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\"Cities need healthy chunks of the world's ecosystems to persist if they are to survive; yet cities, like parasites, grow and prosper by local destruction of these very ecosystems. In this absorbing and wide-ranging book, the authors use New York City as a microcosm to explore both the positive and negative sides of the relationship between cities, the environment, and the future of global biodiversity. They illuminate the mass of contradictions that cities present by offering the best and the worst of human existence. Eldredge and Horenstein demonstrate that, though cities have voracious appetites for resources such as food and water, they also represent the last hope for conserving healthy remnants of the world's ecosystems and species. With their concentration of human beings, they bring together centers of learning, research, government, finance, and media--institutions that increasingly play active roles in solving environmental problems. Some of the topics covered in Concrete Jungle: --The geological history of the New York region, including remnant glacial features visible today --The early days of urbanization on Manhattan Island, focusing on the history of Central Park, Collect Pond, and Manhattan Square --The history of early railway lines and the development of New York's iconic subway system --The problem of producing enough safe drinking water for an ever-expanding population --Prominent civic institutions, including universities, museums, and zoos\"--Provided by publisher.

If they are to survive, cities need healthy chunks of the world's ecosystems to persist; yet cities, like parasites, grow and prosper by local destruction of these very ecosystems. In this absorbing and wide-ranging book, Eldredge and Horenstein use New York City as a microcosm to explore both the positive and the negative sides of the relationship between cities, the environment, and the future of global biodiversity. They illuminate the mass of contradictions that cities present in embodying the best and the worst of human existence. The authors demonstrate that, though cities have voracious appetites for resources such as food and water, they also represent the last hope for conserving healthy remnants of the world's ecosystems and species. With their concentration of human beings, cities bring together centers of learning, research, government, finance, and media—institutions that increasingly play active roles in solving environmental problems. Some of the topics covered in Concrete Jungle: --The geological history of the New York region, including remnant glacial features visible today --The early days of urbanization on Manhattan Island, focusing on the history of Central Park, Collect Pond, and Manhattan Square --The history of early railway lines and the development of New York’s iconic subway system --The problem of producing enough safe drinking water for an ever-expanding population --Prominent civic institutions, including universities, museums, and zoos

Within a generation, children's lives have largely moved indoors, with the loss of free‐ranging exploration of the nearby natural world, even as research indicates that direct experiences of nature in childhood contribute to care for nature across the life span. In response, many conservation organizations advocate connecting children with nature, and there has been rising interest in measuring young people's connectedness with nature, understanding how it relates to their well‐being and stewardship behaviour and creating programs to increase connection. This article reviews the literature on these topics, covering both quantitative and qualitative studies. It notes that this research emphasizes positive experiences and emotions, even as global environmental changes and biodiversity loss accelerate. Young people's emotions of worry, frustration and sadness as they learn about environmental degradation also express their understanding that they are connected to the biosphere. Therefore this review includes research on how young people cope with information about large‐scale environmental problems, and it identifies practices to sustain hope. The review concludes by suggesting how research on connection with nature and coping with environmental change can benefit from integration. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Three decades of biodiversity governance has largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. InCounting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical management. Since its inception in the 1980s, biodiversity's political power has also hinged on its affiliation with a series of political concepts. Biodiversity was initially articulated as a moral crime against the intrinsic value of all species. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biodiversity shifted toward an association with service provision in a globalizing world economy before attaching itself more recently to the discourses of security and resilience. Even as species extinctions continue, biodiversity's role in environmental governance has become increasingly abstract. Yet the power of global biodiversity is eventually always localized and material when it encounters nonhuman life. In these encounters, Youatt finds reasons for optimism, tracing some of the ways that nonhuman life has escaped human social means.Counting Speciescompellingly offers both a political account of global biodiversity and a unique approach to political agency across the human-nonhuman divide.

1. The challenges associated with monitoring low-density carnivores across large landscapes have limited the ability to implement and evaluate conservation and management strategies for such species. Non-invasive sampling techniques and advanced statistical approaches have alleviated some of these challenges and can even allow for spatially explicit estimates of density, one of the most valuable wildlife monitoring tools. 2. For some species, individual identification comes at no cost when unique attributes (e.g. pelage patterns) can be discerned with remote cameras, while other species require viable genetic material and expensive laboratory processing for individual assignment. Prohibitive costs may still force monitoring efforts to use species distribution or occupancy as a surrogate for density, which may not be appropriate under many conditions. 3. Here, we used a large-scale monitoring study of fisher Pekania pennanti to evaluate the effectiveness of occupancy as an approximation to density, particularly for informing harvest management decisions. We combined remote cameras with baited hair snares during 2013-2015 to sample across a 70 096-km² region of western New York, USA. We fit occupancy and Royle-Nichols models to species detection-non-detection data collected by cameras, and spatial capture-recapture (SCR) models to individual encounter data obtained by genotyped hair samples. Variation in the state variables within 15-km² grid cells was modelled as a function of landscape attributes known to influence fisher distribution. 4. We found a close relationship between grid cell estimates of fisher state variables from the models using detection-non-detection data and those from the SCR model, likely due to informative spatial covariates across a large landscape extent and a grid cell resolution that worked well with the movement ecology of the species. Fisher occupancy and density were both positively associated with the proportion of coniferous-mixed forest and negatively associated with road density. As a result, spatially explicit management recommendations for fisher were similar across models, though relative variation was dampened for the detection-non-detection data. 5. Synthesis and applications. Our work provides empirical evidence that models using detection-non-detection data can make similar inferences regarding relative spatial variation of the focal population to models using more expensive individual encounters when the selected spatial grain approximates or is marginally smaller than home range size. When occupancy alone is chosen as a cost-effective state variable for monitoring, simulation and sensitivity analyses should be used to understand how inferences from detection-non-detection data will be affected by aspects of study design and species ecology.

There is a 187-year history of stonefly (Insecta, Plecoptera) research in New York State. In total, 29 current valid species have a type locality in this state. Despite several new species' descriptions and numerous other papers discussing stoneflies in general from New York, a comprehensive treatment of the state's fauna is lacking. In this treatment we provide a comprehensive approach to assessing distribution and diversity patterns across multiple dimensions, focusing on adult flight periods, habitat associations, elevation gradients, United States Geological Survey Hierarchical Unit Code (HUC8) drainages, and United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Level IV Ecoregions. This work is based on recent fieldwork, exhaustive searches of museums and research collections for specimens and accumulation of specimen data from peer-reviewed literature. Our analyses of 6,538 records from 1375 unique locations confirm the presence of 127 species in 42 genera across nine families, representing 58 of the 62 counties of the state. Nine new state records are presented with three known only from historical collections prior to 1970. Further analyses produced for all species include adult flight periods, elevational ranges, and distributional affinities across HUC8s and USEPA Level IV Ecoregions. This research will provide the basis for future conservation decisions in the state, identify gaps in our current knowledge, and elucidate needs for future research. A specimen data set has been associated with this document to aid in future assessments.

Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) are globally distributed and concentrate in urban environments, where they live and feed in closer proximity to human populations than most other mammals. Despite the potential role of rats as reservoirs of zoonotic diseases, the microbial diversity present in urban rat populations remains unexplored. In this study, we used targeted molecular assays to detect known bacterial, viral, and protozoan human pathogens and unbiased high-throughput sequencing to identify novel viruses related to agents of human disease in commensal Norway rats in New York City. We found that these rats are infected with bacterial pathogens known to cause acute or mild gastroenteritis in people, including atypical enteropathogenic Escherichia coli, Clostridium difficile, and Salmonella enterica, as well as infectious agents that have been associated with undifferentiated febrile illnesses, including Bartonella spp., Streptobacillus moniliformis, Leptospira interrogans, and Seoul hantavirus. We also identified a wide range of known and novel viruses from groups that contain important human pathogens, including sapoviruses, cardioviruses, kobuviruses, parechoviruses, rotaviruses, and hepaciviruses. The two novel hepaciviruses discovered in this study replicate in the liver of Norway rats and may have utility in establishing a small animal model of human hepatitis C virus infection. The results of this study demonstrate the diversity of microbes carried by commensal rodent species and highlight the need for improved pathogen surveillance and disease monitoring in urban environments. Importance: The observation that most emerging infectious diseases of humans originate in animal reservoirs has led to wide-scale microbial surveillance and discovery programs in wildlife, particularly in the developing world. Strikingly, less attention has been focused on commensal animals like rats, despite their abundance in urban centers and close proximity to human populations. To begin to explore the zoonotic disease risk posed by urban rat populations, we trapped and surveyed Norway rats collected in New York City over a 1-year period. This analysis revealed a striking diversity of known pathogens and novel viruses in our study population, including multiple agents associated with acute gastroenteritis or febrile illnesses in people. Our findings indicate that urban rats are reservoirs for a vast diversity of microbes that may affect human health and indicate a need for increased surveillance and awareness of the disease risks associated with urban rodent infestation.

Biodiversity is crucial for humankind. It encompasses three main levels: ecosystem, species, and intraspecific genetic diversity. Species consist of populations that exhibit deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) variability, which is a key component of intraspecific genetic diversity. In turn, intraspecific genetic diversity is directly linked with the term population genetic structure (PGS). There is a great deal of uncertainty and confusion surrounding the concept of the PGS of species in the scientific literature, yet the term PGS is central to population genetics, and future research is expected to focus on the evolutionary continuum from populations to species. Therefore, it is necessary for current biologists and the next generation of scientists to acquire a better understanding of a PGS, both as a term and a concept, as well as the various roles PGSs play within a biodiversity context. This knowledge can then be applied to the expansion of both practical and theoretical science. Finding answers and reaching a consensus among the scientific community on certain questions regarding PGSs could expand the horizons of population genetics and related research disciplines. The major areas of interest and research are PGSs’ roles in the processes of microevolution and speciation, the sustainable use of natural resources, and the conservation of genetic diversity. Other important aspects of this perspective review include proposals for scientific definitions of some terms and concepts, as well as new perspectives and explanations that could be used as a basis for future theoretical models and applied research on PGSs. In conclusion, a PGS should be viewed as a fragile genetic mosaic encompassing at least three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension.

Chihuahuan Desert grasslands are ecologically diverse and considered among the most threatened ecosystems in North America, stretching from the southwestern United States toward San Luis Potosí, Mexico. These desert grasslands support a wide diversity of mammal, bird, and herpetofauna species, with the latter being among the least surveyed taxa within these ecosystems. Data on snake communities within desert grasslands are relatively sparse due to the difficulty in consistently detecting these secretive reptiles. Herein, we report the success of timelapsetriggered camera trap arrays in documenting snake community structure within a desert shortgrass prairie ecosystem on private land in the TransPecos Region of Texas in Presidio County. During 2020 and 2021, a total of 564 images of snakes were captured, with 268 of these being unique observations representing 15 species. Snakes were observed during every month the cameras were operational except for February and November 2020. Diversity indices were similar across cameras arrays, but frequency of occurrence of each species varied greatly. Camera trapping continues to play a pivotal role in characterizing squamate communities, and this study provides another example of how camera trapping can be successful at surveying snake communities on private lands within desert grassland ecosystems. Los pastizales del Desierto Chihuahuense son ecológicamente diversos y se consideran uno de los ecosistemas más amenazados en América del Norte, extendiéndose desde el suroeste de los Estados Unidos hasta San Luis Potosí, en México. Estos pastizales desérticos albergan una amplia diversidad de especies de mamíferos, aves y herpetofauna, siendo esta última uno de los grupos menos estudiados dentro de estos ecosistemas. Los datos acerca de las comunidades de serpientes dentro de los pastizales desérticos son relativamente escasos debido a la dificultad para detectar de manera consistente a estos sigilosos reptiles. En este artículo, registramos el éxito de las cámaras trampa activadas por intervalos de tiempo, en la documentación de la estructura de la comunidad de serpientes dentro de un ecosistema de pastizal desértico de pasto corto, en un área de propiedad privada en la región de TransPecos de Texas, en el condado de Presidio. Durante los años 2020 y 2021, se capturaron un total de 564 imágenes de serpientes, de las cuales 268 fueron observaciones únicas que representaron 15 especies. Se observaron serpientes durante cada uno de los meses que las cámaras estuvieron en funcionamiento, con excepción de los meses de febrero y noviembre del 2020. Los índices de diversidad fueron similares entre las distintas cámaras, pero la frecuencia de ocurrencia de cada especie varió enormemente. La cámara trampa continúa desempeñando un papel fundamental en la caracterización de comunidades de escamosos, y este estudio brinda otro ejemplo de cómo el uso de cámaras trampa puede contribuir en el estudio de comunidades de serpientes en áreas de propiedad privada dentro de los ecosistemas de pastizal desértico.