Peer-reviewed publications

Global pressures on freshwater ecosystems are high and rising. Viewed primarily as a resource for humans, current practices of water use have led to catastrophic declines in freshwater species and the degradation of freshwater ecosystems, including their genetic and functional diversity. Approximately three-quarters of the world's inland wetlands have been lost, one-third of the 28,000 freshwater species assessed for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List are threatened with extinction, and freshwater vertebrate populations are undergoing declines that are more rapid than those of terrestrial and marine species. This global loss continues unchecked, despite the importance of freshwater ecosystems as a source of clean water, food, livelihoods, recreation, and inspiration.

Climate change has significant consequences for land conservation. Government agencies and nonprofit land trusts heavily rely on perpetual conservation easements. However, climate change and other dynamic landscape changes raise questions about the effectiveness and adaptability of permanent conservation instruments like conservation easements. Building upon a study of 269 conservation easements and interviews with seventy conservation-easement professionals in six different states, we ex-amine the adaptability of conservation easements to climate change. We outline four potential approaches to enhance conservation outcomes under climate change: shift land-acquisition priorities to account for potential climate change impacts; consider conservation tools other than perpetual conservation easements; ensure that the terms of conservation easements permit the holder to adapt to climate change successfully; and provide for more active stewardship of conservation lands. There is still a good deal of uncertainty as to the legal fate of a conservation easement that no longer meets its original purposes. Many state laws provide that conservation easements can be modified or terminated in the same manner as traditional easements. Yet conservation easements are in many ways unlike other easements. The beneficiary is usually the public, not merely a neighboring landowner, and the holder is always a nonprofit conservation organization or a government agency. Thus, there is a case to be made for adaptive protection. An overly narrow focus on perpetual property rights could actually thwart efforts to meet adaptation needs over the long term. We call for careful attention to ensuring conservation outcomes in dynamic landscapes over time.

Increasing interest in measuring, modelling and valuing ecosystem services (ES), the benefits that ecosystems provide to people, has resulted in the development of an array of ES assessment tools in recent years. Selecting an appropriate tool for measuring and modelling ES can be challenging. This document provides guidance for practitioners on existing tools that can be applied to measure or model ES provided by important sites for biodiversity and nature conservation, including Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), natural World Heritage sites (WHS), and protected areas (PAs). Selecting an appropriate tool requires identifying the specific question being addressed, what sorts of results or outputs are required, and consideration of practical factors such as the level of expertise, time and data required for applying any given tool. This guide builds on existing reviews of ES assessment tools, but has an explicit focus on assessing ES for sites of importance for biodiversity and nature conservation.

In the decade since the Brisbane Declaration (2007) called upon governments and other decision makers to integrate environmental flows into water management, practitioners have continued to seek ways to expand implementation of flow restoration or protection. The science and practice of environmental flow assessment have evolved accordingly, generating diverse methods of differing complexity from which water managers or regulators need to select an approach best fitting their context. Uncertainty over method choice remains one of several of the more readily overcome barriers that have contributed to slowing the implementation of environmental flows. In this paper, we introduce a three-level framework intended to help overcome such barriers by intertwining holistic environmental flow assessment with implementation. The three levels differ based on the availability of resources and level of resolution required in the flow recommendations, with the framework designed to guide the user toward implementation at any level as soon as possible, based on at least some of the recommendations. Level 1 is a desktop analysis based on existing data, typically conducted by one or a few scientists. Level 2 is similarly mostly reliant on existing information, but brings together a multidisciplinary set of experts within a facilitated workshop setting to use both this knowledge and professional judgment to develop flow recommendations and fill data gaps. The most comprehensive assessment level, Level 3, guides the collection of new data and/or construction of models to test hypotheses developed by the expert team. Key characteristics of this framework include: (1) methods are matched to the levels of resources available and certainty required; funds for research are invested strategically to address critical knowledge gaps and thereby reduce uncertainty; (2) the framework is iterative and information generated at one level provides the foundation for, and identifies the need for, higher levels and; and (3) processes for flow assessment and implementation are intertwined, meaning they move forward in coordinated fashion, with each process informing the other. Using practical cases from North America, we illustrate how environmental flow assessment at each level has led to implementation, with changes in policy or management.

The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted under the Paris Agreement propose a country's contribution to global mitigation efforts and domestic adaptation initiatives. This paper provides a systematic analysis of NDCs submitted by South Asian nations, in order to assess how far their commitments might deliver meaningful contributions to the global 2°C target and to sustainable broad-based adaptation benefits. Though agriculture-related emissions are prominent in emission profiles of South Asian countries, their emission reduction commitments are less likely to include agriculture, partly because of a concern over food security.

Analysis of long-term trends in forest carbon stocks is challenged by interactions among climate change, wildfire and other disturbances, forest management actions, and heterogeneous vegetation responses. For such circumstances where complex interactions make it difficult to encompass the full range of processes in any one mode of analysis, expert elicitation is a well-developed method for documenting judgments about uncertainty, based on available evidence, to inform ongoing decision-making. Applying this method for the Sierra Nevada, we evaluate subjective probabilistic estimates of trends in aboveground forest carbon for different management scenarios toward the goal of maximizing carbon stored, while also considering implications for wildfire risk. The analysis examines the effects of four treatments in isolation (thinning, timber harvesting, prescribed burning, managed wildfire), as well as a user-defined management portfolio allocating resources across five management practices (thinning, harvesting, prescribed burning, firefighting, and restoration). The expert elicitation suggests that aboveground forest carbon stocks will decline 8%, from 126 to 116 tC/ha, between 2030 and 2100 (median estimate across experts) assuming conventional forest management practices are continued. Out of all surveyed practices, the custom user-defined management portfolio results in the highest carbon stock of 129 tC/ha which is 11% higher than conventional practice in 2100 at the 50th percentile. The expert elicitation indicates less beneficial carbon sequestration outcomes than recent modeling studies. Suggesting co-benefits across objectives, 75 experts collectively estimate a 61% likelihood that managing for carbon also reduces wildfire risk. By contrast, decreases in carbon stocks are anticipated for large magnitudes of climate change or substantial decreases in forest management investments.

The meta-ecosystem approach has significantly advanced ecosystem science and landscape ecology by explicitly addressing the flow of elements (live organisms, biotic and abiotic materials) among ecosystems at different temporal and spatial scales [1,2]. Gounand et al. [3] recently argued that the conciliation of theoretical and empirical studies on meta-ecosystems needs better quantification of spatial flows in terms of movements (dispersal, foraging, life-cycle, and migration), feedbacks, and resources.

The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, along with other development in the Yangtze River basin, has had profound consequences for the river's flow and sediment regime. This has had major impacts on the geomorphology and ecology of the river downstream of the dam, with related impacts on biodiversity, including fish populations, livelihoods, and water security in the middle and lower Yangtze. Changes to fish populations have included a fall of around 90% in the total number of fish fry for the four economically-important Chinese carp species, caused at least in part by alterations in the flow regime. In response, there has been increased research into the significance of flow regimes for Chinese carp, as well as other aspects of river health. A partnership between the Chinese Government, the dam operator, scientists, and conservationists has led to pilot environmental flow releases over a 5-year period in an attempt to mitigate some of these impacts. Subsequent monitoring has shown that numbers of fish fry are increasing from the low they had fallen to in 2008. Drawing on lessons from the pilot environmental flow releases, in October 2015 the official regulations that govern operations of the Three Gorges Dam were amended to incorporate additional objectives, including incorporating environmental flow releases as part of the routine operation of the dam. This paper describes the processes that led to the environmental flow program from Three Gorges, a review of monitoring data collected during the pilot environmental flow releases, the subsequent amendment of the dam operating rules, and prospects for expanding environmental flow implementation in the Yangtze River in coming years.

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing society and is already having a significant impact on people and biodiversity around the globe. Rural communities in developing countries are experiencing some of the worst impacts of climate change, but removed from decision making bodies and financial resources, they are often left to their own devices to cope with and adapt to these changes. Through WWF's Climate Crowd initiative, large amounts of data on how vulnerable communities are affected by changes in weather and climate, how they are coping with these changes, and how their responses might negatively impact biodiversity are being crowd-sourced. WWF then curates data sourced from partner organisations, analyses it, and disseminates it on wwfclimatecrowd.org for use by researchers, educators, and conservation and development practitioners. This data is also used to develop and implement site-specific solutions that reduce the vulnerability of people and wildlife to changes in climate.

Degradation of freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide is a primary cause of increasing water insecurity, raising the need for integrated solutions to freshwater management. While methods for characterizing the multi-faceted challenges of managing freshwater ecosystems abound, they tend to emphasize either social or ecological dimensions and fall short of being truly integrative. This paper suggests that management for sustainability of freshwater systems needs to consider the linkages between human water uses, freshwater ecosystems and governance. We present a conceptualization of freshwater resources as part of an integrated social-ecological system and propose a set of corresponding indicators to monitor freshwater ecosystem health and to highlight priorities for management. We demonstrate an application of this new framework—the Freshwater Health Index (FHI)—in the Dongjiang River Basin in southern China, where stakeholders are addressing multiple and conflicting freshwater demands. By combining empirical and modeled datasets with surveys to gauge stakeholders' preferences and elicit expert information about governance mechanisms, the FHI helps stakeholders understand the status of freshwater ecosystems in their basin, how ecosystems are being manipulated to enhance or decrease water-related services, and how well the existing water resource management regime is equipped to govern these dynamics over time. This framework helps to operationalize a truly integrated approach to water resource management by recognizing the interplay between governance, stakeholders, freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide.