Animal mass mortality events (MMEs) will increase with weather and climate extremes. MMEs can add significant stress to ecosystems through extraordinary nutrient pulses or contribute to potential disease transmission risks. Given their efficient removal of carrion biomass from landscapes, we argue here for the potential of scavenger guilds to be a key nature-based solution to mitigating MME effects. However, we caution that scavenger guilds alone will not be a silver bullet. It is critical for further research to identify how the composition of scavenger guilds and the magnitude of MMEs will determine when scavengers will buffer the impacts of such events on ecosystems and when intervention might be required. Some MMEs are too large for scavengers to remove efficiently, and there is a risk of MMEs subsidizing pest species, altering nutrient cycling or leading to disease spread. Prioritizing native scavenger taxa in conservation management policies may help to boost ecosystem resilience through preserving their key ecological services. This should be part of a multi-pronged approach to MME mitigation that combines scavenger conservation with practices such as carcass dispersal or removal when exceeding a threshold quantity. Policymakers are urged to identify such thresholds and to recognize both the insects and the vertebrate scavengers that could act as allies for mitigating the emerging problem of climate-driven MMEs.

Allocation of water specifically to the environment (often dubbed ‘environmental water’ or ‘environmental flows’) can be contentious within government, among irrigators and between community members. The reduction in supply of fresh water has led to questions surrounding the efficiencies and ecological value of securing these adequate flows for waterways. This literature review examines the evidence on these perceptions of environmental water allocations, focusing foremost on general public, irrigator, Indigenous and decision-maker perspectives. Existing studies are predominantly in Global North areas such as Australia, Canada and the USA. Two themes featured strongly in the papers: the importance of personal values in the acceptance of environmental water and the perception of fairness in environmental water allocation processes. Although the research area has been expanding, there is still limited representation in types of study, disciplinary backgrounds and study locations, and as such many research opportunities remain.

The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has played an important role in assessing knowledge and raising awareness of biodiversity loss, and it is now also mandated to assess and support processes of transformative change. This perspective paper argues that the transformative change assessment entails key elements of transformative agency, which, along with the performative role of IPBES, makes it relevant to re-conceptualize the organization as a transformative agent. This new role will change IPBES and brings attention to risks related to undermining the credibility, relevance and legitimacy of IPBES, but it also brings opportunities for innovations that may strengthen the organization, including furthering public reasoning, acknowledging ambiguities and disagreements, ensuring scientific autonomy and balancing governmental power in the organization. As IPBES takes on the fundamental challenge of transformative change, critical scrutiny and democratic debate regarding its function as a political actor are more important than ever.

Interventions in environmental conservation are intended to make things better, not worse. Yet unintended and unanticipated consequences plague environmental conservation; key is how uncertainty plays out. Insights from the intellectual humility literature offer constructive strategies for coming to terms with uncertainty. Strategies such as self-distancing and self-assessment of causal complexity can be incorporated into conservation decision-making processes. Including reflection on what we know and do not know in the decision-making process potentially reduces unintended and unanticipated consequences of environmental conservation and management decisions. An important caution is not to have intellectual humility legitimate failing to act in the face of uncertainty.

The intrinsic complexity, variety of concepts and numerous ways to quantify landscape heterogeneity (LH) may hamper a better understanding of how its components relate to ecological phenomena. Our study is the first to synthesize understanding of this concept and to provide the state of the art on the subject based on a comprehensive systematic literature review of 661 articles published between 1982 and 2019. Definitions, terminologies and measurements of LH were diverse and conflicting. Most articles (534 out of 661) did not provide any definition for LH, and we found great variation among the studies that did. According to our review, only 10 studies measured the effects of different land-cover types on biotic or abiotic processes (functional LH). The remaining 651 studies measured physical attributes of the landscape without mentioning that different land-cover types may impact biotic and abiotic processes differently (structural LH). The metrics most frequently used to represent LH were the Shannon diversity index and proportion of land-cover type. Most metrics used as proxies of LH also coincided with those used to represent non-heterogeneity metrics, such as fragmentation and connectivity. We identify knowledge gaps, indicate future perspectives and propose guidelines that should be addressed when researching LH.

While scientific research highlights the threats of invasive alien species (IAS) to the environment and human livelihoods, another voice is rising that recognizes their beneficial impacts. With evidence increasing of the contrasting impacts of some IAS, the lack of communication between science and society makes decision-making processes more complex. Here, we consider the beneficial aspects of invasive alien plant species and take examples from other life forms to argue that, over time and space, the detrimental impacts of IAS might endanger sustainable livelihoods by increasing invasion debt manyfold. We therefore suggest that future studies reporting the positive impacts of IAS and those encouraging the management of IAS through their utilization should include value judgements that acknowledge the potential risks involved in the practice and the scale and context specificity of such studies. Studies highlighting the negative impacts of IAS should also recognize the context dependency of their findings and emphasize the benefits to be gained from the management of the IAS. We provide a more complete picture of IAS impacts that could help to inform management decisions in the face of different potential choices and the possible impacts of these choices on sustainable livelihoods in the long term.

Climate change (CC) is a major threat to biodiversity, increasing species extinction risk. Assessments of its possible impacts on species are crucial for designing conservation strategies. Here, we adjusted a global trait-based approach to the national level and apply it to Uruguay (South America) to evaluate the CC vulnerability of its herpetofauna. A total of 112 species were assessed in a scenario of CC projections for 2050 with regard to three dimensions of vulnerability: sensitivity, low adaptive capacity and exposure. We conducted the assessment through an expert elicitation process based on the Delphi method. We found that most local species (64.6% amphibians; 100% reptiles) were highly sensitive to CC. Among them, seven amphibians (14.6%) and seven reptiles (10.9%) were identified as highly vulnerable to CC. Important gaps in the life-history traits of the species were found that should guide future research. The structured expert consultation process allowed us to gather more and better information than if it had only been based on published sources. Our study identified challenges associated with changing the scale from global to national that might be used for similar assessments in other countries.

Invasive species can have disastrous effects on the ecosystems they invade, requiring costly, labour-intensive mitigation. Public awareness campaigns are often used as a tool to reduce these species’ impacts. While heralded as useful and cost-effective, little evidence suggests that these campaigns contribute to meaningful biological outcomes. Furthermore, awareness campaigns are relatively understudied despite their usage as a common approach to mitigating invasive species. We conducted a literature review to assess publications that evaluated the efficacy of public awareness campaigns for managing invasive species. Out of 4382 papers initially extracted for analysis, we determined that 24 of them included studies conducted on awareness campaigns for invasive species. Four public awareness campaigns were deemed a ‘success’, and the other campaigns’ success was indeterminable due to study design. Our study revealed that inconsistencies in defined end points, unclear procedures and variability of campaigns contribute to there being insufficient evidence to determine the efficacy of public awareness campaigns. To evaluate the true efficacy of public awareness campaigns, we recommend that organizations conducting such campaigns implement rigorous and standardized assessments (e.g., Before–After Control–Impact designs or Bayesian analyses) that include measures of not just changes in the knowledge and behaviour of target audiences, but also relevant biological outcomes.

Unsustainable hunting threatens biodiversity in the tropics through the removal of key seed-dispersing frugivorous primates. Traditionally, hunting in the Amazon Basin was managed through hunter territoriality, with the threat of social sanctions for overexploitation. We examined hunter territoriality and differential prey selection as alternative hypotheses to central-place foraging. Territoriality occurred beyond common hunting grounds, which were on major rivers and immediately surrounding the community. Hunters displayed selectivity in prey choice, with 50% of hunters not hunting primates. The combination of hunter territoriality and differential prey selection means that over 22% of the hunted area of the Sucusari river basin could be considered primate refuge. Of the remaining hunted area, 16% was hunted relatively little by primate hunters. We suggest that the combination of territoriality and selection against primates creates refuges, mitigating the effects of sustained hunting pressure and contributing to the conservation of these species.

Forests are the most important carbon pools among terrestrial ecosystems, and ensuring less disturbance of sacred groves might constitute a form of forest management for carbon sequestration and climate change reduction. The carbon contents in Zagros oak sacred groves and silvopastoral lands were compared to determine the carbon sequestration potential of these forests. Using a nested sampling design, we measured total carbon content (tC ha–1; aboveground tree biomass, aboveground sapling biomass, belowground biomass, soil organic carbon, leaf litter, herbs and grasses and dead wood and fallen stumps) in both forest groves and silvopastoral lands. The mean total biomass and mean total carbon content varied between sacred groves (453.8 t ha–1 and 338.79 tC ha–1, respectively) and silvopastoral lands (89.4 t ha–1 and 113.46 tC ha–1, respectively). Mean soil organic carbon was significantly lower (71.44 tC ha–1) in silvopastoral lands than in sacred groves (125.49 tC ha–1). The mean total sequestered carbon dioxide (CO2) was 1243.36 tCO2 ha–1 in the sacred groves and 416.40 tCO2 ha–1 in silvopastoral lands. We conclude that human activities have reduced the CO2 absorption capacity of the forests. The substantial disparities between the landscapes emphasize the need to restore damaged forests, and sacred groves might be a useful model for increasing carbon storage in these forests.

The Atlantic Forest of South America has undergone major changes due to urban and agriculture/pasture extension, resulting in a highly fragmented biome. Protected areas, created to ensure the biodiversity conservation of this biome, need to be connected for long-term landscape integrity. We aimed to quantify connectivity among protected areas in the south-east Atlantic Forest using two species with different environmental requirements: a threatened species with high requirements, the jaguar Panthera onca; and an exotic species with low requirements, the wild pig Sus scrofa. Our methods included expert opinion, and Circuitscape and least-cost-path analyses. We hypothesized that the patchy and altered landscape would not support the connectivity of jaguars but would allow wild pigs to transit. In fact, we found connectivity for both species, but there were more connectivity opportunities for wild pigs. The connection between Serra do Mar (and Serra do Mar state park) and Serra da Mantiqueira (Mantiqueira Mosaic) is narrow but possible to traverse through some protected areas of sustainable use and private reserves, highlighting the importance of these to structural landscape connectivity for the studied species in this region. The same connectivity that allows the transit of the native jaguar with high environmental requirements also allows the invasive wild pig to move through the landscape, which is worrisome.

The wetlands of the jalca ecoregion in the Andes of northern Peru form peat and play a major role in the hydrological ecosystem services of the ecoregion. Although peat is globally valued for carbon sequestration and storage, peatlands have not yet been mapped in the jalca. In this region, the Gocta waterfall, one of the 20 highest waterfalls in the world, depends on the jalca’s wetlands ecosystem. The local population depends on tourism to the waterfall and is concerned about preserving its drainage area. To inform conservation planning, in this study we delimited the drainage area of the Gocta waterfall and identified land tenure by applying Geographic Information System (GIS), remote sensing and participatory mapping techniques. Then, by classifying optical, radar and digital elevation models data, we mapped peatland in the jalca of the Gocta drainage area with an overall accuracy of 97.1%. Our results will inform conservation strategy in this complex area of communal, private and informal land tenure systems. At a regional level, this appears to be the first attempt at mapping peatlands using remote sensing imagery in the jalca ecoregion, and it represents a milestone for future efforts to map and conserve peatlands in other tropical mountain areas of the world.

One of the multiple threats to protected areas worldwide, invasive plant species have the potential to decrease biodiversity and ecosystem function. We studied changes in infestation by two widespread invasive plant species – Chromolaena odorata and Mikania micrantha – in India’s Manas National Park, a critical conservation site for threatened flora and fauna. Based on field surveys in 2011 and 2019, we found that C. odorata and M. micrantha were present in most of the sampled plots and had newly invaded over 20% of the plots. However, the abundance of M. micrantha decreased in 45% of the plots while C. odorata increased in >50% of the plots. We used a decision tree-based regression with environmental variables as predictors to generate the distribution, abundance and invasion risk maps of the two species. Among environmental variables, road proximity and fire frequency had the strongest influences, respectively, on C. odorata and M. micrantha. Invaded quadrats exhibited lower native-plant diversity than non-invaded quadrats, and C. odorata specifically had a strong negative association with native-plant community structure. These invasive species have increased their range and abundance, and our predicted invasion risk maps indicate the areas where management intervention is urgently needed.

Despite the progress in conservation risk management, conservation organizations are reluctant to interface usable risk-diversification strategies with their decision-making processes. One reason for this reluctance is that the empirical models used to develop risk-diversification strategies need the expected returns on investment (ROIs) of target assets and their variances and covariances, and the probabilities of occurrence of the scenarios needed to calculate those statistics are almost always unknown. We examine how risk diversification for conservation is influenced by the probabilities assigned to uncertainty scenarios using a case study involving the conservation of biodiversity at the county level in the central and southern Appalachian region within the framework of modern portfolio theory. A comparison of risk-mitigating portfolios with bootstrapped and fixed probability distributions shows that introducing the flexibility of an unknown probability distribution of uncertainty scenarios allows conservation organizations to spread bets more than with the inflexibility of the fixed probability distribution, while also achieving higher expected ROIs per unit of risk on average. The improvement becomes more significant when conservation organizations are less risk averse.

Sea-level rise threatens both human communities and vulnerable species within coastal areas. Joint spatial planning can allow conservation and social resiliency goals to work in synergy. We present a case study integrating distribution information of a threatened saltmarsh bird, the eastern black rail (Laterallus jamaicensis jamaicensis), with social information to facilitate such joint planning. We constructed a distribution model for the species within an urbanizing coastal region (New Jersey, USA) and integrated this with publicly available parcel and protected area data to summarize ownership patterns. We estimated that c. 0.3–2.8% (c. 260–2200 ha) of available saltmarsh is occupied by eastern black rail, most of which is publicly owned (79%). Privately owned saltmarsh was spread across nearly 5000 individual parcels, 10% of which contained areas with the highest likelihood of rail presence according to our model (top quartile of predicted occupancy probabilities). Compared with all privately owned saltmarsh, parcels with probable rail habitat were larger (median: 5 versus 2 ha), contained more marsh (87% versus 59%) and were less economically valuable (US$11 200 versus US$36 100). Our approach of integrating species distributions with landownership data helps clarify trade-offs and synergies in species conservation and coastal resiliency planning.

Loss of local biodiversity resulting from abrupt environmental change is a significant environmental problem throughout the world. Extinctions of plants are particularly important yet are often overlooked. Drawing from a case in Hawai‘i, a global hotspot for plant and other extinctions, we demonstrate an effort to better understand and determine priorities for the management of an endangered plant (‘Ihi makole or Portulaca sclerocarpa) in the face of rapid and extreme environmental change. Volcanic heat emissions and biological invasions have anecdotally been suggested as possible threats to the species. We integrated P. sclerocarpa outplanting with efforts to collect geological and ecological data to gauge the role of elevated soil temperatures and invasive grasses in driving P. sclerocarpa mortality and population decline. We measured soil temperature, soil depth, surrounding cover and P. sclerocarpa survivorship over three decades. The abundance of wild P. sclerocarpa decreased by 99.7% from the 1990s to 2021. Only 51% of outplantings persisted through 3–4 years. Binomial regression and structural equation modelling revealed that, among the variables we analysed, high soil temperatures were most strongly associated with population decline. Finding the niche where soil temperatures are low enough to allow P. sclerocarpa survival but high enough to limit other agents of P. sclerocarpa mortality may be necessary to increase population growth of this species.

Grassland habitats currently face severe anthropogenic exploitation, thereby affecting the survival of grassland-dependent biodiversity globally. The biodiversity-rich grasslands of India lack quantitative spatiotemporal information on their status. We evaluated the status of upper Gangetic Plains grasslands in 2015 and compared it with those from 1985, 1995 and 2005. On-ground mapping and visual classifications revealed a 57% decline in these grasslands between 1985 (418 km2) and 2015 (178 km2), mostly driven by habitat conversion (74% contribution by cropland). Limited radiotelemetry data from endemic swamp deer indicated a possible grassland-dominated average home range size of 1.02 km2, and these patches were highly preferred (average Ivlev’s index = 0.85) over other land-use classes at both spatial and temporal scales. Camera-trapping within the core habitats suggests the critical use of these patches as fawning/breeding grounds. Habitat suitability analysis indicates only c. 17% of the area along the Ganges is suitable as swamp deer habitat. We recommend the protection of these critical grassland patches to maintain ‘dynamic corridors’, with restoration and other management approaches involving multiple stakeholders to ensure the survival of this critical ecosystem.