Systematic conservation planning has been used extensively throughout the world to identify important areas for maintaining biodiversity and functional ecosystems, and is well suited to address large-scale biodiversity conservation challenges of the twenty-first century. Systematic planning is necessary to bridge implementation, scale, and data gaps in a collaborative effort that recognizes competing land uses. Here, we developed a conservation planning process to identify and unify conservation priorities around the central and southern Appalachian Mountains as part of the Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative (App LCC). Through a participatory framework and sequential, cross-realm integration in spatial optimization modeling we highlight lands and waters that together achieve joint conservation goals from LCC partners for the least cost. This process was driven by a synthesis of 26 multi-scaled conservation targets and optimized for simultaneous representation inside the program Marxan to account for roughly 25% of the LCC geography. We identify five conservation design elements covering critical ecological processes and patterns including interconnected regions as well as the broad landscapes between them. Elements were then subjected to a cumulative threats index for possible prioritization. The evaluation of these elements supports multi-scaled decision making within the LCC planning community through a participatory, dynamic, and iterative process.

Threats to aquatic biodiversity are expressed at broad spatial scales, but identifying regional trends in abundance is challenging owing to variable sampling designs and temporal and spatial variation in abundance. We compiled a regional data set of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) counts across their southern range representing 326 sites from eight states between 1982 and 2014 and conducted a statistical power analysis using Bayesian state-space models to evaluate the ability to detect temporal trends by characterizing posterior distributions with three approaches. A combination of monitoring periods, number of sites and electrofishing passes, decline magnitude, and different revisit patterns were tested. Power increased with monitoring periods and decline magnitude. Trends in adults were better detected than young-of-the-year fish, which showed greater interannual variation in abundance. The addition of weather covariates to account for the temporal variation increased power only slightly. Single- and three-pass electrofishing methods were similar in power. Finally, power was higher for sampling designs with more frequent revisits over the duration of the monitoring program. Our results provide guidance for broad-scale monitoring designs for temporal trend detection.

Model systems enlightened by history that provide understanding and inform contemporary and future landscapes are needed. Through transdisciplinary collaboration, historic rice fields of the southeastern United States can be such models, providing insight into how human–ecological systems work. Rice culture in the United States began in the 1670s; was primarily successfully developed, managed, and driven by the labor of enslaved persons; and ended with the U.S. Civil War. During this time, wetlands were transformed into highly managed farming systems that left behind a system of land use legacies when abandoned after slavery. Historically accepted estimates range from 29,950 to 60,703 ha; however, using remotely sensed data (e.g., LiDAR) and expert opinion, we mapped 95,551 ha of historic rice fields in South Carolina, USA. After mapping, the rice fields’ current wetland and land cover characteristics were assessed. Understanding the geographic distribution and characteristics allows insight into the overall human and ecological costs of forced land use change that can inform future landscapes.

We systematically evaluated the influence of dams on downstream aquatic habitat and early life stage (ELS) fish at two spatial scales from epilimnetic and hypolimnetic discharges and made comparisons with a control stream. ELS fish exhibited a general increase in abundance, richness, and Shannon diversity with increasing distance from dams in both epilimnetic and hypolimnetic release types. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) indicated larval and juvenile fish communities were structured differently between epilimnetic and hypolimnetic releases, and habitat variables structuring those communities were more variable in epilimnetic releases than in hypolimnetic releases. Rapid changes occurred within the first 1100 m reach and a second more gradual gradient extended beyond the 5100 m sample reach. Generally, our findings agreed with that of the Serial Discontinuity Concept (SDC), but we believe future studies should be explicit in the systematic evaluation of the SDC, and further studies are required to understand the two recovery gradients that exist below impoundments.