Matters Arising |
Featured
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Caution over the use of ecological big data for conservation
- Nuno Queiroz
- , Nicolas E. Humphries
- & David W. Sims
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Correspondence |
Ancient oaks of Europe are archives — protect them
- Christian Sonne
- , Changlei Xia
- & Su Shiung Lam
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Where I Work |
Shell shock: a biologist’s quest to save the endangered painted snail
Bernardo Reyes-Tur aims to unravel the mating mysteries of Cuba’s imperilled Polymita.
- Kendall Powell
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Where I Work |
Tapping local knowledge to save a Papua New Guinea forest
Villagers who know the land help Jason Paliau to survey the region’s insects.
- Chris Woolston
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Research Highlight |
Forests that float in the clouds are drifting away
Tropical cloud forests are safe havens for a vast range of creatures and plants, but they are under siege around the globe.
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Correspondence |
China’s wildlife protection: add annual reviews and oversight
- Hai-Tao Shi
- , Jian Wang
- & James F. Parham
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Correspondence |
Add Himalaya’s Grand Canyon to China’s first national parks
- Fang Wang
- , Zhixiang Zhang
- & Zhi Lu
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Correspondence |
Vaccinate in biodiversity hotspots to protect people and wildlife from each other
- Fabian H. Leendertz
- & Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka
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Research Highlight |
Humans push a hulking fish with a chainsaw nose towards oblivion
The strange-looking sawfish, itself a predator, falls prey to overfishing and habitat destruction.
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Where I Work |
The bird librarian
Leah Tsang helps to bring bird poisoners to justice as part of her role at Australia’s oldest museum.
- James Mitchell Crow
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Research Highlight |
Pangolins in peril get a hand from human neighbours
The expertise of local people could help to protect an extremely rare Philippine species.
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Article |
More than one million barriers fragment Europe’s rivers
Validated barrier inventories and modelling indicate that Europe’s rivers are fragmented by more than one million barriers, such as dams, weirs and fords, causing major impacts on biodiversity.
- Barbara Belletti
- , Carlos Garcia de Leaniz
- & Maciej Zalewski
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News & Views |
River conservation by an Indigenous community
Populations of river fish are threatened by pressures on land and water resources. Networks of reserves managed by Indigenous people at community level offer a way to conserve fish diversity and enhance yields of nearby fisheries.
- Edward H. Allison
- & Violet Cho
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Outlook |
Research round-up: sustainable nutrition
A way to estimate household food waste, the unintended consequences of environmental interventions and other highlights from research.
- Dyani Lewis
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Article |
A network of grassroots reserves protects tropical river fish diversity
A network of small, community-run river reserves in Thailand increases local fish biomass, diversity and richness.
- Aaron A. Koning
- , K. Martin Perales
- & Peter B. McIntyre
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Correspondence |
Giant tortoises make a comeback in Madagascar
- Miguel Pedrono
- , Elodi Rambeloson
- & Alison Clausen
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Article |
Clustered versus catastrophic global vertebrate declines
In the geographically and taxonomically divided systems of vertebrates in the Living Planet Index, a small percentage of clusters showed extreme declines or increases, whereas most vertebrate populations across all systems showed no mean global trend.
- Brian Leung
- , Anna L. Hargreaves
- & Robin Freeman
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Article |
Sensory pollutants alter bird phenology and fitness across a continent
Human-generated noise and night lighting affect breeding habits and fitness in birds, implying that sensory pollutants must be considered alongside other environmental factors in assessing biodiversity conservation.
- Masayuki Senzaki
- , Jesse R. Barber
- & Clinton D. Francis
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Editorial |
Get Africa’s Great Green Wall back on track
A plan to green 7,000 kilometres of Africa’s drylands is struggling to take off. Researchers must help.
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Obituary |
Joseph H. Connell (1923–2020)
Ecologist who transformed the study of natural communities.
- Jane Lubchenco
- & Wayne P. Sousa
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Obituary |
Georgina Mace (1953–2020)
Pioneer of biodiversity accounting who overhauled the Red List of threatened species.
- Nathalie Pettorelli
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News & Views |
Prioritizing where to restore Earth’s ecosystems
Targets for ecosystem restoration are usually specified in terms of the total area to be restored. A global analysis reveals that the benefits and costs of achieving such targets depend greatly on where this restoration occurs.
- Simon Ferrier
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Article |
Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration
Multicriteria optimization identifies global priority areas for ecosystem restoration and estimates their benefits for biodiversity and climate, providing cost–benefit analyses that highlight the importance of optimizing spatial planning and incorporating several biomes in restoration strategies.
- Bernardo B. N. Strassburg
- , Alvaro Iribarrem
- & Piero Visconti
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Nature Podcast |
Superconductivity gets heated
A high pressure experiment reveals the world’s first room-temperature superconductor, and a method to target ecosystem restoration.
- Nick Howe
- & Shamini Bundell
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Where I Work |
Fighting fires to save a natural preserve in Brazil
Biologist Cristina Cuiabália Neves and her team are dedicated to maintaining a nature reserve that is home to many endangered and threatened species.
- Patrícia Maia Noronha
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Review Article |
Area-based conservation in the twenty-first century
The long-term success of area-based conservation—including both protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures—after 2020 will depend on governments securing adequate funding and prioritizing biodiversity in land, water and sea management.
- Sean L. Maxwell
- , Victor Cazalis
- & James E. M. Watson
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Where I Work |
Chasing bats at dawn
Conservation scientist Ricardo Rocha seeks to discover how deforestation affects communities of bats that feast on disease-bearing insects.
- Patrícia Maia Noronha
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News & Views |
A recipe to reverse the loss of nature
How can the decline in global biodiversity be reversed, given the need to supply food? Computer modelling provides a way to assess the effectiveness of combining various conservation and food-system interventions to tackle this issue.
- Brett A. Bryan
- & Carla L. Archibald
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News |
Why deforestation and extinctions make pandemics more likely
Researchers are redoubling efforts to understand links between biodiversity and emerging diseases — and use that information to predict and stop future outbreaks.
- Jeff Tollefson
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News & Views |
An inventory of plants for the land of the unexpected
New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora, according to the area’s first plant list catalogued by experts. Completing this list poses a formidable challenge that New Guineans are best placed to take up.
- Vojtech Novotny
- & Kenneth Molem
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Article
| Open AccessThe tuatara genome reveals ancient features of amniote evolution
The approximately 5-Gb tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) genome assembly provides a resource for analysing amniote evolution, and highlights the imperative for meaningful cultural engagement with Indigenous communities in genome-sequencing endeavours.
- Neil J. Gemmell
- , Kim Rutherford
- & Haydn Edmonds
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Article |
New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora
A catalogue of the vascular flora of New Guinea indicates that this island is the most floristically diverse in the world, and that 68% of the species identified are endemic to New Guinea.
- Rodrigo Cámara-Leret
- , David G. Frodin
- & Peter C. van Welzen
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News & Views |
Rethinking extinctions that arise from habitat loss
Does the loss of species through habitat decline follow the same pattern whether the area lost is part of a large or a small habitat? An analysis sheds light on this long-running debate, with its implications for conservation strategies.
- Joaquín Hortal
- & Ana M. C. Santos
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Article |
Ecosystem decay exacerbates biodiversity loss with habitat loss
Analysis of 123 studies of assemblage-level abundances of focal taxa from fragmented habitats finds that increasing fragmentation has a disproportionately large effect on biodiversity loss, supporting the ecosystem decay hypothesis.
- Jonathan M. Chase
- , Shane A. Blowes
- & Felix May
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Article |
Global status and conservation potential of reef sharks
Fishing has had a profound impact on global reef shark populations, and the absence or presence of sharks is strongly correlated with national socio-economic conditions and reef governance.
- M. Aaron MacNeil
- , Demian D. Chapman
- & Joshua E. Cinner
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Article |
Antarctica’s wilderness fails to capture continent’s biodiversity
Historical records reveal that although 99.6% of Antarctica is defined as wilderness, areas undisturbed by humans comprise less than 32%, largely in regions of low biodiversity.
- Rachel I. Leihy
- , Bernard W. T. Coetzee
- & Steven L. Chown
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Where I Work |
To look after these birds is to ‘fall in love’ with them
Andrew Digby works to protect the kakapo, a critically endangered and charismatic New Zealand species of parrot.
- Amber Dance
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Book Review |
The novelist who loved soil
A biography digs into Pulitzer prizewinner and farming pioneer Louis Bromfield’s life. By David R. Montgomery.
- David R. Montgomery
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Review Article |
Rebuilding marine life
Analyses of the recovery of marine populations, habitats and ecosystems following past conservation interventions indicate that substantial recovery of the abundance, structure and function of marine life could be achieved by 2050 if major pressures, including climate change, are mitigated.
- Carlos M. Duarte
- , Susana Agusti
- & Boris Worm
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Research Highlight |
The bits of wire that can devastate lion populations
Simple snares aimed at catching African game for the table take a huge toll on carnivores, too.
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Article |
Global conservation of species’ niches
Protected areas would need to expand to 33.8% of the total land surface to adequately represent environmental conditions across the habitats of amphibians, birds and terrestrial mammals, far exceeding the current 17% target.
- Jeffrey O. Hanson
- , Jonathan R. Rhodes
- & Richard A. Fuller
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Correspondence |
COVID-19: protect great apes during human pandemics
- Thomas R. Gillespie
- & Fabian H. Leendertz
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News & Views |
Predators on track for ocean protection around Antarctica
Satellite tracking of marine predators in the Southern Ocean has revealed key ecological areas under disproportionate pressure from human activities. These results show the value of tracking data for informing conservation efforts.
- Ana M. M. Sequeira
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Article |
Intensive farming drives long-term shifts in avian community composition
Variation in vegetation and climate affects the long-term changes in bird communities in intensive-agriculture habitats, but not in diversified-agriculture or natural-forest habitats, by changing the local colonization and extinction rates.
- J. Nicholas Hendershot
- , Jeffrey R. Smith
- & Gretchen C. Daily
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Article |
Tracking of marine predators to protect Southern Ocean ecosystems
Tracking data from 17 marine predator species in the Southern Ocean are used to identify Areas of Ecological Significance, the protection of which could help to mitigate increasing pressures on Southern Ocean ecosystems.
- Mark A. Hindell
- , Ryan R. Reisinger
- & Ben Raymond
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Where I Work |
Mission marmoset
Andreia Martins tracks and monitors golden lion tamarins in Brazil in an effort to rebuild their population.
- Reinaldo José Lopes
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Book Review |
Dodging bandits, eking out food: tracking wildlife in Mongolia
Star field biologist and explorer George Schaller penetrates another isolated wilderness. By Tom McCarthy
- Tom McCarthy