Peer-reviewed publications

As the international community strives to conserve 30% of Earth’s lands and waters by 2030, the full extent of area-based conservation remains unclear. Official databases do not fully recognize and track the diversity of conservation-relevant governance systems, hindering conservation research, policy, planning, and action. Here, we describe and test an inclusive, empirically grounded approach to documenting area-based governance systems that potentially advance biodiversity conservation. Among Amazonian countries, we identify greater area coverage and diversity of conservation governance systems than official databases. We further illustrate the relevance of this approach using global examples of under-recognized conservation governance systems. Our findings highlight the need for an inclusive, empirically grounded inventory that reflects the full diversity of area-based conservation systems. We recommend researchers, governments, non-state actors, and donors to adopt similar inventories to increase feasibility, transparency, and inclusivity as a foundational component of global efforts to fulfill international commitments and create a nature-positive future.

During animal migration, ephemeral communities of taxa at all trophic levels co-occur over space and time. The interactions between predators and prey along migration corridors are ecologically and evolutionarily significant. However, these interactions remain understudied in terrestrial systems and warrant further investigations using novel approaches.We investigated the predator–prey interactions between a migrating avivorous predator and ephemeral avian prey community in the fall migration season. We tested for associations between avian traits and prey selection and hypothesized that prey traits (i.e. relative size, flocking behaviour, habitat, migration tendency and availability) would influence prey selection by a sexually dimorphic raptor on migration.To document prey consumption, we sampled trace prey DNA from beaks and talons of migrating sharp-shinned hawks Accipiter striatus (n = 588). We determined prey availability in the ephemeral avian community by extracting weekly abundance indices from eBird Status and Trends data. We used discrete choice models to assess prey selection and visualized the frequency of prey in diet and availability on the landscape over the fall migration season.Using eDNA metabarcoding, we detected prey species on 94.1% of the hawks sampled (n = 525/588) comprising 1396 prey species detections from 65 prey species. Prey frequency in diet and eBird relative abundance of prey species were correlated over the migration season for top-selected prey species, suggesting prey availability is an important component of raptor-songbird interactions during fall. Prey size, flocking behaviour and non-breeding habitat association were prey traits that significantly influenced predator choice. We found differences between female and male hawk prey selection, suggesting that sexual size dimorphism has led to distinct foraging strategies on migration.This research integrated field data collected by a volunteer-powered raptor migration monitoring station and public-generated data from eBird to reveal elusive predator–prey dynamics occurring in an ephemeral raptor-songbird community during fall migration. Understanding dynamic raptor-songbird interactions along migration routes remains a relatively unexplored frontier in animal ecology and is necessary for the conservation and management efforts of migratory and resident communities.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020 was a reminder of society’s vulnerability in the face of natural upheavals, leading to widespread unemployment and increased poverty. Simultaneously, human activities have precipitated large-scale environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change. Here, we conduct a global-scale, 186-country analysis examining the potential impact of basic income (BI) as a two-pronged solution to both sustainability and social resilience. We reveal BI’s potential to bolster economies, particularly in times of crisis. To lower the huge barrier imposed by implementation costs, we suggest a diverse array of strategies aimed at financing BI, strategically designed to concurrently alleviate economic insecurity while fostering nature conservation. We suggest that BI implementation is feasible and could be a potent tool in addressing the twin challenges of decreasing worldwide poverty while reducing environmental degradation—a nexus that arguably constitutes the paramount global challenge of our times.

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal requires rapid greenhouse gas emission reductions and near-term scale-up of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Greenhouse gas emissions continued to grow in 2023. This trend is incompatible with the Paris Agreement on climate change, regardless of how much CDR countries choose to deploy. The most important mitigation strategy in the near term is reducing emissions. Alongside rapidly reducing emissions, removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is also necessary to meet climate goals. Precisely how much CDR will be needed, and where it will be deployed, depends on an array of factors, including the peak temperature reached as well as how quickly and by how much emissions are reduced. Although the Paris Agreement states that climate change mitigation must be done “in the context of sustainable development”, most scenarios do not explicitly consider social and environmental sustainability. We therefore identified a subset of scenarios that can be considered “more sustainable”. Across this group of scenarios, the central range of CDR deployment is 7 to 9 GtCO2 per year in 2050. The lowest scenarios reach 4 GtCO2 per year in 2050. While this range is similar in 2050 to that for all below 2°C scenarios, the more sustainable scenarios cumulatively remove 170 GtCO2 between 2020 and the time of net zero CO2, compared with 260 GtCO2 cumulatively in all below 2°C scenarios.

Climate change is having a disproportionate impact on the Arctic. For Arctic breeding birds, basic knowledge of their annual cycle, specifically the timing, route, and movement behavior of migration, is needed to understand when and where populations may experience threats. We used a combination of geolocators and stable isotope analysis to identify route and timing of migration in Smith’s Longspurs (Calcarius pictus) that breed in Alaska’s Brooks Range. We trapped males on their breeding grounds from 2011 to 2014 and collected head feathers for stable isotopes of hydrogen (δ²H). We deployed 22 geolocators on a subset of individuals and retrieved four, which all overwintered in southern Texas. Individual start dates for fall migration based on geolocators were more variable than for the spring, and individuals were highly mobile while on their wintering grounds. Geolocators and stable isotope values were comparable across years and indicated that birds from the Brooks Range undergo their pre-nuptial molt in central Canada. We compared geolocator and stable isotope inferred locations to observations submitted to e-Bird and found that longspurs were distributed farther south during the winter months, but farther north during the spring than most eBird observations. Concurrent deployments of geolocator tags across Smith’s Longspurs’ breeding range would clarify whether migratory behaviors and routes are population-specific or shared widely across breeding locations.

Rewilding is an increasingly popular approach to ecosystem-level restoration whereby strengthening ecosystem resilience and functionality is achieved through restoring previously extirpated species and/or ecological processes. Although rewilding has been broadly applied in many systems globally, there are limited examples that use sociological information to inform multi-species restoration efforts under this paradigm. We surveyed Montana, USA residents representing five stakeholder groups (local ranchers, statewide ranchers, rural residents, urban residents and members of conservation organizations) to assess public attitudes and behaviors towards a suite of species and ecological processes targeted for multi-species restoration in the Northern Great Plains. We also evaluated levels of public support for conservation incentive programs that are commonly used as a mechanism to increase restoration potential on private lands. We found that there were differences in how stakeholders perceived and behaved towards species subject to or targeted for restoration. Species perceived as potential risks to humans and livestock, or possessing regulatory constraints, yielded more negative attitudes, had increased potential for negative behaviors, and support for incentives for those species was lacking. Conversely, we found that stakeholder attitudes towards conserving migration as an ecological process were generally favorable. Our results illustrate how using public tolerance as a metric of social suitability will reveal barriers to acceptance for individual species restoration as well as insights into potential mechanisms for increasing public support for rewilding. More broadly, our study highlights how achieving rewilding in working lands will require community engagement to increase public support and continued assessments of social processes that may limit multi-species restoration.

Achieving inclusive and sustainable ocean economies, long-term climate resilience and effective biodiversity conservation requires urgent and strategic actions from local to global scales. We discuss fundamental changes that are needed to allow equitable policy across these three domains.

CONTEXTAgriculture-driven land conversion poses a significant threat to global biodiversity conservation. Balancing agricultural expansion with conservation is a critical challenge for governments and development partners. Sustainability-oriented agriculture programs such as conservation agriculture and land intensification aim to reduce land conversion and deforestation; however, evidence of their effectiveness remains complex and elusive, especially regarding the role of smallholders.OBJECTIVEThis study addresses this knowledge gap by systematically mapping the drivers of smallholder land conversion and their interconnections across three focal biodiverse contexts including sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia as well as from a global scale.METHODSUsing literature that focuses on the nexus of smallholder farmers and agricultural intensification, this study systematically identified the potential of distinct factors and dynamic processes to serve as system leverage points toward improved outcomes for biodiversity, food security, and smallholder livelihoods, using a combination of structural factor analysis, centrality analysis, and feedback loop analysis.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSThe results highlight the importance of strengthening land tenure systems, providing technical support to farmers, improving market access, and prioritizing smallholder livelihoods in mitigating land conversion.SIGNIFICANCEContextual differences emphasize the need for context-specific interventions and further research to explore factors driving land conversion more deeply within specific contextual boundaries. Future studies should map proposed policy interventions onto local systems driving land conversion and incorporate the diverse perspectives of local stakeholders to guide effective and sustainable agriculture interventions.

Landscape ecologists have long suggested that pest abundances increase in simplified, monoculture landscapes. However, tests of this theory often fail to predict pest population sizes in real-world agricultural fields. These failures may arise not only from variation in pest ecology, but also from the widespread use of categorical land-use maps that do not adequately characterize habitat-availability for pests. We used 1163 field-year observations of Lygus hesperus (Western Tarnished Plant Bug) densities in California cotton fields to determine whether integrating remotely-sensed metrics of vegetation productivity and phenology into pest models could improve pest abundance analysis and prediction. Because L. hesperus often overwinters in non-crop vegetation, we predicted that pest abundances would peak on farms surrounded by more non-crop vegetation, especially when the non-crop vegetation is initially productive but then dries down early in the year, causing the pest to disperse into cotton fields. We found that the effect of non-crop habitat on pest densities varied across latitudes, with a positive relationship in the north and a negative one in the south. Aligning with our hypotheses, models predicted that L. hesperus densities were 35 times higher on farms surrounded by high versus low productivity non-crop vegetation (EVI area 350 vs. 50) and 2.8 times higher when dormancy occurred earlier versus later in the year (May 15 vs. June 30). Despite these strong and significant effects, we found that integrating these remote-sensing variables into land-use models only marginally improved pest density predictions in cotton compared to models with categorical land cover metrics alone. Together, our work suggests that the remote sensing variables analyzed here can advance our understanding of pest ecology, but not yet substantively increase the accuracy of pest abundance predictions.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted fisheries at every step of the global seafood supply chain, through such challenges as trade stoppages, lockdowns, and restaurant closures. We performed a scoping review of the literature published during the first two years of the pandemic to examine the challenges of new and unpredictable shocks to fisheries in countries around the world, with a specific focus on development status. We identified a robust body of published work that illustrates a rapid mobilization around COVID-19 research by scholars around the world. Pressures were governmental, economic, and societal in nature. Across developed and emerging countries, we found the greatest number of reports of impacts on fish harvest/production and fish trade. In least developed countries, impacts reported were often more cross cutting, affecting multiple aspects of the supply chain simultaneously. Individuals were most frequently reported as bearing the burden of responses to COVID-19 pressures in lower development status nations, while a larger proportion of responses reported for developed nations happened at the fishery and farm/firm level. In developed nations the pandemic also created new opportunities for people to respond innovatively and capitalize on supply chain disruptions. Importantly, while the literature offers robust details on fishers and fisheries from geographically and economically diverse locales, it fails to provide the necessary baseline information or other quantitative details that would be required to evaluate the magnitude and extent of harms experienced that may create long-term legacies for fisheries and small-scale fishing communities in least developed and emerging economies.