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Land
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Designing Biodiversity−Friendly Landscapes
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Designing Biodiversity−Friendly Landscapes

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land, Biodiversity, and Human Wellbeing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (22 December 2023) | Viewed by 6175

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Kenneth R. Young

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
Interests: biogeography; environmental conservation; developing countries; tropical ecosystems; protected areas; Latin America, biodiversity; climate change; landscape change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Landscapes worldwide are affected by shifting economic, social, and political factors that alter their land uses, land covers, and spatial ecologies. This Special Issue invites research articles and perspectives on proactive conservation efforts in landscapes utilized for farming, forestry, or settlements, and also for those meant strictly for nature conservation. Given ongoing biophysical changes due to climate change and biotic homogenization, it is likely that many such landscapes will have novel characteristics in the future, with species composition and ecosystem functions different than in the past. Conservation goals would need to be crafted for those conditions, with predictions, evaluation criteria, and management strategies re-envisioned. This Special Issue will provide an overview of the state of knowledge of such approaches in relation to biodiversity concerns.

The biological diversity that may be considered for this Special Issue may include wild species of special interest, the utilized and domesticated species involved in the particular land-use system(s), or entire assemblages of species found interacting in the landscape. Many management tools at the landscape scale include conservation corridors, protected riparian zones or wetlands, and restoration ecology. Their implementation may involve management for endangered species, rewilding, prescribed burns, attention to wild crop relatives, or other activities now characterizing proactive approaches. Additionally, it may be feasible to extend such approaches to their respective counterparts in cities, riverscapes, seascapes, or coastal situations.

Prof. Dr. Kenneth R. Young
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • biological diversity
  • utilized landscapes
  • conservation landscapes
  • land use systems
  • climate change
  • species of concern

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 2764 KiB  
Article
Ecological Change and Livestock Governance in a Peruvian National Park
by Kenneth R. Young, Eyner Alata, Rodney A. Chimner, Randall B. Boone, Gillian Bowser, Laura Bourgeau-Chavez, Beatriz Fuentealba, Jessica Gilbert, Javier A. Ñaupari, Molly H. Polk, Sigrid C. Resh, Cecilia Turin and Melody Zarria-Samanamud
Land 2023, 12(11), 2051; https://doi.org/10.3390/land12112051 - 11 Nov 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1311
Abstract
While the grazing of livestock has occurred for millennia in the Andes, current sustainability debates center on concerns with co-managing climate change and pastoralism. These discussions have special resonance in places protected by the state for biodiversity, scenery, and sustainable and traditional land [...] Read more.
While the grazing of livestock has occurred for millennia in the Andes, current sustainability debates center on concerns with co-managing climate change and pastoralism. These discussions have special resonance in places protected by the state for biodiversity, scenery, and sustainable and traditional land uses, such as those found in protected areas and biosphere reserves. For this article, we integrate data from a social-ecological research project on the land use systems that affect high-elevation ecosystems in Peru’s Huascarán National Park, with special emphasis on the wetlands. We used land cover and land use data and insights from interactions with pastoralists to show that (1) wet meadows dominate the lower reaches of the park, while peatlands predominate above 4000 m elevation; (2) wet meadows are most useful for traditional grazing systems, while the peatlands are especially susceptible to trampling by livestock; and (3) there is limited ecological space at the highest elevations for the successful future upward relocation of either land use or potential habitats for species identified as of concern. We explore the implications of these findings for the adaptive strategies of biophysical and social processes in terms of livelihoods and biodiversity in and around a protected area. We conclude that there are many additional opportunities to be explored to inform the management of ecosystem services and provide improvements for the adaptive capacity of communities and park managers. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Designing Biodiversity−Friendly Landscapes)
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17 pages, 3811 KiB  
Article
Estimating Fragmentation and Connectivity Patterns of the Temperate Forest in an Avocado-Dominated Landscape to Propose Conservation Strategies
by María Camila Latorre-Cárdenas, Antonio González-Rodríguez, Oscar Godínez-Gómez, Eugenio Y. Arima, Kenneth R. Young, Audrey Denvir, Felipe García-Oliva and Adrián Ghilardi
Land 2023, 12(3), 631; https://doi.org/10.3390/land12030631 - 07 Mar 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2230
Abstract
The rapid expansion of avocado cultivation in Michoacán, Mexico, is one of the drivers of deforestation. We assessed the degree of fragmentation and functional connectivity of the remaining temperate forest within the Avocado Belt and prioritized patches that contribute the most to connectivity [...] Read more.
The rapid expansion of avocado cultivation in Michoacán, Mexico, is one of the drivers of deforestation. We assessed the degree of fragmentation and functional connectivity of the remaining temperate forest within the Avocado Belt and prioritized patches that contribute the most to connectivity using a network-based approach and modelling different seed and pollen dispersal scenarios, including two types of patch attributes (size and degree of conservation). As landscape transformation in the region is rapid and ongoing, we updated the land-use and land-cover maps through a supervised classification of Sentinel-2 imagery, improving the reliability of our analyses. Temperate forest is highly fragmented within the region: most patches are small (<30 ha), have a reduced core-area (28%), and irregular shapes. The degree of connectivity is very low (0.06), dropping to 0.019 when the degree of conservation of patches was considered. The top 100 ranked patches of forest that support the connectivity of seeds and pollen have different characteristics (i.e., size and topology) that may be considered for implementing conservation and management strategies. Seed dispersal seems to be more threatened by fragmentation than pollen dispersal, and patches that are important for maintaining seed connectivity are embedded in the denser zone of avocado orchards. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Designing Biodiversity−Friendly Landscapes)
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14 pages, 3134 KiB  
Article
Assessing Project Proposals Based on National and Global Tiger Action Plans: Lessons from the Integrated Tiger Habitat Conservation Programme (ITHCP)
by Johan Diepstraten, Mitali Sharma, Mohammad Khalid Sayeed Pasha and Sugoto Roy
Land 2022, 11(12), 2326; https://doi.org/10.3390/land11122326 - 19 Dec 2022
Viewed by 1899
Abstract
Tigers play a crucial role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. Unfortunately, tigers are threatened by poaching, human–wildlife conflict, habitat loss, and more. In response to these threats, the conservation community pledged to double the worldwide wild tiger population by 2022 (known as TX2) at [...] Read more.
Tigers play a crucial role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. Unfortunately, tigers are threatened by poaching, human–wildlife conflict, habitat loss, and more. In response to these threats, the conservation community pledged to double the worldwide wild tiger population by 2022 (known as TX2) at the “Tiger Summit” in St. Petersburg in 2010, and to track the progress of Tiger Range Countries. Between 2010 and 2022, the Global Tiger Recovery Programme was implemented. To accomplish this TX2 goal, each Tiger Range Country developed a National Tiger Action Plan (NTAP). The Integrated Tiger Habitat Conservation Programme (ITHCP) is a grant-making mechanism that focusses on a subsection of the Global Tiger Recovery Programme. It had twelve projects in six Tiger Range Countries during Phase 1 of the program. Evaluating the proposals of these projects is crucial for resource allocation. In this study, we assessed project proposals by evaluating how the proposed activities of all twelve ITHCP projects addressed their corresponding NTAPs, by comparing the plans against the proposals. A further comparison was undertaken using the Conservation Assured|Tiger Standards Lite, a site-based tiger conservation accreditation system. Overall, this study shows the importance of both global and national action plans and how comparing project activities with NTAP requirements can help address resource allocation needs to fill gaps in management. We conclude that projects should be designed to closely align with national action plans, best practice standards, and the activities of other projects in their landscape to maximize conservation outputs and impact. However, projects on their own are not enough to satisfy whole NTAPs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Designing Biodiversity−Friendly Landscapes)
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