A growing number of protected areas are defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as protected landscapes and seascapes, or category V protected areas, one of six protected area categories based on management approach. Category V now makes up over half the protected area coverage in Europe, for instance. While the earliest category V areas were designated mainly for their landscape and recreational values, they are increasingly expected also to protect biodiversity. Critics have claimed that they fail to conserve enough biodiversity.

The predominant environmental consciousness in both the United States and China reflects an underlying sense of separation of people from nature. Likewise, traditional landscape paintings in the United States and China share a common underlying aesthetic—i.e., the “picturesque”. Together, these similarities appear to have led to the preservation of similar types of landscapes in both countries.

This research examines the impact of forest management regimes, with various degrees of restriction, on forest conservation in a dry deciduous Indian forest landscape. Forest change is mapped using Landsat satellite images from 1977, 1990, 1999, and 2011. The landscape studied has lost 1478 km2 of dense forest cover between 1977 and 2011, with a maximum loss of 1002 km2 of dense forest between 1977 and 1990. The number of protected forest areas has increased, concomitant with an increase in restrictions on forest access and use outside protected areas.

Anthropogenic land use will likely present a greater challenge to biodiversity than climate change this century in the Pacific Northwest, USA. Even if species are equipped with the adaptive capacity to migrate in the face of a changing climate, they will likely encounter a human-dominated landscape as a major dispersal obstacle. Our goal was to identify, at the ecoregion-level, protected areas in close proximity to lands with a higher likelihood of future land-use conversion.

Protected areas are intended to conserve biodiversity by restricting human activities within their boundaries. However, such restrictions are difficult to enforce fully in many tropical parks. Improving regulatory enforcement requires an understanding of prevailing challenges to detection and sanctioning activities. Drawing from empirical field research in 15 Colombian parks, I show that current enforcement efforts may be insufficient to deter most priority threats.

The introduction to this set of papers highlights four challenges to the large-scale analysis of population growth at protected area edges in Africa and Latin America undertaken by George Wittemyer and colleagues in their 2008 paper published in Science. First, it raises questions about their sampling procedures, given national-level variation in systems of protected area designation and protected area estates. Second, it challenges the largely economic model of migration decisions that underlies their analysis.

We review Miami-Dade County's Environmentally Endangered Lands (EEL) Covenant Program as a means to create protected areas on private property via financial incentives. Such incentives go a step beyond regulatory and fee simple approaches to conservation. The program is codified under Chapter 25B, Article II, of the Miami-Dade County Code as authorized by section 193.501, Florida Statutes.

National parks are often places where people have previously lived and worked-they have been formed by a combination of natural and human processes that embody an identifiable history of cultural and political values. Conservation of protected areas is primarily about how we perceive such landscapes, how we place differential values on different landscape components, and who gets to decide on these values. Thus, conservation has been and still is very much about issues of power and environmental justice.

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.

National parks are often places where people have previously lived and worked-they have been formed by a combination of natural and human processes that embody an identifiable history of cultural and political values. Conservation of protected areas is primarily about how we perceive such landscapes, how we place differential values on different landscape components, and who gets to decide on these values. Thus, conservation has been and still is very much about issues of power and environmental justice.

Protected area downgrading, downsizing and degazettement (PADDD) is a global phenomenon that has not received formal attention in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) policies designed to reduce forest carbon emissions and conserve biodiversity. Here, we examine how PADDD affects deforestation and forest carbon emissions. We documented 174 enacted and 8 proposed PADDD events affecting more than 48,000 km² in three REDD+ priority countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malaysia, and Peru.