The resilience, diversity and stability of mountain ecosystems are threatened by climatic as well as land‐use changes, but the combined effects of these drivers are only poorly understood. We combine two high‐resolution sediment records from Iffigsee (2065 m a.s.l.) and Lauenensee (1382 m a.s.l.) at different elevations in the Northern Swiss Alps to provide a detailed history of vegetational changes during the period of first pastoralism (ca. 7000–5000 cal. BP, 5000–3000 BC) in order to understand ongoing and future changes in mountain ecosystems.

AIM: New conservation approaches that account for broad‐scale ecological processes must underpin decisions about conservation planning in the world's remaining wilderness areas. Our goal is to make the relevant tools and methods that have been developed by conservation scientists accessible to conservation practitioners working towards wilderness preservation. LOCATION: Wilderness areas, in particular the North American boreal region.

In light of impending water and arable land shortages, population growth and climate change, it is more important than ever to examine how forest tree domestication can be accelerated to sustainably meet future demands for wood, biomass, paper, fuel and biomaterials. Because of long breeding cycles, tree domestication cannot be rapidly achieved through traditional genetic improvement methods alone. Integrating modern genetic and genomic techniques with conventional breeding will expedite tree domestication.

The role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the development and transfer of climate change technologies has been a contentious issue in negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Irreconcilable differences seem to oppose those who believe IPRs are an inherent barrier to the transfer of climate change technologies and those who argue they are an essential incentive to innovation.

In a previous article, Beschta et al. (2013) argue that grazing by large ungulates (both native and domestic) should be eliminated or greatly reduced on western public lands to reduce potential climate change impacts. The authors were selective in their use of the scientific literature, and their publication is more of an opinion article than a synthesis. Their conclusions do not reflect the complexities associated with herbivore grazing. Interactions of climate change and grazing will depend on the specific situation.

The implementation of an international programme for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) can help to mitigate climate change and bring numerous benefits to environmental conservation. Information on land change modelling and carbon mapping can contribute to quantify future carbon emissions from deforestation. However limitations in data availability and technical capabilities may constitute an obstacle for countries interested in participating in the REDD programme.

River ecosystems are driven by linked physical, chemical, and biological subsystems, which operate over different temporal and spatial domains. This complexity increases uncertainty in ecological forecasts, and impedes preparation for the ecological consequences of climate change. We describe a recently developed “multi-modeling” system for ecological forecasting in a 7600 km² watershed in the North American Great Lakes Basin.

Protected areas are usually conceived and managed as static entities, although this approach is increasingly viewed as unrealistic given climate change and ecosystem dynamics. The ways in which people use land and/or natural resources within and around protected areas can also shift and evolve temporally but this remains an under-acknowledged challenge for protected area managers. Here we investigate the factors driving a rapid rise in charcoal production within a new, multiple-use protected area in Madagascar, to inform appropriate management responses.

Currently, there is a major concern about the future of nutrient loads discharged into the Baltic Sea from Polish rivers because they are main contributors to its eutrophication. To date, no watershed-scale studies have properly addressed this issue. This paper fills this gap by using a scenario-modeling framework applied in the Reda watershed, a small (482� km²) agricultural coastal area in northern Poland. We used the SWAT model to quantify the effects of future climate, land cover, and management changes under multiple scenarios up to the 2050s.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) is a conservation finance instrument based on the payments for ecosystem services model, wherein governments, private landowners, concession holders, and/or communities are compensated for undertaking activities which mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from forest use and land use change. This article reviews the numerous sources for REDD+ finance within the context of total global conservation finance.

Australia has long been a major exporter of the products of broadacre agriculture, a production system well suited to the economic and climatic conditions of the country. According to the conventional wisdom, Australia holds a comparative advantage in these products, among which wheat and livestock products predominate. However, the future validity of this proposition is sensitive to the projected impacts of climate change.

During 2008 the world witnessed a global food crisis which caused social unrest in many countries and drove 75 million more people into poverty. The crisis resulted from sharply higher oil prices, increased bio-fuel production, dwindling grain stocks, market speculation, changing food consumption patterns in emerging economies, and changes in world trade agreements, among other factors. Although the rise in food prices was sudden, the fragility of global food security had been developing for years.