Incorporating relevant stakeholder input into conservation decision making is fundamentally challenging yet critical for understanding both the status of, and human pressures on, natural resources. Collective intelligence (CI ), defined as the ability of a group to accomplish difficult tasks more effectively than individuals, is a growing area of investigation, with implications for improving ecological

Wetland ecosystems are highly biodiverse, essential to human health and well‐being, and in decline, yet knowledge of the natural dynamics and distributions of wetland systems is lacking globally, hindering conservation efforts. We integrated data generated from novel remote‐sensing techniques and Bayesian hierarchical modeling to estimate the daily surface area of 149 wetlands (vernal pools) over a

Roads represent a threat to biodiversity, primarily through increased mortality from collisions with vehicles. Although estimating roadkill rates is an important first step, how roads affect long‐term population persistence must also be assessed. We developed a trait‐based model to predict roadkill rates for terrestrial bird and mammalian species in Europe and used a generalized population model to

Infectious diseases have indelibly altered human history and, in doing so, have shaped the ecology and conservation of the natural world. Attempts to control diseases often result in adverse environmental impacts, including habitat degradation and unintended outcomes such as effects on non‐target species. However, in instances where the most effective strategy is to physically avoid specific species

During seasonal changes around the globe, trillions of insects are on the move. Many insect populations, including butterflies, moths, hoverflies, and dragonflies, make repeated seasonal migrations each year. It is only during the past century that biologists have come to accept the concept of insect migration, and new research using radar, citizen science, and stable isotopes has revealed unexpected

The destructive wildfires that occurred recently in the western US starkly foreshadow the possible future of forest ecosystems and human communities in the region. With increases in the area burned by severe wildfire in seasonally dry forests expected to result from climate change, judicious, science‐based fire and restoration strategies will be essential for improving the resilience of forest ecosystems

Salvage logging, or logging after natural disturbances such as wildfires, insect outbreaks, and windstorms, is carried out to recover some of a forest's natural and/or economic capital. However, trade‐offs between management objectives and a lack of consensus on the ecological consequences of salvage logging impair science‐based decision making on the management of forests after natural disturbances

At the time of this writing (early spring 2020), the COVID‐19 wave is hitting the US. We are all hoping that the wave, here and elsewhere, can be kept sufficiently low and slow so that medical infrastructure and personnel can keep pace with the outbreak. That will also provide time for the research and clinical‐practice communities to better understand the disease and how to manage it. A wave of a

Climate‐change adaptation focuses on conducting and translating research to minimize the dire impacts of anthropogenic climate change, including threats to biodiversity and human welfare. One adaptation strategy is to focus conservation on climate‐change refugia (that is, areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of valued physical, ecological, and

Disturbance refugia – locations that experience less severe or frequent disturbances than the surrounding landscape – provide a framework to highlight not only where and why these biological legacies persist as adjacent areas change but also the value of those legacies in sustaining biodiversity. Recent studies of disturbance refugia in forest ecosystems have focused primarily on fire, with a growing

Natural springs in water‐limited landscapes are biodiversity hotspots and keystone ecosystems that have a disproportionate influence on surrounding landscapes despite their usually small size. Some springs served as evolutionary refugia during previous climate drying, supporting relict species in isolated habitats. Understanding whether springs will provide hydrologic refugia from future climate change

Climate‐change refugia – locations likely to facilitate species persistence under climate change – are increasingly important components of conservation planning. Recent approaches for identifying refugia at broad scales include identifying regions that are projected to experience less severe changes (climatic exposure), that contain a diversity of physical and topographic features (environmental diversity)

The vast boreal biome plays an important role in the global carbon cycle but is experiencing particularly rapid climate warming, threatening the integrity of valued ecosystems and their component species. We developed a framework and taxonomy to identify climate‐change refugia potential in the North American boreal region, summarizing current knowledge regarding mechanisms, geographic distribution

Within the context of climate adaptation, the concept of climate refugia has emerged as a framework for addressing future threats to freshwater fish populations. We evaluated recent climate‐refugia management associated with water use and landscape modification by comparing efforts in the US states of Oregon and Massachusetts, for which there are contrasting resource use patterns. Using these examples

Natural resource managers need information about the risks associated with climate change to provide guidance on where to implement various management practices on natural lands. The spatial variation of projected impacts within a vegetation type can be used to target climate‐adaptive management actions because different locations will be exposed to different levels of climatic stress. Vegetation refugia

Plant distributions are strongly influenced by both climate and topography. In an analysis of geographic and topographic distributions for selected tree species in California, we found that tree populations are increasingly restricted to extreme topographic positions as they approach the edge of their geographic ranges, occupying cooler, pole‐facing slopes (at the warm and dry edge) and warmer, equator‐facing

Efforts to conserve biodiversity increasingly focus on identifying climate‐change refugia – areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable species persistence. Identification of refugia typically includes modeling the distribution of a species’ current habitat and then extrapolating that distribution given projected changes in temperature and precipitation, or by mapping

No one was quite prepared for what the Doc Ricketts , a remotely operated submersible vehicle, would reveal when, in late March 2015, it illuminated the gloomy depths of the Gulf of California. Between 600 and 900 m below the surface, in one of the most extreme low‐oxygen environments anywhere in the world's oceans, it found fish. Lots of fish. In fact, the seabed was littered with cusk eels (Cherublemma

The climate crisis is upon us. Our physical world is changing as our climate veers away from its historical state and societies comprehend the magnitude of this disruption. Youth, students, and many others are in the streets, demanding deeper, faster, and more equitable action to protect their future. Simultaneously, we as ecologists, environmental scientists, and climate and sustainability educators

Canadians aim for greener shipping Janet Pelley Nearly everyone enjoys seeing the delivery van drop off their online order at the doorstep. But all the trucks bringing goods into cities also deliver a substantial load of CO2 and toxic exhaust. Alarmed by rapid growth in delivery traffic, Canada's largest cities are taking steps to decarbonize urban freight, according to a new report from the Calgary‐based

Pareidolia: seeing faces or objects where there are none. Those creepy caricatures that stared at you from your bedroom curtains throughout the night, Captain Jack Sparrow in the passing clouds, that so‐much‐like Abraham Lincoln potato, the Man in the Moon (or a rabbit pounding rice if you're from Japan); all are the effects of pareidolia. Scientists must beware of pareidolia – and of how communicating

To stem the ongoing loss of biodiversity, conservation practitioners must distinguish between effective and ineffective approaches for protecting species habitats. Using Google Earth Engine and 31 years of Landsat images, we quantified changes in the habitats of 24 vertebrates listed under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) and on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List

The US Endangered Species Act (ESA) is an important safety net for the protection and recovery of critically imperiled species. One mechanism of the ESA is prohibitions on harming listed species and their habitat, yet the ESA does not require proactive conservation by the private sector, which is necessary for the recovery of many species. A range of ESA programs have been developed – including Candidate

Climate change will bring more extremes in temperature and precipitation that will impact productivity and ecosystem resilience throughout agroecosystems worldwide. Historical events can be used to identify drivers that impact future events. A catastrophic drought in the US in the 1930s resulted in an abrupt boundary between areas severely impacted by the Dust Bowl and areas that were less severely

Maps of the human footprint allow ecologists to identify the wildest lands on the planet, track their decline, and prioritize wildland conservation efforts. Other research efforts have mapped biological intactness and identified conservation priorities to protect biodiversity. However, little research has involved the use of historical references to evaluate intactness of species composition globally

Commonly used in the literature to refer to the “attractiveness”, “appeal”, or “beauty” of a species, charisma can be defined as a set of characteristics – and the perception thereof – that affect people's attitudes and behaviors toward a species. It is a highly relevant concept for invasion science, with implications across all stages of the invasion process. However, the concept of invasive alien

Assessments of climate‐change effects on ecosystem processes and services in high‐latitude regions are hindered by a lack of decision‐support tools capable of forecasting possible future landscapes. We describe a collaborative effort to develop and apply the Integrated Ecosystem Model (IEM) for Alaska and northwestern Canada to explore how climate change influences interactions among disturbance regimes

New development in regions with rapidly changing climates may experience unforeseen hazards. Thermokarst lakes (bodies of freshwater that collect in depressions formed by thawing permafrost) cover 20% of Arctic lowlands and are naturally prone to causing catastrophic flooding. Cumulative lake drainage over time has resulted in up to 60% landscape coverage by drained thermokarst lake basins (DTLBs)

Oil palm plantations are expanding rapidly throughout Southeast Asia due to increasing global food demand, thereby putting greater pressure on local ecosystems. These plantations usually replace rainforests, resulting in major losses of soil structure and fertility, and belowground biodiversity. However, despite causing soil degradation, oil palms may provide a novel microhabitat for soil biota in

Global warming is expected to drive species toward higher altitudes. Indeed, most documented range shifts are upward, but observed shifts are often far from model predictions, and even downward shifts are common. Can such counterintuitive observations be explained? Metabolic oxygen demand rises with temperature in ectothermic animals, but levels of metabolic sensitivity to temperature increases (Q10)

Nearly 19% of the world's population lives in China, yet the country contains only 7% of the planet's fresh water. Combining remotely sensed data and ground‐based measurements, we conducted a comprehensive assessment of recent changes in China's water resources. Beginning in the 21st century, glaciers in western China have been melting at very high rates; lakes on the Tibetan Plateau have been expanding

Biological invasions are a form of global change threatening biodiversity, ecosystem stability, and human health, and cost government agencies billions of dollars in remediation and eradication programs. Attempts to eradicate introduced species are most successful when detection of newly established populations occurs early in the invasion process. We review existing and emerging tools – specifically

Although it is well known that insects are sensitive to temperature, how they will be affected by ongoing global warming remains uncertain because these responses are multifaceted and ecologically complex. We reviewed the effects of climate warming on 31 globally important phytophagous (plant‐eating) insect pests to determine whether general trends in their responses to warming were detectable. We

Exit strategies – plans to end involvement in a project once selected criteria have been reached – are rare in conservation planning but can play a vital role in the conservation planning process; such strategies also prepare the institution, its staff, its partners, and a wider group of stakeholders for eventual success or failure and signal when it is time to move on. Exit strategies may indicate

Citizen science is a powerful tool for connecting members of the public with research and for obtaining large amounts of data. However, it is far less commonly implemented in developing countries than in developed countries. We conducted a large‐scale citizen‐science program monitoring honey bee (Apis mellifera) colony losses in Argentina to examine how a national consortium composed of local coordinators

There is substantial interest in understanding the ecological impacts of the nuclear accidents at the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants. However, population‐level data for large mammals have been limited, and there remains much speculation regarding the status of wildlife species in these areas. Using a network of remote cameras placed along a gradient of radiological contamination

Despite the mounting threats that tropical ecosystems face, conservation in the tropics remains severely under‐researched relative to temperate systems. Efforts to address this knowledge gap have so far largely failed to analyze the relationship between an author's choice of study site and that author's country of origin. We examined factors that motivate both foreign and domestic scientists to conduct

Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) are critical strongholds for the environmental services that they provide, not least for their role in climate protection. On the basis of information about the distributions of IFLs and Indigenous Peoples’ lands, we examined the importance of these areas for conserving the world's remaining intact forests. We determined that at least 36% of IFLs are within Indigenous

Wild‐caught fish account for approximately one‐half of all seafood consumed globally, yet there is strong evidence that improved science and management are needed to ensure the biological, economic, and social sustainability of this critical food source. Presently, insufficient resources are allocated to achieve such sustainability, but conservation finance offers promising new sources of funding for

Shifts in phenology that are driven by climate change have substantial impacts on ecosystems, but the effects of these ecological shifts on coupled social–ecological systems remain largely unexplored. Using a large database of crowd‐sourced photographs from the image‐hosting website Flickr, we show that early snow disappearance conditions similar to those expected by the late 21st century cause the

Human activities have altered the global nitrogen (N) cycle, elevating rates of atmospheric N deposition up to tenfold above pre‐industrial levels, with consequences for ecosystem function and human health. To date, most N deposition studies have been carried out in rural areas; however, there has been a recent surge of N deposition studies conducted in urban ecosystems due to the increased recognition

Farmlands are currently among the dominant uses of the land. When managed under low‐input farming systems, farmlands are associated with diverse cultural and natural heritages around the world. Known in Europe as high nature value (HNV) farmlands, these agricultural landscapes and their associated farming systems evolved as tightly coupled socioecological systems, and are essential to biodiversity

Molecular detection techniques are powerful tools used in ecological applications ranging from diet analyses to pathogen surveillance. Research partnerships that use these tools often involve collaboration among professionals with expertise in field biology, laboratory techniques, quantitative modeling, wildlife disease, and natural resource management. However, in many cases, each of these collaborators

Animal migrations are ecologically, culturally, and economically important. Ungulate populations in many parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas migrate long distances to access seasonally available resources, traversing vast landscapes in large numbers. Yet some migrations are declining, raising concerns among scientists and natural resource managers. We synthesize recent advances in ungulate

Policies designed to address current challenges to the sustainability of fisheries generally use an ecosystem‐based approach – one that incorporates interactions between fishes, fishers, and the environment. Fishing alters the trophic structure among coral reef fish but properly assessing those impacts requires an understanding of how and why that structure varies naturally across scales. Using a combination

Over the Earth's terrestrial surface, wildlife species are adversely affected by an increasing number of anthropogenic impacts to the landscape, collectively termed the “human footprint”. However, there is limited understanding of how the human footprint influences cause‐specific mortality in wildlife. We conducted a synthesis of cause‐specific mortality of North American terrestrial mammals, compiling

Urban development can alter resource availability, land use, and community composition, which, in turn, influences wildlife health. Generalizable relationships between wildlife health and urbanization have yet to be quantified and could vary across different measures of health and among species. We present a phylogenetic meta‐analysis of 516 comparisons of the toxicant loads, parasitism, body condition

Ecological research increasingly relies on broad‐scale databases containing information collected by personnel from a variety of sources, including government agencies, universities, and citizen‐science programs. However, the contribution of citizen‐science programs to these databases is not well known. We analyzed one such database to quantify the contribution of citizen science to lake water‐quality

The rapid pace of environmental change in the Anthropocene necessitates the development of a new suite of tools for measuring ecosystem dynamics. Sentinel species can provide insight into ecosystem function, identify hidden risks to human health, and predict future change. As sentinels, marine apex (top) predators offer a unique perspective into ocean processes, given that they can move across ocean

In southern Amazonia, more than half of all cropland is devoted to the production of two rainfed crops per year, an agricultural practice known as “double cropping” (DC). Climate change, including feedbacks between changes in land use and the local climate, is shortening the extent of the historical rainy season in southern Amazonia, increasing the risk of future detrimental environmental conditions

The ability to routinely quantify global carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption by the oceans has become crucial: it provides a powerful constraint for establishing global and regional carbon (C) budgets, and enables identification of the ecological impacts and risks of this uptake on the marine environment. Advances in understanding, technology, and international coordination have made it possible to measure

Wetlands across the globe provide extensive ecosystem services. However, many wetlands - especially those surrounded by uplands, often referred to as geographically isolated wetlands (GIWs) - remain poorly protected. Protection and restoration of wetlands frequently requires information on their hydrologic connectivity to other surface waters, and their cumulative watershed-scale effects. The integration

Parasites have historically been considered a scourge, deserving of annihilation. Although parasite eradications rank among humanity's greatest achievements, new research is shedding light on the collateral effects of parasite loss. Here, we explore a "world without parasites": a thought experiment for illuminating the ecological roles that parasites play in ecosystems. While there is robust evidence

Socioecological theory, developed through the study of urban environments, has recently led to a proliferation of research focusing on comparative analyses of cities. This research emphasis has been concentrated in the more developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere (often referred to as the "Global North"), yet urbanization is now occurring mostly in the developing world, with the fastest rates

Since the identification and imprisonment of "Typhoid Mary," a woman who infected at least 47 people with typhoid in the early 1900s, epidemiologists have recognized that 'superspreading' hosts play a key role in disease epidemics. Such variability in transmission also exists among species within a community (amplification hosts) and among habitat patches across a landscape (disease 'hotspots'), underscoring

Through the work of international public health organizations and advancements in the biological and technological sciences, substantial progress has been made in our ability to prevent, control, locally eliminate, and in one case eradicate infectious diseases. Yet each successful control or local elimination has been met with the emergence of new pathogens, the evolution of novel strains, or different

Innovation has the potential to enable conservation science and practice to keep pace with the escalating threats to global biodiversity, but this potential will only be realized if such innovations are designed and developed to fulfill specific needs and solve well‐defined conservation problems. We propose that business‐world strategies for assessing the practicality of innovation can be applied to

“Infochemicals” (information‐conveying chemicals) dominate much of the underwater communication in biological systems. They influence the movement and behavior of organisms, the ecological interactions between and across populations, and the trophic structure of marine food webs. However, relative to their terrestrial equivalents, the wider ecological and economic importance of marine infochemicals

In an era of unprecedented environmental change, US national parks are refuges of natural ecosystems and facilitate connections between humans and nature. However, anthropogenic noise is an increasingly pervasive threat in these parks. To diagnose noise levels and sources, we analyzed thousands of hours of acoustic recordings collected across park units and summarized results from continental‐scale

Energy development – as manifested by the proliferation of hydroelectric dams and increased oil and gas exploration – is a driver of change in Amazonian ecosystems. However, prevailing approaches to Amazonian ecosystem conservation that focus on terrestrial protected areas and Indigenous territories do not offer sufficient insurance against the risks associated with energy development. Here, we explore