This outbreak of West Nile meningoencephalitis in the New York City metropolitan area represents the first time this virus has been detected in the Western Hemisphere. Given the subsequent rapid spread of the virus, physicians along the eastern seaboard of the United States should consider West Nile virus infection in the differential diagnosis of encephalitis and viral meningitis during the summer months, especially in older patients and in those with muscle weakness.

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Effective conservation planning requires information from well‐designed studies across a spectrum of land uses, ranging from wildlands to highly modified production landscapes and large cities. There is currently a lack of such information about human settlement, even though this is a major source of land‐use change with serious implications for biodiversity. Fewer than 6% of the papers in recent volumes of Conservation Biology described work conducted in urban, suburban, or exurban areas or studies in which human settlement was considered explicitly. For a variety of reasons, conservation has tended to focus on lands with a relatively small human presence, often dominated by resource extraction and agriculture. Urbanization is occurring in numerous biodiversity hotspots worldwide, however, and has been identified as a primary cause of declines in many threatened and endangered species. Suburban and exurban growth are affecting biodiversity in many places once thought of as too remote to attract such levels of development. Conservation biologists must address the issue of human settlement to enhance the habitat value of unreserved lands for native species, to increase landscape connectivity between reserves, and to mitigate adverse influences on reserves from adjacent lands. Conservation and restoration of native habitats in densely settled areas also have social and educational value. We therefore suggest a more balanced approach in conservation biology to addressing the effects of human land use through increased attention to areas where people live and work.

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The management of landscapes for biological conservation and ecologically sustainable natural resource use are crucial global issues. Research for over two decades has resulted in a large literature, yet there is little consensus on the applicability or even the existence of general principles or broad considerations that could guide landscape conservation. We assess six major themes in the ecology and conservation of landscapes. We identify 13 important issues that need to be considered in developing approaches to landscape conservation. They include recognizing the importance of landscape mosaics (including the integration of terrestrial and aquatic areas), recognizing interactions between vegetation cover and vegetation configuration, using an appropriate landscape conceptual model, maintaining the capacity to recover from disturbance and managing landscapes in an adaptive framework. These considerations are influenced by landscape context, species assemblages and management goals and do not translate directly into on-the-ground management guidelines but they should be recognized by researchers and resource managers when developing guidelines for specific cases. Two crucial overarching issues are: (i) a clearly articulated vision for landscape conservation and (ii) quantifiable objectives that offer unambiguous signposts for measuring progress.