This year marks the mid-point for the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including Sustainable Development Goal 14 (‘Life below water’). We asked a range of researchers working across marine science, conservation, policy and implementation to reflect on priorities for action on ocean health and biodiversity over the next seven years.

This year marks the mid-point for the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including Sustainable Development Goal 15 ‘Life on land’. We asked a range of researchers, working across biodiversity science, conservation, policy and implementation, to reflect on priorities for action on conserving terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems over the next seven years.

Combining transcriptomics, mathematical modelling and in vivo gene editing, this study shows that Sfrp2 contributes to stripe formation and hair colour in the African striped mouse.

A comparative analysis of head-regeneration capacity across planarian species in a phylogenetic context reveals multiple Wnt-dependent transitions in head-regeneration ability and proposes Wnt functions in the reproductive system as possible evolutionary drivers.

Melanoma cell lines are used to identify the tumour characteristics that increase the chances of drug dependency, and mathematical modelling shows that this can be exploited for treatment using drug holidays with only measurements of total population size required for near optimality.

Analysing ten bipartite networks of empirically sampled biotic interactions and the associated species’ spatial distribution, the authors model how network degree distributions can be predicted by accounting for the frequency of co-occurrences between species.

The authors used multiple lines of evidence including behavioural assays, quantitative genetics and transcriptomics to explore schooling behaviour in guppies. Both genomic and transcriptomic analyses indicated that genes involved in neuron migration and synaptic function played key roles in the evolution of schooling behaviour.

A spatial analysis of how transportation noise corresponds with ‘redlining’ categories of racial segregation in US cities is combined with a literature review of the effects of noise on urban wildlife.

Using deep learning to identify the assembly rules of microbial communities from different habitats, the authors develop a framework to quantify and predict the community-specific keystoneness of each species in any microbiome sample.

Nitrogen isotopic measurements from fossilized cycad leaves and ancestral state reconstructions suggest that N₂-fixing symbiosis arose independently in the lineages leading to extant cycads at some point during or after the Jurassic.

Leading conservation planner and champion for biodiversity.

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.

Biodiversity directly and indirectly contributes to all 17 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Making meaningful progress towards achieving these goals in the next seven years will require embracing their interdependencies.

For the concept of nature positive to succeed as the lodestar for international action on biodiversity conservation, it must build upon lessons learned from the application of the mitigation hierarchy — or risk becoming mere greenwash.