Factors influencing property selection for conservation revolving funds

Finding sustainable ways to increase the amount of private land protected for biodiversity is challenging for many conservation organizations. In some countries, organizations use revolving‐fund programs, whereby land is purchased and then sold to conservation‐minded owners under condition they enter into a conservation covenant or easement. The sale proceeds are used to purchase, protect, and sell additional properties, incrementally increasing the amount of protected private land. Because the effectiveness of this approach relies on selecting appropriate properties, we explored factors currently considered by practitioners and how these are integrated into decision making. We conducted exploratory, semistructured interviews with managers from each of the 5 major revolving funds in Australia. Responses indicated although conservation factors are important, financial and social factors are also highly influential. A major determinant was whether the property could be resold within a reasonable period at a price that replenishes the fund. To facilitate resale, often selected properties include the potential for the construction of a dwelling. Practitioners face with clear trade‐offs between conservation, financial, amenity, and other factors in selecting properties and 3 main challenges: recovering the costs of acquisition, protection, and resale; reselling the property; and meeting conservation goals. Our findings suggest the complexity of these decisions may constrain revolving‐fund effectiveness. Drawing from participant responses, we identified potential strategies to mitigate these risks, such as providing adequate recreational space without jeopardizing ecological assets. We suggest managers could benefit from a shared‐learning and adaptive approach to property selection given the commonalities between programs. Understanding how practitioners deal with complex decisions in the implementation of revolving funds helps identify future research to improve the performance of this conservation tool.     

Distributions, cycling and recovery of amino acids in estuarine waters and sediments

Acid hydrolysis of estuarine water samples for the determination of amino acids (AAs) was tested and found to be effective at high (250 μM) nitrate concentrations when the anti-oxidant, ascorbic acid, was added to the samples. Hydrolysable AA concentrations were then determined in surface sediments collected from low and high salinity regions of the Tamar Estuary (UK) during winter 2003 and 2004, and in overlying water when simulated resuspension of sediment particles was performed. Concentrations of AAs in sediment samples comprised <50% of particulate nitrogen, fitting the paradigm that most sedimentary nitrogen is preserved within an organic matrix. When sediment samples were resuspended in overlying water (salinity 17.5), the rapid, measured increase in dissolved AA concentrations almost equalled the reported nitrate concentration in the lower estuary, with the subsequent decrease in the total dissolved AA levels suggested that bacterial uptake was occurring. Our data concur with previous studies on nitrogen desorption from sediments and suggest that an understanding of organic nitrogen cycling will be an important aspect of future effective estuarine management.     

Conservation Covenants on Private Land: Issues with Measuring and Achieving Biodiversity Outcomes in Australia

Conservation covenants and easements have become essential tools to secure biodiversity outcomes on private land, and to assist in meeting international protection targets. In Australia, the number and spatial area of conservation covenants has grown significantly in the past decade. Yet there has been little research or detailed policy analysis of conservation covenanting in Australia. We sought to determine how conservation covenanting agencies were measuring the biodiversity conservation outcomes achieved on covenanted properties, and factors inhibiting or contributing to measuring these outcomes. In addition, we also investigated the drivers and constraints associated with actually delivering the biodiversity outcomes, drawing on detailed input from covenanting programs. Although all conservation covenanting programs had the broad aim of maintaining or improving biodiversity in their covenants in the long term, the specific stated objectives of conservation covenanting programs varied. Programs undertook monitoring and evaluation in different ways and at different spatial and temporal scales. Thus, it was difficult to determine the extent Australian conservation covenanting agencies were measuring the biodiversity conservation outcomes achieved on covenanted properties on a national scale. Lack of time available to covenantors to undertake management was one of the biggest impediments to achieving biodiversity conservation outcomes. A lack of financial resources and human capital to monitor, knowing what to monitor, inconsistent monitoring methodologies, a lack of benchmark data, and length of time to achieve outcomes were all considered potential barriers to monitoring the biodiversity conservation outcomes of conservation covenants.     

Unexpected removal of the most neutral cationic pharmaceutical in river waters

Contamination of surface waters by pharmaceuticals is now widespread. There are few data on their environmental behaviour, particularly for those which are cationic at typical surface water pH. As the external surfaces of bacterio-plankton cells are hydrophilic with a net negative charge, it was anticipated that bacterio-plankton in surface-waters would preferentially remove the most extensively-ionised cation at a given pH. To test this hypothesis, the persistence of four, widely-used, cationic pharmaceuticals, chloroquine, quinine, fluphenazine and levamisole, was assessed in batch microcosms, comprising water and bacterio-plankton, to which pharmaceuticals were added and incubated for 21 days. Results show that levamisole concentrations decreased by 19 % in microcosms containing bacterio-plankton, and by 13 % in a parallel microcosm containing tripeptide as a priming agent. In contrast to levamisole, concentrations of quinine, chloroquine and fluphenazine were unchanged over 21 days in microcosms containing bacterio-plankton. At the river-water pH, levamisole is 28 % cationic, while quinine is 91–98 % cationic, chloroquine 99 % cationic and fluphenazine 72–86 % cationic. Thus, the most neutral compound, levamisole, showed greatest removal, contradicting the expected bacterio-plankton preference for ionised molecules. However, levamisole was the most hydrophilic molecule, based on its octanol–water solubility coefficient (K _ow). Overall, the pattern of pharmaceutical behaviour within the incubations did not reflect the relative hydrophilicity of the pharmaceuticals predicted by the octanol–water distribution coefficient, D _ow, suggesting that improved predictive power, with respect to modelling bioaccumulation, may be needed to develop robust environmental risk assessments for cationic pharmaceuticals.     

Perceptions and attitudes of land managers in multi-tenure reserve networks and the implications for conservation

Multi-tenure reserve networks aim to connect areas managed for biodiversity conservation across public and private land and address the impacts of fragmentation on both biotic and social systems. The operation and function of Australian multi-tenure reserve networks as perceived by their land managers was investigated. Overall, the conservation of natural assets was the most frequently reported primary reason for involvement in a network. The perceived aims of the respective networks largely reflected the response identified for involvement and management. Over 88% of managers considered their involvement in multi-tenure reserve networks to be a positive or very positive experience. A lack of resources and time for management were considered major limitations of these networks. The majority (80%) of private land managers within networks were willing to be included in a national reserve system of conservation lands. As the Australian National Reserve System currently incorporates mostly public land, these findings have important and potentially positive implications for a greater role for protected private land.     

Standardized reporting of the costs of management interventions for biodiversity conservation

Effective conservation management interventions must combat threats and deliver benefits at costs that can be achieved within limited budgets. Considerable effort has focused on measuring the potential benefits of conservation interventions, but explicit quantification of the financial costs of implementation is rare. Even when costs have been quantified, haphazard and inconsistent reporting means published values are difficult to interpret. This reporting deficiency hinders progress toward a collective understanding of the financial costs of management interventions across projects and thus limits the ability to identify efficient solutions to conservation problems or attract adequate funding. We devised a standardized approach to describing financial costs reported for conservation interventions. The standards call for researchers and practitioners to describe the objective and outcome, context and methods, and scale of costed interventions, and to state which categories of costs are included and the currency and date for reported costs. These standards aim to provide enough contextual information that readers and future users can interpret the cost data appropriately. We suggest these standards be adopted by major conservation organizations, conservation science institutions, and journals so that cost reporting is comparable among studies. This would support shared learning and enhance the ability to identify and perform cost‐effective conservation.     

Does carbon limitation reduce nitrogen retention in soil?

Environmental Chemistry Letters - Artificial soils made from waste materials offer an alternative to imported natural topsoils, notably in large-scale groundwork and reclamation projects. Benefits...     

Processes of distribution of pharmaceuticals in surface freshwaters: implications for risk assessment

The global consumption and production of pharmaceuticals is increasing concomitantly with concern regarding their environmental fate and effects. Active pharmaceutical ingredients are mainly released into the aquatic environment through wastewater effluent discharge. Once in the environment, pharmaceuticals can undergo processes of natural attenuation, i.e. dilution, sorption, transformation, depending on physico-chemical properties of the compound, such as water solubility, lipophilicity, vapour pressure, and environmental conditions, such as pH, temperature and ionic strength. A major natural attenuation process is the sorption on dissolved organic matter, colloids, suspended solids and sediments, which in turn control pharmaceuticals distribution, residence time and persistence in aquatic systems. Here we review studies of sorption capacity of natural sorbents to pharmaceuticals. These report on the importance of several environmental and sorbent-specific properties, such as the composition, quality, and amount of the sorbent, and the environmental pH, which determines the speciation of both the sorbent and compound. The importance of accounting for distribution processes on freshwater sorbents for any determination of environmental concentrations of pharmaceuticals is apparent, while the reliability of surrogate standards for measuring dissolved organic matter (DOM) distribution is evaluated in the context of the need for robust environmental risk assessment protocols.     

A comparison of SEM-EDS with ICP-AES for the quantitative elemental determination of estuarine particles

Suspended particulate matter (SPM) is a key component regulating the biogeochemistry of natural and contaminant moieties in estuaries. Individual particle analyses can complement conventional bulk analyses of SPM, but are rarely undertaken. This study used scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (SEM-EDS) of particles to quantify a range of elements in the reference estuarine sediment PACS-2. This approach was compared with a bulk SPM analysis based on inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES). The median concentrations of Al, Fe, Mg, and Ca for the two approaches were similar, and accuracy for both methods was good. SEM-EDS analysis was also satisfactory for K. Agreement was poorer for Mn and Ti, which were present at trace concentrations. Increasing the number of particles examined by SEM-EDS should improve the analysis. SEM-EDS analysis of SPM from the Tamar Estuary, UK, revealed marked geochemical differences between particle sub-populations.Selected article from 6th European Meeting on Environmental Chemistry, Belgrade, 2005, organised by Prof. Dr. Branimir Jovancicevic and the European Association of Chemistry and the Environment (ACE, www.research.plymouth.ac.uk/ace)     

Bark in the Park: A Review of Domestic Dogs in Parks

The presence of domestic dogs Canis familiaris in public open spaces is increasingly controversial. In our review of the literature, we located 133 publications of various types (papers, reports etc.) that examine some aspect of dogs in parks and open spaces (50 % focussed solely on dogs). There has been an exponential growth in the cumulative number of articles (R ² = 0.96; 82 % published since 1997); almost all pertain to temperate latitudes (97 %) and most to the northern hemisphere (62 %). Most articles focus on impacts on wildlife (51 %), zoonotic diseases (17 %), and people’s perceptions regarding dogs (12 %). Articles mostly describe problems associated with dogs, while reports of low compliance with dog regulations are common. We outline six major findings regarding dogs in parks: (1) there is a paucity of information on dogs in parks, particularly in relation to their interactions with wildlife and regarding their management; (2) published studies are mainly restricted to a handful of locations in developed countries; (3) sectors of societies hold different views over the desirability of dogs in parks; (4) the benefits and risks of dogs to humans and park values are poorly documented and known; (5) dogs represent a notable disease risk in some but not all countries; and (6) coastal parks are over-represented in the literature in terms of potential negative impacts. Park managers globally require better information to achieve conservation outcomes from dog management in parks.