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.

A commonly assumed reason for the delegation of authority from a legislature (politicians) to bureaucracies is that the bureaucrats have an information advantage over the politicians, including knowledge of cost–benefit analysis (CBA). But it is reasonable to assume that the bureaucrats use their information advantage by taking all relevant aspects of policy into account? We model the use of CBA using a delegation model and then test the theoretical predictions with empirical data collected from five Swedish government agencies. The empirical results lend support both for the hypothesis that risk aversion concerning the environmental outcome, the bureaucrats’ environmental attitudes, and the cost of taking CBA information into account have a considerable impact on the probability of using information from a CBA. Hence risk averse and bureaucrats with strong environmental preferences are less likely and bureaucrats with low cost of doing a CBA more likely than other bureaucrats to use CBA information. Finally, a binding governmental budget constraint may positively influence a bureaucrat’s choice of using CBA information. A tentative conclusion is therefore that it may be possible to increase the use of CBA by making the budgetary consequences of policies much clearer and demanding due consideration of costs.

Vertebrate microremains from the upper Silurian Winnica Formation in the Holy Cross Mountains, Poland are described from the Winnica and Rzepin sections. Both sites record the uppermost part of the Słupianka Member, but represent different depositional environments. The Winnica samples come from a low-energy environment, while the Rzepin sample was taken from a high-energy, oolitic facies. Both sites contain thelodonts Thelodus parvidens, Thelodus trilobatus, an anaspid cf. Liivilepis and a number of acanthodian scales of ‘nostolepid’, poracanthodid and ‘gomphonchid’ types. Notable differences between the sites are the addition of the osteostracan Tahulaspis cf. ordinata, the thelodont Paralogania ludlowiensis and acanthodian scales identified as Nostolepis gracilis in the Rzepin section. Placing the vertebrate faunas within the vertebrate biozonation established for the Silurian proved difficult. The suggested late Ludlow age for the Słupianka Member based on sequence stratigraphical and chemostratigraphical correlations cannot be definitely confirmed or refuted, but a late Ludfordian age seems the most plausible based on invertebrate and vertebrate faunas. The much lower abundance of poracanthodid acanthodians in the Rzepin sample supports the notion of Poracanthodes porosus Zone as a deep-water equivalent to a number of vertebrate biozones. The presence of P. ludlowiensis only in the oolitic sample confirms a long temporal range, but restricted environmental distribution for this taxon.