Comment

Adaptive certification is the best remaining option for the trophy hunting industry in Africa to demonstrate sustainable and ethical hunting practices that benefit local communities and wildlife conservation.

Our incomplete taxonomic knowledge impedes our attempts to protect biodiversity. A renaissance in the classification of species and their interactions is needed to guide conservation prioritization.

Reciprocal interactions between hosts, their symbionts and their oncobiota (cancer cell communities) are yet to be studied in detail. Considering malignant cells in addition to the holobiont perspective allows greater understanding of the processes governing both host phenotypes and cancer dynamics.

We anticipate that conventional management approaches will be insufficient to protect coral reefs, even if global warming is limited to 1.5 °C. Emerging technologies are needed to stem the decline of these natural assets.

Targets for human development are increasingly connected with targets for nature, however, existing scenarios do not explicitly address this relationship. Here, we outline a strategy to generate scenarios centred on our relationship with nature to inform decision-making at multiple scales.

As sea levels rise, human displacement and subsequent land-use change may be as ecologically significant as the direct impacts of climate change. New work suggesting that mean sea level will rise further and faster than previously thought calls attention to the importance of these indirect processes for ecology and conservation.

The actions that lead to conservation successes and failures are the result of decision-making by individuals and organizations about what to conserve and how to conserve it. The psychology of decision-making should be considered when assessing conservation outcomes.

The pernicious problem of evidence complacency, illustrated here through conservation policy and practice, results in poor practice and inefficiencies. It also increases our vulnerability to a ‘post-truth’ world dealing with ‘alternative facts’.

Cancer evolution is central to poor outcomes of cancer therapies, enabling tumour progression and the acquisition of drug resistance. Joint efforts of evolutionary biologists, oncologists and cancer researchers are necessary to understand the principles of cancer evolution and to derive therapeutic strategies that can control it.

Increasingly, the pathogens that pose the greatest threats to humans are those that evolve to escape prior immunity and pharmaceutical interventions. In response, we need to employ evolutionary thinking to manage infectious disease.

Similarities in planning, development and culture within urban areas may lead to the convergence of ecological processes on continental scales. Transdisciplinary, multi-scale research is now needed to understand and predict the impact of human-dominated landscapes on ecosystem structure and function.

In 2018 technologies on the International Space Station will provide ∼1 year of synchronous observations of ecosystem composition, structure and function. We discuss these instruments and how they can be used to constrain global models and improve our understanding of the current state of terrestrial ecosystems. Author Correction (05 September 2017)

Large-scale invasive species control initiatives are motivated by laudable desires for native species recovery and economic benefits, but they are not without risk. Management interventions and policies should include evidence-based risk–benefit assessment and mitigation planning.

DNA sequencing is faster and cheaper than ever before but quantity does not necessarily mean quality. Towards a comprehensive understanding of the microbial biosphere, we need more reference genomes from single-celled eukaryotes (protists) across the full breadth of eukaryotic diversity.

Despite the obvious influence of space on interactions, constraints imposed by the built environment are seldom considered when examining collective behaviours of animals and humans. We propose an interdisciplinary path towards uncovering the impact of architecture on collective outcomes.

The biodiversity of the Amazonian savannahs may be lost before it is known, unless scientists, conservationists and policymakers come together quickly to protect it.

Despite projections of a severe extinction event, a window of opportunity is now open for a mix of policies to avoid biodiversity collapse in the Cerrado hotspot.

As peace consolidates in Colombia, can biodiversity survive development? We discuss challenges and opportunities for integrating forest biodiversity conservation into developing, war-dilapidated economies of post-conflict regions, paving the way for a green economy and climate resilient society.

Can applying an evolutionary perspective generate effective change in clinical care and/or public health policy? An evolution-informed research programme has changed practice on UK post-natal units and UK health policies on infant care over the past two decades.

The founding members of the Cultural Evolution Society were surveyed to identify the major scientific questions and ‘grand challenges’ currently facing the study of cultural evolution. We present the results and discuss the implications for an emergent synthesis in the study of culture based on Darwinian principles.