Relational values are a way of recognizing and valuing the complex and interconnected relationships between people and nature, such as caregiving, place attachment and spiritual meaning, as well as the social and cultural impacts of degradation and environmental and conservation efforts. However, the implications of these values for the management and conservation of protected areas are little known. We explored the role of relational values in shaping local communities’ connectedness to a protected area of Ecuador that had been used by the military in the past and the implications of the values for well-being. Four hundred individual face-to-face surveys in the surroundings of Arenillas Ecological Reserve (south-west Ecuador) indicated high levels of connectedness towards this natural reserve amongst local communities through multiple values of nature. However, relational values were identified as the most prominent value explaining the strength of connectedness to nature, followed by intrinsic and instrumental values. We also showed that combinations of different natural values (instrumental, intrinsic and relational) might explain the support for specific well-being components. Our findings offer understanding of human behaviour towards protected areas with a military past and represent a first step in Ecuador towards comprehending how relational values shape the connectedness of local communities to nature.

Cities are becoming increasingly important to biodiversity conservation, conservation that could also benefit urban people given the importance of nature to human well-being. Urban conservation is challenging, however, given cities’ primary role as human habitats and the need to simultaneously support heterogeneous human and wild species communities in similarly heterogeneous environments. We demonstrate a framework for identifying conservation zones within cities and human and species habitat preferences within them, thereby identifying habitat attributes that management could target to support human well-being and conservation objectives. The framework first categorizes conservation zones within a city, then develops species indicator communities for each zone. Habitat preferences are identified for each indicator community using richness modelling, and human habitat preferences within zones are identified using one of several approaches. Lastly, habitat preferences are compared to identify commonalities and differences within zones. We demonstrate our framework in Iowa City (IA, USA) using songbirds, identifying similarities in human and bird habitat preferences within conservation zones that management could target to support human well-being and species conservation and differences in preferences that could be proactively managed to reduce conflict. This framework can thus identify key habitat attributes and approaches to inform conservation planning targeted to specific settings within cities.

There has been a systematic increase in the length of the freeze-free season in several Canadian cities since 1940. This increase is believed to be due mainly to urbanization. Although the rate of urbanization during the period 1940–70 was not significantly higher than the rates in the preceding decades, urban growth during those thirty years was accompanied by higher levels of fossil-fuel conversion, which produced higher temperatures in towns and cities than in surrounding rural areas, and a generally reinforced ‘greenhouse effect’. The higher temperatures in turn combined with other urban factors to enhance the length of the freeze-free season.

In a northern climate where the growing-season is already precariously short, a longer freeze-free season should have beneficial effects on agriculture and affect other aspects of the environment. There is general agreement among research workers that the energetics of solar variability are too small to affect tropospheric or stratospheric processes directly to any significant degree. This study reinforces belief in the importance of local factors; such influences tend to override any subtle connection between solar variability and the weather.