Peer-reviewed publications

Increasing human pressures are driving a global loss of biodiversity and of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP)—the contributions of living nature to people’s quality of life. Understanding the spatial relationship between biodiversity and NCP is essential for securing Earth’s life support systems. Here we estimate the importance of high-biodiversity regions in maintaining the provision of three NCP under four scenarios of climate change. We focus on critical regulatory NCP which are currently facing decline: regulation of air quality, climate and freshwater quantity. We estimate the current and future value of NCP using a suite of environmental indicators and evaluate whether risk from environmental change is higher or lower within high-biodiversity regions compared with control regions. We find higher levels of NCP within high-biodiversity regions both in the present and the future for all indicators, which highlights the spatial congruence between biodiversity and NCP. Moreover, air quality and climate regulation indicators show rapidly increasing levels within high-biodiversity regions, especially under higher-emission scenarios. Our results point to a substantial contribution of high-biodiversity areas to the provision of NCP. Protecting areas of high biodiversity value will synergistically contribute to the preservation of many of nature’s contributions humanity depends on.

The construction of solar energy facilities can have positive or negative impacts on biodiversity depending on siting and associated land use transitions. We identified drivers of solar siting and quantified patterns of buildout in states surrounding the Chesapeake Bay watershed – a biodiversity hotspot with numerous ecosystem services. Using a convolutional neural network, we mapped the footprints of ground-mounted solar arrays present in satellite imagery annually from 2017 to 2021 in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and West Virginia. As of 2021, we identified 958 solar arrays covering 52.3 km2 built primarily on previously cultivated land, while avoiding natural landcover. We fit a binomial-Weibull model to these solar timeseries data in a hierarchical, Bayesian framework to quantify the relationship between geospatial covariates and rate of solar development. Solar array construction rate increased in cultivated areas, areas of lower agricultural suitability, lower slope, lower forest cover, lower biodiversity protection, and greater distances from roads. We also estimated changes in the rate of solar construction over time and found differences among states: acceleration in Virginia and deceleration in New York. We used parameter estimates to map the relative likelihood of future solar development across the study area. This methodology can be used to anticipate where solar is likely to be built in different landscapes and how these patterns align with conservation goals. Around the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the selection of lower quality agricultural areas for solar energy minimizes removal of important habitat and provides opportunities for native plant and pollinator restoration.

Community-based conservation can support livelihoods and biodiversity, while reinforcing local and Indigenous values, cultures, and institutions. Its delivery can help address cross-cutting global challenges, such as climate change, conservation, poverty, and food security. Therefore, understanding trends in community-based conservation is pertinent to setting and implementing global goals. We undertook a horizon scan to prioritize 15 emerging threats and opportunities expected to impact the future effectiveness of community-based conservation. Topics relate to global biodiversity policy; human rights; shifting human geography; inclusion, diversity, equity, and access; conservation finance and income; and economic reforms. Our findings offer guidance on strengthening community-based conservation to achieve global environmental and development goals.

Understanding large carnivore demography on human-dominated lands is a priority to inform conservation strategies, yet few studies examine long-term trends. Jaguars (Panthera onca) are one such species whose population trends and survival rates remain unknown across working lands. We integrated nine years of camera trap data and tourist photos to estimate jaguar density, survival, abundance, and probability of tourist sightings on a working ranch and tourism destination in Colombia. We found that abundance increased from five individuals in 2014 to 28 in 2022, and density increased from 1.88 ± 0.87 per 100 km2 in 2014 to 3.80 ± 1.08 jaguars per 100 km2 in 2022. The probability of a tourist viewing a jaguar increased from 0% in 2014 to 40% in 2020 before the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results are the first robust estimates of jaguar survival and abundance on working lands. Our findings highlight the importance of productive lands for jaguar conservation and suggest that a tourism destination and working ranch can host an abundant population of jaguars when accompanied by conservation agreements and conflict interventions. Our analytical model that combines conventional data collection with tourist sightings can be applied to other species that are observed during tourism activities.

Conservation interventions are central strategies for achieving sustainable development goals given the inextricable dependence of humanity on nature. Current debate centres on whether interventions such as marine protected areas (MPAs) promote co-benefits or trade-offs among multiple goals such as poverty alleviation, food security and protection of marine resources. Resolving this question is hindered by a lack of quantitative impact evaluations of concurrent ecological and social co-benefits of MPAs. Here we use a statistical matching approach to examine whether MPAs are associated with co-benefits or trade-offs between reef fish abundances and measures of human well-being, including income, diet and food security in the Mesoamerican region. We find that highly protected areas (HPAs) with stringent fishing restrictions tend to support high mean abundances and stable or increasing trends in fish abundances compared with unprotected sites and ‘general use zones’ of MPAs. At the same time, indicators of income and food security were elevated in communities near MPAs, especially HPAs, compared with communities far from MPAs. Finally, proximity to MPAs and to reefs with high fish abundance were both positively associated with well-being across space. Together, these results provide quantitative evidence of co-benefits for fish and people associated with MPAs, highlighting the potential value of MPAs in achieving multiple sustainable development goals.

Approaches to marine conservation and management issues has often been limited to using scientific research to propose technical and policy interventions. However, communicating outputs as scientific publications and policy briefs has limited reach and impact for non-academic audiences. Art markets in Mombasa and Kilifi Counties in Kenya were sampled to determine how the creative arts can be used to communicate ocean science. Artwork with terrestrial themes was popular and increasingly available to buyers compared to ocean art. Billfish as a representative species was popular in ocean art culture, underscoring its potential in a niche market for ocean art. Our study highlights opportunities for active collaboration between scientists and artists in communicating messages from scientific work to non-academic audiences. Engagement of Western Indian Ocean countries in the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development will benefit from the use of ocean art in science communication and enhance ocean literacy in the region.

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. This paper describes how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support decision-making. First, we describe key considerations for the NFF in developing qualitative and quantitative scenarios: i) multiple value perspectives on nature as a state space where pathways improving nature toward a frontier can be represented, ii) mutually reinforcing key feedbacks of social-ecological systems that are important for nature conservation and human wellbeing, iii) indicators of multiple knowledge systems describing the evolution of complex social-ecological dynamics. We then present three approaches to modelling Nature Futures scenarios in the review, screening, and design phases of policy processes. This paper seeks to facilitate the integration of relational values of nature in models and strengthen modelled linkages across biodiversity, nature’s contributions to people, and quality of life.

Wildlife species may shift towards more nocturnal behavior in areas of higher human influence, but it is unclear how consistent this shift might be. We investigated how humans impact large mammal diel activities in a heavily recreated protected area and an adjacent university-managed forest in southwest British Columbia, Canada. We used camera trap detections of humans and wildlife, along with data on land-use infrastructure (e.g., recreation trails and restricted-access roads), in Bayesian regression models to investigate impacts of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality. We found moderate evidence that black bears (Ursus americanus) were more nocturnal in response to human detections (mean posterior estimate = 0.35, 90% credible interval = 0.04 to 0.65), but no other clear relationships between wildlife nocturnality and human detections. However, we found evidence that coyotes (Canis latrans) (estimates = 0.81, 95% CI = 0.46 to 1.17) were more nocturnal and snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) (estimate = -0.87, 95% CI = -1.29 to -0.46) were less nocturnal in areas of higher trail density. We also found that coyotes (estimate = -0.87, 95% CI = -1.29 to -0.46) and cougars (Puma concolor) (estimate = -1.14, 90% CI = -2.16 to -0.12) were less nocturnal in areas of greater road density. Furthermore, coyotes, black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and snowshoe hares were moderately more nocturnal in areas near urban-wildland boundaries (estimates and 90% CIs: coyote = -0.29, -0.55 to -0.04, black-tailed deer = -0.25, -0.45 to -0.04, snowshoe hare = -0.24, -0.46 to -0.01). Our findings imply anthropogenic landscape features may influence medium to large-sized mammal diel activities more than direct human presence. While increased nocturnality may be a promising mechanism for human-wildlife coexistence, shifts in temporal activity can also have negative repercussions for wildlife, warranting further research into the causes and consequences of wildlife responses to increasingly human-dominated landscapes.

The 2022 United Nations (UN) Biodiversity Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognized for the first-time ‘inland waters’ as a distinct realm in terms of setting targets and a process for monitoring and conserving them and their biodiversity. It is common for environmentalists and environmental scholars to bemoan things that they care about, but that have been forgotten, ignored, or excluded when it comes to environmental decisions, or the development of environmental policy. Often those concerns focus on a specific taxonomic group or species, a specific locality, a particular environmental decision, or a particular regional or national policy. However, rarely do they focus on an entire realm that occurs around the globe. By ‘realm’ we are referring to terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. Equally important, some of the key messages of the Kunming-Montreal GBF were picked up at the UN Water Conference in March 2023, the first of such meetings in almost 50 years, which commits to a global water action agenda to restore and protect freshwater ecosystems as a component of sustainable development. Here, we draw attention to the CBD included language that recognizes inland waters on their own merits (i.e., as a distinct realm) within the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) [1] that was submitted by the President of CBD COP 15, held in Montreal, on December 18, 2022.

As humanity has become increasingly urban, a growing number of people have been deprived of access to nature and the benefits it provides. This is especially true for marginalized groups, who often live in neighbourhoods where nature has been so diminished and degraded that it provides fewer types, and much lower levels of benefits.We review the literatures on human–nature relationships, urban sustainability and justice to create an actionable definition of ‘access to nature’ that people can use to advocate for and guide investments that improve access to nature in urban contexts.We show how the interplay of three dimensions of justice—recognitional, procedural and distributional—determines access to nature in cities, and how these dimensions are core to increasing access to urban nature.We present a design thinking framework that centres justice in creating interventions for access to nature, together with questions that can guide the process of designing and implementing new interventions.Lastly, we illustrate how our framework can be operationalized by showcasing three case studies that improve access to nature to marginalized communities in the United States: Latino Outdoors, Sogorea Te′ Land Trust and the Nature Imagery in Prisons Project.We conclude by re-affirming the importance of centring justice in improving access to nature, so that all people can enjoy the benefits that nature provides and lead healthy, fulfilling lives.