Brazilian environmental law imposes more restrictions on land-use change by private landowners in riparian forests than in non-riparian forest areas, reflecting recognition of their importance for the conservation of biodiversity and key ecosystem services. A 22-year time series of classified Landsat images was used to evaluate deforestation and forest regeneration in riparian permanent preservation areas over the past two decades, focusing on the municipality of Paragominas in the state of Pará in eastern Amazonia. There was no evidence that riparian forests had been more effectively protected than non-riparian forests. Instead, deforestation was found to be comparatively higher inside riparian permanent preservation areas as recently as 2010, indicating a widespread failure of private property owners to comply with environmental legislation. There was no evidence for higher levels of regeneration in riparian zones, although property owners are obliged by law to restore such areas. A number of factors limit improvements in the protection and restoration of riparian forests. These include limited awareness of environmental compliance requirements, the need for improved technical capacity in mapping the distribution and extent of riparian forests and the boundaries of private properties, and improved access to the financial resources and technical capacity needed to support restoration projects.

Protected areas remain the most commonly used tool for in situ conservation; however growth in the USA's system of public lands has stagnated while private land conservation continues to expand. Easements can provide a range of ecosystem services (ESs), but it is unknown whether conservation easements maintain ES capacities equivalent to public protected areas. Evaluation of the capacity of seven ESs on federal and state protected areas and conservation easements in the USA using spatially-explicit ES models and publicly available data indicated that ES capacities in easements were equal to or greater than capacities within state or federal protected areas for six of seven services and, when bundled together, conservation easements protected greater focal ES capacity than other conservation areas. Economic incentive programmes and regulatory mechanisms may be used to stimulate capacity improvements for surface water regulation, riparian filtration, erosion control, and carbon storage on conservation easements, and landscape-level conservation efforts should (1) continue to protect natural and uninhabited areas that provide ecosystem and biological diversity, (2) expand private conservation efforts close to human population centres, and (3) limit future development to areas with high regulating service capacity that can sustain new population growth.

For over a century the foundation of biological conservation has been the development of open space networks either through outright public land acquisition or appropriate management of private lands. Because both approaches come with significant trade-offs, it is critical to understand which species are found across various land ownership types so that policy tools and management actions can efficiently be targeted to do the most good. In this paper, presence-only biological data were used to create species distribution maps for 18 imperilled forest bird species that breed within the deciduous forests of New Jersey (USA). These maps, combined with publicly available, spatially explicit information on land ownership, document who owns the habitat relied on by each of these 18 species. There were significant variations in both species- and guild-specific reliance on public versus private lands, with the latter preferentially supporting nearly twice as many species as the former. Subcategories of land ownership provided support for the role of both state-owned forests and privately-owned agricultural lands in forest bird conservation; however, each landownership type supports a distinct set of species. While explicitly recognizing the need to employ diverse conservation strategies, the approach provides a solid framework for structuring forest conservation planning and policy at regional scales.

The large fish indicator (LFI), or ‘proportion of fish greater than 40 cm length in bottom trawl surveys,’ is a frequently debated indicator of Good Environmental Status in European regional seas. How does the LFI respond to changes in fishing pressure? This question is addressed here through analysis of fine-scale spatial trends in the LFI within the North Sea, compared between two periods of contrasting fisheries management: 1983–1999 and 2000–2012, respectively, before and after the onset of the European Union's fleet reduction scheme. Over the entire period, the LFI has decreased in large parts of the North Sea. However, most of the decline was from 1983–1999; since 2000 the LFI has improved in much of the North Sea, especially in UK waters. Comparison with international effort data shows that those western areas where the LFI has improved correspond with regions where otter trawl effort has decreased since 2000 (and previously was highest in the 1990s), and also with decreases in beam trawl effort. This study provides strong support that recent European effort reduction schemes are now beginning to result in an improved ecosystem state as indicated by the regional-scale improvement in the LFI.

Protected areas are regarded as the main strategy to halt biodiversity loss; however, protected area effectiveness evaluations remain scarce and mostly rely on limited scientific evidence. Protected area managers from two case studies in the Mediterranean basin biodiversity hotspot (networks of Spanish terrestrial protected areas and individual Mediterranean marine protected areas) were surveyed to assess the use of two protected area evaluation systems: the ‘System for the Integrated Assessment of Protected Areas’ (SIAPA) and the ‘System for Quick Evaluation of Management in Mediterranean MPAs’ using the ‘Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Development’ framework. A second survey in Spain ascertained the degree of implementation of protected area evaluation systems and the institutional interest in implementing such systems. The main weaknesses attributable to the systems presented were limited salience (for the SIAPA) and legitimacy in terms of costs (for the System for Quick Evaluation of Management in Mediterranean MPAs). However, the main reasons for the limited uptake of the evaluation systems presented were not attributable to the systems themselves, but to management or institutional limitations: the lack of basic data for and weak institutional interest in evaluation in Spain, and the scarce resources available for evaluation in the case of some Mediterranean marine protected areas.

Despite significant expansion of the global protected area (PA) network, this investment has not commonly been matched by investment in their management. This includes managing trade-offs between social and biodiversity goals, including resource use in PAs. While some resource-use activities receive significant attention, the full suite of resources extracted from PA systems is rarely documented. This paper illustrates the potential risk of resource use to PA ecological performance through a survey of resources harvested in South Africa's national parks. Even for this comparatively well-managed suite of parks, significant data gaps preclude assessments of harvest sustainability. Harvest quantities were known for < 8% of the 341 used resources, while 23% were not identified to species level. International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List conservation status had not been evaluated for 78% of species, and 31% of all species (83% of marine species) had not been evaluated nationally. Protected areas face ongoing pressure to balance people-based and biodiversity outcomes, but whether or not both objectives can be achieved cannot be assessed without adequate data. Managing PAs in future will require consideration of trade-offs between investing in PA expansion, increasing the monitoring and management capacity of PA agencies, and investing in the research needed to support decision making.

Rapid population growth and economic change on the tropical islands of Mauritius have led to one of the highest rates of urban build-out in the world. Pressure on many of the island's natural features and resources increasingly risks further degradation to the environmental services that they provide to the country. Fourteen types of marine and terrestrial environmentally sensitive areas (ESAs) are critical to the nation's sustainable development. Twelve of these ESA types are currently at risk of degradation, owing to their spatial proximity to built-up areas (BUAs) and current use designation. There was a bimodal distribution in proximity; eight of the 12 ESA types analysed had an area-weighted modal peak < 500 m from the nearest BUA, and four ESAs had a modal peak 2–3 km from the nearest BUA. Six coastal and marine ESAs had limited protection from urban expansion and over-use. The Mauritian experience reflects trends that are emerging across many tropical developing countries, where the bulk of future global growth in urban area is expected to occur. The approach detailed in this case study is replicable and may be useful in assessing degradation risk as a result of urban expansion in other island countries.

Members of the public and resource-dependent communities are increasingly participating alongside professional scientists to monitor the natural world. This study applies the contention from development studies that participatory approaches may be tyrannical to participatory monitoring of Nepal's community forests. There is a tyranny of the group because elites within the community stand to benefit at the cost of those already marginalized. In theory, tyranny is produced through the methods employed in the projects, as they promote scientific systems of monitoring at the expense of local understandings of environmental change; in practice, however, the latter aspects override official monitoring to enable effective learning from the projects. In some instances, tyranny is produced through decision-making and control, whilst, in other cases, the reverse is true and communities are empowered through their participatory monitoring efforts. Policy makers and those involved in participatory monitoring should endeavour to transform tyranny created at local and wider scales. Participatory monitoring holds huge potential in the assessment of biodiversity, natural resources and ecosystem services, but programmes and projects need to effectively deliver associated benefits of conservation and community empowerment.

The challenge to manage coastal resources within Asia-Pacific's Coral Triangle has gained global attention. Co-management is promoted as a key strategy to address this challenge. Contemporary community-based co-management often leads to ‘hybridization’ between local (customary) practices, and science-based management and conservation. However, the form of this hybrid has rarely been critically analysed. This paper presents examples of co-management practices in eastern Indonesia and Solomon Islands, focusing in particular on area closures. In contrast to the temporary closures used before the influx of sustainability discourses, contemporary closures are periodically-harvested but predominantly closed, reflecting attempts to reduce fishing effort and enhance ecological sustainability. When areas are opened, harvests are relatively short and largely triggered by the social and economic needs of particular individuals or whole communities. In all cases, engagement with environmental management interventions has led to more formalized access and use arrangements. The harvesting and management practices observed are influenced by these relatively recent interventions designed to promote sustainability, but also by religious institutions, increasing resource demand, and modernization. This study unpacks some of the contemporary influences, particularly environmental sustainability initiatives, on local management practices, and provides insights for co-management in practice.