Climate change policies fail to protect child health.

Background: National policies are essential for countries to adapt to the negative health impacts of climate change. Children are disproportionately affected by these impacts and must be at the heart of adaptation policies to address their vulnerabilities. Adaptation commitments worldwide are integrated into national adaptation plans, nationally determined contributions, national communications, and other multisectoral policies.

Impact of climate change on diarrhoea risk in low- and middle-income countries.

Diarrhoea remains a leading cause of mortality among children under five years of age, with over 99 % of deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Poor water quality, inadequate sanitation, poverty, undernutrition, and limited healthcare access contribute to this lingering problem, together with emerging environmental stressors driven by climate change. We analysed long-term spatial relationships between environmental, socio-economic, and maternal/child factors using Demographic and Health Surveys and WorldClim data across eight South and Southeast Asian countries (n = 66,545 clusters; 3,143,811 child-level observations).

A Guide for Developing Demo-Genetic Models to Simulate Genetic Rescue.

Genetic rescue is a conservation management strategy that reduces the negative effects of genetic drift and inbreeding in small and isolated populations. However, such populations might already be vulnerable to random fluctuations in growth rates (demographic stochasticity). Therefore, the success of genetic rescue depends not only on the genetic composition of the source and target populations but also on the emergent outcome of interacting demographic processes and other stochastic events.

Typology of the ecological impacts of biological invasions.

Biological invasions alter ecosystems by disrupting ecological processes that can degrade biodiversity, harm human health, and cause massive economic burdens. Existing frameworks to classify the ecological impacts either miss many types of impact or conflate mechanisms (causes) with the impacts themselves (consequences). We propose a comprehensive typology of 19 types of ecological impact across six levels of ecological organisation.

Restoration cannot be scaled up globally to save reefs from loss and degradation.

Coral restoration is gaining popularity as part of a continuum of approaches addressing the widespread, recurring mass mortality events of corals that-together with elevated and chronic mortality, slower growth and recruitment failure-threaten the persistence of coral reefs worldwide. However, the monetary costs associated with broad-scale coral restoration are massive, making widespread implementation challenging, especially with the lack of coordinated and ecologically informed planning. By combining a comprehensive dataset documenting the success of coral restoration with current and forecasted environmental, ecological and climate data, we highlight how such a coordinated and ecologically informed approach is not forthcoming, despite the extent of previous and ongoing efforts.

Testing the Dispersal-Origin-Status-Impact (DOSI) scheme to prioritise non-native and translocated species management.

Assessing actual and potential impacts of non-native species is necessary for prioritising their management. Traditional assessments often occur at the species level, potentially overlooking differences among populations. The recently developed Dispersal-Origin-Status-Impact (DOSI) assessment scheme addresses this by treating biological invasions as population-level phenomena, incorporating the complexities affecting populations of non-native species.

Small populations of Palaeolithic humans in Cyprus hunted endemic megafauna to extinction.

The hypothesized main drivers of megafauna extinctions in the late Quaternary have wavered between over-exploitation by humans and environmental change, with recent investigations demonstrating more nuanced synergies between these drivers depending on taxon, spatial scale, and region. However, most studies still rely on comparing archaeologically based chronologies of timing of initial human arrival into naïve ecosystems and palaeontologically inferred dates of megafauna extinctions. Conclusions arising from comparing chronologies also depend on the reliability of dated evidence, dating uncertainties, and correcting for the low probability of preservation (Signor-Lipps effect).

A Late Devonian coelacanth reconfigures actinistian phylogeny, disparity, and evolutionary dynamics.

The living coelacanth Latimeria (Sarcopterygii: Actinistia) is an iconic, so-called 'living fossil' within one of the most apparently morphologically conservative vertebrate groups. We describe a new, 3-D preserved coelacanth from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Western Australia. We assemble a comprehensive analysis of the group to assess the phylogeny, evolutionary rates, and morphological disparity of all coelacanths.

Projected loss of brown macroalgae and seagrasses with global environmental change.

Although many studies predict extensive future biodiversity loss and redistribution in the terrestrial realm, future changes in marine biodiversity remain relatively unexplored. In this work, we model global shifts in one of the most important marine functional groups-ecosystem-structuring macrophytes-and predict substantial end-of-century change. By modelling the future distribution of 207 brown macroalgae and seagrass species at high temporal and spatial resolution under different climate-change projections, we estimate that by 2100, local macrophyte diversity will decline by 3-4% on average, with 17 to 22% of localities losing at least 10% of their macrophyte species.

Demographic models predict end-Pleistocene arrival and rapid expansion of pre-agropastoralist humans in Cyprus.

The antiquity of human dispersal into Mediterranean islands and ensuing coastal adaptation have remained largely unexplored due to the prevailing assumption that the sea was a barrier to movement and that islands were hostile environments to early hunter-gatherers [J. F. Cherry, T.

Net benefit of smaller human populations to environmental integrity and individual health and wellbeing.

Introduction: The global human population is still growing such that our collective enterprise is driving environmental catastrophe. Despite a decline in average population growth rate, we are still experiencing the highest annual increase of global human population size in the history of our species-averaging an additional 84 million people per year since 1990. No review to date has accumulated the available evidence describing the associations between increasing population and environmental decline, nor solutions for mitigating the problems arising.

Taming the terminological tempest in invasion science.

Standardised terminology in science is important for clarity of interpretation and communication. In invasion science - a dynamic and rapidly evolving discipline - the proliferation of technical terminology has lacked a standardised framework for its development. The result is a convoluted and inconsistent usage of terminology, with various discrepancies in descriptions of damage and interventions.

How climate change degrades child health: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Children are more vulnerable than adults to climate-related health threats, but reviews examining how climate change affects human health have been mainly descriptive and lack an assessment of the magnitude of health effects children face. This is the first systematic review and meta-analysis that identifies which climate-health relationships pose the greatest threats to children.

Objectives: We reviewed epidemiologic studies to analyse various child health outcomes due to climate change and identify the relationships with the largest effect size.

Shifts in the incidence of shark bites and efficacy of beach-focussed mitigation in Australia.

Shark-human interactions are some of the most pervasive human-wildlife conflicts, and their frequencies are increasing globally. New South Wales (Australia) was the first to implement a broad-scale program of shark-bite mitigation in 1937 using shark nets, which expanded in the late 2010s to include non-lethal measures. Using 196 unprovoked shark-human interactions recorded in New South Wales since 1900, we show that bites shifted from being predominantly on swimmers to 79 % on surfers by the 1980s and increased 2-4-fold.

Global economic costs of alien birds.

The adverse impacts of alien birds are widespread and diverse, and associated with costs due to the damage caused and actions required to manage them. We synthesised global cost data to identify variation across regions, types of impact, and alien bird species. Costs amount to US$3.

Differential developmental rates and demographics in Red Kangaroo () populations separated by the dingo barrier fence.

Decommissioning the dingo barrier fence has been suggested to reduce destructive dingo control and encourage a free transfer of biota between environments in Australia. Yet the potential impacts that over a century of predator exclusion might have had on the population dynamics and developmental biology of prey populations has not been assessed. We here combine demographic data and both linear and geometric morphometrics to assess differences in populations among 166 red kangaroos ()-a primary prey species of the dingo-from two isolated populations on either side of the fence.

Recent advances in availability and synthesis of the economic costs of biological invasions.

Biological invasions are a global challenge that has received insufficient attention. Recently available cost syntheses have provided policy- and decision makers with reliable and up-to-date information on the economic impacts of biological invasions, aiming to motivate effective management. The resultant database is now publicly and freely accessible and enables rapid extraction of monetary cost information.

Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities.

Permafrost thawing and the potential 'lab leak' of ancient microorganisms generate risks of biological invasions for today's ecological communities, including threats to human health via exposure to emergent pathogens. Whether and how such 'time-travelling' invaders could establish in modern communities is unclear, and existing data are too scarce to test hypotheses. To quantify the risks of time-travelling invasions, we isolated digital virus-like pathogens from the past records of coevolved artificial life communities and studied their simulated invasion into future states of the community.

Estimating co-extinction threats in terrestrial ecosystems.

The biosphere is changing rapidly due to human endeavour. Because ecological communities underlie networks of interacting species, changes that directly affect some species can have indirect effects on others. Accurate tools to predict these direct and indirect effects are therefore required to guide conservation strategies.

Thermal aerial culling for the control of vertebrate pest populations.

Helicopter-based shooting is an effective management tool for large vertebrate pest animals. However, animals in low-density populations and/or dense habitat can be difficult to locate visually. Thermal-imaging technology can increase detections in these conditions.

Unveiling the hidden economic toll of biological invasions in the European Union.

Background: Biological invasions threaten the functioning of ecosystems, biodiversity, and human well-being by degrading ecosystem services and eliciting massive economic costs. The European Union has historically been a hub for cultural development and global trade, and thus, has extensive opportunities for the introduction and spread of alien species. While reported costs of biological invasions to some member states have been recently assessed, ongoing knowledge gaps in taxonomic and spatio-temporal data suggest that these costs were considerably underestimated.

Logistic-growth models measuring density feedback are sensitive to population declines, but not fluctuating carrying capacity.

Analysis of long-term trends in abundance of animal populations provides insights into population dynamics. Population growth rates are the emergent interplay of fertility, survival, and dispersal. However, the density feedbacks operating on some vital rates ("component feedback") can be decoupled from density feedbacks on population growth rates estimated using abundance time series ("ensemble feedback").