This article investigates if higher levels of social capital, better governance structures, and a more ambitious conservation policy are positively linked to the ability of states to address biodiversity loss. Serving this purpose is a data set containing estimates of woodpecker diversity in 20 European countries. These data are argued to be a more valid indicator of biodiversity than most other available cross-national measures of environmental quality. A seemingly unrelated regression analysis reveals that none of the indicators are linked to higher levels of woodpecker diversity, which in turn leads to the conclusion that present institutions, environmental policies, and social structures have negligible effects on biodiversity compared to long-term landscape transformations.
Large herbivores play key roles in terrestrial ecosystems. Continuous defaunation processes have produced cascade effects on plant community composition, vegetation structure, and even climate. Wood-pastures were created by traditional management practices that have maintained open structures and biodiversity for millennia. In Europe, despite the broad recognition of their biological importance, such landscapes are declining due to land-use changes. This calls for finding urgent solutions for wood-pasture conservation. To test whether introducing an ecological replacement of an extinct wild horse could have positive effects on wood-pasture restoration, we designed a 3-year rewilding experiment. Horses created a more open wood-pasture structure by browsing on seedlings and saplings, affected tree composition via selective browsing and controlled the colonization of woody vegetation in grassland-dominated areas. Thus, rewilding could be a potential avenue for wood-pasture restoration and biodiversity conservation. However, such benefits may not materialize without a necessary paradigm and political shift.
Key words: Monitoring, perception, indicators Globally, land-use and climate change has resulted in a number of landscape transformations. At the same time, how humans use and perceive landscapes has changed and is changing. People's landscape perception depends on many different factors such as gender, age, sense of place, ownership and actual land-use interest. Despite the growing number of studies suggesting that certain biophysical landscape properties are perceived by humans in similar ways, independently of cultural background and personal preferences, few studies have determined the interactions between sense of place, demography and preferences for these landscape properties. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of linking perceived landscape features to biophysical landscape property data sampled in the NILS (National Inventory of Landscapes in Sweden) monitoring program. "Features" are e.g. descriptions of perceived things such as an open landscape and "properties" are measured field data such as cover of spruce. In doing that we aim at enabling the use of monitoring data as a proxy for evaluate landscape perception changes over time. We used the Swedish national environmental objectives as a framework policy, since those objectives include targets that are linked to landscape perception. So far, however, no indicators have been defined to follow them up. We collected information on how people with a professional background linked to mountain areas, such as officials at governmental organisations and business companies, perceive the Swedish mountains. In an enquiry the respondent's rated pre-defined attributes linked to perceptions of mountain landscapes, as well as described the perceptions with their own words. The output data were later subjectively linked to physical landscape properties monitored in the NILS program. The landscape feature primarily associated to Swedish mountains were "view", "openness" and "open landscapes", whereas "spruce" and "pine" that contradict openness were much lower rated. We suggest that by assessing physical landscape properties using monitoring data, it is possible to evaluate people's potentially positive or negative perceptions of landscapes, as well as changes in perceptions that may occur when the landscape change. These linkages could be used to evaluate the potential of a landscape to provide restoratives or aesthetical values of landscapes over time. Results from the evaluations could also be used for guiding landscape management to increase certain perception values and address negative impacts of land-use decisions on other values. ; peerReviewed
