawn (45–85% cover), open lawn (0% cover), row crop (forage‐corn) and recent clear‐cut. Runways consisted of 35 × 2·5 m enclosures, located perpendicular to a forest edge and extending into treatment areas with tracking stations at 10, 20 and 30 m. As indices of permeability, we measured the number of animals traversing each station, the proportion changing direction, movement timing and movement rates. Based on an index that compounds four metrics and scales them relative to mature forest as a control, permeability varied between open‐canopy cover types in the following order: row crop < hayfield < clear‐cut < open lawn < moderate‐cover lawn. The highest proportions of individuals changed direction (towards forest) in the hayfield, moderate‐cover lawn and clear‐cut, suggesting that juveniles may make forays into the open and subsequently assess habitat. Nonetheless, individuals could eventually transit entire runways, indicated by overall recaptures at 30 m (e.g. hayfield, 29%; moderate‐cover lawn, 24%; and clear‐cut, 20%) at the end of our six‐week experiment. Synthesis and applications. We provide quantitative evidence that open‐canopy cover types may act as differential ecological filters to ranging movements, and ultimately dispersal. Differences in the willingness of animals to enter treatments, coupled with motility and residency times, support the differing roles of open‐canopy vegetation as both filters and conduits to movement. Thus, it may be overly simplistic to estimate matrix permeability as uniformly low in models that predict movement in fragmented landscapes. To promote functional connectivity, modification of vegetation composition and configuration may provide an underutilized tool for conservation practitioners to reduce the effective isolation of habitat patches for post‐metamorphic amphibians.

Exploitation of natural forests forms expanding frontiers. Simultaneously, protected area frontiers aim at maintaining functional habitat networks. To assess net effects of these frontiers, we examined 16 case study areas on five continents. We (1) mapped protected area instruments, (2) assessed their effectiveness, (3) mapped policy implementation tools, and (4) effects on protected areas originating from their surroundings. Results are given as follows: (1) conservation instruments covered 3–77 %, (2) effectiveness of habitat networks depended on representativeness, habitat quality, functional connectivity, resource extraction in protected areas, time for landscape restoration, “paper parks”, “fortress conservation”, and data access, (3) regulatory policy instruments dominated over economic and informational, (4) negative matrix effects dominated over positive ones (protective forests, buffer zones, inaccessibility), which were restricted to former USSR and Costa Rica. Despite evidence-based knowledge about conservation targets, the importance of spatial segregation of conservation and use, and traditional knowledge, the trajectories for biodiversity conservation were generally negative.