Ecosystem services are essential for human well-being, but the links between ecosystem services and human well-being are complex, diverse, context-dependent, and complicated by the need to consider different spatial and temporal scales to assess them properly. We present the results of a study in the rural community of Sistelo in northern Portugal that formed part of the Portugal Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The main purpose of our study was to assess the linkages between human well-being and ecosystem services at the local level, as perceived by the community. We used a range of tools that included participatory rural appraisal and rapid rural appraisal as well as other field methods such as direct observation, familiarization and participation in activities, semistructured interviews, trend lines, wellbeing ranking, and other ranking and scoring exercises. Sistelo has a unique landscape of agricultural terraces that are now being abandoned because of the depopulation of the region, a common trend in mountainous rural areas of Europe. From the community perspective, some components of well-being such as material well-being have been improving, whereas some ecosystem services, e.g., food production, have been declining. Although a few of the local criteria for well-being are closely related to local ecosystem services, most of them are not. People recognize many of the services provided by ecosystems, in particular, provisioning, cultural, and regulating services, although they feel that provisioning services are the most important for well-being. It is apparent that, for the Sistelo community, there is an increasing disconnect between local well-being and at least some local ecosystem services. This disconnect is associated with greater freedom of choice at the local level, which gives the local inhabitants the power to find substitutes for ecosystem services. The consequences of land abandonment for human well-being and ecosystem services at different temporal and spatial scales are discussed.

In the Amazonian basin, the human populations that traditionally inhabit the forest use its natural resources in various ways. One example is the local fauna which, among several other uses, is an important source of protein. The general aim of our study was to investigate the importance of hunting to the lives of the Amazonian riverine communities and to identify the multiple uses and knowledge about the hunted animals. In this article we focused the study on the razor-billed curassow Pauxi tuberosa, a Cracidae of significant value to the studied community. The investigation was conducted in the "Riozinho do Anfrísio Extractive Reserve", a Brazilian Conservation Unit located at the Altamira municipality, in the state of Pará. We used an ethnoecological approach, which included participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Our results show that the razor-billed curassow is used by the "Riozinho do Anfrísio" local population mainly as food, but it also fulfils secondary functions, with the feathers being used as a domestic tool and as magic-religious symbol, some organs as traditional medicine, and some chicks even being raised as pets. Our study also revealed that the traditional ecological knowledge of the riverines about their environment is considerably large, and that the local biodiversity provides various ecosystem services.

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Merchant (2001) proposes that preposition stranding under sluicing is allowed only in those languages that also allow P-stranding in regular whquestions. Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) seem to falsify this generalization, as both are non-P-stranding languages that allow P-stranding under sluicing. Our claim is that, despite initial appearances, Spanish and BP do not constitute counterexamples to Merchant's generalization. We propose that there are two sources of sluicing in Romance: wh-movement plus IP-deletion (à la Merchant 2001), and clefting plus IP deletion (à la Merchant 1998), the latter being the underlying source for P-stranding sluicing. The apparent P-stranding effect follows from the fact that, as opposed to regular interrogatives, clefts in BP and Spanish do not involve P-stranding at all. We reinforce this conclusion by showing that, in those cases where a cleft base is independently banned, P-stranding under sluicing becomes impossible too.

Uncertainty in projections of global change impacts on biodiversity over the 21st century is high. Improved predictive accuracy is needed, highlighting the importance of using different types of models when predicting species range shifts. However, this is still rarely done. Our approach integrates the outputs of a spatially-explicit physiologically inspired model of extinction and correlative species distribution models to assess climate-change induced range shifts of three European reptile species (Lacerta lepida, Iberolacerta monticola, and Hemidactylus turcicus) in the coming decades. We integrated the two types of models by mapping and quantifying agreement and disagreement between their projections. We analyzed the relationships between climate change and projected range shifts. Agreement between model projections varied greatly between species and depended on whether or not they consider dispersal ability. Under our approach, the reliability of predictions is greatest where the predictions of these different types of models converge, and in this way uncertainty is reduced; sites where this convergence occurs are characterized by both current high temperatures and significant future temperature increase, suggesting they may become hotspots of local extinctions. Moreover, this approach can be readily implemented with other types of models.