Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.

We explore the connections among indigenous climate-related narratives, documented temperature changes, and climate change impact studies from the scientific literature. We then propose a framework for enhancing synthesis of these indigenous narratives of observed climate change with global assessments. Our aim is to contribute to the thoughtful and respectful integration of indigenous knowledge with scientific data and analysis, so that this rich body of knowledge can inform science and so that indigenous peoples can use the tools and methods of science for the benefit of their communities if they choose to do so. Improving ways of understanding such connections is critical as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report process proceeds.

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We evaluated the habitat and populations of the black howler monkey (Alouatta pigra) in the municipality of Balancán, Tabasco, southeastern Mexico, using a combination of field surveys and remotely sensed data. We identified 21,937 ha of remnant vegetation composed of 1,348 fragments. Fragments separated by up to 200 m were grouped into "clusters" of fragments in accordance with the maximum observed open distance crossed by A. pigra. A total of 11% or 84 of the 772 clusters identified through remote sensing were selected at random, and for these we determined the vegetation type, canopy height, area, and distance to the closest human settlement. In these same 84 clusters, which included a total area of 9,817 ha, from October to June of 2006 we located a total of 1,064 black howler monkeys, including 228 troops and 49 solitary monkeys. A. pigra was found in 62 (74.7%) of all clusters visited, with a cumulative area of 6,032 ha. Troops varied in size from 2 to 15 individuals (average 6.0+/-2.9 ind/troop). Adults were 67% (n=716) of detected individuals, whereas juveniles were 20.5% (n=218) and infants were 12.5% (n=133). We found black howlers to occur at an ecological density of 10.8 ind/km(2), which is low in comparison with A. pigra in other fragmented and conserved sites. We found a statistically significant relationship between the area of clusters and the abundance of howler monkeys (r(2)=0.2, F=10.47, gl=3, P=0.002). In addition, the probability of finding A. pigra was greater in secondary vegetation, riparian vegetation, tropical dry forest, undisturbed tropical oak forest, and palm forest (F=12, gl=3, P<0.0001), as compared with disturbed tropical oak forest. Our results provide data on the distribution, abundance, and population structure of black howler monkeys in a fragmented landscape in the southeast of Mexico. These data are a necessary prerequisite for conservation planning for this species.

The Austral and Neotropical America (ANA) section of the Society for Conservation Biology includes a vast territory with some of the largest relatively pristine ecosystems in the world. With more than 573 million people, the economic growth of the region still depends strongly on natural resource exploitation and still has high rates of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. A survey among the ANA section membership, with more than 700 members, including most of the section's prominent ecologists and conservationists, indicates that lack of capacity building for conservation, corruption, and threats such as deforestation and illegal trade of species, are among the most urgent problems that need to be addressed to improve conservation in the region. There are, however, strong universities and ecology groups taking the lead in environmental research and conservation, a most important issue to enhance the ability of the region to solve conservation and development conflicts.

A hybrid zone exists between Macaca tonkeana and Macaca hecki (Primates: Cercopithecidae), centered along the Tawaeli-Toboli road in the narrow isthmus that connects North and Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The current study demonstrates morphological substructure from north to south across the hybrid zone. Macaques to the northwest of the Tawaeli-Toboli road more closely resemble M. hecki, and macaques to the southeast of the road resemble M. tonkeana. While morphology shifted for both males and females over a distance of 1,500-2,000 m, adult males were significantly more M. tonkeana-like across the morphological gradient. This suggests that in the study area, males of M. tonkeana-like morphology are dispersing into hybrid groups at the expense of M. hecki-like males. A permutation analysis of diagnostic character states indicated that associations existed among several morphological traits. This could be due to the operation of one or several nonexclusive evolutionary processes, including recent secondary contact, pleiotropic effects, physical linkage of loci, natural selection against hybrids, the influx of parental types, or assortative mating. Continued environmental perturbation associated with the Tawaeli-Toboli road is likely to be a significant factor in the future of the M. tonkeana/M. hecki hybrid interaction.

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Capacity development is increasingly recognized as central to conservation goals. Efforts to develop individual, organizational and societal capacity underpin direct investments in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management, and sustain their impact over time. In the face of urgent needs and increasingly complex contexts for conservation the sector not only needs more capacity development, it needs new approaches to capacity development. The sector is embracing the dynamic relationships between the ecological, political, social and economic dimensions of conservation. Capacity development practitioners should ensure that individuals, organizations and communities are prepared to work effectively in these complex environments of constant change to transform the systems that drive biodiversity loss and unsustainable, unequitable resource use. Here we advocate for a systems view of capacity development. We propose a conceptual framework that aligns capacity development components with all stages of conservation efforts, fosters attention to context, and coordinates with parallel efforts to engage across practitioners and sectors for more systemic impact. Furthermore, we highlight a need for practitioners to target, measure and support vital elements of capacity that have traditionally received less attention, such as values and motivation, leadership and organizational culture, and governance and participation by using approaches from psychology, the social sciences and systems thinking. Drawing from conservation and other sectors, we highlight examples of approaches that can support reflective practice, so capacity development practitioners can better understand the factors that favour or hinder effectiveness of interventions and influence system-wide change.