As the rate and extent of environmental change increases, traditional perspectives on ecosystem management and restoration are being juxtaposed with approaches that focus on the altered settings now being encountered or anticipated. We suggest that a combination of traditional and emerging frameworks is necessary to achieve the multiple goals of ecosystem management, including biodiversity conservation and provision of other ecosystem services such as food and fiber production, recreation, and spiritual enrichment.An effective approach entails a move away from partitioning the environment into dichotomous categories (eg natural/unnatural, production/conservation, intact/degraded). Instead, landscapes are increasingly characterized by a complex mosaic of ecosystems or "patches" in varying states of modification, each of which delivers various combinations of services and presents assorted management challenges and opportunities. These patches interact and affect broader-scale processes (such as water flows and animal migrations), necessitating the urgent development of a conservation and restoration strategy that recognizes these rapid spatial changes.Here, we focus on an emerging framework that differentiates patches according to the degree of change from a historical state (resulting from altered abiotic factors and biotic compositions), the likely extent to which such changes are reversible, and the effect of altered patches on other patches within the landscape (WebPanel 1). This framework, derived from recent research on novel ecosystems (Hobbs et al. 2009, helps to identify the relative values of ecosystems in different conditions and the management options available in each case. As seen from a landscape perspective, this framework provides a comprehensive approach to decision making and management, including much-needed prioritization of resource allocations.n Managing the whole landscape Recent analyses have highlighted the need for management and restoration efforts to go beyond site-focused interventions and to consider landscape and regional scales (Mentz et al. 2013). Ecosystem managers increas- REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWSManaging the whole landscape: historical, hybrid, and novel ecosystems The reality confronting ecosystem managers today is one of heterogeneous, rapidly transforming landscapes, particularly in the areas more affected by urban and agricultural development. A landscape management framework that incorporates all systems, across the spectrum of degrees of alteration, provides a fuller set of options for how and when to intervene, uses limited resources more effectively, and increases the chances of achieving management goals. That many ecosystems have departed so substantially from their historical trajectory that they defy conventional restoration is not in dispute. Acknowledging novel ecosystems need not constitute a threat to existing policy and management approaches. Rather, the development of an integrated approach to management interventions can provide options that are in tune with ...

The concept of trophic levels is one of the oldest in ecology and informs our understanding of energy flow and top-down control within food webs, but it has been criticized for ignoring omnivory. We tested whether trophic levels were apparent in 58 real food webs in four habitat types by examining patterns of trophic position. A large proportion of taxa (64.4%) occupied integer trophic positions, suggesting that discrete trophic levels do exist. Importantly however, the majority of those trophic positions were aggregated around integer values of 0 and 1, representing plants and herbivores. For the majority of the real food webs considered here, secondary consumers were no more likely to occupy an integer trophic position than in randomized food webs. This means that, above the herbivore trophic level, food webs are better characterized as a tangled web of omnivores. Omnivory was most common in marine systems, rarest in streams, and intermediate in lakes and terrestrial food webs. Trophic-level-based concepts such as trophic cascades may apply to systems with short food chains, but they become less valid as food chains lengthen.

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity.

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Human occupation is usually associated with degraded landscapes but 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia's coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity. This is particularly the case over the last 6,000 years when intensified intertidal shellfish usage resulted in the accumulation of substantial shell middens. We show that soils at habitation sites are higher in calcium and phosphorous. Both of these are limiting factors in coastal temperate rainforests. Western redcedar (Thuja plicata) trees growing on the middens were found to be taller, have higher wood calcium, greater radial growth and exhibit less top die-back. Coastal British Columbia is the first known example of long-term intertidal resource use enhancing forest productivity and we expect this pattern to occur at archaeological sites along coastlines globally.