Peer-reviewed publications

Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aims to increase global coverage of protected and conserved areas to at least 30% by 2030. The impact of this expansion on people, whether positive or negative, will depend on the social context of additional areas and how they are governed and managed. However, little is known about the people inhabiting and using areas that could be affected by the implementation of the target; information crucial for successful implementation. Here, we assess the population size and socioeconomic status (human development status and livelihoods) of people living in areas that could be included under three scenarios for achieving the 30% coverage element of Target 3. Nearly half the global human population (46%) lives within 10 km of areas included in a scenario maximising biodiversity representation. Four percent of people live within 10 km of areas included in an Indigenous and traditional territories-based scenario, but many have low development status (74%) and high participation in tropical wild harvesting (91%). A scenario prioritising areas nature’s contributions to people is intermediate on all measures. Our results demonstrate that Target 3 is a highly ambitious social as well as ecological target. Implementation requires an equally ambitious commitment to development funding, and interventions to support local residents.

Models generated from laboratory-based thermal performance experiments predict that arthropod crop pest densities will escalate under rising temperatures. Conversely, natural enemies are predicted to decline under warming, exacerbating pest outbreaks. We tested these predictions using 141,562 field-year observations of 43 arthropod populations across spatial and temporal temperature gradients. Pests exhibited remarkable heterogeneity of responses to elevated temperatures, with some populations increasing and others decreasing. Natural enemies also showed variable responses to elevated temperatures, with partial support emerging for the hypothesis that natural enemies are more vulnerable to warming than pests. Laboratory-measured thermal performance and life-history traits failed to explain the variability of responses across taxa. Our findings challenge predictions of universal pest proliferation, highlighting the urgent need for species-specific monitoring approaches in agricultural climate adaptation.

Conservation management of large, multi-species landscapes requires integrating heterogeneous data streams—such as satellite imagery, GPS telemetry, camera traps, bioacoustic sensors, weather stations, and field reports—into a unified model capable of simulating ecosystem dynamics and generating actionable recommendations. This paper proposes a tiered, energy-aware AI architecture for constructing ecosystem digital twins that enables prescriptive, rather than merely descriptive or predictive, landscape-scale conservation management. The framework classifies conservation tasks across three computational tiers: classical machine learning for continuous environmental monitoring and species distribution prediction, deep learning for perception-oriented tasks such as computer vision and bioacoustic analysis, and foundation models for cross-domain synthesis and stakeholder interaction. We apply this architecture to a comprehensive digital twin of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, anchored in the ongoing conservation crisis of the Sublette Pronghorn Herd—a population that crashed from 43,000 to 24,000 animals in a single winter due to compounding severe weather and a Mycoplasma bovis outbreak. We formalize a coupled change model linking population dynamics, forage condition, corridor permeability, winter severity, and disease pressure, and demonstrate how a prescriptive recommendations engine can generate goal-conditioned management actions for the herd’s 165-mile “Path of the Pronghorn” migration corridor. A comparative energy footprint analysis, grounded in hardware-level energy measurements using Intel RAPL instrumentation and the CodeCarbon framework, estimates that the tiered architecture reduces computational energy consumption by approximately 34% relative to a deep-learning-everywhere baseline and by over three orders of magnitude relative to a foundation-model-centric baseline. The architecture provides a replicable blueprint for resource-constrained conservation organizations seeking to deploy AI-powered ecosystem management at landscape scale.

Approaches to addressing marine resource use issues have often been limited to relying on scientific research to propose technical solutions and policies that affect Ocean spaces. The communication of these solutions typically occurs through scientific publications and policy briefs, which have a restricted reach and impact. Creative arts can uniquely connect scientific findings to human values and emotions, motivating behavioral change. To explore this idea, we conducted a study in Kenya to understand the role that coastal and marine artists play in fostering awareness of the Ocean and marine life through their art. Findings revealed that the content of the artwork is driven by market demand with wildlife and terrestrial themes dominating coastal artwork. Art sales depend highly on foreign tourists and contribute significantly to the Blue Economy. The market preference in Kenya is on terrestrial art and impediments to the purchase of Ocean art by locals were identified as a lack of awareness of the Ocean, religious barriers, and purchasing power.

There is a need to focus on co-creation and partnerships with key allies in both the public and private sectors. Additionally, incorporating Ocean Literacy into the Marine Spatial Planning process in Kenya is essential. Our foundational work provides an opportunity to expand the use of art in advancing the Blue Economy discourse, amplifying the active participation of local and Indigenous communities.

Virtual fencing technology holds the potential to modernize and transform livestock management, with significant but still underexplored biodiversity conservation applications. The technology uses Global Positioning System-enabled collars on livestock and software-defined boundaries to provide a virtual alternative to traditional physical fencing, creating opportunities to remove or reduce physical fences. We identify four key functional attributes of virtual fencing that can be leveraged to achieve conservation goals: eliminating the barrier effects of physical fencing infrastructure that fragment landscapes, providing precise and temporally adaptable exclusion capabilities for protecting sensitive ecological areas, enabling targeted livestock concentration for invasive species control and predator conflict mitigation, and facilitating adaptive grazing rotations that promote habitat heterogeneity and vegetative health. Collectively, these functions address critical conservation challenges including restoration of landscape connectivity, protection of riparian habitat, maintaining wildlife corridors, and livestock-carnivore coexistence. Despite its promise as a conservation tool, adoption of virtual fencing still faces substantial barriers including technological limitations, learning curves for both operators and livestock, limited research on diverse livestock types, cost barriers, animal welfare concerns, data privacy issues, and the complexity of implementing virtual fencing specifically for conservation outcomes. Conservation organizations can accelerate virtual fencing deployment through strategic cost-sharing partnerships, incentive-based conservation agreements, and advocacy for supportive policy frameworks. Investment in interdisciplinary research will be essential for demonstrating effectiveness and addressing adoption barriers. Virtual fencing represents a transformative conservation tool with applications across diverse grazing contexts around the world and offers substantial opportunities to reconcile livestock production with biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration goals.

Growing demand for food coupled with climate commitments to reduce emissions will result in more land development for agriculture and renewable energy. Simultaneously, conserving land for biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people (NCP) is imperative for achieving international climate, sustainable development, and biodiversity goals. Meeting these interconnected objectives requires efficient land allocation across sectors. Here, we present a flexible, multiple-objective framework for strategically allocating land to mitigate threats to biodiversity and NCP under climate change while supporting development. Application of this framework at a global scale shows that if future development is planned without consideration of nature, demands for land could impact nearly 1 million km2 of high-priority areas for biodiversity and NCP. Multi-sector planning can mitigate potential conflict, reducing carbon loss and species exposure. Our findings underscore the need to conserve critical areas for nature, reduce land demand for food and energy, and intentionally coordinate land use across sectors.

Reliable freshwater access drives terrestrial wildlife movements and habitat use globally. The small, rain-fed seasonal pools critical for dryland wildlife persistence are vulnerable to rising temperatures and unstable precipitation regimes projected under climate change. In southern Africa, which is expected to warm rapidly by 2100, the drying and disappearance of surface water may cause a breakdown in seasonal migrations of large, area-sensitive, and water-dependent wildlife species. Furthermore, the disappearance of ephemeral water may concentrate wildlife around remaining surface water, increasing resource competition and human-wildlife conflict. An accurate understanding of the dynamics and drivers of seasonal surface water will therefore be crucial to wildlife and human health as climate change intensifies.

Here, we present a framework and empirical analysis of fine-scale surface water mapping in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), the world’s largest terrestrial conservation area (520,000km2). From 2019-2025, we implemented Otsu thresholding on median Automated Water Extraction Index Sentinel-2 MSI imagery (10m), creating >35 quasi-monthly KAZA-wide Ephemeral Surface Water (ESW) rasters (mean classification accuracy 87%, compared to 50% accuracy for a 30m Global Surface Water (GSW) product). We found that low wet season (November-May) rainfall drove led to low surface water fill from February-May, especially after multiple drought years (2023-2024), suggesting a critically vulnerable time for water-dependent wildlife.

Finally, we assessed the applicability of our ESW map for wildlife movement analyses. African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) are known to visit water approximately every 48 hours; a useful water map should reflect this dependence. We calculated water visitation rates using GPS data from 27 individual elephant and a threshold distance of T = 200m, and found that 99% of GPS tracks maintained ESW visitation rates under 48 hours, compared to only 42% of tracks for GSW visitation. These results were robust when T was varied, and ESW similarly outperformed random controls, making ESW an effective proxy for actual water use in animal movement models. As climate change threatens seasonally ephemeral surface water, fine-resolution tools such as ESW will help conservation scientists and managers to understand and predict the drivers of wildlife movements at the scale of wildlife needs.

The billions invested annually in marine climate adaptation, development, and conservation projects in the Global South can address, or reinforce, pre-existing contextual inequities 1. Concurrently, contextual inequities can also undermine the effectiveness and outcomes of externally-funded projects. We developed a composite index of contextual inequity and assessed the distribution and equity of 35,440 coastal and marine projects across 84 countries. Our global map highlights “high-stakes” locations, where interactions between substantial external investment and high contextual inequity make equitable design and implementation critical. We observed high-stakes conditions across every ocean basin, and explicit consideration of equity in only 27% of projects globally. To advance equity, we recommend investing smarter through cross-sectoral partnerships and deeper to address root causes of contextual inequity in marine systems globally.

Between 2008 and 2018, the CARE-World Wildlife Fund Alliance implemented an integrated conservation and development project in the Primeiras e Segundas region of Mozambique to address intersecting challenges of poverty, food insecurity and biodiversity loss. The project aimed to catalyze the development of robust community-led governance of coastal resources and generate insights concerning the interplay between conservation and development interventions. After ten years, three of the four communities in this study appear to have been relatively successful in promoting compliance with conservation rules by ensuring the continuity of local enforcement and establishing linkages with district government officials. In contrast, a lack of nested governance and high levels of food insecurity played an important role in the collapse of rule enforcement in the fourth community and continues to generate challenges across all four communities. Overall, the results suggest that external partners should continue offering technical and financial support for community-led governance until fair and effective systems for rule enforcement and nested governance structures have been firmly established. Furthermore, aligning investments in local governance with development interventions can strengthen community support for conservation by addressing underlying drivers of non-compliance and environmental degradation.

Between 2008 and 2018, the CARE-World Wildlife Fund Alliance implemented an integrated conservation and development project in the Primeiras e Segundas region of Mozambique to address intersecting challenges of poverty, food insecurity and biodiversity loss. The project aimed to catalyze the development of robust community-led governance of coastal resources and generate insights concerning the interplay between conservation and development interventions. After ten years, three of the four communities in this study appear to have been relatively successful in promoting compliance with conservation rules by ensuring the continuity of local enforcement and establishing linkages with district government officials. In contrast, a lack of nested governance and high levels of food insecurity played an important role in the collapse of rule enforcement in the fourth community and continues to generate challenges across all four communities. Overall, the results suggest that external partners should continue offering technical and financial support for community-led governance until fair and effective systems for rule enforcement and nested governance structures have been firmly established. Furthermore, aligning investments in local governance with development interventions can strengthen community support for conservation by addressing underlying drivers of non-compliance and environmental degradation.