333.7 Natürliche Ressourcen, Energie und Umwelt
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- Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft (3) (remove)
Establishing and maintaining protected areas (PAs) is a key action in delivering post-2020 biodiversity targets. PAs often need to meet multiple objectives, ranging from biodiversity protection to ecosystem service provision and climate change mitigation, but available land and conservation funding is limited. Therefore, optimizing resources by selecting the most beneficial PAs is vital. Here, we advocate for a flexible and transparent approach to selecting PAs based on multiple objectives, and illustrate this with a decision support tool on a global scale. The tool allows weighting and prioritization of different conservation objectives according to user-specified preferences as well as real-time comparison of the outcome. Applying the tool across 1,346 terrestrial PAs, we demonstrate that decision makers frequently face trade-offs among conflicting objectives, e.g., between species protection and ecosystem integrity. Nevertheless, we show that transparent decision support tools can reveal synergies and trade-offs associated with PA selection, thereby helping to illuminate and resolve land-use conflicts embedded in divergent societal and political demands and values.
Wolves (Canis lupus) are currently showing a remarkable comeback in the highly frag-mented cultural landscapes of Germany. We here show that wolf numbers increasedexponentially between 2000 and 2015 with an annual increase of about 36%. Wedemonstrate that the first territories in each newly colonized region were establishedover long distances from the nearest known reproducing pack on active militarytraining areas (MTAs). We show that MTAs, rather than protected areas, served asstepping-stones for the recolonization of Germany facilitating subsequent spreadingof wolf territories in the surrounding landscape. We did not find any significant differ-ence between MTAs and protected areas with regard to habitat. One possible reasonfor the importance of MTAs may be their lower anthropogenic mortality rates com-pared to protected and other areas. To our knowledge, this is the first documented casewhere MTAs facilitate the recolonization of an endangered species across large areas.
Vegetation responds to drought through a complex interplay of plant hydraulic mechanisms, posing challenges for model development and parameterization. We present a mathematical model that describes the dynamics of leaf water-potential over time while considering different strategies by which plant species regulate their water-potentials. The model has two parameters: the parameter λ describing the adjustment of the leaf water potential to changes in soil water potential, and the parameter Δψww describing the typical ‘well-watered’ leaf water potentials at non-stressed (near-zero) levels of soil water potential. Our model was tested and calibrated on 110 time-series datasets containing the leaf- and soil water potentials of 66 species under drought and non-drought conditions. Our model successfully reproduces the measured leaf water potentials over time based on three different regulation strategies under drought. We found that three parameter sets derived from the measurement data reproduced the dynamics of 53% of an drought dataset, and 52% of a control dataset [root mean square error (RMSE) < 0.5 MPa)]. We conclude that, instead of quantifying water-potential-regulation of different plant species by complex modeling approaches, a small set of parameters may be sufficient to describe the water potential regulation behavior for large-scale modeling. Thus, our approach paves the way for a parsimonious representation of the full spectrum of plant hydraulic responses to drought in dynamic vegetation models.