Water quality challenges associated with industrial logging of a karst landscape: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands.

Human disturbance of karst landscapes in tropical volcanic islands present a unique challenge for understanding sediment transport to the coastal zone. Here we present the first evidence of urban drinking water quality impacts from industrial logging in the Solomon Islands. Despite only 6% of the Honiara's drinking water catchment being disturbed by logging, rhodamine dye tracers demonstrated complex karst sinkholes that led to high suspended sediment concentrations being transported from neighbouring Kovi catchment into the Kongulai water supply offtake point for Honiara. This has resulted in the exceedance of practical treatment thresholds of 20 NTU 9.5% of the time, leading to water supply for the majority of Honiara's residents being unavailable for 58 days in 2019. This work highlights the cost-benefit disparity between industrial logging yielding minimal short-term economic yields in comparison to on-going broader impacts of increased coastal sediment transport while restricting water supply to a developing nation's capital.

Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales.

Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.

Interaction between forest biodiversity and people's use of forest resources in Roviana, Solomon Islands: implications for biocultural conservation under socioeconomic changes.

BACKGROUND: In Solomon Islands, forests have provided people with ecological services while being affected by human use and protection. This study used a quantitative ethnobotanical analysis to explore the society-forest interaction and its transformation in Roviana, Solomon Islands. We compared local plant and land uses between a rural village and urbanized village. Special attention was paid to how local people depend on biodiversity and how traditional human modifications of forest contribute to biodiversity conservation. METHODS: After defining locally recognized land-use classes, vegetation surveys were conducted in seven forest classes. For detailed observations of daily plant uses, 15 and 17 households were randomly selected in the rural and urban villages, respectively. We quantitatively documented the plant species that were used as food, medicine, building materials, and tools. RESULTS: The vegetation survey revealed that each local forest class represented a different vegetative community with relatively low similarity between communities. Although commercial logging operations and agriculture were both prohibited in the customary nature reserve, local people were allowed to cut down trees for their personal use and to take several types of non-timber forest products. Useful trees were found at high frequencies in the barrier island's primary forest (68.4%) and the main island's reserve (68.3%). Various useful tree species were found only in the reserve forest and seldom available in the urban village. In the rural village, customary governance and control over the use of forest resources by the local people still functioned. CONCLUSIONS: Human modifications of the forest created unique vegetation communities, thus increasing biodiversity overall. Each type of forest had different species that varied in their levels of importance to the local subsistence lifestyle, and the villagers' behaviors, such as respect for forest reserves and the semidomestication of some species, contributed to conserving diversity. Urbanization threatened this human-forest interaction. Although the status of biodiversity in human-modified landscapes is not fully understood, this study suggested that traditional human modifications can positively affect biodiversity and that conservation programs should incorporate traditional uses of landscapes to be successful.