Detecting Extinction Risk from Climate Change by IUCN Red List Criteria

Anthropogenic climate change is a key threat to global biodiversity. To inform strategic actions aimed at conserving biodiversity as climate changes, conservation planners need early warning of the risks faced by different species. The IUCN Red List criteria for threatened species are widely acknowledged as useful risk assessment tools for informing conservation under constraints imposed by limited data. However, doubts have been expressed about the ability of the criteria to detect risks imposed by potentially slow‐acting threats such as climate change, particularly because criteria addressing rates of population decline are assessed over time scales as short as 10 years. We used spatially explicit stochastic population models and dynamic species distribution models projected to future climates to determine how long before extinction a species would become eligible for listing as threatened based on the IUCN Red List criteria. We focused on a short‐lived frog species (Assa darlingtoni) chosen specifically to represent potential weaknesses in the criteria to allow detailed consideration of the analytical issues and to develop an approach for wider application. The criteria were more sensitive to climate change than previously anticipated; lead times between initial listing in a threatened category and predicted extinction varied from 40 to 80 years, depending on data availability. We attributed this sensitivity primarily to the ensemble properties of the criteria that assess contrasting symptoms of extinction risk. Nevertheless, we recommend the robustness of the criteria warrants further investigation across species with contrasting life histories and patterns of decline. The adequacy of these lead times for early warning depends on practicalities of environmental policy and management, bureaucratic or political inertia, and the anticipated species response times to management actions. Detección del Riesgo de Extinción a partir del Cambio Climático por medio del Criterio de la Lista Roja de la UICNKeith et al.     

Seventy‐One Important Questions for the Conservation of Marine Biodiversity

The ocean provides food, economic activity, and cultural value for a large proportion of humanity. Our knowledge of marine ecosystems lags behind that of terrestrial ecosystems, limiting effective protection of marine resources. We describe the outcome of 2 workshops in 2011 and 2012 to establish a list of important questions, which, if answered, would substantially improve our ability to conserve and manage the world's marine resources. Participants included individuals from academia, government, and nongovernment organizations with broad experience across disciplines, marine ecosystems, and countries that vary in levels of development. Contributors from the fields of science, conservation, industry, and government submitted questions to our workshops, which we distilled into a list of priority research questions. Through this process, we identified 71 key questions. We grouped these into 8 subject categories, each pertaining to a broad component of marine conservation: fisheries, climate change, other anthropogenic threats, ecosystems, marine citizenship, policy, societal and cultural considerations, and scientific enterprise. Our questions address many issues that are specific to marine conservation, and will serve as a road map to funders and researchers to develop programs that can greatly benefit marine conservation. Setenta y Un Preguntas Importantes para la Conservación de la Biodiversidad Marina     

Current Practice and Future Prospects for Social Data in Coastal and Ocean Planning

Coastal and ocean planning comprises a broad field of practice. The goals, political processes, and approaches applied to planning initiatives may vary widely. However, all planning processes ultimately require adequate information on both the biophysical and social attributes of a planning region. In coastal and ocean planning practice, there are well‐established methods to assess biophysical attributes; however, less is understood about the role and assessment of social data. We conducted the first global assessment of the incorporation of social data in coastal and ocean planning. We drew on a comprehensive review of planning initiatives and a survey of coastal and ocean practitioners. There was significantly more incorporation of social data in multiuse versus conservation‐oriented planning. Practitioners engaged a wide range of social data, including governance, economic, and cultural attributes of planning regions and human impacts data. Less attention was given to ecosystem services and social–ecological linkages, both of which could improve coastal and ocean planning practice. Although practitioners recognize the value of social data, little funding is devoted to its collection and incorporation in plans. Increased capacity and sophistication in acquiring critical social and ecological data for planning is necessary to develop plans for more resilient coastal and ocean ecosystems and communities. We suggest that improving social data monitoring, and in particular spatial social data, to complement biophysical data, is necessary for providing holistic information for decision‐support tools and other methods. Moving beyond people as impacts to people as beneficiaries, through ecosystem services assessments, holds much potential to better incorporate the tenets of ecosystem‐based management into coastal and ocean planning by providing targets for linked biodiversity conservation and human welfare outcomes. La Práctica Actual y los Prospectos Futuros para los Datos Sociales en la Planeación Costera y Oceánica     

Nested Subsets and the Distribution of Birds on Isolated Woodlots

Abstract. Distribution of bird species among isolated habitat patches (e.g., woodlots in an agricultural landscape) often appears to be nonrandom; species present in small, species-poor patches also are found in larger patches that support more species. Bird communities form 'nested subsets' (after Patterson & Atmar 1986) if all species found in small faunas also are found in more species-rich assemblages. Occurrence of a nested subset pattern implies an underlying, nonrandom pattern of species distributions. I used computer simulations to analyze the degree of nestedness exhibited by bird communities in east-central Illinois. Results demonstrated that the distribution of bird species breeding in isolated woodlots (1.8 to 600 ha) differed significantly from that predicted by a random distribution model; species assemblages were more "nested" than expected by chance. Most species present in small, species-poor woodlots also were found in larger, species-rich woodlots. As groups, species requiring forest interior habitat for breeding and species wintering in the tropics showed highly nested distributions. In contrast, short-distance migrants and species breeding in forest edge habitat showed more variable distribution patterns, species recorded on smaller woodlots were not always recorded on larger, more species-rich wood-lots. Apparent absences from larger woodlots may have reflected real distribution patterns or insufficient sampling of edge habitats. These results support previous conclusions that small habitat patches are insufficient for preservation of many species.     

Is the Intensity of Copper Use Still Declining in the USA?

This article examines several deficiencies in the standard procedure for calculating the intensity of metal use. It then investigates the possibility that the long-term decline in the intensity of copper use in the USA, which has persisted for more than four decades, has in recent years come to an end, even though the standard measures of intensity of use indicate a continuation of the downward trend, albeit at a slower rate. If true, the implications are significant for the copper industry worldwide, because the USA is the largest national market for copper. In addition, consumption trends in many other countries in some respects follow those in the USA. The results do provide some support for the hypothesis that intensity of copper use in the USA is no longer falling. They also indicate that the standard procedure significantly underestimates USA copper consumption and in turn intensity of use.