生态建筑设计理论与实践研究

发展生态建筑已经成为当今社会发展的主题,同时也是顺应建筑全球化潮流,提升人居环境健康性和舒适性的迫切需要.必须不断转变建筑在设计和建设方面的思维方式,才能逐步缓解资源紧缺和环境污染的现状.该文对生态建筑定义以及设计原则两方面进行研究,通过对台湾水滴塔和新加坡展览塔楼这两座典型生态建筑案例进行了分析,再从生态建筑材料和生态建筑节能技术两方面予以阐述,得出生态建筑作为当今社会的发展趋势,其还有很多方面需要通过实践去探索.     

Conservation,development and stakeholder relations in Bhutanese protected area management

Conservation and development initiatives have been widely promoted in protected areas (PAs) in developing countries despite ongoing challenges inherent in their capacity to protected biodiversity and alleviate poverty. Bhutan’s vast PA network is becoming increasingly affected by the rapid expansion of conservation and development activities. This paper examines important challenges that PA stakeholders face during socio-political change, and assess how these challenges might impact stakeholder relations in a remote Asian PA. Multiple methods were used to explore the gap between expectations and delivery of two development projects and provide insights through issues of local capacity, indigenous culture and incompatible priorities. Perceived impacts indicated flaws in project design, strong local cultural norms yet weak local ownership, trust and accountability concerns, tensions between modernization and traditional lifestyles, and prospective trade-offs. Suggestions for stronger projects and PA management include having greater internal leadership, adopting realistic timelines, and openly negotiating trade-offs and hard choices.     

Priority areas for conservation of Old World vultures

The prosperity and well-being of human societies relies on healthy ecosystems and the services they provide. However, the biodiversity crisis is undermining ecosystems services and functions. Vultures are among the most imperiled taxonomic groups on Earth, yet they have a fundamental ecosystem function. These obligate scavengers rapidly consume large amounts of carrion and human waste, a service that may aid in both disease prevention and control of mammalian scavengers, including feral dogs, which in turn threaten humans. We combined information about the distribution of all 15 vulture species found in Europe, Asia, and Africa with their threats and used detailed expert knowledge on threat intensity to prioritize critical areas for conserving vultures in Africa and Eurasia. Threats we identified included poisoning, mortality due to collision with wind energy infrastructures, and other anthropogenic activities related to human land use and influence. Areas important for vulture conservation were concentrated in southern and eastern Africa, South Asia, and the Iberian Peninsula, and over 80% of these areas were unprotected. Some vulture species required larger areas for protection than others. Finally, countries that had the largest share of all identified important priority areas for vulture conservation were those with the largest expenditures related to rabies burden (e.g., India, China, and Myanmar). Vulture populations have declined markedly in most of these countries. Restoring healthy vulture populations through targeted actions in the priority areas we identified may help restore the ecosystem services vultures provide, including sanitation and potentially prevention of diseases, such as rabies, a heavy burden afflicting fragile societies. Our findings may guide stakeholders to prioritize actions where they are needed most in order to achieve international goals for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.     

系统性生物多样性保护法律体系的定位与构建

随着国家政策导向提出实现生物多样性整体性、系统性保护的要求,新时期背景下的生物多样性保护除了注重实现生物多样性在自然生态系统、生物物种、遗传资源(基因)三方面的协同性整体性保护以外,还强调了实现自然生态系统平衡、维护国家安全等总体性目标。在此背景下,本文建议,生物多样性保护法律体系也应当在推动立法实践、提升国家安全治理能力、整合现有立法资源等方面发挥其应有价值。从系统性的角度出发,明确法律体系贯彻生物多样性整体性保护理念、执行国家战略部署以及平衡多元化利益的应有定位,并在此基础上从整体性目标的树立、网格联动性的体系构建、合理配置现行法律制度等方面探寻系统性法律体系的构建路径,将有效发挥我国生物多样性保护法律体系在服务社会需求、回应国家政策导向等方面的制度支撑价值。     

A counterfactual approach to measure the impact of wet grassland conservation on U.K. breeding bird populations

Wet grassland populations of wading birds in the United Kingdom have declined severely since 1990. To help mitigate these declines, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has restored and managed lowland wet grassland nature reserves to benefit these and other species. However, the impact of these reserves on bird population trends has not been evaluated experimentally due to a lack of control populations. We compared population trends from 1994 to 2018 among 5 bird species of conservation concern that breed on these nature reserves with counterfactual trends created from matched breeding bird survey observations. We compared reserve trends with 3 different counterfactuals based on different scenarios of how reserve populations could have developed in the absence of conservation. Effects of conservation interventions were positive for all 4 targeted wading bird species: Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), Redshank (Tringa totanus), Curlew (Numenius arquata), and Snipe (Gallinago gallinago). There was no positive effect of conservation interventions on reserves for the passerine, Yellow Wagtail (Motacilla flava). Our approach using monitoring data to produce valid counterfactual controls is a broadly applicable method allowing large-scale evaluation of conservation impact.     

A multispecies assessment of wildlife impacts on local community livelihoods

Conflicts between the interests of agriculture and wildlife conservation are a major threat to biodiversity and human well-being globally. Addressing such conflicts requires a thorough understanding of the impacts associated with living alongside protected wildlife. Despite this, most studies reporting on human–wildlife impacts and the strategies used to mitigate them focus on a single species, thus oversimplifying often complex systems of human–wildlife interactions. We sought to characterize the spatiotemporal patterns of impacts by multiple co-occurring species on agricultural livelihoods in the eastern Okavango Delta Panhandle in northern Botswana through the use of a database of 3264 wildlife-incident reports recorded from 2009 to 2015 by the Department of Wildlife and National Parks. Eight species (African elephants [Loxodonta africana], hippopotamuses [Hippopotamus amphibious], lions [Panthera leo], cheetah [Acinonyx jubatus], African wild dogs [Lycaon pictus], hyenas [Crocuta crocuta], leopards [Panthera pardus], and crocodiles [Crocodylus niloticus]) appeared on incident reports, of which 56.5% were attributed to elephants. Most species were associated with only 1 type of damage (i.e., either crop damage or livestock loss). Carnivores were primarily implicated in incident reports related to livestock loss, particularly toward the end of the dry season (May–October). In contrast, herbivores were associated with crop-loss incidents during the wet season (November–April). Our results illustrate how local communities can face distinct livelihood challenges from different species at different times of the year. Such a multispecies assessment has important implications for the design of conservation interventions aimed at addressing the costs of living with wildlife and thereby mitigation of the underlying conservation conflict. Our spatiotemporal, multispecies approach is widely applicable to other regions where sustainable and long-term solutions to conservation conflicts are needed for local communities and biodiversity.     

Reconciling multiple counterfactuals when evaluating biodiversity conservation impact in social-ecological systems

When evaluating the impact of a biodiversity conservation intervention, a counterfactual is typically needed. Counterfactuals are possible alternative system trajectories in the absence of an intervention. Comparing observed outcomes against the chosen counterfactual allows the impact (change attributable to the intervention) to be determined. Because counterfactuals by definition never occur, they must be estimated. Sometimes, there may be many plausible counterfactuals, including various drivers of biodiversity change and defined on a range of spatial or temporal scales. Here, we posit that, by definition, conservation interventions always take place in social-ecological systems (SES) (i.e., ecological systems integrated with human actors). Evaluating the impact of an intervention in an SES, therefore, means taking into account the counterfactuals assumed by different human actors. Use of different counterfactuals by different actors will give rise to perceived differences in the impacts of interventions, which may lead to disagreement about its success or the effectiveness of the underlying approach. Despite that there are biophysical biodiversity trends, it is often true that no single counterfactual is definitively the right one for conservation assessment, so multiple evaluations of intervention efficacy could be considered justifiable. Therefore, we propose calculating the sum of perceived differences, which captures the range of impact estimates associated with different actors in a given SES. The sum of perceived differences gives some indication of how closely actors in an SES agree on the impacts of an intervention. We applied the concept of perceived differences to a set of global, national, and regional case studies (e.g., global realization of Aichi Target 11 for marine protected areas, effect of biodiversity offsetting on vegetation condition in Australia, and influence of conservation measures on an endangered ungulate in Central Asia). We explored approaches for minimizing the sum, including a combination of negotiation and structured decision making, careful alignment of expectations on scope and measurement, and explicit recognition of any intractable differences between stakeholders.     

Large carnivore hunting and the social license to hunt

The social license to operate framework considers how society grants or withholds informal permission for resource extractors to exploit publicly owned resources. We developed a modified model, which we refer to as the social license to hunt (SLH). In it we similarly consider hunters as operators, given that wildlife are legally considered public resources in North America and Europe. We applied the SLH model to examine the controversial hunting of large carnivores, which are frequently killed for trophies. Killing for trophies is widespread, but undertaken by a minority of hunters, and can pose threats to the SLH for trophy-seeking carnivore hunters and potentially beyond. Societal opposition to large carnivore hunting relates not only to conservation concerns but also to misalignment between killing for trophies and dominant public values and attitudes concerning the treatment of animals. We summarized cases related to the killing of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos), wolves (Canis lupus), and other large carnivores in Canada, the United States, and Europe to illustrate how opposition to large carnivore hunting, now expressed primarily on social media, can exert rapid and significant pressure on policy makers and politicians. Evidence of the potential for transformative change to wildlife management and conservation includes proposed and realized changes to legislation, business practice, and wildlife policy, including the banning of some large carnivore hunts. Given that policy is ultimately shaped by societal values and attitudes, research gaps include developing increased insight into public support of various hunting policies beyond that derived from monitoring of social media and public polling. Informed by increased evidence, the SLH model can provide a conceptual foundation for predicting the likelihood of transient versus enduring changes to wildlife conservation policy and practice for a wide variety of taxa and contexts.     

The bean method as a tool to measure sensitive behavior

Conservationists need to measure human behavior to guide decisions and evaluate their impact. However, activities can be misreported and reporting accuracy may change following conservation interventions, making it hard to verify any apparent changes. Techniques for asking sensitive questions are increasingly integrated into survey designs to improve data quality, but some can be costly or hard for nonexperts to implement. We demonstrate a straightforward, low-cost approach, the bean method in which respondents give anonymous answers by adding a colored bean to a jar to denote a yes or no response. We applied the bean method to measure wild-meat hunting and trading over 2 years at a conservation-project (hunting reduction) site in Gola Forest, Liberia. We extended the technique to accommodate questions about hunting and meat-selling frequency. We compared responses given using the bean method and direct questioning for groups that did and did not participate in conservation interventions. Results from the bean method corresponded to those from direct questioning, and there was no indication of change in question sensitivity following conservation interventions. Estimates from both methods indicated that wild-meat trading decreased in project and nonproject households (from 36% to 20%) and that hunting decreased in 1 project group (38–28%). Where inconsistent answers were given (2–6% of respondents), differences were in both directions and were most likely attributable to measurement error. The bean method was quick and straightforward to administer in a low-literacy setting. We showed how it can be modified for answers of more than 2 categories and consider it a valuable tool that could be adapted for a wide range of conservation settings.     

Bridging gaps in demographic analysis with phylogenetic imputation

Phylogenetically informed imputation methods have rarely been applied to estimate missing values in demographic data but may be a powerful tool for reconstructing vital rates of survival, maturation, and fecundity for species of conservation concern. Imputed vital rates could be used to parameterize demographic models to explore how populations respond when vital rates are perturbed. We used standardized vital rate estimates for 50 bird species to assess the use of phylogenetic imputation to fill gaps in demographic data. We calculated imputation accuracy for vital rates of focal species excluded from the data set either singly or in combination and with and without phylogeny, body mass, and life-history trait data. We used imputed vital rates to calculate demographic metrics, including generation time, to validate the use of imputation in demographic analyses. Covariance among vital rates and other trait data provided a strong basis to guide imputation of missing vital rates in birds, even in the absence of phylogenetic information. Mean NRMSE for null and phylogenetic models differed by <0.01 except when no vital rates were available or for vital rates with high phylogenetic signal (Pagel's λ > 0.8). In these cases, including body mass and life-history trait data compensated for lack of phylogenetic information: mean normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) for null and phylogenetic models differed by <0.01 for adult survival and <0.04 for maturation rate. Estimates of demographic metrics were sensitive to the accuracy of imputed vital rates. For example, mean error in generation time doubled in response to inaccurate estimates of maturation time. Accurate demographic data and metrics, such as generation time, are needed to inform conservation planning processes, for example through International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List assessments and population viability analysis. Imputed vital rates could be useful in this context but, as for any estimated model parameters, awareness of the sensitivities of demographic model outputs to the imputed vital rates is essential.