Synthesizing biodiversity science

The Brazilian Society of Palaeontology (BSP) has recently taken steps to become more involved in the repatriation of fossil specimens — a central issue in the global palaeontological community, as interest in combating scientific colonialism grows — both through collaboration with researchers and other Latin American scientific associations. We discuss our experience, including the challenges we have faced and how we have overcome them, in the hope of inspiring other scientific societies to play their part.

Deep-sea mining could provide a substantial supply of metals that we urgently need to decarbonize our society, yet its environmental impact remains intractable. Considering on-land resources remain abundant and can be extracted using well-established risk management, deep-sea mining cannot currently be justified.

A much-cited statistic about how much of the world’s biodiversity is under Indigenous stewardship is unsupported — and could harm the cause it is meant to support.

It is widely perceived how research institutes have been adopting the discourse of champions of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) in recent years. Despite progress in diversity and inclusion in the academic environment, we highlight here that nothing or, at very best, little work has been done to overcome the scientific labor division in academic research that promotes neocolonial practices in academic recognition and jeopardizes equity. In this piece, we bring secondary data that reinforce biased patterns in academic recognition between Global North and South (geographical markers and citation bias), and propose three actions that should be adopted by researchers, research institutes, journals, and scientific societies from the Global North that allows for a fairer recognition of the academic expertise produced by the Global South.

Participants in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s processes for implementing the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework need clarity on what makes biodiversity information useful to national decision-makers. Here we present seven preconditions of useful biodiversity information and describe how these can be supported through regional support centres and south–south cooperation.

Continuing to produce nature-based credits using dubious accounting methodologies will yield limited carbon and biodiversity gains. Establishing scientific credibility unlocks the potential of credits to meaningfully contribute to targets of the Paris and Kunming-Montreal agreements.

Infrastructure development and biodiversity conservation are often planned and executed in isolation. However, outcomes from these efforts are interlinked, with coordinated actions required to jointly address sustainability challenges. Natural infrastructure — encompassing a spectrum of natural to conventional solutions — is key to the infrastructure–biodiversity connection and should be brought into large-scale application.

Large animal conservation and rewilding are increasingly considered to be viable climate mitigation strategies. We argue that overstating animal roles in carbon capture may hinder, rather than facilitate, effective climate mitigation and conservation efforts.

The Anthropocene has been rejected as a formal epoch by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Moving on and recognizing the deeper and more complex roots of human impacts on our planet will enable us to better, and more fairly, address them.

Freshwaters require targeted policy considerations to achieve biodiversity conservation goals and to support ecosystem services that communities around the globe depend upon. Effective conservation requires creative solutions that build and expand upon conventional protected areas, contextualized for these diverse ecosystems.

This Perspective discusses how the latest advances in remote sensing can be used to answer basic ecological and evolutionary questions, as well as contribute to important biodiversity monitoring.

Time is running out to prevent our closest living relatives—the great apes—from being driven to extinction at our own hands. Mitani et al. advocate for substantial changes to policy and research practices before it is too late.

This Perspective discusses four questions of evolutionary biology that bridge macro and microevolution perspectives and proposes future research avenues to link evolutionary mechanisms and processes.

Divergent conceptions of living nature between conservationists and other groups of people can hinder progress to protect biodiversity. This Perspective reflects on the use of the concept of biodiversity, willingness to expand its ambit, and engagement with the various drivers of change.

Learning from the failure to meet the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the authors recommend effective global and national targets and other measures to ensure the post-2020 targets are more successful.

In this Perspective, the authors develop an integrated framework to understand and predict the joint impacts of climate change and urbanization on biodiversity and ecosystems. They review examples of interacting impacts and present opportunities for future research.

This Perspective proposes that the driving force of photoreceptor diversity was visual–motor perception with colour discrimination evolving as a secondary function.

This Perspective highlights the global consensus on the urgency and growing threat of invasive alien species, and management needs, as found by the 2023 report on invasive alien species conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

In this Perspective, Vincent Merckx and colleagues discuss an important but overlooked aspect of mycorrhizal interactions, mycoheterotrophy, in the context of recent arguments about the importance of these interactions to forest functioning.

Warming temperatures driven by climate change are causing species geographic ranges to shift, but factors such as habitat characteristics and species interactions impact these changes. This Review examines range shift documentation, how shifts differ from temperature-based expectations, and the effects of range shifts on natural and human systems.

This Review highlights how information from archaeology, history, palaeoecology and other past sources can, and should, be used to inform plans to enhance the sustainability and resilience of our societies.

Species and communities can respond to global climate change by genetically adapting to new environmental conditions, by shifting their range or through phenotypic plasticity. This Review summarizes approaches that apply and integrate omics tools to experimentally investigate, monitor and predict these species responses.

The volume of global aquaculture production has tripled since 2000 with positive trends in environmental performance, but the sector faces mounting challenges including pathogen management, pollution, climate change, and increasing dependence on land-based resource systems.

This Review identifies and describes interactions and feedbacks between biodiversity and diversity of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, and uses case studies from South America to illustrate the conservation and human benefits that can arise from protecting both biological and cultural diversity.

This Review summarizes our current knowledge from genomics and fossil records about the evolutionary transition from charophycean algae to embryophytes, with a focus on the progressive assembly of the embryophyte genetic innovations during terrestrialization.

In this Review, Voolstra, Raina, Peixoto and colleagues discuss our current knowledge of the function and role of the bacterial microbiome in coral health and disease, and elucidate the response of the host-associated bacteria to global change, which bears implications for coral reef conservation.

Zooplankton are a critical link to higher trophic levels and play an important role in global biogeochemical cycles. This Review examines key responses of zooplankton to ocean warming, highlights key knowledge and geographic gaps that need to be addressed, and discusses how better use of observations and long-term zooplankton monitoring programmes can help fill these gaps.