Peer-reviewed publications

The tropical dry regions in the Neotropics face significant anthropogenic pressures, impacting local communities’ life patterns and wellbeing. In a study of the Gulf of Mexico’s tropical dry region, we evaluated traditional uses of tree species in vegetation patches. Notably, Acacia cochliacantha, Cedrela odorata, Enterolobium cyclocarpum, Gliricidia sepium, and Guazuma ulmifolia were the most commonly used species. Firewood and pasture management were widespread uses, while reforestation was less common. Proximity to human settlements influenced inhabitants’ use and recognition of plant species. Despite reduced forest cover, local communities still recognize multiple uses for vegetation patches. This research provides essential baseline information for conservation efforts.

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is common in most types of ecosystems that are characterized by common property practices. However, the emergence and spread of CBNRM has varied across geographies and contexts. This study explores factors that have enabled the modern emergence, persistence, and spread of marine CBNRM in four coastal districts in Tanzania. It also investigates how CBNRM—particularly local ownership and management of marine resources —is implemented and developed. It draws on a document review of the grey and scientific literature, and in-depth qualitative field work carried out in four coastal districts on mainland Tanzania. The field work involved 15 key informant interviews, 12 focus groups discussion, and participant observation, documenting the perceptions of resource users. The findings indicate that marine CBNRM – operationalized largely through local organizations called Beach Management Units (BMUs) – have strong support from local communities, but emerged, persist, and scaled largely through government and donor led initiatives. The local communities' strong desire to safeguard fisheries resources and reduce overexploitation, caused by illegal harvesting practices, promoted the quick expansion of BMUs, which in turn ensured the continuation of CBNRM. The positive experience and lessons learned from BMUs established early in the process encouraged the spread and ultimately scaling out of CBNRM. Expanding and sustaining marine CBNRM beyond its current form, which relies heavily on external support, will require innovative approaches that foster collective action, identify sustainable financing mechanisms, provide clarity in roles and responsibilities, and identify cost-effective and scalable CBNRM approaches.

Populations on the periphery of a species range generally occupy marginal or less continuous habitat and can have greater extinction risk than populations in the range-center. For climate-sensitive populations on the trailing edge of a species' distribution (i.e. low latitude or low elevation), the effects of climate change are expected to compound these threats, increasing the vulnerability of these populations. The spruce grouse Canachites canadensis is a boreal forest specialist that is expected to experience range contraction at the trailing edge of its range due to climate change. In this study, we investigated the genetic structure, genetic diversity, and connectivity of spruce grouse in Minnesota, along the southeastern range limit in the United States. Clustering algorithms and genetic diversity indices suggested a single continuous population occurred throughout northern Minnesota. We detected no signatures of recent inbreeding or population bottlenecks. We used maximum likelihood population effects modeling and identified coniferous forest land cover and lower average spring temperatures as predictors of gene flow. We used two approaches based on circuit theory to map the potential for gene flow and identified regions of consistently high gene flow in the northwest and northeast of the study area. Omniscape, which incorporated additional parameters representing the likely origins of dispersers and the maximum dispersal distance, suggested a more continuous gene flow landscape than did Circuitscape. Our work highlights the current genetic integrity of one of the largest populations of the eastern subspecies of spruce grouse C. c. canadensis in the United States, identifies key landscape attributes for functional connectivity, and demonstrates complementary approaches of Circuitscape and Omniscape for gene flow mapping.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) can deliver many benefits to human wellbeing, including some crucial to climate adaptation. We quantitatively assess the global potential of NBS strategies of protection, restoration, and agroforestry by modeling global climate change mitigation and local ecosystem services (water availability, sediment retention, runoff, pollination, nitrogen retention, green water storage, and coastal protection). The strategies with the most potential to help people do not necessarily deliver the most climate change mitigation: per area of conservation action, agroforestry provides substantial benefits (>20% increase in at least one local ecosystem service) to three times more people on average than reforestation while providing less than one tenth the carbon sequestration per unit area. Each strategy delivers a different suite of ecosystem service benefits; for instance, avoided forest conversion provides a strong increase in nitrogen retention (100% increase to 72 million people if fully implemented globally) while agroforestry increases pollination services (100% increase to 3.0 billion people if fully implemented globally). One common disservice shared by all the NBS strategies modeled here is that increased woody biomass increases transpiration, reducing annual runoff and in some watersheds negatively impacting local water availability. In addition, the places with the greatest potential for climate change mitigation are not necessarily the ones with the most people. For instance, reforestation in Latin America has the greatest climate change mitigation potential, but the greatest ecosystem service benefits are in Africa. Focusing on nations with high climate mitigation potential as well as high local ecosystem service potential, such as Nigeria in the case of reforestation, India for agroforestry, and the Republic of Congo for avoided forest conversion, can help identify win-win sites for implementation. We find that concentrating implementation of these three conservation strategies in critical places, covering 5.8 million km2, could benefit 2.0 billion people with increased local ecosystem services provision. These critical places cover only 35% of the possible area of implementation but would provide 80% of the benefits that are possible globally for the selected set of ecosystem services under the NBS scenarios examined here. We conclude that targeting these critical places for protection, restoration, and agroforestry interventions will be key to achieving adaptation and human wellbeing goals while also increasing nature-based carbon mitigation.

Nature-based climate solutions (NbCSs) could play an important role in meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. The contribution approach offers an alternative model to carbon offsetting for funding NbCSs. This paper presents three crucial design principles to help ensure the contribution approach results in high-quality climate and other benefits and avoids harms.

For many decades, food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) were only health-oriented. This changed post-2009 when gradually, an increasing number of countries began to include environmental sustainability considerations in their guidelines. International organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have stated that governments should include environmental sustainability in future FBDGs. However, methodologies on how this should be done are lacking. Therefore, through workshops and discussions with experts, we analysed a selection of methodologies and classified them into six groups: (1) health first; (2) additional advice; (3) demonstrating synergies; (4) modelling impact; (5) combining strategies; (6) systems first. We then assessed how innovative each approach was and their potential for transformative impact. Of the 6 approaches investigated, only approaches 5 and 6 could be considered as disruptive innovations and leading to major changes. Adding environmental sustainability into FBDGs is a policy innovation and has become a debate between old and new multi-criteria guidelines for eating. With the addition of environmental sustainability in FBDGS, a new or emerging set of multi-criteria guidelines for judging food are being proposed that challenges past norms and governance. Today, there is growing scientific consensus that diets that are good for human health are also good for the environment. There is also a growing recognition that food system change is inevitable and desirable. We see this as a positive opportunity to collaborate on FBDGs that are more appropriate for the 21st century and ambitious enough to meet the environmental challenges at hand.

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.