The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is a voluntary set-aside program in the United States designed to amelioratesoil erosion, control crop overproduction, enhance water quality, and provide wildlife habitat by replacing crops with other forms of land cover. Because CRP includes primarily grass habitats, it has great potential to benefitdeclining North American grassland bird populations. We looked at the change in national and state population trends of grassland birds and related changes to cover-specific CRP variables (previous research grouped all CRP practices).

This paper takes the move from the uncertainty surrounding ecosystem thresholds and addresses the issue of ecosystem-state assessment by means of ecological integrity indicators and ‘ecological risk‘. The concept of ‘ecological risk‘ gives a measure of the likelihood of ecosystem failure to provide the level of natural ecological goods and services expected/desired by human societies. As a consequence of human pressures (use of resources and discharge into the environment), ecosystem thresholds can be breached thus resulting in major threats to human health, safety and well-being.

Climate warming during the past century has imposed recession of glaciers and perennial snow/ice patches along the entire Swedish Scandes. On the newly exposed forefields, subfossil wood remnants are being outwashed from beneath ice and snow bodies. In Scandinavia, this kind of detrital wood is a previously unused source of postglacial vegetation and climate history. The present study reports radiocarbon dates of a set of 78 wood samples, retrieved from three main sites, high above modern treelines and stretching along the Swedish Scandes.

The field for application of biomass is rising. The demand for food and feeding stuff rises while at the same time energy, chemicals and other materials also need to be produced from biomass because of decreasing fossil resources. However, the biorefinery ideas and concepts can help to use the limited renewable raw materials more efficiently than today. With biorefineries, valuable products, such as platform chemicals, can be produced from agricultural feedstock, which can subsequently be further processed into a variety of substances by the chemical industry.

Cities are not socially homogenous, but divided into socially and structurally differentiated sub-units. Likewise, the individuals of a community, city or neighbourhood present specific behavioural patterns and uses with respect to their public green areas. This premise has led us to explore the question of how the perceptions, uses, and behaviours of people from different countries, cultures, and socioeconomic levels in Chile, Germany and Spain differ or coincide as far as urban nature and landscapes are concerned.

Landscapes differ in their capacities to provide ecosystem goods and services, which are the benefits humans obtain
from nature. Structures and functions of ecosystems needed to sustain the provision of ecosystem services are altered
by various human activities. In this paper, a concept for the assessment of multiple ecosystem services is proposed
as a basis for discussion and further development of a respective evaluation instrument. Using quantitative and

Demographic change suggests substantial effects on future societal demands on agricultural landscape use and thus on rural areas. Demographic change is thereby defined as both the decrease of the population and the shift in the age distribution („aging“) and in the spatial distribution („rural flight“ particularly of young people).

New broader, adaptable and accommodating sets of themes have been proposed to help to identify, understand and solve sustainability problems. However, how this knowledge will foster decisions that lead to more desirable outcomes and analyses necessary to transition to sustainability remains a critical theoretical and empirical question for basic and applied research. We argue that we are still underestimating the tendency to lock into certain patterns that come at the cost of the ability to adjust to new situations.

Understanding and measuring functional connectivity for animals with habitats that have been fragmented by human
activity requires that the biology and movement of the species be considered. We used least cost paths in GIS
to test hypotheses regarding how different species of longhorned beetles likely connect habitats with dispersal.
We predicted that there would be differences in the functional connectivity of landscapes depending on species
larval niche breadth, adult feeding habits, and the potential for use of non-forest habitats. For the species with very

Peninsula effects - decreasing richness with increasing distance along peninsula lobes - have been identified for
many taxa on large peninsulas. Peninsula effects are caused by differences in colonization and extinction predicted
by island biogeography or by environmental gradients along the peninsula. We compared species-area regressions
for cove patches (i.e., mainland) to regressions for lobe patches (i.e., on peninsula tips) for wet meadow birds
along a highly interdigitated shoreline (northern Lake Huron, USA). We conducted analysis both with and without

Topography and relief variability play a key role in ecosystem functioning and structuring. However, the most commonly used concept to relate pattern to process in landscape ecology, the so-called patch-corridor-matrix model, perceives the landscape as a planimetric surface. As a consequence, landscape metrics, used as numerical descriptors of the spatial arrangement of landscape mosaics, generally do not allow for the examination of terrain characteristics and may even produce erroneous results, especially in mountainous areas.

The relationships between patterns and processes lie at the core of modern landscape ecology. These dependences
can be quantified by using indices related to the patch-corridor-matrix model. This model conceptualizes
landscapes as planar mosaics consisting of discrete patches. On the other hand, relief variability is a key factor for
many ecological processes, and therefore these processes can be better modeled by integrating information concerning
the third dimension of landscapes. This can be done by generating a triangle mesh which approximates