• The 9th World Wilderness Congress will be held in November in Merida, Mexico.
• Nine thresholds for a safe planet (from Nature)
• Even the most dire predictions from the IPCC were optimistic. It’s already twice as hot as they thought it would be.
• Since it’s getting warmer, kudzu is creeping north to Canada. Hey Toronto, better sleep with your windows closed.

• Science recently published further evidence of the “broken window” theory, which suggests that people act badly in degraded environments. These studies are about human-dominated environments, but it seems likely that the same is true for more “natural” areas, too.
• Christopher Dunn argues in Nature that cultural diversity ought to be preserved alongside biodiversity. He even suggests that maps of hotspots of the two tend to overlap. Okay, so let’s make a deal: people can stay in and around areas of high biodiversity if they agree to live according to their “traditional” culture — any development or significant growth and you’ve got to move to the city. Fair?
• Yesterday I mentioned some worry about homogenizing landscapes in rural areas. There was a paper published in Conservation Biology by Rahmig et al. recently that suggested exactly that: homogenization of farming practices has led to declines in avian diversity.
• Also in Cons Bio, Ben Collen and colleagues at ZSL take a closer look at the “Living Planet Index,” one of the 22(!) headline indicators established by the Convention on Biological Diversity used to assess trends in biodiversity loss. Their conclusion: it’s good, but we need more data.
• Kindberg et al. have shown that hunter-reported observations of moose in Sweden were (if corrected) a pretty good method of monitoring.

Commentary from Nature on the IUCN and the Red List.

I just can’t seem to get enough… Nature comes out with a fair and balanced editorial about the Endangered Species Act. Key quotes: “[Interior Secretary Kempthorne's] latest efforts to alter the act are neither benign nor bipartisan,” but at the same time “when it comes to habitat loss in general — the biggest threat — the act is quite constrained. Although protecting ‘indicator’ or ‘keystone’ species can bring about broader habitat protection that benefits other species, this the approach is still, at its core, purely reactive.”

…and the Ecological Society of America piles on.