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Land-use change is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. Through intensification of land-use, the agricultural landscape has become more homogenous and a result, many species associated with traditional farmland or other semi-natural open habitats have declined. To be able to improve biodiversity conservation we need to be able to track components of biodiversity and understand how they res

Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly agreed on the 2030 Agenda forSustainable Development to guide public policies and inspire societal actors topromote sustainable development worldwide. The core of this programme are 17‘Sustainable Development Goals’ with 169 more specific targets. Two years ofintense intergovernmental negotiations at the United Nations headquarters in NewYork preceded t

The scope of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 SustainableDevelopment Goals is unprecedented. So is the broad ambition expressed in thisagreement. While the United Nations has rarely shied away from declaring farreaching policy aspirations in the past, the 2030 Agenda sets the bar high –possibly higher than it has ever been before, with ambitious goals to end hungerand poverty

This chapter focuses on the national level and studies interlinkages, institutional integration and policy coherence in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. After defining key terms, the chapter reviews how perspectives on interlinkages have shaped a new discourse, followed by an analysis of the steering effects of the global goals on in

This chapter provides an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of methods used to study the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. After a discussion of the political use of science and the complex relations between science and politics, the chapter showcases a selection of different methods that are employed to trace the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. Sel

Given the regulatory gap in earth system governance, numerous new governance initiatives, such as multilateral clubs, private certification schemes and multi-stakeholder forums, have emerged to tackle transboundary environmental challenges. This plethora of different governance initiatives has led to a significant increase in the institutional complexity of global (environmental) policymaking and

The salinization of freshwaters is a global threat to aquatic biodiversity. We quantified variation in chloride (Cl−) tolerance of 19 freshwater zooplankton species in four countries to answer three questions: (1) How much variation in Cl− tolerance is present among populations? (2) What factors predict intraspecific variation in Cl− tolerance? (3) Must we account for intraspecific variation to ac

The relationships between species abundance or occurrence versus spatial variation in climate are commonly used in species distribution models to forecast future distributions. Under “space-for-time substitution”, the effects of climate variation on species are assumed to be equivalent in both space and time. Two unresolved issues of space-for-time substitution are the time period for species' res

Perturbation of soil microbial communities by rising temperatures could have important consequences for biodiversity and future climate, particularly in tropical forests where high biological diversity coincides with a vast store of soil carbon. We carried out a 2-year in situ soil warming experiment in a tropical forest in Panama and found large changes in the soil microbial community and its gro

To provide a complete portrayal of the multiple factors negatively impacting insects in agricultural landscapes it is necessary to assess the concurrent incidence, magnitude, and interactions among multiple stressors over substantial biogeographical scales. Trans-national ecological field investigations with wide-ranging stakeholders typically encounter numerous challenges during the design planni

The medical imaging technique called “ultrasound optical tomography” (UOT) entails light scattered in tissue that is given spatial information by interacting with an ultrasound field, thus allowing for molecular information to be imaged with ultrasonic resolution. This thesis discusses how UOT can be implemented, with most attention put toward the implementation using spectral-hole-burning filters

Climate change is pushing species ranges and abundances towards the poles and mountain tops. Although many studies have documented local altitudinal shifts, knowledge of general patterns at a large spatial scale, such as a whole mountain range, is scarce. From a conservation perspective, studying altitudinal shifts in wildlife is relevant because mountain regions often represent biodiversity hotsp

Morphology and facet engineering have been proved efficient strategies to prepare high-performance photoelectrochemical (PEC) materials. WO3/BiVO4 heterojunction photoanodes with different morphologies were prepared by simply controlling the amount of electrodeposited charge. The coral-like WO3/BiVO4 photoanode with the orientation growth of {110} and {011} active facets of BiVO4 exhibited the opt

Trophic cascades in the aquatic environment constitute important mechanisms for improving water quality. However, how the presence or non-presence of these trophic cascades may affect interactions across the aquatic–terrestrial interface remains poorly investigated. Pollinators such as bees may be especially vulnerable to changes in water resource quality induced by trophic cascades. Understanding

We report the synthesis of various binary and ternary inorganic and hybrid organic-inorganic iodide nanocrystals (NCs) starting from molecular iodine (I2). The synthesis described herein utilizes a reaction between I2 and oleylamine, which results in oleylammonium iodide, an iodide precursor that can be directly used in the preparation of iodide-based NCs. The generality of the synthesis was demon

In this work, we proposed to include remote sensing techniques as a part of the methodology for natural lake bottom mapping, with a focus on the littoral zone. Due to the inaccessibility of this zone caused by dense vegetation, measurements of the lake bottom and the coastline are also difficult to perform using traditional methods. The authors of this paper present, discuss and verify the applica

Piscivorous fish are important predators in aquatic systems and as such they can have far-reaching effects on ecosystem composition and function. These effects depend on piscivore predation rates and behaviour, and recruitment of young-of-the-year fish into piscivory can hereby govern ecosystem properties. Growth and recruitment can differ between water bodies due to e.g. general productivity, but