Reviews & Analysis

The authors outline five decolonizing shifts that could help to transform academic ecological practice, challenging the discipline to become more inclusive, creative and ethical.

This Perspective examines how systems ecology models that incorporate pathogens can transform our understanding of ecosystem functioning, disease ecology, and the detection and control of zoonoses.

Remote sensing of geospatial biodiversity patterns is an important complement to field observations. This priority list suggests how remote sensing observations can be better integrated into the essential biodiversity variables.

This Perspective outlines how financial levies on fisheries bycatch may aid biodiversity conservation both directly, by incentivizing bycatch prevention, and indirectly, through raising revenue that could be directed towards compensatory conservation.

The authors review wildlife protection laws in China and provide recommendations on how sentencing could be improved to incentivize compliance.

This Perspective highlights how conservation of intraspecific variation is critical for sustaining nature’s contributions to people.

This Perspective draws on emerging ecological coexistence theory to illustrate how changes in both competitive ability and niche overlap are critical for understanding the costs of antibiotic resistance and the persistence of pathogens in microbial communities.

Research on the evolution of cooperation has been revolutionized by advances in genetic, microbiological and analytical techniques. This Perspective highlights recent insights and considers future directions in research on cooperation.

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.

Ecosystems that exhibit long periods of transient dynamics pose particular challenges for management because state shifts can occur in the absence of exogenous drivers. In this Perspective, the authors outline how different transient behaviours can be influenced by management actions, and how understanding their causal mechanisms can guide future mitigation strategies.

Five key criteria are proposed to demonstrate robustly that temperature-mediated phenological asynchrony will negatively impact consumers, which the authors show are rarely met in the current literature.

Outlining a conceptual framework of climate-driven fast, slow and abrupt ecological change that integrates palaeoecology, contemporary ecology and invasion biology, the authors argue that the focus of theory and practice needs to shift from managing states to managing rates of change.

Systematic reviews are a powerful tool to synthesize large volumes of the published literature, but are susceptible to a number of methodological biases. Here, the authors outline mitigation strategies for improving the quality of evidence syntheses.

There is an urgent need to ensure that marine ecosystems are able to support biodiversity and the services they sustain in the face of rapid global change. Here, the authors argue that a holistic approach of integrated ocean management can ensure a sustainable and resilient ocean economy.

Tulloch details a six-step timeline that improves ecology and conservation conference inclusion by embedding diversity and equity into planning, financing, marketing, scientific and social scheduling, evaluation and reporting.

In Africa, COVID-19 has created a perfect storm of reduced funding, restrictions on the operations of conservation agencies, and elevated human threats to nature. This Perspective discusses solutions to move beyond this immediate crisis.

Vaccines that can spread autonomously through animal populations could help to prevent zoonoses before they spillover into humans. This Perspective discusses the epidemiological theory and the practical challenges associated with transmissible and transferable vaccines.

Recent institutional and vertebrate conservation scientists’ publication data suggest that China has a growing conservation research capacity deficit. Here the authors outline steps China must take to build up this capacity in order to safeguard the country’s exceptionally rich biodiversity.

This Perspective uses a social–ecological systems framework to make recommendations for global targets that capture the interdependencies of biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainable development to inform the Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 process and the future of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

This Perspective discusses the microbial metacommunity of animal social groups, and the social and environmental forces that shape it at different levels, from individuals to species.