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Our annual report of the journal’s statistics shows little overall change on gender and geographical diversity, and highlights areas where our editors want to redouble efforts — with help from you.
Sociocultural transitions and medical advancements can disrupt evolutionary equilibriums underlying modern human anatomy, physiology and life history. Disentangling such complex biosocial evolutionary dynamics poses serious ethical questions but has strong potential for guiding public health policies.
Ash forests in North America and Eurasia are rapidly being lost to two invasive alien species: the emerald ash borer and Chalara ash dieback fungus. We argue that better regulatory policy and science-based intervention can help slow losses, and recommend an international consortium to coordinate science-based intervention.
Debate surrounding the dilution effect hypothesis in disease ecology has reached such intensity that it is stymying further research. Yet collaborative progress is important for human health and biodiversity conservation.
Biodiversity underpins the function of ecosystems. Here we discuss how biodiversity–ecosystem function theory could apply to our bodies and buildings, outline practical applications and call for further research.
Evidence overwhelmingly shows structural barriers to women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, and suggests that the onus cannot be on women alone to confront the gender bias in our community. Here, I share my experience as a scientist and a woman who has collected data during more than ten years of scientific training about how best to navigate the academic maze of biases and barriers.
Keeping global temperature to no more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels is an enormous task that requires the complementary efforts of scientists from across the biological, physical and social sciences.
Ensuring an environmentally friendly overhaul of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy will entail payments for environmental objectives, promoting High Nature Value Farmlands, improved flexibility and policy integration.
Globally, flora, fauna and many indigenous cultures have evolved to coexist sustainably with fire. We argue that the key to sustainable contemporary human coexistence with wildfires is a form of biomimicry that draws on the evolutionary adaptations of organisms that survive (and flourish) in the fire regimes in which they reside.
Indigenous knowledge and ecological science have complementary differences that can be fruitfully combined to better understand the past and predict the future of social-ecological systems. Cooperation among scientific and Indigenous perspectives can improve conservation and resource management policies.
A major new report highlighting the importance of fungi to humans and natural ecosystems makes it clear that a coordinated global conservation strategy is urgently needed to ensure that their benefits may continue to be reaped.
In the 150 years since the discovery of human fossils at Cro-Magnon, archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists have grappled with the questions of how to recognize our species in the fossil record, and what we should call ourselves.
