Pursuing a desire to do conservation-relevant science, she worked as a field ornithologist for many years.
Alternatives based on agri-environment policies oriented to support conservation-relevant farming systems have been suggested, but they have faced operational difficulties related primarily to obtaining the necessary data to define farming system typologies.
Our approach allows forest managers to amend regional and countrywide management plans with reliable maps depicting areas of high forest structural complexity and habitat quality, which will facilitate the integration of conservation-relevant information into multifunctional forestry.
Although it is impossible to demonstrate the effectiveness of species action planning through rigorous scientific assessment, these results indicate a substantial amount of conservation-relevant activity directly attributable to the process.
Here we investigated whether a simplified approach based on a coarse farming system typology built from incomplete data on land-use and livestock, such as that available in CAP paying agencies, could be used to infer on a wider range of conservation-relevant farm management practices and, ultimately, to select the farming systems qualifying for premium payments.
Based on data collected by a farm-survey on a High Nature Value farmland area in southern Portugal, we show that some farming systems are consistently associated with conservation-relevant practices related to the use of herbicides, stubble grazing, creation of wildlife plots and early cereal harvest.
Despite the potential, the majority of conservation-relevant paleoecological studies primarily focus on describing historical forest conditions in broad terms and for large spatial scales, addressing former climate, land-use, and landscape developments, often in the absence of a specific conservation context.
However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding which genetic metrics, temporal sampling protocols, and genetic markers are sufficiently sensitive and robust, on conservation-relevant timescales.
It is often questioned whether significant genetic changes over conservation-relevant periods of time are frequent, as discussed in Smith and Bernatchez (2008).
As a consequence, there is an urgent need to perform multigeneration population-based selection experiments with model species to tackle conservation-relevant questions.
