Peer-reviewed publications

The magnitude of global food loss and waste requires a major overhaul of economies and food supply chains to reduce food insecurity, environmental burdens, and economic losses. Reducing food loss and waste and improving access and distribution to feed hungry people are the highest priorities. The next highest value is converting energy and nutrients in food waste (FW) materials into animal feeds to produce more food while recovering resources and reducing environmental costs. Governments in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have developed laws, regulations, economic incentives, subsidies, and infrastructure to require collection and recycling of all sources of FW and promote the conversion of a high proportion (>65 %) to safe animal feed. Many countries have extensive laws and regulations designed to prevent transmission of animal diseases that could occur from feeding FW, but those in the U.S. and E.U. are too restrictive based on current heat processing technology and monitoring systems available, resulting in only 5–10 % of available FW used in animal feeds. In China, despite difficulties controlling African swine fever virus, new government initiatives show promise for developing guidelines, infrastructure, and processes for diverting more of the 350 million tonnes of annual FW toward safe animal feed.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important tool to protect marine biodiversity that can have substantial impacts on human well-being. However, such social impacts are rarely considered proactively. Proponents must work collectively and proactively to better understand and communicate future well-being impacts while co-creating lasting solutions prior to MPA development and iteratively during ongoing management.

Evidence-informed decision-making can help catalyze the development and implementation of effective conservation actions. Yet despite decades of research on evidence-informed conservation, its realization within conservation implementing agencies and organizations still faces challenges. First, conservation decisions are shaped by individual, organizational, and systemic factors that operate and interact across different temporal and spatial scales. Second, the different cultures and value systems within conservation implementing agencies fuels continued debate on what can and should count as evidence for decision-making, and ultimately shapes how evidence is used in practice. While the importance of evidence-informed conservation is increasingly recognized, we have witnessed few changes within conservation implementing agencies that could enable better engagement with diverse types of evidence and knowledge holders. Based on our experience supporting monitoring, evaluation and learning systems in conservation implementing agencies, we argue that to realize evidence-informed conservation we need a better understanding of the process and context of conservation decision-making within organizations, an alignment of institutional systems and processes that generate evidence relevant to information needs, and changes that help conservation organizations become learning organizations. These actions could help transform how conservation practitioners and organizations learn to enable more evidence-informed decision-making within the complex systems they work in.

Feed use in aquaculture results in large amounts of embodied land, freshwater, energy and wild fish use. Selection of feed ingredients at feed mills can reduce the amounts of one or more of the four major natural resources embodied in feed. However, better feed management to lessen FCR is more likely the key to lessening resource use at the farm level. Of course, lessening the FCR will reduce the amount of feed that must be purchased and diminish the direct and embodied negative environmental impacts associated with feed. It also is important to note that mechanical aeration applied in many methods of production requires more energy than associated with feed alone. Aeration is necessary for high feed inputs required in intensive production, and without aeration, most types of intensive production would not be possible. The amounts of resource use attributed to feeding and aeration were applied in estimating the resulting quantities of water pollutants in effluents and emission of atmospheric contaminants. Some of the misunderstandings about life cycle assessment (LCA) such as it usually covering all impacts of product systems, and especially its failure to assess the oxygen demand of effluents are mentioned.

The impacts of climate change on species, and assessments of species vulnerability to climate change, have been well documented in the literature. However, translation of this research into on-the-ground interventions, for example by NGOs or protected area authorities, is lacking. Here we present a simple species climate vulnerability assessment tool, which assesses different dimensions of climate change vulnerability. The trait-based assessment leads to actionable climate-adaptive management recommendations. Additionally, we highlight projects funded by the Wildlife Adaptation Innovation Fund, which supports project ideas from around the world which reduce the vulnerability of wildlife to changes in weather and climate.

Environmental flows (e-flows) aim to mitigate the threat of altered hydrological regimes in river systems and connected waterbodies and are an important component of integrated strategies to address multiple threats to freshwater biodiversity. Expanding and accelerating implementation of e-flows can support river conservation and help to restore the biodiversity and resilience of hydrologically altered and water-stressed rivers and connected freshwater ecosystems. While there have been significant developments in e-flow science, assessment, and societal acceptance, implementation of e-flows within water resource management has been slower than required and geographically uneven. This review explores critical factors that enable successful e-flow implementation and biodiversity outcomes in particular, drawing on 13 case studies and the literature. It presents e-flow implementation as an adaptive management cycle enabled by 10 factors: legislation and governance, financial and human resourcing, stakeholder engagement and co-production of knowledge, collaborative monitoring of ecological and social-economic outcomes, capacity training and research, exploration of trade-offs among water users, removing or retrofitting water infrastructure to facilitate e-flows and connectivity, and adaptation to climate change. Recognising that there may be barriers and limitations to the full and effective enablement of each factor, the authors have identified corresponding options and generalizable recommendations for actions to overcome prominent constraints, drawing on the case studies and wider literature. The urgency of addressing flow-related freshwater biodiversity loss demands collaborative networks to train and empower a new generation of e-flow practitioners equipped with the latest tools and insights to lead adaptive environmental water management globally. Mainstreaming e-flows within conservation planning, integrated water resource management, river restoration strategies, and adaptations to climate change is imperative. The policy drivers and associated funding commitments of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework offer crucial opportunities to achieve the human benefits contributed by e-flows as nature-based solutions, such as flood risk management, floodplain fisheries restoration, and increased river resilience to climate change.

Understanding the relative effectiveness and enabling conditions of different area-based management tools is essential for supporting efforts that achieve positive biodiversity outcomes as area-based conservation coverage increases to meet newly set international targets. We used data from a coastal social-ecological monitoring program in six Indo-Pacific countries to analyze whether social, ecological, and economic objectives and specific management rules (temporal closures, fishing gear-, species-specific restrictions) were associated with coral reef fish biomass above sustainable yield levels across different types of area-based management tools (i.e., comparing those designated as marine protected areas (MPAs) to other types of area-based management). We found that all categories of objectives, multiple combinations of rules, and all types of area-based management had some sites that were able to sustain high levels of reef fish biomass – a key measure for coral reef health – compared to reference sites with no area-based management. Yet the same management types also had sites with low biomass. As governments advance their commitments to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the target to conserve 30% of the planet's land and oceans by 2030, we show that while different types of management can be effective, most of the managed areas in our study regions did not meet IUCN criteria for effectiveness. These findings underscore the importance of strong management and governance of managed areas, and the need to measure the ecological impact of area-based management rather than counting areas because of their designation.

As countries consider new area-based conservation targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity, protected areas and their impacts on people and nature are coming under increasing scrutiny. We review the evidence base on protected area impacts, combining the findings from existing rigorous impact evaluations with local case studies developed for this study. We identify characteristics of protected areas establishment and management that improve the sustainability of biodiversity conservation and justice for local communities. We find that recognizing and respecting local values and knowledge about natural resource stewardship, co-learning and comanagement are key to achieving positive impacts for nature and people. Transforming protected areas governance towards more inclusive conservation depends upon their ability to be designed and implemented around the values andneeds of local people.

Outdoor recreation is widespread, with uncertain effects on wildlife. The human shield hypothesis (HSH) suggests that recreation could have differential effects on predators and prey, with predator avoidance of humans creating a spatial refuge ‘shielding’ prey from people. The generality of the HSH remains to be tested across larger scales, wherein human shielding may prove generalizable, or diminish with variability in ecological contexts. We combined data from 446 camera traps and 79,279 sampling days across 10 landscapes spanning 15,840 km2 in western Canada. We used hierarchical models to quantify the influence of recreation and landscape disturbance (roads, logging) on ungulate prey (moose, mule deer and elk) and carnivore (wolf, grizzly bear, cougar and black bear) site use. We found limited support for the HSH and strong responses to recreation at local but not larger spatial scales. Only mule deer showed positive but weak landscape-level responses to recreation. Elk were positively associated with local recreation while moose and mule deer responses were negative, contrary to HSH predictions. Mule deer showed a more complex interaction between recreation and land-use disturbance, with more negative responses to recreation at lower road density or higher logged areas. Contrary to HSH predictions, carnivores did not avoid recreation and grizzly bear site use was positively associated. We also tested the effects of roads and logging on temporal activity overlap between mule deer and recreation, expecting deer to minimize interaction with humans by partitioning time in areas subject to more habitat disturbance. However, temporal overlap between people and deer increased with road density. Our findings highlight the complex ecological patterns that emerge at macroecological scales. There is a need for expanded monitoring of human and wildlife use of recreation areas, particularly multi-scale and -species approaches to studying the interacting effects of recreation and land-use change on wildlife.

Spatial relationships between sympatric species underpin biotic interactions, structure ecological communities, and maintain ecosystem health. However, the resilience of interspecific spatial associations to human habitat modification remains largely unknown, particularly in tropical regions where anthropogenic impacts are often greatest. We applied multi-state multi-species occurrence models to camera trap data across nine tropical landscapes in Colombia to understand how prominent threats to forest ecosystems influence Neotropical carnivore occurrence and interspecific spatial associations, with implications for biotic interactions. We show that carnivore occurrence represents a delicate balance between local environmental conditions and interspecific interactions that can be compromised in areas of extensive habitat modification. The stability of carnivore spatial associations depends on forest cover to mediate antagonistic encounters with apex predators and structurally intact forests to facilitate coexistence between competing mesocarnivores. Notably, we demonstrate that jaguars play an irreplaceable role in spatially structuring mesocarnivore communities, providing novel evidence on their role as keystone species. With increasing global change, conserving both the extent and quality of tropical forests is imperative to support carnivores and preserve the spatial associations that underpin ecosystem stability and resilience.