It seems widely accepted that environmental conservation will develop in the right direction only through dialogue across disciplines that is well sourced and objectively argued. Yet most people seem to have different ideas about what constitutes interdisciplinarity and few if any have a clear idea as to how different disciplines should be effectively integrated in the context of conserving the environment. The Comments section of the journal provides a unique opportunity to explore more of this important ground. In effect, Environmental Conservation is aiming for the Comments section to become a regular feature in each issue. This is a new departure to address topical issues of general interest through brief essays that are intended to stimulate discussion. Comments may either challenge or augment the findings of previously published work (in this or other journals), present new interpretations or syntheses of current issues, or suggest new ideas and approaches to environmental conservation, policy and management.

Concerns about anthropogenic climate change have resulted in promotion of renewable energy sources, especially wind energy. A concern raised against widespread windfarm development is that it may negatively impact bird populations as a result of bird collision with turbines, habitat loss and disturbance. Using systematic review methodology bird abundance data were synthesized from 19 globally-distributed windfarms using meta-analysis. The effects of bird taxon, turbine number, power, location, latitude, habitat type, size of area, time since operation, migratory status of the species and quality of evidence were analysed using meta-regression. Although the synthesized data suggest a significant negative impact of windfarms on bird abundance, there is considerable variation in the impact of individual windfarm sites on individual bird species, and it is unclear if the negative impact is a decline in population abundance or a decline in use owing to avoidance. Anseriformes experienced greater declines in abundance than other taxa, followed by Charadriiformes, Falconiformes and Accipitriformes, and Passeriformes. Time since windfarms commenced operation also had a significant impact on bird abundance, with longer operating times resulting in greater declines in abundance than short operating times. Other variables, including turbine number and turbine power either had very weak but statistically significant effects or did not have a significant effect on bird abundance. Windfarms may have significant biological impacts, especially over longer time scales, but the evidence-base is poor, with many studies being methodologically weak, and more long-term impact assessments are required. There is clear evidence that Anseriformes (wildfowl) and Charadriiformes (waders) experience declines in abundance, suggesting that a precautionary approach should be adopted to windfarm development near aggregations of these taxa in offshore and coastal locations. The impact of windfarm developments on bird populations must also be viewed in the context of the possible impact of climate change in the absence of windfarms.

Most environmental scientists care about the state of nature. They are concerned about loss of biodiversity, degradation of ecosystems services and threats to sustainability. Do such concerns and the values they reflect make an environmental scientist an environmentalist? Should they be environmentalists?

The Amazon basin is a key supplier of wild freshwater fishes to the multi-billion US$ global aquarium market, yet limited information exists on the organization of the regional trade, its importance to local economies or conservation impacts. Through field interviews and review of government statistics, this paper describes the state of the industry in Peru, reporting on the scale and value of the trade, the nature of the fishery and the characteristics and roles of key actors in regional supply networks. An economically important industry is revealed, with 28 firms officially exporting over nine million fishes worth US$ 2.5 million to 24 countries in 2001, and involving fish species from 36 families transported from rainforest catchments up to 1100 km distant from the export centre of Iquitos. Most fish are however collected close to the city, with 10 species representing >70% of trade volume. Some 10 000 people earn income from the trade, among them many rural poor who depend on aquarium fish collection as a primary or supplementary source of cash income. The industry is currently undergoing an important transition towards supplying new Asian and European markets, increasing exports of species biologically unsuited to heavy exploitation as a result, and highlighting the conservation need for improved knowledge and management of the trade in Amazonia.

Navassa Island is a small uninhabited island, approximately 60 km west of the south-west tip of Haiti (18°24′N, 75°00′W). Haiti laid claim to the island in 1804, however the USA claimed it under the Guano Act of 1856 and recently placed it under jurisdiction of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Remoteness from USFWS administration in Puerto Rico and disputed sovereignty by Haiti make enforcement of management impractical. Artisanal fishers from Haiti have frequented Navassa over the past several decades. Given the lack of current land-based development and limited transient land-based activity (for example salting fish and gear construction), Navassa provides a case study where fishing is largely isolated as the dominant human impact on coastal resources.

Global assessments demonstrate that as a conservation measure protected areas (PAs) are incomplete, and tend to be poorly documented in the international scientific literature, hindering the assessment of their scientific and policy foundations. The step from mapping priority areas for biodiversity conservation based on scientific information to formulating the practical tools for conserving biological diversity is critical; several key aspects such as legislative frameworks, multi-scale politics and socioeconomic realities must be taken into account. With the planet's human population continuing to grow, this step is all the more crucial, as the designation of PAs is increasingly being forced alongside the development frontier. This paper examines the process of reserve establishment in the case of the Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve (AMNR) (Peruvian Amazonia). On the basis of interviews, document analysis and media studies, a series of actions and reactions worked to shape the ultimate categorization and management plan of the AMNR. While scientific knowledge played a central role in the initial selection of the AMNR site, a number of critical aspects such as estimated environmental services, unresolved land entitlements, use values and multi-scale politics needed to be addressed in order to meet the originally set objective of biodiversity conservation. The importance of several biophysical features of the AMNR was initially emphasized as a key argument for conservation, whereas potential benefits of the AMNR (such as environmental services, particularly at the regional scale) proved to be the ultimate driving factor. Between the AMNR's official establishment in 1999 and its approved categorization and management plan in 2004 and 2005, respectively, a substantial shift in argumentation was witnessed. This change was particularly influential in that, contrary to what was initially expected, the livelihood requirements of local communities that were strongly linked to land entitlements and natural resources management came to play an essential role in both the categorization process and in the elaboration of the management plan of the Reserve. The AMNR was only effectively established because of this shift in emphasis.

The hundreds of lake associations in Minnesota are examples of voluntary collective action organizations. Although these groups are organized for several purposes, their main concern is environmental management and specifically the improvement or preservation of lake water quality. Social capital probably affects organizational effectiveness. Survey and biophysical data were used to examine the determinants and efficacy of social capital in lake associations. Social capital production in lake associations was associated with water quality, lake size, recreational preferences, seasonality of residents, location, information sharing, per caput budget and relations with local government. Social capital also had a significant but small positive relationship with lake water clarity. Natural resource policy makers might consider investments in social capital as part of their strategy portfolio. Although statistical analyses of the role of social capital in local environmental management using large sample sizes are promising, several measurement and methodological difficulties remain.

This paper assesses territorially-focused conservation practice from geographic perspectives, focusing particularly on the influence of cartography. Contemporary mapping technologies and practices can favour territorial conservation approaches, perhaps at the expense of other possibilities, and may condition the flexibility and types of conservation feasible. For instance, might mapping practices lead to an emphasis on certain species, ecosystems or conservation concepts over others? How appropriate is the static idea of a mapped conservation space for fluctuating environmental conditions and changing threats? Understanding that many of the challenges outlined here are acknowledged by conservation practitioners, this paper summarizes ways in which these concerns are currently addressed in the conservation biology literature. Advances in geography and cartography might offer further solutions that could assist in confronting conservation challenges. These critiques and potential solutions identify gaps and opportunities that would benefit from increased interdisciplinary engagement across conservation, geographic and cartographic fields.

The world's arid and semi-arid regions are severely affected by desertification. In China, wind erosion, water erosion, soil salinization and the freezing and melting processes have contributed to 2.64 million km2 of desertified land, covering 27.5% of the country's land surface (State Forestry Administration, Peoples' Republic of China 2005). Although climate change could be a reason for desertification, anthropogenic factors such as overgrazing and overcultivation also contribute to degradation in grassland areas (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Zheng et al. 2006). The Chinese government has adopted afforestation as the main measure to control desertification. Major projects, including the ‘Three North Shelterbelt Programme’ (also known as the ‘Green Great Wall’) and the ‘Sandstorm Source Control Project around Beijing and Tianjin’, are necessary to shield northern and eastern agricultural ecosystems against sand and dust (Zhou 2002). However, these countermeasures require substantial effort and investment, and, in the semi-arid and arid regions of Inner Mongolia, newly planted trees have often died of drought, while tree planting could also be responsible for exhausting the precious groundwater resources of these regions (Jackson et al. 2005). Alternative and more practical ways of combating desertification by using multi-disciplinary approaches observing both social and ecological principles are required. The Hunshandake Sandy Land restoration demonstration project conducted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences was an attempt to restore desertified grassland mainly through natural processes, and requiring limited investment.

Current threshold-dominated methodologies of vulnerability analysis do not give sufficient emphasis to the processes that shape the environment and define the behaviour of environmental systems. While there has been widespread recognition for developing comprehensive approaches to assessing vulnerability, there has been relatively little theoretical debate on limitations and opportunities for improving the application of vulnerability analysis to environmental management, particularly in terms of a more complex systems perspective. A functional-based approach to ‘vulnerability’ is a means whereby the dynamics of vulnerable systems could be more fully integrated within vulnerability analysis. Functionality is seen as the ability of the environment to deliver outputs through time. Vulnerability analysis that is focused not only on thresholds that define the limits of system behaviour, but also on the process-defined capacity of systems to maintain this behaviour and deliver those outputs, could emerge as a useful element in integrated environmental management. Linking threshold analysis with a clear understanding of the interactions, differences and similarities between system processes which define coping ranges and system performance is a relatively simple conceptual development in vulnerability analysis. Such a development could, if successful, be of great value to those managing complex environments.

Insects worldwide are undergoing unprecedented rates of decline, with many species severely threatened or already extinct. Despite their extreme diversity and functional importance in ecosystems, this extinction crisis has seldom gained media attention; endangered large mammals and birds receive much greater coverage. In the UK, where the insect fauna is relatively depauperate and well known, this bias has recently been redressed by a range of initiatives that highlighted the importance of insect conservation. This study investigated the popularity of different arthropod groups drawn by children (as part of one such event), in modern culture and in the scientific literature. Children's preference for insect groups strongly correlated with their representation in modern culture and in the scientific literature. However none of the measures of popularity of each group correlated with their abundance or conservation status in the UK. The profile of lesser-known groups therefore needs to be raised to reduce the chance that threatened taxa are overlooked for conservation action.

People may behave in environmentally friendly ways because they gain psychologically from their experiences in natural environments. Psychological benefits of nature experience may also underlie concerns about personally harmful effects of environmental problems. Cross-sectional survey data from 1413 Norwegian adults were used to assess the relationship between use of natural environments for psychological restoration and ecological behaviour, as mediated by personal environmental concern. Mediation tests with hierarchical regression analyses provided evidence of partial mediation; the use of natural environments for restoration remained a significant predictor of ecological behaviour after the entry of environmental concern into the analysis. These associations held independently of age, gender, education, household income, size of community of upbringing, size of community of current residence and distance of current residence from an outdoor recreation area. Among sociodemographic variables, only gender had a significant association with the use of natural environments for restoration, suggesting that their use transcends several important social categories in Norway. In short, positive experiences in natural environments may promote ecological behaviour.

Many landscapes contain traditional rural systems of high environmental value and are attractive for cultural tourism, while the traditional activities indicate sensible use of some marginal areas, whether protected or not. Recreational activities and tourism constitute new uses lending cultural and economic interest. To maintain both rural and recreational uses of landscape, links need to be established with the local population, which has a tendency to abandon such rural areas. In this study, landscapes in Central Spain were categorized using variables which described their structure and associated natural and cultural characteristics. Visitors were categorized by surveying their visit preferences. Multivariate analyses of the two sets of data determined the degree of correspondence between the type of visitors and what the landscape could ‘offer’, considering perception, preferences, potential interest in specific landscapes (‘outdoor recreational niche’) and degree of satisfaction with regard to the natural and rural characteristics of the territory. The resulting thematic maps constitute useful tools for developing planning and environmental management strategies.

Minimizing the impact of invasive alien species (IAS) on islands and elsewhere requires researchers to provide cogent information on the environmental and socioeconomic consequences of IAS to the public and policy makers. Unfortunately, this information has not been readily available owing to a paucity of scientific research and the failure of the scientific community to make their findings readily available to decision makers. This review explores the vulnerability of islands to biological invasion, reports on environmental and socioeconomic impacts of IAS on islands and provides guidance and information on technical resources that can help minimize the effects of IAS in island ecosystems. This assessment is intended to provide a holistic perspective on island-IAS dynamics, enable biologists and social scientists to identify information gaps that warrant further research and serve as a primer for policy makers seeking to minimize the impact of IAS on island systems. Case studies have been selected to reflect the most scientifically-reliable information on the impacts of IAS on islands. Sufficient evidence has emerged to conclude that IAS are the most significant drivers of population declines and species extinctions in island ecosystems worldwide. Clearly, IAS can also have significant socioeconomic impacts directly (for example human health) and indirectly through their effects on ecosystem goods and services. These impacts are manifest at all ecological levels and affect the poorest, as well as richest, island nations. The measures needed to prevent and minimize the impacts of IAS on island ecosystems are generally known. However, many island nations and territories lack the scientific and technical information, infrastructure and human and financial resources necessary to adequately address the problems caused by IAS. Because every nation is an exporter and importer of goods and services, every nation is also a facilitator and victim of the invasion of alien species. Wealthy nations therefore need to help raise the capacity of island nations and territories to minimize the spread and impact of IAS.

Redesign of shore protection projects in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany) is allowing landforms to become more dynamic after centuries of employing structures to increase stability. Current policies are designed to maintain sediment transfers, re-establish wetlands, ensure zero net loss of coastal habitat and apply the user-pays principle for restoring damaged habitat. Projects that achieve new nature-oriented goals include (1) relocating dykes landward or allowing dykes or protective dunes to erode to expose more land to episodic inundation by the sea; (2) reinstating sediment transfers from bluffs to adjacent low-lying shores; (3) increasing sediment transport rates through groyne fields; and (4) removing exotic vegetation from dunes. These actions create new habitat, add portions of the coast to the public domain, and provide a wider buffer against accelerated sea-level rise for developed lands further inland. The management actions have been relatively small in scale, applied where there has been little threat to human facilities and done to achieve specific environmental goals, but they provide examples of workable options to increase the dynamism of stabilized landforms on other exposed coasts. The need to restore natural functions while providing some stability places emphasis on a strategy of controlling dynamism rather than preventing it.

Relict endangered populations may be especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A data series for the period 1974–2003 was used to examine shifts in brown bear Ursus arctos food habits in its south-westernmost European population. This focused on the hyperphagic season, when bears gain the fat that is essential for winter dormancy and reproduction. General climatic indicators were predictors of diet trends. Other variables potentially able to modify brown bear food habits at the local scale were accounted for by considering two areas where local conditions changed in different ways during the study period. General climatic indicators such as temperature and the winter North Atlantic Oscillation index were good predictors of some diet trends, although local factors seemed to modulate the potential response of food habits to recent climate change. Boreal and temperate food items decreasingly contributed to brown bear diet, replaced by increasing contributions of southern foods, which suggested that warmer temperatures might determine the occurrence of some food items in the diet of Cantabrian brown bears through effects on plant distribution and phenology. At the local scale, high cattle density in one of the study areas limited food sources available for brown bears. Important food sources for brown bears, such as heath-like Vaccinium formations and old-growth oak forest in the Cantabrian Mountains, require increased levels of protection.