Species traits and landscape structure can drive scale-dependent propagation of effects in ecosystems.

Species can directly and indirectly affect others across communities and habitats, yet the spatial scale over which such effects spread remains unclear. This uncertainty arises partly because the species traits and landscape structures allowing indirect effects to propagate may differ across scales. Here, we use a topological network metric, communicability, to explore the factors controlling spatial propagation of effects in a large-scale plant-frugivore network projected across the territory of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Priority areas for nature-based adaptation to climate change in the Alps.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are promising initiatives for climate change adaptation, mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Given the finite human and financial resources for NbS, identifying optimal locations is critical. Here, we identified priority areas for drought adaptation in the European Alps using the "bright spots" approach to estimate future water deficit and surplus from groundwater and soil moisture.

Exploring environmental justice and nexus approaches in Paris urban nature policies.

Pathways to a just and sustainable future require integrated policies that account for the interlinkages between biodiversity, climate and human health. Cities have a vital role in implementing these approaches in their local policies to address urban challenges. However, significant knowledge gaps persist in understanding how current urban policies address the interconnections between issues, and in identifying nature-based initiatives that successfully replace siloed approaches with more integrated strategies.

Landscapes-a lens for assessing sustainability.

Context: There are urgent calls to transition society to more sustainable trajectories, at scales ranging from local to global. Landscape sustainability (LS), or the capacity for landscapes to provide equitable access to ecosystem services essential for human wellbeing for both current and future generations, provides an operational approach to monitor these transitions. However, the complexity of landscapes complicates how and what to consider when assessing LS.

Intertwined people-nature relations are central to nature-based adaptation to climate change.

Adaptation to climate change is a social-ecological process: it is not solely a result of natural processes or human decisions but emerges from multiple relations within social systems, within ecological systems and between them. We propose a novel analytical framework to evaluate social-ecological relations in nature-based adaptation, encompassing social (people-people), ecological (nature-nature) and social-ecological (people-nature) relations. Applying this framework to 25 case studies, we analyse the associations among these relations and identify archetypes of social-ecological adaptation.

Business-as-usual trends will largely miss 2030 global conservation targets.

To address climate change and global biodiversity loss, the world must hit three important international conservation targets by 2030: protect 30% of terrestrial and marine areas, halt and reverse forest loss, and restore 350 Mha of degraded and deforested landscapes. Here, we (1) provide estimates of the gaps between these globally agreed targets and business-as-usual trends; (2) identify examples of rapid past trend-shifts towards achieving the targets; and (3) link these past trend-shifts to different levers. Our results suggest that under a business-as-usual scenario, the world will fail to achieve all three targets.

Tree contributions to climate change adaptation through reduced cattle heat stress and benefits to milk and beef production.

Cattle heat stress causes billions of dollars' worth of losses to meat and milk production globally, and is projected to become more severe in the future due to climate change. Tree establishment in pastoral livestock systems holds potential to reduce cattle heat stress and thus provide nature-based adaptation. We developed a general model for the impact of trees on cattle heat stress, which can project milk and meat production under future climate scenarios at varying spatial scales.

Knowledge coproduction to improve assessments of nature's contributions to people.

Sustainability science needs new approaches to produce, share, and use knowledge because there are major barriers to translating research into policy and practice. Multiple actors hold relevant knowledge for sustainability including indigenous and local people who have developed over generations knowledge, methods, and practices that biodiversity and ecosystem assessments need to capture. Despite efforts to mainstream knowledge coproduction, less than 3% of the literature on nature's contributions to people (NCP) integrates indigenous and local knowledge (ILK).

Global beta-diversity of angiosperm trees is shaped by Quaternary climate change.

As Earth's climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimilarity in taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional composition among neighboring 200-kilometer cells (beta-diversity) for angiosperm trees worldwide.

Integrating natural gradients, experiments, and statistical modeling in a distributed network experiment: An example from the WaRM Network.

A growing body of work examines the direct and indirect effects of climate change on ecosystems, typically by using manipulative experiments at a single site or performing meta-analyses across many independent experiments. However, results from single-site studies tend to have limited generality. Although meta-analytic approaches can help overcome this by exploring trends across sites, the inherent limitations in combining disparate datasets from independent approaches remain a major challenge.

Integrating design and ecological theory to achieve adaptive diverse pastures.

Increasing plant diversity is often suggested as a way of overcoming some of the challenges faced by managers of intensive pasture systems, but it is unclear how to design the most suitable plant mixtures. Using innovative design theory, we identify two conceptual shifts that foster potentially beneficial design approaches. Firstly, reframing the goal of mixture design to supporting ecological integrity, rather than delivering lists of desired outcomes, leads to flexible design approaches that support context-specific solutions that should operate within identifiable ecological limits.

High exposure of global tree diversity to human pressure.

Safeguarding Earth's tree diversity is a conservation priority due to the importance of trees for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services such as carbon sequestration. Here, we improve the foundation for effective conservation of global tree diversity by analyzing a recently developed database of tree species covering 46,752 species. We quantify range protection and anthropogenic pressures for each species and develop conservation priorities across taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity dimensions.

A network perspective for sustainable agroecosystems.

Nature-based management aims to improve sustainable agroecosystem production, but its efficacy has been variable. We argue that nature-based agroecosystem management could be significantly improved by explicitly considering and manipulating the underlying networks of species interactions. A network perspective can link species interactions to ecosystem functioning and stability, identify influential species and interactions, and suggest optimal management approaches.

Effects of land use and climate on carbon and nitrogen pool partitioning in European mountain grasslands.

European mountain grasslands are increasingly affected by land-use changes and climate, which have been suggested to exert important controls on grassland carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools. However, so far there has been no synthetic study on whether and how land-use changes and climate interactively affect the partitioning of these pools amongst the different grassland compartments. We analyzed the partitioning of C and N pools of 36 European mountain grasslands differing in land-use and climate with respect to above- and belowground phytomass, litter and topsoil (top 23 cm).

Game of Cruxes: co-designing a game for scientists and stakeholders for identifying joint problems.

Unlabelled: Scientists increasingly cross their disciplinary boundaries and connect with local stakeholders to jointly solve complex problems. Working with stakeholders means higher legitimacy and supports practical impact of research. Games provide a tool to achieve such transdisciplinary collaboration.

Balancing conservation priorities for nature and for people in Europe.

There is an urgent need to protect key areas for biodiversity and nature's contributions to people (NCP). However, different values of nature are rarely considered together in conservation planning. Here, we explore potential priority areas in Europe for biodiversity (all terrestrial vertebrates) and a set of cultural and regulating NCP while considering demand for these NCP.

The acquisitive-conservative axis of leaf trait variation emerges even in homogeneous environments.

Background And Aims: The acquisitive-conservative axis of plant ecological strategies results in a pattern of leaf trait covariation that captures the balance between leaf construction costs and plant growth potential. Studies evaluating trait covariation within species are scarcer, and have mostly dealt with variation in response to environmental gradients. Little work has been published on intraspecific patterns of leaf trait covariation in the absence of strong environmental variation.

Co-producing ecosystem services for adapting to climate change.

Ecosystems can sustain social adaptation to environmental change by protecting people from climate change effects and providing options for sustaining material and non-material benefits as ecological structure and functions transform. Along adaptation pathways, people navigate the trade-offs between different ecosystem contributions to adaptation, or adaptation services (AS), and can enhance their synergies and co-benefits as environmental change unfolds. Understanding trade-offs and co-benefits of AS is therefore essential to support social adaptation and requires analysing how people co-produce AS.

An overview of the 2017 report of the French academy of Sciences on biodiversity.

In the present context of concerns for biodiversity, the French Academy of Sciences produced in 2017 a report entitled "Mechanisms of adaptation of biodiversity to climate change and their limits". We briefly review here the production process and structure of the report, and summarize its conclusions and recommendations. The conclusions emphasize the role of habitat fragmentation in the expected impact of climate change on biodiversity, in particular for organisms with limited dispersal abilities, and the disparities in species responses which must be taken to understand the future of species assemblages ("communities") under different scenarios of climate change.