Well-managed and connected protected area networks are needed to combat the 6th mass extinction, yet the implementation of plans intended to secure landscape connectivity remains insufficient. The failure to translate planning efforts into effective action (i.e., the research-implementation gap) hinders our ability to conserve biodiversity threatened by ongoing climate change and habitat fragmentation.

The purpose of this research is to better conserve biodiversity by improving land allocation modeling software. Here we introduce a planning support framework designed to be understood by and useful to land managers, stakeholders, and other decision-makers. With understanding comes trust and engagement, which often yield better implementation of model results.

Identifying and quantifying conservation-practice adoption in U.S. cropland is key to accurately monitoring trends in soil health regionally and nationally and informing climate change mitigation efforts. We present the results of an automated system used across 645 counties in the United States Corn Belt from 2005 to 2018, mapped at field-scale and summarized for distribution at aggregated scales.

Successive surveys related to land degradation in India, reveal that despite several announcements and policy changes, the desertification and degradation of land and forest continues to rise. It has posed serious threats to environment, biodiversity, local economy and food security. Globally and nationally, India has been very vocal to address this issue.

Madagascar is the world’s fourth largest island with a total land area of 581,800 km². The country’s unique wildlife and biodiversity resources have attracted tourists and significant donor investments over the last three decades. In 2003, the Government of Madagascar committed to tripling protected areas and, by 2016, the country’s total coverage of protected areas had increased from 1.6 million to 7.1 million hectares.Madagascar adopted a new approach to protected area management in 2006.

The increasing expansion of cropland is major driver of global carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. However, predicting plausible future global distributions of croplands remains challenging. Here, we show that, in general, existing global data aligned with classical economic theories of expansion explain the current (1992) global extent of cropland reasonably well, but not recent expansion (1992–2015).

This guide is for forestry practitioners from local communities, governments, the private sector, civil society and academia in Southeast Asia. It explains the fundamentals of forest landscape restoration (FLR) and serves as a starting point for future exploration and design of FLR initiatives. 

Three-quarters of emerging infectious diseases are zoonoses, meaning they can be transmitted from animals to humans, with Ebola, SARS, MERS and now COVID-19 being examples. Scientists are warning that deforestation, industrial agriculture, illegal wildlife trade, climate change and other types of environmental degradation increase the risk of future pandemics.

Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage more than half of the world´s land. These biodiverse ancestral lands are vital to the people who steward them and the planet we all share. But governments only recognize indigenous and community legal ownership of 10 percent of the world´s lands. Secure tenure is essential for safeguarding the existing forests against external forces. This is specifically true for forests managed by Indigenous Peoples, where much of the world’s carbon is stored.

COVID-19 has negatively affected indigenous land rights, particularly for those who already face food insecurity as a result of land confiscation or grabbing and the loss of their territories. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the expropriation of indigenous lands and natural resources and the increase in conflicts on their territories were already placing indigenous peoples in a particularly precarious situation. The crisis has led to reports of encroachment upon indigenous land by opportunists, such as illegal loggers and miners.

Poland, like other countries in the world, increasingly experiences the ongoing climate change. However, the level of preparation of the country and its society for climate change in the second decade of the 21st century can be evaluated as low. The Municipal Adaptation Plans (MAPs) created in 2017–2019 became a subject of research studies whose main goal was to determine the typology of adaptation actions to be undertaken as part of MAPs in the 14 selected Polish cities in various geographical regions.

Preserving landscape connectivity is one of the most frequently recommended strategies to address the synergistic threats of climate change, habitat fragmentation, and intensifying disturbances. Although assessments to develop plans for linked and connected landscapes in response to climate and land-use change have been increasingly employed in the last decade, efforts to operationalize and implement these plans have been limited. Here, we present a framework using existing, available biological data to design an implementable, comprehensive multispecies connectivity plan.