In spite of the many laws and regulations regarding the development of property and the protection of open space and wildlife, developers often try to get around compliance with the law using subtle, or not–so–subtle, tactics. In some cases, they violate the law because they know that there is little or no enforcement, or, if caught, they pay the fine and charge it up as a cost of doing business which is of course tax-deductible. Over the last few years I have been involved in a status study on two species of lizards of special concern (the Orange-throated Whiptail, Cnemidophorus hyperythrus and the Coastal Horned Lizard, Phrynosoma coronatum) for the California Department of Fish and Game. During this study, I noticed several of what I call ‘developers' devious digressions’. As a biologist and environmental consultant, I have seen, over the last few decades, developers use these same ways of getting around environmental laws in Arizona, Montana, Mexico, and Australia. I have placed these digressions, detours and non-conformities, with the law in the following several categories.

There has been a systematic increase in the length of the freeze-free season in several Canadian cities since 1940. This increase is believed to be due mainly to urbanization. Although the rate of urbanization during the period 1940–70 was not significantly higher than the rates in the preceding decades, urban growth during those thirty years was accompanied by higher levels of fossil-fuel conversion, which produced higher temperatures in towns and cities than in surrounding rural areas, and a generally reinforced ‘greenhouse effect’. The higher temperatures in turn combined with other urban factors to enhance the length of the freeze-free season.

In a northern climate where the growing-season is already precariously short, a longer freeze-free season should have beneficial effects on agriculture and affect other aspects of the environment. There is general agreement among research workers that the energetics of solar variability are too small to affect tropospheric or stratospheric processes directly to any significant degree. This study reinforces belief in the importance of local factors; such influences tend to override any subtle connection between solar variability and the weather.

Across the Danish–German border in the Wadden Sea, a new dike was completed in 1981, enclosing formerly productive tidal flats and marsh areas which were most important as feeding grounds to breeding and migrant waterbirds. The bird populations responded immediately by a 50% or more reduction in numbers of resting birds and breeding pairs of most species. This paper reviews the management of the enclosed areas, comparing the differences in approach in the Danish and German areas involved.

Most importantly, a saline environment was re-established (a Saltwater Lagoon) in parts of the Danish area by actively pumping in water from the Wadden Sea. Despite sometimes drastic fluctuations in environmental conditions in the Lagoon, an infauna of species important in the birds' diet was maintained, and the Lagoon to some extent counteracted the negative effects of the dike construction.

The former marsh areas on the Danish side are drained and partly cultivated. In addition, the land areas are separated from the Lagoon by a dike, preventing a saline environment from being maintained outside the designated Saltwater Lagoon. Overall, the land areas in the Danish part are too dry and intensively used to be optimal to the breeding birds.

After construction of the dike, the breeding bird populations shifted more towards the German areas. Here, the land-use is much more beneficial to the breeding birds, because no cultivation has taken place, and a generally high water-level in the marsh areas is preserved. Furthermore, in Germany the new dike was placed closer to the original coastline than in Denmark, but a small area of the original foreland remained outside the dike, providing good breeding sites for colonial waterbirds.

It is concluded that, due to the creation of the Saltwater Lagoon, the Danish part of the area again sustains waterbirds in numbers of international importance. But an integrated approach to the Nature management of the enclosed areas — combining the solutions adopted for land management in the German part with the technical solution of re-establishing a saline environment behind the dike as in the Danish part — would have rendered a better compensation for the damage caused by the dike construction and related activities.

The Neotropics have vast river catchments with untapped hydroelectric potential, but there are multiple expected negative impacts of dams, including those on local food security and livelihoods. Yet, monitoring of dam effects on subsistence is rare, particularly during initial implementation. Our study assessed changes in human fish consumption near the Belo Monte Dam in the Brazilian Amazon during the period 2012–2021, which covers construction, operation and a severe El Niño-induced drought. Over time, fish became less common and were consumed in smaller amounts, even though fewer people shared meals. The largest changes occurred between 2013 and 2016 (post-construction but prior to full operation), resulting in a downward trend in fish consumption, particularly during the drought season. Adding more fish species to the diet did not increase consumption per person. These changes in fish consumption suggest that they stem from environmental impacts of the project (e.g., reduced river level), despite secondary effects from climatic events. These findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive assessments of the social and ecological impacts of large infrastructure projects in the Amazon, along with sustainable and equitable management strategies to ensure food security and meet the needs of local communities.

The analysis of conservation narratives primarily resides in the methods and techniques of social sciences, focusing mainly on uncovering advocacy versus critical lines of thought in the complex mosaic of arguments around institutional actors and the public. Researchers have previously proposed an archetypal scheme in which the core conservation narratives and their conceptual interrelations are classified. This report explores the feasibility of coupling such a traditional method with techniques emanating from quantitative linguistics, network analysis and bibliometry. The neologic metaphor of the Anthropause is purposely added to long-established narratives to examine its potential effects on the conservation narratives landscape. The results show that this metaphor reorganizes the mentally constructed connections between flag narratives and symbolic lexical units.

Cities are becoming increasingly important to biodiversity conservation, conservation that could also benefit urban people given the importance of nature to human well-being. Urban conservation is challenging, however, given cities’ primary role as human habitats and the need to simultaneously support heterogeneous human and wild species communities in similarly heterogeneous environments. We demonstrate a framework for identifying conservation zones within cities and human and species habitat preferences within them, thereby identifying habitat attributes that management could target to support human well-being and conservation objectives. The framework first categorizes conservation zones within a city, then develops species indicator communities for each zone. Habitat preferences are identified for each indicator community using richness modelling, and human habitat preferences within zones are identified using one of several approaches. Lastly, habitat preferences are compared to identify commonalities and differences within zones. We demonstrate our framework in Iowa City (IA, USA) using songbirds, identifying similarities in human and bird habitat preferences within conservation zones that management could target to support human well-being and species conservation and differences in preferences that could be proactively managed to reduce conflict. This framework can thus identify key habitat attributes and approaches to inform conservation planning targeted to specific settings within cities.

The hibernation sites of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus, L.) were discovered in central Mexico in 1975 and, following the decree of a protected area in 1986, processes of deforestation and forest degradation were triggered on the socially owned land in question. Further deterioration has occurred since the expansion and designation of the area as the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in 2000. An innovative programme of economic incentives was established to compensate the affected properties in the core zone for curtailment of their forest use and to pay for environmental services; however, some of the agrarian communities were in disagreement with this programme. Orthophotographs from 1994 were compared with high-resolution satellite images from 2017 in order to determine forest-cover trends in the areas incentivized by Payment for Environmental Services to avoid deforestation and those areas that were not incentivized. The results show an overall recovery of 2% in forest area between 1994 and 2017, while a 5% increase in the deforested area is notable in the core zone. The findings indicate that, for the establishment of an effective protected area on social property lands, consensus must be achieved across all of the communities in order to avoid subsequent forest loss.

Medium- and large-sized mammals play important roles in maintaining forest ecosystem functions, and these functions often diminish when mammal species are depleted by human activities. Understanding the sensitivity or tolerance of mammal species to human pressure and detecting species changes through monitoring programmes can inform appropriate management decisions. The objective of our study was to identify medium- and large-sized mammal species that can be included in a monitoring programme in the Southern Yungas of Argentina. We used occupancy modelling to estimate the probability of habitat use (ψ) of 13 of 25 mammal species detected by 165 camera traps placed in forests across a range of human footprint index (HFI) values. As defined by the HFI, 54% of the study area is wilderness. The probabilities of habitat use of two mammal species were significantly associated with the HFI: the lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris; ψ = 0.33, range = 0.22–0.50) was inversely associated with HFI values, whereas the grey brocket deer (Mazama gouazoubira; ψ = 0.79, range = 0.67–0.87) was positively associated with the HFI. Monitoring the probability of habitat use of the sensitive species (lowland tapir) could help us to detect changes in areas experiencing anthropogenic impacts before they cause extirpation, whereas the high probability of the habitat use values of the tolerant species (grey brocket deer) might indicate that anthropogenic impacts are strongly influencing habitat, signalling that mitigation strategies might be warranted. The Southern Yungas retains an intact mammal fauna, and we showed that the HFI is useful for monitoring anthropogenic impacts on these mammals. There are still opportunities to develop conservation strategies to minimize threats to mammal species in the region by implementing a monitoring programme with the proposed species.

Increasing public awareness of the need to protect Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs), as well as the establishment of regional municipalities, provided the impetus for local governments to initiate ESA planning in Ontario. As of 1981, twenty municipalities—primarily regional municipalities and counties—had adopted ESA programmes.

This paper examines the current status of ESA-protection planning in Ontario and the problems encountered by municipalities in adopting and implementing ESA programmes. Using a questionnaire survey, data were collected concerning 66 municipalities, and a review was carried out of the ESA policies in 36 Official Plans. The results show that an additional 11 municipalities have adopted ESA programmes since 1981, and that most of these have been designated cities. The primary problems encountered by municipalities in implementing ESA-protection programmes have been a lack of landowner support, weakness of any provincial policy-directive, and shortness of funding. These problems are also faced by uninvolved municipalities, and play an important role in preventing them from adopting ESA programmes.

If a wider municipal adoption of ESA programmes is to be achieved, a stronger commitment will be needed from the Provincial Government in the form of guiding policies, financial assistance, and incentives to landowners who wish to protect their sensitive lands. A greater emphasis on landowner contact and public education programmes will also be required. Municipalities should cooperate with other conservation agencies and organizations in working towards this end.