Depauperate Avifauna in Plantations Compared to Forests and Exurban Areas

Native forests are shrinking worldwide, causing a loss of biological diversity. Our ability to prioritize forest conservation actions is hampered by a lack of information about the relative impacts of different types of forest loss on biodiversity. In particular, we lack rigorous comparisons of the effects of clearing forests for tree plantations and for human settlements, two leading causes of deforestation worldwide. We compared avian diversity in forests, plantations and exurban areas on the Cumberland Plateau, USA, an area of global importance for biodiversity. By combining field surveys with digital habitat databases, and then analyzing diversity at multiple scales, we found that plantations had lower diversity and fewer conservation priority species than did other habitats. Exurban areas had higher diversity than did native forests, but native forests outscored exurban areas for some measures of conservation priority. Overall therefore, pine plantations had impoverished avian communities relative to both native forests and to exurban areas. Thus, reports on the status of forests give misleading signals about biological diversity when they include plantations in their estimates of forest cover but exclude forested areas in which humans live. Likewise, forest conservation programs should downgrade incentives for plantations and should include settled areas within their purview

Design patterns for business process individualization

Competition is forcing organizations to constantly innovate and identify ways to deliver high quality services and products. The Business Process Management (BPM) discipline has contributed by providing a rich set of analysis and re-design techniques. However, BPM methods and guidelines are often driven by process standardization and economies of scale, while emerging digital technologies (e.g. advanced manufacturing,sophisticated data analytics) increasingly facilitate process individualization. In this paper we contribute to an extended BPM body of knowledge by presenting design patterns for process individualization. We argue that (1) technological developments have made scalable process variant management viable and that (2) these technologies enable new forms of process individualization altogether. In our research, we identified and analyzed design patterns that make use of rapid digitalization to obtain individualized products and services. A conceptual model supported by literature and case examples is presented. This model forms theory on design and action of business process individualization in the digital age. Companies can deploy the design patterns developed in this paper as guidelines in their quest for process individualization