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Global sustainability agendas focus primarily on halting deforestation, yet the biodiversity crisis resulting from the degradation of remaining forests is going largely unnoticed. Forest degradation occurs through the loss of key ecological structures, such as dying trees and deadwood, even in the absence of deforestation. One of the main drivers of forest degradation is limited awareness by policy makers and the public on the importance of these structures for supporting forest biodiversity and ecosystem function. Here, we outline management strategies to protect forest health and biodiversity by maintaining and promoting deadwood, and propose environmental education initiatives to improve the general awareness of the importance of deadwood. Finally, we call for major reforms to forest management to maintain and restore deadwood; large, old trees; and other key ecological structures.

Ongoing controversy over logging the ancient Białowieża Forest in Poland symbolizes a global problem for policies and management of the increasing proportion of the earth's intact forest that is subject to postdisturbance logging. We review the extent of, and motivations for, postdisturbance logging in protected and unprotected forests globally. An unprecedented level of logging in protected areas and other places where green‐tree harvest would not normally occur is driven by economic interests and a desire for pest control. To avoid failure of global initiatives dedicated to reducing the loss of species, five key policy reforms are necessary: (1) salvage logging must be banned from protected areas; (2) forest planning should address altered disturbance regimes for all intact forests to ensure that significant areas remain undisturbed by logging; (3) new kinds of integrated analyses are needed to assess the potential economic benefits of salvage logging against its ecological, economic, and social costs; (4) global and regional maps of natural disturbance regimes should be created to guide better spatiotemporal planning of protected areas and undisturbed forests outside reserves; and (5) improved education and communication programs are needed to correct widely held misconceptions about natural disturbances.

Forgotten Grasslands of the South is a literary and scientific case study of some of the biologically richest and most endangered ecosystems in North America.Eminent ecologist Reed Noss tells the story of how southern grasslands arose and persisted over time and addresses questions that are fundamental for conserving these vital yet poorly.

We assess progress toward the protection of 50% of the terrestrial biosphere to address the species-extinction crisis and conserve a global ecological heritage for future generations. Using a map of Earth’s 846 terrestrial ecoregions, we show that 98 ecoregions (12%) exceed Half Protected; 313 ecoregions (37%) fall short of Half Protected but have sufficient unaltered habitat remaining to reach the target; and 207 ecoregions (24%) are in peril, where an average of only 4% of natural habitat remains. We propose a Global Deal for Nature—a companion to the Paris Climate Deal—to promote increased habitat protection and restoration, national- and ecoregion-scale conservation strategies, and the empowerment of indigenous peoples to protect their sovereign lands. The goal of such an accord would be to protect half the terrestrial 2050 to halt the extinction crisis while sustaining human livelihoods.

This paper introduces and summarizes a series of articles on the potential impacts of sea level rise on Florida’s natural and human communities and what might be done to reduce the severity of those impacts. Most of the papers in this special issue of Climatic Change were developed from presentations at a symposium held at Archbold Biological Station in January 2010, sponsored by the Florida Institute for Conservation Science. Symposium participants agreed that adaptation to sea level rise for the benefit of human communities should be planned in concert with adaptation to reduce vulnerability and impacts to natural communities and native species. The papers in this special issue discuss both of these categories of impacts and adaptation options. In this introductory paper, I place the subject in context by noting that that the literature in conservation biology related to climate change has been concerned largely about increasing temperatures and reduced moisture availability, rather than about sea level rise. The latter, however, is the most immediate and among the most severe impacts of global warming in low-lying regions such as Florida. I then review the content of this special issue by summarizing and interpreting the following 10 papers. I conclude with a review of the recommendations for research and policy that were developed from group discussions at the Archbold symposium. The main lesson that emerges from this volume is that sea level rise, combined with human population growth, urban development in coastal areas, and landscape fragmentation, poses an enormous threat to human and natural well-being in Florida. How Floridians respond to sea level rise will offer lessons, for better or worse, for other low-lying regions worldwide.

Agricultural development was the major contributor to South America's designation as the continent with the highest rates of forest loss from 2000-2012. As the apex predator in the Neotropics, jaguars (Panthera onca) are dependent on forest cover but the species' response to habitat fragmentation in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes has not been a subject of extensive research. We used occupancy as a measure of jaguar habitat use in Colombia's middle Magdalena River valley which, as part of the intercontinental Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena biodiversity hotspot, is exceedingly fragmented by expanding cattle pastures and oil palm plantations. We used single-season occupancy models to analyze 9 months of data (2015-2016) from 70 camera trap sites. Given the middle Magdalena's status as a \"jaguar corridor\" and our possible violation of the occupancy models' demographic closure assumption, we interpreted our results as \"probability of habitat use (Ψ)\" by jaguars. We measured the associations between jaguar presence and coverage of forest, oil palm, and wetlands in radii buffers of 1, 3, and 5 km around each camera trap. Our camera traps recorded 77 jaguar detections at 25 of the camera trap sites (36%) during 15,305 trap nights. The probability of detecting jaguars, given their presence at a site, was 0.28 (0.03 SE). In the top-ranked model, jaguar habitat use was positively influenced by wetland coverage (β = 7.16, 3.20 SE) and negatively influenced by cattle pastures (β = -1.40, 0.63 SE), both in the 3 km buffers. We conclude that wetlands may serve as keystone habitats for jaguars in landscapes fragmented by cattle ranches and oil palm plantations. Greater focus on wetland preservation could facilitate jaguar persistence in one of the most important yet vulnerable areas of their distribution.

Conservation biology emerged in the mid-1980s, drawing on established disciplines and integrating them in pursuit of a coherent goal: the protection and perpetuation of the Earth's biological diversity. Opportunistic in its borrowing and application of knowledge, conservation biology had its roots within the established biological sciences and resource management disciplines but has continually incorporated insights from the empirical experience of resource managers, from the social sciences and humanities, and from diverse cultural sources. The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) has represented the field's core constituency, while expanding that constituency in keeping with the field's integrative spirit. Conservation Biology has served as SCB's flagship publication, promoting research, dialog, debate, and application of the field's essential concepts. Over the last 20 years the field, SCB, and the journal have evolved to meet changing conservation needs, to explore gaps in our knowledge base, to incorporate new information from related fields, to build professional capacity, and to provide expanded opportunities for international participation. In turn, the field, SCB, and journal have prompted change in related fields, organizations, and publications. In its dedication to advancing the scientific foundations of biodiversity conservation and placing that science at the service of society in a world whose variety, wildness, and beauty we care for, conservation biology represents both a continuation and radical reconfiguration of the traditional relationship between science and conservation.

Biodiversity hotspots are conservation priorities. We identify the North American Coastal Plain (NACP) as a global hotspot based on the classic definition, a region with > 1500 endemic plant species and > 70% habitat loss. This region has been bypassed in prior designations due to misconceptions and myths about its ecology and history. These fallacies include: (1) young age of the NACP, climatic instability over time and submergence during high sea-level stands; (2) climatic and environmental homogeneity; (3) closed forest as the climax vegetation; and (4) fire regimes that are mostly anthropogenic. We show that the NACP is older and more climatically stable than usually assumed, spatially heterogeneous and extremely rich in species and endemics for its range of latitude, especially within pine savannas and other mostly herbaceous and fire-dependent communities. We suspect systematic biases and misconceptions, in addition to missing information, obscure the existence of similarly biologically significant regions world-wide. Potential solutions to this problem include (1) increased field biological surveys and taxonomic determinations, especially within grassy biomes and regions with low soil fertility, which tend to have much overlooked biodiversity; (2) more research on the climatic refugium role of hotspots, given that regions of high endemism often coincide with regions with low velocity of climate change; (3) in low-lying coastal regions, consideration of the heterogeneity in land area generated by historically fluctuating sea levels, which likely enhanced opportunities for evolution of endemic species; and (4) immediate actions to establish new protected areas and implement science-based management to restore evolutionary environmental conditions in newly recognized hotspots.

Historically, grasslands with limited tree presence were embedded in a matrix of predominantly open oak and pine forests in the eastern United States. These open ecosystems mostly have been lost to other land uses, particularly agriculture, and also to closed forests under fire exclusion because frequent surface fire prevents tree encroachment. We located the potential extent of eastern fire‐maintained grasslands by applying the random forests and C5.0 classifiers to determine the relationship between mapped areas of historical grasslands and topography and wind speed, which are proxies for surface fire frequency. A generalized ruleset was that fire‐maintained grasslands occurred at roughness values of less than 95, or flatter sites, and wind speeds ≥3.4 m s−1, which created large fire compartments. Potential grasslands covered 27 million ha, or 14% of the 200 million ha of the eastern United States, although these fire‐maintained locations also may have been savannas or open woodlands historically. Currently, potential grassland locations are 40% crops, 25% pasture, 18% forests, and 13% developed land, with about 1.5% each of herbaceous upland vegetation, herbaceous wetlands, and shrublands. According to historical accounts, fire‐maintained grasslands generally transitioned to dense young tree growth within a 20‐year interval after fire exclusion; in Kentucky, the transition transpired during the periods 1790–1810 or 1810–1830, but dates vary with Euro‐American settlement time. Finding the forgotten grasslands of the eastern United States, with this mechanistic approach to estimate fire disturbance, is an important first step for recovering and managing eastern grassland biodiversity.

Available habitat within a landscape is often more limited for specialist species than for generalists. Therefore, specialists are potentially more vulnerable to extinction. The goal of our study was to better understand the ephemeral wetland habitat associations of specialist and generalist amphibians within a longleaf pine landscape in the southeastern United States. We also sought to determine specialist (e.g., oak toad [Anaxyrus quercicus], Maybee's salamander [Ambystoma maybeei], pine woods treefrog [Hyla femoralis], carpenter frog [Lithobates virgatipes]) and generalist (e.g., spotted salamander [Ambystoma maculatum], Cope's gray treefrog [Hyla chrysoscelis], southern leopard frog [Lithobates sphenocephalies]) species' responses to specific habitat restoration treatments. From 2005–2010, we examined the relationship between aquatic specialist and generalist amphibian species occupancy and wetland vegetation structure. We measured vegetation and amphibian responses to prescribed fire and vegetation mulching (a fire surrogate), plus a combination of mulching and burning. Untreated controls were wetlands that had not burned for 4–15 years. We combined data from this study and a previous study to elucidate patterns in amphibian assemblages in relation to fire history. Specialist relative species richness was highest when canopy openness was high and leaf litter depth was low, conditions best achieved by mulching plus burning. Some specialist species were not detected in wetlands with >8 years since fire, and some generalist species were not detected in wetlands with <2 years since fire, indicating that as vegetation structure changes with time since fire, there is a corresponding shift in the amphibian assemblage. Important patterns in species distributions can be overlooked if relationships to environment and responses to habitat change are too generalized and do not account for shifts in community composition. For conservation of longleaf pine specialist species, we recommend that uplands continue to be prescribed-burned on a 1–3-year return interval. Burning should occur during the early growing season when possible to maximize the probability that wetland basins burn. In cases where species of high conservation value are at imminent risk of extinction, we recommend a combination of mulching and burning to most quickly restore suitable habitat structure.