Feature Article

Attempts to reduce the environmental and health impacts of mining cause unrest.

If scientists want the public to continue to volunteer for research projects, they must learn to be a lot more forthcoming about the ways in which the information they garner will be used. (Editorial)

Global food systems are not meeting the world's dietary needs. About one billion people are hungry, while two billion people are overweight. India, for example, is experiencing rises in both: since 1995 an additional 65 million people are malnourished, and one in five adults is now overweight. This coexistence of food insecurity and obesity may seem like a paradox, but over- and undernutrition reflect two facets of malnutrition. Underlying both is a common factor: food systems are not driven to deliver optimal human diets but to maximize profits.

The rising global temperature is predicted to expand the distribution of vector-borne diseases both in latitude and altitude. Many host communities could be affected by increased prevalence of disease, heightening the risk of extinction for many already threatened species. To understand how host communities could be affected by changing parasite distributions, we need information on the distribution of parasites in relation to variables like temperature and rainfall that are predicted to be affected by climate change.

Steady-state and dynamic gas exchange responses to ozone visible injury were investigated in an ozone-sensitive poplar clone under field conditions. The results were translated into whole tree water loss and carbon assimilation by comparing trees exposed to ambient ozone and trees treated with the ozone-protectant ethylenediurea (EDU). Steady-state stomatal conductance and photosynthesis linearly decreased with increasing ozone visible injury.

Balancing forest harvesting and restoration is critical for forest ecosystem management. In this study, we used LANDIS, a spatially explicit forest landscape model, to evaluate the effects of 21 alternative forest management initiatives which were drafted for forests in the upstream region of the Hun River in northeastern China.

Ecosystem service assessments have increasingly been used to support environmental management policies, mainly based on biophysical and economic indicators. However, few studies have coped with the social-cultural dimension of ecosystem services, despite being considered a research priority. We examined how ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs emerge from diverging social preferences toward ecosystem services delivered by various types of ecosystems in Spain.

Changes in land use/land cover are a major driver of biodiversity change in the Mediterranean region. Understanding how animal populations respond to these landscape changes often requires using landscape mosaics as the unit of investigation, but few previous studies have measured both response and explanatory variables at the land mosaic level.