Peter Kareiva

The Nature Conservancy

Seafood farming is heralded for its economic opportunities and its potential to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production. Yet the persistent lack of awareness among the US public about these potential benefits of seafood farming is often cited as a barrier to social acceptance and industry growth. We employed two explorat...

Hunting and trapping of gray wolves (Canis lupus) has increased dramatically in the "lower 48" states of the United States. We assess the data used to justify the intense hunting pressure on wolves, and find an absence of accessible biological data. We find there is a clear need for more transparent reporting of livestock losses, wolf kills, and es...

Placing conservation easements on private lands could contribute greatly to biodiversity protection in the United States. However, a paucity of data prevents us from knowing to what extent this potential is met. We discuss best practices for baseline documentation reports and biodiversity surveys of properties that could help mitigate this data sho...

Conservation interventions such as assisted migration and genetic alterations are controversial in part because, through unintended hybridization events, they may imperil native species. Threats could stem from hybrid offspring having altered fitness or from genetic swamping due to extensive introgression of non‐native genes. Over the last 40 years...

Capitalism, globalization, consumerism and an almost religious commitment to perpetual growth are often blamed for the world's environmental woes. But does this mean that economic stagnation and Marxism, for example, would be the friend of the environment? We need to analyze the flaws of our current socioeconomic ecosystem and work to make concrete...

Inspired by Mark Plummer's legacy of questioning conservation and environmental orthodoxy, we challenge several common conservation memes and patterns of thinking. First, we argue that framing conservation messages as crises typically is not an effective strategy. Second, we question conservation regulations that are inflexible and insensitive to c...

Caught between ongoing habitat destruction and funding shortfalls, conservation organizations are using systematic planning approaches to identify places that offer the highest biodiversity return per dollar invested. However, available tools do not account for the landscape of funding for conservation or quantify the constraints this landscape imp...

No abstract is available for this article.

While there have been rapid advances in assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES), a critical remaining challenge is how to move from scientific knowledge to real-world decision making. We offer 6 lessons from our experiences applying new approaches and tools for quantifying BES in 20 pilot demonstrations: (1) Applying a BES approach...

This is the accepted manuscript of a paper that will be published in PNAS. It is currently under an infinite embargo.

The central challenge of the 21st century is to develop economic, social, and governance systems capable of ending poverty and achieving sustainable levels of population and consumption while securing the life-support systems underpinning current and future human well-being. Essential to meeting this challenge is the incorporation of natural capita...

The National Climate Assessment process gives us an opportunity to determine if the changes in ecosystems, biodiversity and ecosystem services that have been predicted to occur have actually come to pass. Where have we been right? Where have we been wrong? What can we learn from predictions that have not come to pass? An iterative process of predic...

The N ature C onservancy ( TNC ) was founded by ecologists as a U nited S tates land trust to purchase parcels of habitat for the purpose of scientific study. It has evolved into a global organization working in 35 countries ‘to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends’. TNC is now the world's largest conservation non‐governmental or...

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Executive Summary Several conservation organizations and scientists are promoting "sustainable intensification" as a strategy for simultaneously feeding the expanding human population and minimizing the need to clear more land for agriculture. While it is clear that higher crop yields per hectare can reduce pressure on land, there is no guarantee t...

We conducted an intensive review of conservation science to find out whether the field has tracked priorities over the past 20 years. A total of 628 papers from the literature, for the years 1984, 1994, and 2004, were surveyed. For each paper, we recorded where conservation research was done and what was studied. We found geographic gaps in conserv...

Climate change alters the functions of ecological systems. As a result, the provision of ecosystem services and the well-being of people that rely on these services are being modified. Climate models portend continued warming and more frequent extreme weather events across the US. Such weather-related disturbances will place a premium on the ecosys...

The global overshoot indicated by Ecological Footprint calculations consists entirely of an unreliable reframing of human carbon emissions and none of the five other land-use categories-cropland, grazing land, built-up land, fishing grounds, and forests. The Ecological Footprint is therefore "so misleading as to preclude its use in any serious scie...

In this Formal Comment, Blomqvist et al. note that the main points of their Perspective, "Does the Shoe Fit? Real versus Imagined Ecological Footprints," are robust to Rees and Wackernagel's response, "The Shoe Fits, but the Footprint is Larger than Earth."

As part of the 2014 US National Climate Assessment, over 60 subject-matter experts from government agencies, academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector assessed the current and projected impacts of climate change on ecosystems, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Here, we introduce and provide context for the papers included...

Extreme weather, sea-level rise and degraded coastal ecosystems are placing people and property at greater risk of damage from coastal hazards. The likelihood and magnitude of losses may be reduced by intact reefs and coastal vegetation, especially when those habitats fringe vulnerable communities and infrastructure. Using five sea-level-rise scena...

While numerous scientific publications have used biological data and sometimes decision theory to identify where conservation funds should be invested, studies that examine where money for conservation actually has been spent and how investment patterns have changed through time are scarce. We analyze changing spatial patterns of spending on land p...

A vast number of prioritization schemes have been developed to help conservation navigate tough decisions about the allocation of finite resources. However, the application of quantitative approaches to setting priorities in conservation frequently includes mistakes that can undermine their authors’ intention to be more rigorous and scientific in t...

In 1985, Michael Soulé asked, “What is conservation biology?” We revisit this question more than 25 years later and offer a revised set of core principles in light of the changed global context for conservation. Most notably, scientists now widely acknowledge that we live in a world dominated by humans, and therefore, the scientific underpinnings o...

Efficient conservation planning requires knowledge about conservation targets, threats to those targets, costs of conservation and the marginal return to additional conservation efforts. Systematic conservation planning typically only takes a small piece of this complex puzzle into account. Here, we use a return-on-investment (ROI) approach to prio...

Background/Question/Methods As the effects of climate change become increasingly prevalent, there is a growing recognition of the interdependency between human and ecological systems. Climate change puts at risk many of nature’s benefits, or ecosystem services, that humans derive from our lands and waters. The rapidly advancing field of climate a...

Background/Question/Methods Thousands of professional ecologists make their living as consultants and preparers of environmental impact assessments. This endeavor is largely seen as pedestrian by the academic elite, and rarely is discussed in any undergraduate ecology course. This is a mistake. The decisions and activities of global corporations m...

In biophysical terms, humanity has never been moving faster nor further from sustainability than it is now. Our increasing population size and per capita impacts are severely testing the ability of Earth to provide for peoples' most basic needs. Awareness of these circumstances has grown tremendously, as has the sophistication of efforts to address...

The global change research community needs to renew its social contract with society by moving beyond a focus on biophysical limits and toward solution-oriented research to provide realistic, context-specific pathways to a sustainable future. A focus on planetary opportunities is based on the premise that societies adapt to change and have historic...

Environmentalists often go to great lengths to block the construction of new dams because dams interfere with fish migration, inundate terrestrial habitats, and interrupt natural flows that are necessary for critical ecosystem processes. However, few environmental issues are so simplistically black and white, and dams are no exception. Dams can be...

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are emerging worldwide as important mechanisms to align investments in human and natural well-being. PES projects are often defined as voluntary transactions where well-defined environmental/ecosystem services (or land uses likely to secure those services) are bought by a minimum of one service buyer, from a mi...

Background/Question/Methods The idea that nature delivers benefits to humans is an easy sell. Turning that idea into changes in government action or business practices is not so simple. It is clear what conservationists and environmentalists think they are achieving by pushing for the valuation of ecosystem services. But what businesses and govern...

IntroductionBackground to global conservation priority schemesMethods in relation to goalsThresholds for identifying priority regionsScoring systems for identifying priority regionsGeneral issues relating to existing approachesReturn on investmentConclusions AcknowledgmentsReferences

IntroductionCongruence between important sites for biodiversity and ecosystem service provisionFinancial support for conserving ecosystem services and biodiversityDo World Bank projects achieve conservation and development goals?Integrating multiple ecosystem services in a mapping toolConclusions AcknowledgmentsReferences

Nature reserves and protected areas enjoy sacred status in conservation - which translates into a 'do not touch' attitude. But selling off some of the less worthy of them would pay conservation dividends.

Urban growth reduces open space in and around cities, impacting biodiversity and ecosystem services. Using land-cover and population data, we examined land consumption and open space loss between 1990 and 2000 for all 274 metropolitan areas in the contiguous United States. Nationally, 1.4 million ha of open space was lost, and the amount lost in a...

Climate change is altering ecological systems throughout the world. Managing these systems in a way that ignores climate change will likely fail to meet management objectives. The uncertainty in projected climate-change impacts is one of the greatest challenges facing managers attempting to address global change. In order to select successful manag...

The full or partial acquisition of land remains a predominant focus of terrestrial conservation strategies. Non-governmental organizations play an important role in habitat protection, yet few studies investigate their contribution to conservation investment. Here we examine temporal trends in the size of land transactions made by the world's large...

Don't Be Such a Scientist Talking Substance in an Age of Style by Randy Olson Island Press, Washington, DC, 2009. 215 pp., illus. Paper, $19.95. ISBN 9781597265638. Am I Making Myself Clear? A Scientist's Guide to Talking to the Public by Cornelia Dean Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009. 284 pp. $19.95, £14.95, €18. ISBN 9780674036352....

Now that there is overwhelming evidence of global climate change, scientists, managers and planners (i.e. practitioners) need to assess the potential impacts of climate change on particular ecological systems, within specific geographic areas, and at spatial scales they care about, in order to make better land management, planning, and policy decis...

Temperature and precipitation change by country during 1951–2002 (same as Figure 4, except countries with >20% area changing are labeled). (6.00 MB TIF)

Seasonal temperature trends during 1951–2002. Both the magnitude of the trends (left) and p-value significance (right) of the trends are mapped out, and the area of significant change in each of the magnitude and p-value significance categories are provided at the bottom. The total height (positive plus negative) of the graph of trend magnitude is...

Climate Wizard interactive results web page. (3.65 MB TIF)

Model agreement in precipitation change. Map showing areas where at least 80% (13 of the 16 models) of the GCMs agree precipitation will either increase (blue areas) or decrease (brown areas). Areas in grey have less than 80% agreement in the direction of change in precipitation. Note that this map was created by overlaying all positive values from...

Seasonal precipitation trends during 1951–2002. Both the magnitude of the trends (left) and p-value significance (right) of the trends are mapped out, and the area of significant change in each of the magnitude and p-value significance categories are provided at the bottom. Terrestrial areas in white did not have sufficient station coverage for the...

Background: Although the message of "global climate change" is catalyzing international action, it is local and regional changes that directly affect people and ecosystems and are of immediate concern to scientists, managers, and policy makers. A major barrier preventing informed climate-change adaptation planning is the difficulty accessing, anal...

Public lands and waters in the United States traditionally have been managed using frameworks and objectives that were established under an implicit assumption of stable climatic conditions. However, projected climatic changes render this assumption invalid. Here, we summarize general principles for management adaptations that have emerged from a m...

With rapid global urban growth, the proximity between urban and protected areas will increase. We identify four categories of nations, based on the proportion of people in urban areas, the amount of protected area, and the 1995 and estimated 2030 distance between cities and protected areas: urbanized nations (>60% urban) with a high population dens...

We hypothesized that willingness to financially support conservation depends on one's experience with nature. In order to test this hypothesis, we used a novel time-lagged correlation analysis to look at times series data concerning nature participation, and evaluate its relationship with future conservation support (measured as contributions to co...

Genetically engineered microbes (GEMs) have the potential to revolutionize agricultural techniques by facilitating crop protection and increased productivity. However, there has been widespread concern regarding the potential impact these microbes may have on the environment. Here we mathematically model the dynamics of GEMs in an agricultural sett...

Ecology is a leading discipline in the synthesis of diverse knowledge. Ecologists have had considerable experience in bringing together diverse, multinational data sets, disciplines, and cultural perspectives to address a wide range of issues in basic and applied science. Now is the time to build on this foundation and invest in ecological synthesi...

Background/Question/Methods and Results/Conclusions For the first time ever most of the world's population lives in cities. Meanwhile children in the US are spending less and less time outdoors and nature-based recreation in general is declining. Consistently, "the environment" is given the lowest priority when it comes to issues people care about...

Background/Question/Methods The Natural Capital Project has developed a portfolio of spatially explicit models that translate maps of land cover, land use, soils, and topography into assessments of environmental services under different scenarios. This suite of models is called InVEST, which will be demonstrated at both a general level, as well as...

Background/Question/Methods Climate is not projected to change uniformly—different ecological systems will experience different changes requiring tools to translate cutting-edge climate science into ecologically relevant information (U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2008). Here, we provide an overview of the ClimateWizard (http://www.ClimateWi...

We identified 100 scientific questions that, if answered, would have the greatest impact on conservation practice and policy. Representatives from 21 international organizations, regional sections and working groups of the Society for Conservation Biology, and 12 academics, from all continents except Antarctica, compiled 2291 questions of relevance...

Few empirical studies examine how conservation organizations distribute the resources that they have available for habitat conservation, despite numerous theoretical studies that recommend how these resources should be directed. Here we examine the distribution of conservation investments made over 49 years by a major conservation nongovernmental o...

Climate change is predicted to be one of the greatest drivers of ecological change in the coming century. Increases in temperature over the last century have clearly been linked to shifts in species distributions. Given the magnitude of projected future climatic changes, we can expect even larger range shifts in the coming century. These changes wi...

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Supplementary table corresponding to manuscript (0.11 MB DOC)

Nature provides a wide range of benefits to people. There is increasing consensus about the importance of incorporating these “ecosystem services” into resource management decisions, but quantifying the levels and values of these services has proven difficult. We use a spatially explicit modeling tool, Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and...

The numerous studies examining where efforts to conserve biodiversity should be targeted are not matched by comparable research efforts addressing how conservation investments should be structured and what balance of conservation approaches works best in what contexts. An obvious starting point is to examine the past allocation of effort among cons...

Climate change is altering ecological systems throughout the world. Managing these systems in a way that ignores climate change will likely fail to meet management objectives. The uncertainty in projected climate change impacts is one of the greatest challenges facing managers attempting to address global change. In order to select successful manag...

Biodiversity protection does not undermine poverty alleviation goals in development projects, especially under sustainable finance and market mechanisms.

The core idea of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is that the human condition is tightly linked to environmental condition. This assertion suggests that conservation and development projects should be able to achieve both ecological and social progress without detracting from their primary objectives. Whereas “win–win” projects that achieve both...