Biodiversity Islands: Strategies for Conservation in Human-Dominated Environments

This book is intended to provide an overview for the identification and establishment of biodiversity islands. It presents examples and case studies where the biodiversity islands approach is being used in a variety of locations and contexts worldwide. It will contribute to design parameters on appropriate sizing and spatial distribution of biodiversity islands in order to be effective in conservation and regeneration across the landscape, using integrated landscape management approaches. This book is essential given the current worldwide trend of habitat destruction and the need to preserve biodiversity and its values.

The chapters are organized in five sections. The first section provides the introduction. Section 2,3 and 4 discuss the challenges and alternatives of establishment and management, case studies across the globe, safeguarding of the environmental, economic, and social benefits, and the final section offers a conclusion.

The contributing authors present views from the academic, the practitioner and the policymaker perspectives, offering alternatives and suggestions for promoting strategies that support biodiversity conservation through intentionally designed frameworks for sustainable forest landscapes.

Readers will discover suggestions and concrete examples that can be used by a variety of stakeholders in various settings throughout the world.

This book is useful to researchers, farmers, foresters, landowners, land managers, city planners, and policy makers alike. 

Dr. Florencia Montagnini has over 30 years of experience researching and teaching in topics on sustainability of managed ecosystems in the tropics, such as forest, tree plantations and agroforestry systems, with a special emphasis on Latin America. Her work as a scientific advisor and consultant has also taken her to Africa and South East Asia.  Her research encompasses sustainable land-use systems that integrate ecological principles with economic, social and political factors; the principles and applications of forest landscape restoration; the reforestation of degraded lands with native species; identification and quantification of ecological services (biodiversity, carbon sequestration and watershed protection); organic farming using indigenous resources; biodiversity conservation in human-dominated landscapes; biodiversity islands. She received her BS in Agronomy from the National University of Rosario, Argentina, her Masters in Ecology from the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC), Caracas, Venezuela, and her Ph. D. in Ecology from the University of Georgia. Since 1989, has worked as a professor and researcher at the Yale School of the Environment, as well as the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE). She has written 11 books and over 250 scientific articles about the ecology of tropical forests, agroforestry systems, native species reforestation and forest landscape restoration.