English:Conservation Biology
Conservation Biology
Introduction
Conservation biology is the scientific study of biological diversity, the processes that threaten it, and the actions that can maintain or restore genes, populations, species, ecosystems, and ecological processes. It is an applied field: you use evidence from ecology, evolution, genetics, geography, economics, ethics, and social science to make decisions under uncertainty.
This aiMOOC is designed for Grades 11–13. You will move from basic concepts to quantitative reasoning, field methods, conservation planning, and evaluation of real-world trade-offs. The aim is not simply to memorize endangered species. You should learn to ask: What is changing? Why is it changing? How strong is the evidence? Which action is likely to help? Who benefits or bears costs? How will we know whether the action worked?
The video above introduces conservation biology, human impacts, habitat restoration, and the idea that conserving biodiversity requires both scientific knowledge and social decisions.
Learning Goals
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- Biodiversity: Explain genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity and why each level matters for conservation.
- Population ecology: Analyze how population size, demographic rates, stochastic events, and genetic processes affect extinction risk.
- Threatened species: Distinguish the major direct drivers of biodiversity loss and explain how drivers can interact.
- Landscape ecology: Evaluate habitat fragmentation, edge effects, connectivity, and wildlife corridors.
- Conservation status: Interpret the purpose of the IUCN Red List without treating a category as a complete conservation plan.
- Conservation management: Compare in situ protection, ex situ conservation, restoration, reintroduction, and adaptive management.
- Biodiversity monitoring: Design evidence-based monitoring using methods such as transects, camera traps, acoustic surveys, eDNA, or remote sensing.
- Environmental policy: Evaluate conservation choices using ecological effectiveness, uncertainty, cost, rights, equity, and long-term resilience.
Foundations of Conservation Biology
What Counts as Biodiversity?
Biodiversity is more than a count of species. Conservation biologists usually consider several linked levels.
Genetic diversity is variation in DNA within and among populations. It can influence a population's capacity to respond to disease, environmental change, and selection. A small population can lose alleles through genetic drift, and mating among close relatives can increase the expression of harmful recessive alleles.
Species diversity includes species richness, but also the relative abundance and ecological roles of species. Two sites with the same number of species can differ greatly if one is dominated by a few species while the other has more even abundances.
Ecosystem diversity refers to variation among habitats, ecological communities, and ecological processes. Conserving a wetland, coral reef, grassland, or old-growth forest can protect many species simultaneously as well as interactions such as pollination, predation, decomposition, and nutrient cycling.
The hotspot map is useful for discussing geographic concentrations of unique species and severe habitat loss. However, hotspots are only one prioritization framework. A complete conservation strategy also considers ecological representation, connectivity, threatened ecosystems, evolutionary history, ecosystem functions, and places important to local and Indigenous communities.
Why Conserve Biodiversity?
Conservation arguments can be ecological, economic, cultural, ethical, or precautionary. Healthy ecosystems can contribute to food production, clean water, soil formation, pollination, climate regulation, coastal protection, recreation, and cultural identity. These benefits are often called ecosystem services or, in broader policy language, nature's contributions to people.
Not every reason for conservation has to be expressed in money. Many people argue that species and ecosystems have intrinsic value independent of their usefulness to humans. Others emphasize responsibilities to future generations, animal welfare, cultural continuity, or the rights and stewardship traditions of Indigenous peoples and local communities. Strong conservation decisions make these value judgments visible instead of pretending that science alone selects a goal.
Population Biology and Extinction Risk
Small Populations and the Extinction Vortex
A population can decline because births plus immigration no longer balance deaths plus emigration. When populations become small, additional processes become important.
Demographic stochasticity is random variation in births, deaths, and sex ratios. Environmental stochasticity is variation in conditions such as drought, temperature, prey availability, or storms. Catastrophes are rare but severe events such as major fires, disease outbreaks, or cyclones. Genetic drift removes genetic variation more rapidly in small populations, while inbreeding can reduce survival or reproduction in some populations.
These processes can reinforce one another. For example, habitat loss can reduce population size; small population size can increase inbreeding and random demographic fluctuations; lower population growth can then make the population still more vulnerable. This reinforcing pattern is often called an extinction vortex.
Effective population size is the size of an idealized population that would experience genetic drift at the same rate as the real population. It is often smaller than the number of individuals counted in the field because real populations have unequal reproductive success, skewed sex ratios, fluctuating numbers, or overlapping generations.
Population Viability Analysis
A population viability analysis, or PVA, uses demographic and environmental data to estimate future extinction or persistence probabilities under explicit assumptions. A PVA may include survival, fecundity, age structure, carrying capacity, catastrophes, dispersal, and management actions.
A PVA is not a crystal ball. Its output depends on model structure, data quality, time horizon, and assumptions about the future. The most useful interpretation is comparative: for example, does reducing adult mortality improve persistence more than increasing juvenile survival, or does reconnecting two habitat patches reduce risk more than expanding only one patch?
Major Drivers of Biodiversity Loss
Five Major Direct Drivers
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services identifies five major direct drivers of human-caused change in nature at the global scale: land and sea use change, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species. Their relative importance differs among ecosystems and regions, and several drivers can act at the same time.
Land or sea use change can replace or degrade habitat through agriculture, infrastructure, urban development, mining, or altered water systems. Direct exploitation includes unsustainable hunting, fishing, logging, harvesting, and bycatch. Pollution includes nutrients, toxic chemicals, plastics, noise, and other stressors. Climate change alters temperature, rainfall, disturbance regimes, sea level, ocean chemistry, and species distributions. Invasive alien species can compete with, prey on, hybridize with, or transmit disease to native species.
Habitat Loss and Fragmentation
Habitat loss reduces the total area available to organisms. Fragmentation divides remaining habitat into smaller and more isolated patches. Fragmentation can increase edge effects, reduce movement, interrupt migration, isolate populations, and change interactions among species.
The effects of fragmentation depend on the species and the surrounding matrix. A road may be a minor barrier for a flying bird but a severe barrier for an amphibian. A corridor can improve movement for one species while also spreading disease, predators, fire, or invasive species. Conservation therefore requires species-specific evidence rather than assuming that every connection is beneficial.
Invasive Alien Species
An alien species occurs outside its native range because of human activity. It is called invasive when it establishes, spreads, and causes harmful ecological or socioeconomic effects. The distinction matters: not every non-native species becomes invasive.
Lionfish in the western Atlantic and Caribbean illustrate how an introduced predator can alter food webs and affect native reef communities. Management may include prevention, early detection, targeted removal, public education, and controls on pathways that move organisms. Eradication is most feasible when invasion is detected early and the occupied area is still limited.
Climate Change and Multiple Stressors
Climate change can shift species ranges, alter seasonal timing, increase thermal stress, change fire and drought regimes, and transform marine and freshwater systems. Conservation planning increasingly asks not only where species live now, but where suitable conditions may persist in the future.
Coral bleaching occurs when stressed corals lose much of their symbiotic algae or algal pigments. Prolonged or severe heat stress can cause mortality, especially when combined with pollution, overfishing, disease, or other pressures. Local management cannot stop global warming, but reducing local stressors and protecting diverse, connected reef systems can improve the chances of persistence and recovery.
Landscape Ecology and Connectivity
Patches, Edges, and Metapopulations
A landscape can be viewed as habitat patches embedded in a surrounding matrix. Patch size, shape, quality, isolation, and the permeability of the matrix influence movement and survival. Edge effects can change light, wind, temperature, predation, nest success, invasive species pressure, and vegetation structure near habitat boundaries.
A metapopulation is a set of local populations connected by dispersal. Local extinctions can sometimes be reversed by recolonization if movement among patches remains possible. Connectivity can also maintain gene flow and allow organisms to track shifting climate conditions.
Wildlife Corridors
A wildlife corridor is a landscape element intended to connect habitat areas. Corridors can reduce isolation, support migration, and facilitate gene flow, but their effectiveness depends on width, habitat quality, location, target species, and surrounding land use.
When you evaluate a corridor, ask for evidence of actual use and biological outcomes. Camera-trap detections, tracks, GPS telemetry, genetic similarity, roadkill rates, and reproductive success can all provide evidence. A visually green bridge is not automatically an effective corridor if target species avoid it.
Assessing Conservation Status
The IUCN Red List
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is a global framework for assessing extinction risk using standardized categories and criteria. The nine main categories are Not Evaluated, Data Deficient, Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct in the Wild, and Extinct. In IUCN usage, the term threatened includes Vulnerable, Endangered, and Critically Endangered.
A Red List category summarizes extinction risk; it does not by itself identify the best intervention. Conservation planning also needs information about threats, population trends, geographic range, ecological requirements, feasibility, costs, governance, and likely responses to management.
Range, Trend, and Evidence
Risk assessments may use evidence about population reduction, geographic range, small population size, or quantitative extinction probability. Two important spatial ideas are extent of occurrence, which describes the broad spread of sites where a species occurs, and area of occupancy, which describes the area actually occupied within that spread.
Data Deficient does not mean safe. It means available information is insufficient for a direct or indirect assessment of extinction risk. In practice, conservationists must decide whether to collect more data, act under precaution, or do both.
Conservation Strategies
In Situ Conservation
In situ conservation protects species in the ecosystems where they occur. Tools include protected areas, community-conserved areas, habitat management, sustainable harvest rules, invasive-species control, anti-poaching measures, wildlife-friendly agriculture, fisheries management, ecological corridors, and legal protection.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework includes a 2030 target to conserve and effectively manage at least 30 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas and at least 30 percent of marine and coastal areas through protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures. The target also emphasizes ecological representation, connectivity, equitable governance, and respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.
An other effective area-based conservation measure, or OECM, is not simply an unprotected place. It is a geographically defined area outside the protected-area system that is governed and managed in ways that deliver sustained, long-term in situ conservation outcomes for biodiversity.
Ex Situ Conservation
Ex situ conservation maintains components of biodiversity outside their natural habitats. Examples include seed banks, cryopreserved tissues, living plant collections, conservation breeding, and microbial or genetic repositories.
Ex situ conservation can buy time, preserve genetic material, support research, and provide individuals for reintroduction. It cannot replace functioning ecosystems. A successful reintroduction requires suitable habitat, control of the original threats, appropriate genetic and behavioral management, and long-term monitoring.
Restoration, Reintroduction, and Rewilding
Ecological restoration aims to assist the recovery of degraded ecosystems. Actions may include restoring hydrology, removing pollutants, re-establishing native vegetation, controlling invasive species, or restoring fire regimes and other ecological processes.
Reintroduction returns a species to part of its indigenous range from which it has disappeared. Reinforcement adds individuals to an existing population. These actions require careful disease screening, genetic planning, habitat assessment, stakeholder engagement, and post-release monitoring.
Rewilding is a broad approach that seeks to restore ecological processes and self-sustaining ecosystems, often by improving connectivity, allowing natural dynamics, and sometimes reintroducing missing species. Definitions and appropriate levels of human intervention vary, so any rewilding proposal should state its goals and assumptions clearly.
Adaptive Management
Adaptive management treats management as a structured process of learning. You define objectives, choose an action based on current evidence, monitor outcomes, compare results with predictions, and adjust future actions. This approach is especially useful when uncertainty is high but waiting for perfect knowledge would itself create risk.
Good adaptive management is not random trial and error. It requires measurable objectives, explicit models or hypotheses, a monitoring design capable of detecting change, and pre-agreed decision rules.
Monitoring Biodiversity and Testing Conservation Actions
Field and Remote-Sensing Methods
Conservation decisions are only as strong as the evidence behind them. Common methods include quadrats and transects for plants or sessile organisms, point counts for birds, acoustic recorders for vocal species, camera traps for terrestrial wildlife, capture-mark-recapture for estimating demographic parameters, telemetry for movement, environmental DNA for detecting species from genetic traces, and satellite or drone imagery for habitat change.
A camera trap records animals that pass its detection zone, but a photograph is not automatically a population estimate. Detectability varies with placement, species behavior, vegetation, weather, and equipment. Monitoring designs must separate true ecological change from changes in observation probability.
Capture-Mark-Recapture: A Quantitative Example
In a simple closed-population study, suppose you capture and mark M individuals, later capture C individuals, and find that R of the second sample are already marked. The Lincoln-Petersen estimator is:
If 40 animals are marked, 50 are captured in the second sample, and 10 are recaptures, the estimate is 200 individuals. This simple model assumes a closed population, no mark loss, equal capture probability, correct identification, and no effect of marking on capture. Real wildlife studies often require more advanced models because these assumptions are rarely perfect.
Environmental DNA
Environmental DNA, or eDNA, is genetic material collected from environmental samples such as water, soil, air, or sediment. It can reveal whether a species' DNA is present without directly observing the organism.
eDNA is powerful for detecting rare or cryptic species, but interpretation requires controls against contamination, validated genetic markers, careful sampling design, and realistic expectations about how DNA moves and persists. A positive detection does not necessarily tell you how many individuals are present.
Experimental Design and Counterfactuals
To claim that a conservation action caused improvement, you need a plausible counterfactual: what would likely have happened without the action. One useful design is a before-after-control-impact comparison, often called BACI. You compare trends before and after intervention at both treated and comparison sites.
Replication, randomization where feasible, standardized effort, and pre-defined indicators strengthen inference. Long-term monitoring matters because ecological responses can be delayed, variable, or reversed by later disturbances.
Conservation Decisions, People, and Ethics
Prioritization Under Limited Resources
Conservation resources are limited, so decisions often involve prioritization. A strong prioritization process can consider extinction risk, ecological irreplaceability, evolutionary distinctiveness, expected benefit, cost, feasibility, urgency, uncertainty, and complementarity with existing protected areas.
Systematic conservation planning aims to represent biodiversity features efficiently across a network while considering spatial configuration and real-world constraints. The cheapest site is not always the best site, and the area with the most species is not always the one that fills the greatest gap in a conservation network.
People Are Part of Conservation Systems
Conservation can restrict access to land, fisheries, forests, or other resources, so ecological goals interact with rights, livelihoods, culture, and governance. Excluding people without legitimate process can produce injustice and undermine long-term conservation. Effective practice requires meaningful participation, transparent decision-making, and attention to who has authority, knowledge, costs, and benefits.
Indigenous and local knowledge can include long-term observations, stewardship practices, cultural values, and place-based ecological understanding. Ethical collaboration means recognizing knowledge holders and rights, obtaining appropriate consent, sharing benefits, and avoiding extraction of knowledge without reciprocity.
Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence
When wildlife damages crops, threatens livestock, or creates safety risks, the costs of conservation may fall disproportionately on people living near wildlife. Coexistence strategies can include better livestock husbandry, early-warning systems, compensation or insurance, barriers, land-use planning, community-based monitoring, and targeted response to problem situations.
The most effective solution depends on species behavior, local economics, trust, governance, and evidence. Conservation biology therefore combines ecological mechanisms with social research rather than treating conflict as a problem caused only by wildlife.
Case Study Synthesis
Case 1: Connecting Fragmented Habitat
Imagine two forest reserves separated by a highway and farmland. A proposed wildlife crossing could reconnect them. A strong evaluation would ask which species need connectivity, where they move, whether crossing mortality is currently limiting populations, whether the structure is placed on movement routes, and whether habitat on both sides remains suitable. Monitoring before and after construction could compare crossing use, roadkill, gene flow, and population trends.
Case 2: Conserving a Heat-Stressed Reef
A coral reef experiences repeated marine heatwaves, declining herbivorous fish, sediment runoff, and tourism pressure. No single local intervention can remove global heat stress. A portfolio might reduce land-based pollution, protect herbivores, manage damaging tourism, identify thermal refugia, improve connectivity among reefs, and monitor coral recruitment and mortality. The case illustrates how global and local drivers interact.
Case 3: Recovering a Small Endangered Population
Suppose a bird population has fewer breeding pairs each year because of invasive predators and low nesting success. Captive breeding alone would not solve the problem if birds are released back into unsafe habitat. A recovery plan might combine predator control, nest protection, habitat restoration, genetic management, carefully planned releases, and demographic monitoring. The key principle is to remove or reduce the original drivers of decline while increasing population resilience.
Scientific Reference Points
The following sources provide reliable international frameworks and methods for further study:
- IPBES Global Assessment: Global evidence on biodiversity, ecosystem change, direct drivers, and societal causes.
- IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Standardized global assessments of species extinction risk.
- Convention on Biological Diversity Global Biodiversity Framework targets: International biodiversity goals and 2030 action targets.
- WWF camera-trap methods: An accessible introduction to remote wildlife monitoring.
Interactive Tasks
Quiz: Test Your Knowledge
What is the central purpose of conservation biology? (To understand and reduce biodiversity loss while maintaining or restoring ecological systems) (!To classify every organism into a new taxonomic group) (!To maximize the number of animals kept in captivity) (!To replace ecology with economic analysis)
Which level of biodiversity describes variation in DNA within and among populations? (Genetic diversity) (!Species richness) (!Ecosystem area) (!Trophic level)
Which direct driver has had the largest global impact on nature according to the IPBES global assessment? (Land and sea use change) (!Ecotourism) (!Museum collecting) (!Citizen science)
Why are very small populations especially vulnerable to genetic drift? (Random allele frequency changes have stronger effects) (!Mutation always stops) (!Every individual becomes genetically identical immediately) (!Natural selection disappears)
What is a main conservation purpose of a wildlife corridor? (To improve movement and connectivity between habitat areas) (!To isolate every local population) (!To prevent all organisms from dispersing) (!To replace habitat with roads)
Which IUCN categories are collectively called threatened? (Vulnerable Endangered and Critically Endangered) (!Least Concern Near Threatened and Data Deficient) (!Extinct Extinct in the Wild and Not Evaluated) (!Data Deficient Least Concern and Extinct)
Which action is an example of in situ conservation? (Protecting and managing a species in its natural habitat) (!Storing seeds in a frozen seed bank) (!Keeping all individuals only in a laboratory) (!Preserving tissue samples without habitat protection)
What is an important limitation of a camera trap photograph? (A detection does not automatically provide a population estimate) (!It can only photograph plants) (!It always identifies every individual) (!Its detection probability is always one)
What can environmental DNA most directly provide? (Evidence that genetic material from a target species is present in a sample) (!A guaranteed census of every individual) (!The exact age of every organism in an ecosystem) (!A complete forecast of future extinction risk)
What makes adaptive management scientifically useful? (Management actions are linked to monitoring learning and adjustment) (!The same action is repeated regardless of evidence) (!Monitoring is avoided to reduce uncertainty) (!Objectives are kept deliberately unmeasurable)
Memory Game
| Genetic diversity | Variation in hereditary information within and among populations |
| Metapopulation | A set of local populations connected by dispersal |
| Habitat corridor | A landscape connection intended to support movement between habitat areas |
| Environmental DNA | Genetic traces collected from water soil air or sediment |
| Ex situ conservation | Protection of biological material outside its natural habitat |
| Population viability analysis | Modeling of future persistence or extinction risk under explicit assumptions |
| Keystone species | A species whose ecological effects can be large relative to its abundance |
| Adaptive management | Structured management that uses monitoring to improve future decisions |
Drag and Drop
| Match the correct terms. | Topic |
|---|---|
| Genetic drift | Random changes in allele frequencies that are strongest in small populations |
| Habitat fragmentation | Division of continuous habitat into smaller and more isolated patches |
| In situ conservation | Protection of biodiversity within the ecosystems where it naturally occurs |
| Camera trapping | Remote photography triggered by animal presence or movement |
| Adaptive management | Iterative decision making based on objectives monitoring and learning |
...
Crossword Puzzle
| Biodiversity | What word describes variation in genes species and ecosystems? |
| Corridor | What landscape connection can help organisms move between habitat patches? |
| Restoration | What process assists the recovery of a degraded ecosystem? |
| Extinction | What term means the permanent loss of a species? |
| Monitoring | What repeated collection of evidence is used to track conservation outcomes? |
| Resilience | What word describes the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and continue functioning? |
LearningApps
Cloze Text
Open-Ended Tasks
Easy
- School biodiversity map: Survey a schoolyard or nearby green space, photograph or sketch at least ten different organisms or signs of organisms, group them by habitat, and produce a map that identifies one realistic conservation improvement.
- Threat detective: Choose five conservation photographs from reliable sources and annotate each image to identify one direct biodiversity driver, one affected ecological process, and one uncertainty that cannot be resolved from the image alone.
- Conservation explainer video: Produce a 90-second video that explains genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity to students one grade below you, using one local example for each level.
- Species status profile: Select one species assessed by the IUCN Red List and create a one-page profile explaining its category, population trend, main threats, habitat needs, and at least two conservation actions.
Standard
- Transect field study: Design and carry out a standardized transect or quadrat survey in two contrasting habitats, compare species observations and abundance patterns, and explain at least three sources of sampling bias.
- Conservation interview: Interview a park manager, farmer, fisher, gardener, forester, wildlife rehabilitator, or environmental scientist about one conservation conflict, then compare that person's priorities with ecological evidence from reliable sources.
- Habitat corridor design: Use a local or online map to design a corridor between two habitat patches, justify its route using target-species needs, and specify how you would test whether the corridor actually improves connectivity.
- Restoration experiment: Plan or conduct a small restoration experiment such as comparing native plant establishment under two treatments, define a control, collect repeated measurements, and evaluate whether the evidence supports your prediction.
Advanced
- Population viability model: Build a spreadsheet or simulation for a hypothetical endangered population using survival, reproduction, and random environmental variation, compare at least three management scenarios, and explain how assumptions change the conclusions.
- Environmental DNA study design: Develop a complete eDNA monitoring proposal for a rare aquatic or terrestrial species, including sampling locations, replication, contamination controls, genetic markers, interpretation limits, and an ethical data-management plan.
- Systematic conservation plan: Use GIS or transparent map-based scoring to select a network of conservation sites that represents multiple habitats while considering connectivity, cost, climate refugia, and community rights; defend your final network against an alternative.
- Conservation policy analysis: Produce a research report or panel debate evaluating a real protected-area, reintroduction, invasive-species, or rewilding policy using ecological effectiveness, uncertainty, economics, governance, justice, and measurable indicators of success.
Learning Assessment
- Causal pathway analysis: Construct a causal diagram that links an indirect driver such as consumption or governance to at least two direct biodiversity drivers and then to population-level outcomes; identify where conservation intervention is most likely to be effective.
- Population recovery decision: Given demographic data for a declining species, decide whether management should prioritize adult survival, juvenile survival, reproduction, habitat area, or connectivity, and justify your choice using population biology.
- Protected-area evaluation: Evaluate a proposed reserve using ecological representation, patch size, connectivity, climate resilience, monitoring feasibility, and equitable governance rather than percentage area alone.
- Monitoring design critique: Critique a study that claims a conservation program succeeded because more animals were photographed after intervention; identify alternative explanations and propose a stronger sampling design.
- Trade-off assessment: Compare two conservation strategies that produce different ecological benefits and social costs, define decision criteria in advance, and explain how uncertainty and stakeholder rights influence your recommendation.
- Transfer challenge: Apply principles from terrestrial conservation to a marine or freshwater problem, identifying which concepts transfer directly and which require modification because movement, detection, or governance differs.
Evidence of Learning
Important evidence of learning includes both what you know and what you can do.
| Dimension | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Knowledge | You can explain biodiversity at genetic species and ecosystem levels; population decline and extinction risk; major direct drivers; connectivity; conservation status; and the logic of in situ ex situ and restoration approaches. |
| Scientific skills | You can form testable questions select suitable indicators design sampling identify bias interpret uncertainty compare management scenarios and distinguish observation from causal evidence. |
| Quantitative reasoning | You can use demographic data simple population estimates maps or models to evaluate risk and management effects while checking assumptions. |
| Products | Strong products include field reports annotated maps videos species profiles monitoring protocols restoration experiments model outputs policy analyses and evidence-based presentations. |
| Ethical and social reasoning | You can identify stakeholders rights costs benefits knowledge systems and governance issues and explain why ecological effectiveness and social legitimacy must be considered together. |
| Transfer | You can apply conservation principles to unfamiliar species ecosystems or policy settings and adapt the methods when ecological or social conditions change. |
OERs on the Topic
The English Wikipedia article below provides an open overview that you can use as a starting point for further research. Verify important claims with primary literature, current IUCN assessments, IPBES reports, and official conservation guidance.
Linked Learning Areas
Conservation biology connects population processes, evolutionary change, landscape structure, ecosystem function, monitoring, restoration, and environmental governance.
