News & Comment

Forests are spatially and temporally dynamic, such that forest degradation is best quantified across whole landscapes and over the long term. The European Union’s forest degradation policy, which focuses on contemporary primary forest conversion to plantations, ignores other globally prevalent forestry practices that can flip forests into a degraded state.

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.

The current and fervent uptick in the natural sciences of seeking to engage with Indigenous partners signals a change in attitudes towards Indigenous knowledge systems and Peoples as well as their rights, but comes with a substantial amount of risk, burden and peril. To aid scientists in conducting research ‘in a good way’, we offer key insights and guidance that are rooted in our own scientific training and communities of practice.

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.

The causation of sexual orientation is likely to be complex and influenced by multiple factors. We advocate incorporating a broader cultural view into evolutionary and genetic studies to account for differences in how sexual orientation is experienced, expressed and understood in both humans and nonhuman animals.

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.

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.

The rate and extent of global biodiversity change is surpassing our ability to measure, monitor and forecast trends. We propose an interconnected worldwide system of observation networks — a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) — to coordinate monitoring worldwide and inform action to reach international biodiversity targets.

The majority of power generated by photovoltaic energy infrastructure is derived from ground-mounted solar arrays that prioritize energy production, minimize operating costs and, at best, accommodate limited ecosystem services. We argue that co-prioritizing ecosystem services and energy generation using an ecologically informed, ‘ecovoltaics’ approach to solar array design and operation will have multiple benefits for climate, biodiversity and the restoration of degraded lands.

Indigenous Peoples are increasingly being sought out for research partnerships that incorporate Indigenous Knowledges into ecology research. In such research partnerships, it is essential that Indigenous data are cared for ethically and responsibly. Here we outline how the ‘CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance’ can sow community ethics into disciplines that are inundated with extractive helicopter research practices, and we provide standardized practices for evolving data and research landscapes.

Machine learning is a popular tool in ecology but many scientific applications suffer from data leakage, causing misleading results. We highlight common pitfalls in ecological machine-learning methods and argue that discipline-specific model info sheets must be developed to aid in model evaluations.

Indicators proposed for nutrient and pesticide pollution in the current text of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) are inadequate for tracking progress and informing policy. We highlight a set of more relevant pollution indicators that would strengthen the monitoring framework of the GBF and discuss conditions for their successful implementation.

Chemical pollution research should be better integrated with other drivers of biodiversity loss and the assessment of human impacts on ecosystems, to more effectively guide management strategies for biodiversity loss mitigation.

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures is a key initiative that seeks to convince companies and financial institutions to manage nature-related risks. Its inherent structures — market-led, voluntary and corporate-governed — present challenges that should be addressed during the final development and initial implementation of the framework.

Research codes and contracts have been developed to protect Indigenous and marginalized peoples from exploitation and to promote inclusion, so that research will become more beneficial to them. We highlight three important but often overlooked challenges for such instruments, drawing on examples from the San of southern Africa.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework envisages an increasing reliance on large-scale private finance to fund biodiversity targets. We warn that this may pose contradictions in delivering conservation outcomes and propose a critical ongoing role for direct public funding of conservation and public oversight of private nature-related financial mechanisms.

Global biodiversity loss has been disproportionately driven by consumption of people in rich nations. The concept of ‘loss and damage’ — familiar from international agreements on climate change — should be considered for the effects of biodiversity loss in countries of the Global South.

SARS-CoV-2 lineages circulating in animal reservoirs may broaden the evolutionary potential of the virus and increase the risk of novel variants emerging. There is an urgent need for more-comprehensive surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in nonhuman hosts.

Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, are ready to speed up monotonous coding tasks and teach you new skills. We highlight, with worked examples, some advantages and limitations of using generative artificial intelligence for scientific coding and argue that if you are willing to debug, you can get a head start on more challenging tasks.

Seminar series are a key part of academic culture. We present practices that are aimed at increasing the diversity of seminar speakers, and thus broadening associated opportunities to more members of the ecology and evolutionary biology research community.