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\"This book describes the changing landscape of European forest ownership and explores the impact a new, often urban, generation of forest owners may have on the future of one of our most basic resources--forests. Forests have not played a major role in rural studies thus far, however they constitute an important part of many rural areas. Drawing on Swedish cases and comparison cases from various other areas of Europe, the authors present these 'new forest owners' as a pivotal factor in the changing relationships between urban and rural life. The chapters explore how forest production, the relationship to the environment, urban-rural relations and local communities have already changed as well as discussing what might be expected for the future. A result of work in the Swedish research programme PLURAL and related projects, such as the EU Cost Action FACESMAP, this volume will be of interest to scholars of forestry and rural studies, as well as to researchers in environmental, population and globalization studies more broadly\"--Back cover.

It was recently suggested that beta diversity can be partitioned into contributions of single sites to overall beta diversity (LCBD) or into contributions of individual species to overall beta diversity (SCBD). We explored the relationships of LCBD and SCBD to site and species characteristics, respectively, in stream insect assemblages. We found that LCBD was mostly explained by variation in species richness, with a negative relationship being detected. SCBD was strongly related to various species characteristics, such as occupancy, abundance, niche position and niche breadth, but was only weakly related to biological traits of species. In particular, occupancy and its quadratic terms showed a very strong unimodal relationship with SCBD, suggesting that intermediate species in terms of site occupancy contribute most to beta diversity. Our findings of unravelling the contributions of sites or species to overall beta diversity are of high importance to community ecology, conservation and bioassessment using stream insect assemblages, and may bear some overall generalities to be found in other organism groups.

Stable isotope analysis is increasingly being utilised across broad areas of ecology and biology. Key to much of this work is the use of mixing models to estimate the proportion of sources contributing to a mixture such as in diet estimation. By accurately reflecting natural variation and uncertainty to generate robust probability estimates of source proportions, the application of Bayesian methods to stable isotope mixing models promises to enable researchers to address an array of new questions, and approach current questions with greater insight and honesty. We outline a framework that builds on recently published Bayesian isotopic mixing models and present a new open source R package, SIAR. The formulation in R will allow for continued and rapid development of this core model into an all-encompassing single analysis suite for stable isotope research.

\"The regeneration of critical urban areas through the redesign of public space with the intense involvement of local communities seems to be the central focus of place-making according to some widespread practices in academic and professional circles. Recently, new expertise maintains that place-making could be an innovative and potentially autonomous field, competing with more traditional disciplines like urban planning, urban design, architecture and others. This book affirms that the question of 'making better places for people' should be understood in a broader sense, as a symptom of the non-contingent limitations of the urban and spatial disciplines. It maintains that research should not be oriented only towards new technical or merely formal solutions but rather towards the profound rethinking of disciplinary paradigms. In the fields of urban planning, urban design and policy-making, the challenge of place-making provides scholars and practitioners a great opportunity for a much-needed critical review. Only the substantial reappraisal of long-standing (technical, cultural, institutional and social) premises and perspectives can truly improve place-making practices. The pressing need for place-making implies trespassing undue disciplinary boundaries and experimenting a place-based approach that can innovate and integrate planning regulations, strategic spatial visioning and urban development projects. Moreover, the place-making challenge compels urban experts and policy-makers to critically reflect upon the physical and social contexts of their interventions. In this sense, facing place-making today is a way to renew the civic and social role of urban planning and urban design\"-- Provided by publisher.

1. It is now commonplace in community ecology to assess patterns of phylogenetic or functional diversity in order to inform our understanding of the assembly mechanisms that structure communities. While both phylogenetic and functional approaches have been used in conceptually similar ways, it is not clear if they both in fact reveal similar community diversity patterns or support similar inferences. We review studies that use both measures to determine the degree to which they support congruent patterns and inferences about communities. 2. We performed a literature review with 188 analyses from 79 published papers that compared some facet of phylogenetic (PD) and functional diversity (FD) in community ecology. These studies generally report four main cases in which phylogenetic and functional information are used together in community analyses, to determine if: (a) there were phylogenetic signals in the measured traits in communities; (b) PD and FD were correlated with one another; (c) standardized PD and FD measures similarly revealed patterns of community over- or under-dispersion; and (d) PD and FD were both related to other explanatory variables (e.g. elevation) similarly. 3. We found that the vast majority of studies found both strong phylogenetic signals in their traits and positive correlations of PD and FD measures across sites. However, and surprisingly, we found substantial incongruencies for the other tests. Phylogenetic and functional dispersion patterns were congruent only about half the time. Specifically, when communities were phylogenetically over-dispersed, these same communities were more likely to be functionally under-dispersed. Similarly, we found that phylogenetic and functional relationships with independent predictors were incongruent in about half of the analyses. 4. Synthesis. Phylogenetic signal tests and PD-FD correlations appear to strongly support the congruence between traits and phylogeny. It is surprising that strong phylogenetic signals appeared so ubiquitous given that ecological studies often analyse phylogenetically incomplete sets of species that have undergone ecological sorting. Despite the largely congruent findings based on phylogenetic signal tests and PD-FD correlations, we found substantial incongruencies when researchers assessed either dispersion patterns or relationships with independent predictors. We discuss a number of potential ecological, evolutionary and methodological reasons for these incongruencies. Phylogenetic and functional information might reflect species ecological differences unequally with phylogenies better reflecting multivariate conserved elements of ecological similarity, and single traits better able to capture recent divergence, and both elements influence ecological patterns.

This book examines how cities can use a public health frame of climate change to boost people's understanding of and concern about climate change and increase policy support for climate adaptation efforts at the local level. It also presents new tools for cities to enhance awareness of and facilitate prioritization of climate risk management choices.

Recently, community ecology has emphasized the multi-facetted aspects of biological diversity by linking species traits and the environment. Here, we explored environmental correlates of taxonomically-based and traits-based compositional distances using a comprehensive data set of diatom and macroinvertebrate communities. We also explored the responses of different beta diversity components (i.e., overall beta diversity, turnover, and nestedness) of beta diversity facets (i.e., taxonomically and traits-based beta diversity) to environmental distances. Partial Mantel tests were used to test the relationships between beta diversity and environmental distance (while controlling for spatial distances). Taxonomically-based beta diversity varied much more than traits-based beta diversity, indicating strong functional convergence. We found that taxonomicallybased beta diversity was largely driven by the turnover component. However, the nestedness component contributed more to overall traits-based beta diversity than the turnover component. Taxonomically-based beta diversity was significantly correlated with environmental distances for both diatoms and macroinvertebrates. Thus, we found support for the role of environmental filtering as a driver of community dissimilarities of rather different biological groups. However, the strength of these relationships between beta diversity and environmental distances varied depending on the biological group, facet, component, and the way which the environmental variables were selected to calculate the explanatory (distance) matrix. Our results indicated that both taxonomically and traits-based approaches are still needed to better understand patterns and mechanisms affecting the organization of biological communities in streams. This is because different facets of biological communities may be driven by different mechanisms.

Soil fauna communities are major drivers of many forest ecosystem processes. Tree species diversity and composition shape soil fauna communities, but their relationships are poorly understood, notably whether or not soil fauna diversity depends on tree species diversity. Here, we characterized soil macrofauna communities from forests composed of either one or three tree species, located in four different climate zones and growing on different soil types. Using multivariate analysis and model averaging we investigated the relative importance of tree species richness, tree functional type (deciduous vs. evergreen), litter quality, microhabitat and microclimatic characteristics as drivers of soil macrofauna community composition and structure. We found that macrofauna communities in mixed forest stands were represented by a higher number of broad taxonomic groups that were more diverse and more evenly represented. We also observed a switch from earthworm-dominated to predator-dominated communities with increasing evergreen proportion in forest stands, which we interpreted as a result of a lower litter quality and a higher forest floor mass. Finally, canopy openness was positively related to detritivore abundance and biomass, leading to higher predator species richness and diversity probably through trophic cascade effects. Interestingly, considering different levels of taxonomic resolution in the analyses highlighted different facets of macrofauna response to tree species richness, likely a result of both different ecological niche range and methodological constraints. Overall, our study supports the positive effects of tree species richness on macrofauna diversity and abundance through multiple changes in resource quality and availability, microhabitat, and microclimate modifications.

Background: Two decades of research showing that increasing plant diversity results in greater community productivity has been predicated on greater functional diversity allowing access to more of the total available resources. Thus, understanding phenotypic attributes that allow species to partition resources is fundamentally important to explaining diversity-productivity relationships. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we use data from a long-term experiment (Cedar Creek, MN) and compare the extent to which productivity is explained by seven types of community metrics of functional variation: 1) species richness, 2) variation in 10 individual traits, 3) functional group richness, 4) a distance-based measure of functional diversity, 5) a hierarchical multivariate clustering method, 6) a nonmetric multidimensional scaling approach, and 7) a phylogenetic diversity measure, summing phylogenetic branch lengths connecting community members together and may be a surrogate for ecological differences. Although most of these diversity measures provided significant explanations of variation in productivity, the presence of a nitrogen fixer and phylogenetic diversity were the two best explanatory variables. Further, a statistical model that included the presence of a nitrogen fixer, seed weight and phylogenetic diversity was a better explanation of community productivity than other models. Conclusions: Evolutionary relationships among species appear to explain patterns of grassland productivity. Further, these results reveal that functional differences among species involve a complex suite of traits and that perhaps phylogenetic relationships provide a better measure of the diversity among species that contributes to productivity than individual or small groups of traits.