Socio-economic changes threaten nomadic pastoralism across the world, changing traditional grazing patterns. Such land-use changes will co-occur with climate change, and while both are potentially important determinants of future ecosystem functioning, interactions between them remain poorly understood. We investigated the effects of grazing by large herbivores and climate manipulation using open-top chambers (OTCs) on flower number and flowering species richness in mountain steppe of northern Mongolia.

AIM: New conservation approaches that account for broad‐scale ecological processes must underpin decisions about conservation planning in the world's remaining wilderness areas. Our goal is to make the relevant tools and methods that have been developed by conservation scientists accessible to conservation practitioners working towards wilderness preservation. LOCATION: Wilderness areas, in particular the North American boreal region.

In a previous article, Beschta et al. (2013) argue that grazing by large ungulates (both native and domestic) should be eliminated or greatly reduced on western public lands to reduce potential climate change impacts. The authors were selective in their use of the scientific literature, and their publication is more of an opinion article than a synthesis. Their conclusions do not reflect the complexities associated with herbivore grazing. Interactions of climate change and grazing will depend on the specific situation.

Currently, there is a major concern about the future of nutrient loads discharged into the Baltic Sea from Polish rivers because they are main contributors to its eutrophication. To date, no watershed-scale studies have properly addressed this issue. This paper fills this gap by using a scenario-modeling framework applied in the Reda watershed, a small (482� km²) agricultural coastal area in northern Poland. We used the SWAT model to quantify the effects of future climate, land cover, and management changes under multiple scenarios up to the 2050s.

Freshwater ecosystems are warming globally from the direct effects of climate change on air temperature and hydrology and the indirect effects on near-stream vegetation. In fire-prone landscapes, vegetative change may be especially rapid and cause significant local stream temperature increases but the importance of these increases relative to broader changes associated with air temperature and hydrology are not well understood.

Hydrological and land use changes can affect species in human altered landscapes. Typically the impacts of hydrological and land use changes are examined separately, with hydrological determinants used to explain the distribution of species in water dependent and aquatic habitats and land use factors used to examine terrestrial species. However, given the connectedness of aquatic and terrestrial habitats, stressors originating in one domain may be important in the other.

Amazon ecosystem degradation profoundly impacts life supporting processes of global importance such as climate regulation, as well as local conditions for livelihoods. In Peru's highland jungle, an expanding deforestation front of forest conversion to agriculture has vastly transformed the landscape. Small–scale farming, the main driver of forest degradation, and consequently household natural resource management affect ecosystem functionality. To investigate farmers' attitudes and priorities to services provided by the ecosystems (ES) we interviewed 51 farmers, both local and colonists.

Environmental factors controlling the distribution and abundance of boreal avifauna are not fully understood, limiting our ability to predict the consequences of a changing climate and industrial development activities underway. We used a compilation of avian point‐count data, collected over 1990–2008 from nearly 36 000 locations, to model the abundance of individual forest songbird species within the Canadian boreal forest.

Land-use patterns are influenced by both top-down and bottom-up (local) factors, with their interactions varying in both space and time. This provides a major challenge to decision-making for sustainable multifunctional landscapes. A cross-scale scenario structure has been developed to integrate top-down and bottom-up context based upon the familiar IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios framework.

Climate change is a fundamental aspect of the Anthropocene. Climate assessments are frequently undertaken to evaluate climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity. Assessments are complex endeavors with numerous challenges.

This article addresses the critical need for a better quantitative understanding of how water resources from the Hérault River catchment in France have been influenced by climate variability and the increasing pressure of human activity over the last 50 years. A method is proposed for assessing the relative impacts of climate and growing water demand on the decrease in discharge observed at various gauging stations in the periods 1961–1980 and 1981–2010.

This study aimed to assess the degree of potential temperature and precipitation change as predicted by the HadCM3 (Hadley Centre Coupled Model, version 3) climate model for Louisiana, and to investigate the effects of potential climate change on surface soil organic carbon (SOC) across Louisiana using the Rothamsted Carbon Model (RothC) and GIS techniques at the watershed scale.