Umbrella species are often spatially demanding and have limited ability to adapt to environmental changes induced by human land-use. This makes them vulnerable to human encroachment. In Sweden, broadleaved trees are disadvantaged by forestry, and commercially managed forests are often deprived of dead wood. This has led to a situation where previously widespread top predators in saproxylic food webs, such as the white-backed woodpecker (Dendrocopos leucotos), have become species of conservation concern. The white-backed woodpecker is generally considered an umbrella species, and it has been linked to forests with large volumes of dead wood from broadleaved trees. In recent years, forest stands have been restored for the white-backed woodpecker, but post-treatment evaluations have rarely included other species that also occur in broad-leaved forests (co-occurring species). Many co-occurring species are saproxylic beetles. In this study, we collected saproxylic beetles and environmental data in restored and commercially managed forests to evaluate if habitat restoration for the white-backed woodpecker also benefited other species with similar habitat associations. We found that volumes of coarse woody debris were higher in restored than in commercially managed forests, and that a majority of man-made snags and downed logs were created from birch trees (Betula spp.). Most spruce trees (Picea abies) were extracted during forest restoration, and this opened up the forest canopy, and created stands dominated by broadleaved trees.Many saproxylic beetles were more common in restored forests, and there were significant differences in species composition between treatments. These differences were largely explained by species traits. Effects of sunexposure were particularly important, but many beneficiary species were also linked to dead wood from broadleaved trees. Red-listed saproxylic beetles showed a similar pattern with more species and individuals in restored sites. The white-backed woodpecker is still critically endangered in Sweden, but important prey species are already responding to forest restoration at the stand level. We recognize that landscape-level improvements will be required to bring the white-backed woodpecker back, but also that the umbrella species concept can provide a useful framework for successful forest restoration as many co-occurring saproxylic beetle species seemingly benefitted from restoration for the white-backed woodpecker

A lack of ecological responses in stream restoration projects has been prevalent throughout recent literature with many studies reporting insufficient time for recovery. We assessed the relative importance of time, site variables, and landscape setting for understanding how plant species richness and understory productivity recover over time in riparian zones of northern Swedish streams. We used a space-for-time substitution consisting of 13 stream reaches restored 5-25 years ago, as well as five unrestored channelized reference reaches. We inventoried the riparian zone for all vascular plant species along 60-m study reaches and quantified cover and biomass in plots. We found that while species richness increased with time, understory biomass decreased. Forbs made up the majority of the species added, while the biomass of graminoids decreased the most over time, suggesting that the reduced dominance of graminoids favored less productive forbs. Species richness and density patterns could be attributed to dispersal limitation, with anemochorous species being more associated with time after restoration than hydrochorous, zoochorous, or vegetatively reproducing species. Using multiple linear regression, we found that time along with riparian slope and riparian buffer width (e.g., distance to logging activities) explained the most variability in species richness, but that variability in total understory biomass was explained primarily by time. The plant community composition of restored reaches differed from that of channelized references, but the difference did not increase over time. Rather, different time categories had different successional trajectories that seemed to converge on a unique climax community for that time period. Given our results, timelines for achieving species richness objectives should be extended to 25 years or longer if recovery is defined as a saturation of the accumulation of species over time. Other recommendations include making riparian slopes as gentle as possible given the landscape context and expanding riparian buffer width for restoration to have as much impact as possible.

The global extraction of forest and water resources has led to habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, and declines in ecosystem services. As a consequence, ecological restoration has become a global priority. Restoration efforts to offset this trend, however, are not always effective. One reason is that many restoration projects target single ecosystems and fail to acknowledge functional links between ecosystems. We synthesized current knowledge on links between forest and stream ecosystems, the effect of anthropogenic stressors on these links, and their implications for restoration planning. Many examples show that lateral subsidies, such as invertebrate prey and nutrients, are important in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Stressors such as commercial forestry, flow regulation, stream channelization, and climate change affect these links and should be considered in restoration planning. Restoration practitioners are encouraged to view adjacent forest and stream ecosystems as one entity.

This article examines how providing one basic city service—sanitation—influenced civic governmentalstructures from 1400 to 1600 in two of England’s largest provincial cities, Norwich and Coventry,and how those changes meshed with concepts of good rule. Although sanitation services wereneither the most costly nor the highest profile activity of city councils, they can be a windowinto the evolution of governmental structures during the early phase of city rule. The periodwitnessed an increasing reliance on a myriad of officials to provide services, but this transitionwas not straightforward. City councils grappled with how to allocate responsibility for sanitationduties among civic officials, and the assignment of responsibility shifted often over the period.In general, the trend was to allocate responsibility closer and closer to the physical problem—that is, movement from the mayor as overseer to local inspectors.

This article investigates the workings of sanitation technologies in late medieval English and Scandinavian cities through both written and archeological evidence. It defines the roles of city corporations and individuals in the areas of street maintenance and waste management between the years 1350 and 1550. It argues that although the urban environment was managed through seemingly simple technologies, such as latrines and guttered cobblestone streets, the technologies required a conjunction of city-provided services and individual behavior management to make them work as intended. The late medieval city governments under investigation therefore crafted social relations to create functional sanitation systems. Because responsibility for sanitation was allocated both to individuals and to the city government, the waste-handling and sanitation strategies of the late medieval city were possibly not as ineffective as they appear on the surface

Ecological restoration has been mainstreamed in international biodiversity policies in the last five years. I analyze statements about restoration in three international policies: the Convention for Biodiversity Strategic Plan 2011-2020 and Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Convention for Biodiversity Decision XI/16 on ecosystem restoration, and the European Union’s Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. I argue that restoration functions at three different levels in these policies: as an objective, as a target, and as a tool. Because restoration appears at all three levels, the policies encourage counting all restoration activity as meeting the objectives of the policy regardless of the activity’s actual effect on ecosystem services or biodiversity more broadly. Reaching a numerical target for a restored area may not necessarily support the overarching policy goals of maintaining Earth’s biodiversity and supporting ecosystem services.

In April 1996, two men working at a convalescent center wrote a letter to the journal Nature proposing that a new word be adopted to designate a person who is the last in the lineage: endling. This had come up because of patients who were dying and thought of themselves as the last of their family line. The word was not picked up in medical circles. But, in 2001, when the National Museum of Australia (NMA) opened its doors, it featured a gallery called Tangled Destinies and endling reappeared. On the wall facing a case with a thylacine specimen was written: Endling (n.) The last surviving individual of a species of animal or plant. Since that appearance, the word endling has slowly seeped into popular culture, appearing in symphonic music, performance art, science fiction stories, comics, and other art works. This paper examines the cultural power of the concept of endling as the last of a species and the history of its mobilization in a world facing extinction around every corner.

There are objects and practices we would not know existed if we relied only on written texts or archeological evidence to piece together medieval agricultural history. These ephemeral aspects of the agricultural past are sometimes, however, captured in art. This essay explores some of the possible ways to recover fleeting history using medieval illuminations, which are hand-painted illustrations in books most often unrelated to agriculture. Unglamorous technologies, agricultural processes, plant varietals, animal breeds, housing design, and variation of agricultural practice in time and space can all be explored in medieval manuscript art. Medieval illuminations can, under the right conditions, give us new knowledge about agricultural practice rather than serving as simple “illustrations” of agricultural history known from textual sources.

This article examines the local responses to medieval urban river pollution in three leading English towns—Coventry, Norwich, and York—during the late fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The case studies reveal the extent to which local governments became involved in river upkeep. Interventions by the town governments were twofold: (1) preventative actions in the form of regulations and regulatory enforcement and (2) responsive actions to physically remove materials that had already accumulated in the rivers. Previous histories have not treated pollution regulations and regular river upkeep activities such as scouring and dredging as part of the same toolbox for responding to urban river pollution, yet these two seemingly separate activities were indeed connected during the medieval period. Both legislative action and scouring projects were responses to filth and waste accumulation in urban waterways. By overlooking the connection between pollution legislation and river cleansing, historians have underappreciated the extent of involvement by local town governments in controlling and responding to pollution in the riverine landscape

This article analyzes two types of latrine regulation in far northern Europe during the medieval period: latrine placement and waste disposal. It shows that latrines in the later fourteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries were very much within the public sphere. Public regulation of latrine placement and waste disposal was required to control individual behavior for the larger public good. Making this private matter into a public concern was integral to good city government in the eyes of elite citizens.

To examine the integration of oil and ocean, this essay analyzes depictions of offshore ecosystems in American aquarium displays owned by a variety of organizations, ranging from commercial restaurant chains to nonprofit environmentally focused organizations. The essay will argue that much of the public presentation of the offshore ecosystem is tied up with the development of Rigs-to-Reefs programs, which allow the conversion of offshore oil structures into artificial reefs after they are decommissioned from active use. The Rigs-to-Reefs concept developed as part of broad strategies to improve U.S. fishing grounds and to make offshore oil production environmentally friendly, and Louisiana began the first state Rigs-to-Reefs program in 1986. In the wake of the Rigs-to-Reefs developments, aquariums located in the Gulf Coast chose to display Gulf of Mexico tanks highlighting the contribution of the oil industry to the Gulf’s ecosystem. After discussing these Gulf exhibits and their context, the essay turns to an exhibit in California, which was introduced during a protracted legislative conflict about permitting Rigs-to-Reefs in that state. By placing these displays into the specific social and political context of the Rigs-to-Reefs program, we can see why aquariums developed hybrid schemes for the representation of marine life in the region that mixed oil and water.

This chapter addresses where two issues – the problem of not seeing at a certain time and the idea of a static nature over time – converge in two historical searches for the last: the European beaver (Castor fiber) in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century and the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) of Tasmania in the twentieth. I explore how the presence of an absence (no known animals) became understood over time as an absence of presence (extinction) through narrative. Swedish beavers and Tasmanian thylacines had both become rare and then finally unseen, which led some people to claim their extinction. Others, however, claimed that the animals had survived, that they continued to exist in the wild fringes beyond civilization. Significantly these searches appear on the fringes of the modern developed world: the northern forests of the northern nation of Sweden and the island of Tasmania off the southeastern coast of Australia. Contentious conclusions resulted from the uncertainty of knowledge and management of the unknown. Consensus on the extinction of the beaver was more easily reached than the thylacine, but in both cases, extinction narratives became fixed and paved the way for efforts to reverse the extinctions. These histories reveal how extinction narratives are built on the acceptance of presence of absence as a sign for absence of presence.

The term 'rewilding' sounds as if it should have a straightforward meaning 'to make wild again'. But in truth the term has a complex history and a host of meanings have been ascribed to it. Rewilding as a specific scientific term has its beginnings as a reference to the Wildlands Project, which was founded in 1991 and aimed to create North American core wilderness areas without human activity that would be connected by corridors. Words, however, do not stand still-they change over time and take on new meanings, while sometimes simultaneously retaining the older sense. Employing Foucault's idea of historical genealogy, this article examines how the term rewilding was historically adopted and modified in ecological scientific discourse over the last two decades. This investigation probes what and, by extension, when and where, rewilding refers to as it has moved into various geographies across the globe. It then examines how the term has moved outside of science and been adopted by environmental activists as a plastic word. Taken as a whole, rewilding discourse seeks to erase human history and involvement with the land and flora and fauna. Such an attempted split between nature and culture may prove unproductive and even harmful. A more inclusive rewilding is a preferable strategy.

The article discusses the political and natural implications of the historical criteria included in Red List designations.

This article examines Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax through the lens of urban environmental history, examining the everyday context of Harington’s discourse. It argues that although Harington may have used the work for the political and social commentary discussed by other scholars, he also puts forward a vision of a new physical urban sanitation system to address concerns about disease transmission from exposure to waste. His proposal includes both individually-owned improved flushed privies and government-sponsored sewage systems, a hitherto overlooked element of his program.