Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment最新文献

Collaborations between biodiversity conservation and the arts can lead to synergies and fresh approaches to intractable problems. These collaborations can yield diverse mutual benefits, such as offering reciprocal sources of inspiration, information, and learning; providing one another with new tools and resources for synthesis and innovation; securing funding; and contributing to increased visibility and influence. The arts may be uniquely poised to raise awareness, influence behavioral change, improve well-being, and assist with developing conservation tools and materials. Likewise, conservation can provide artists with relevant expertise, nature-based art material, samples, and resources, as well as inform sustainability aspects of the arts. Effective synergies between the arts and conservation will necessitate greater funding and institutional support, improved willingness to collaborate, better recognition of the benefits of artists’ involvement in interdisciplinary conservation teams, and sound empirical methods to gauge such collaborations.

Climate-change adaptation planning processes and tools are increasing in number and evolving rapidly. During times of innovation and proliferation, a potential danger is incoherence, when well-intended contributions can overwhelm, create confusion, or mask complementarities. A shared vision is needed to avoid duplication, reduce misunderstandings, and facilitate work across jurisdictions to steward resources undergoing profound changes. Such a vision would document fundamental tools and approaches while allowing flexibility to match highly varied management contexts and organizational missions. Fortunately, the preconditions for coherence exist. Here, we illustrate how climate-change adaptation tools—including scenario planning, conceptual frameworks, structured decision making, and impact-evaluation methods—can be (and are) used in tandem to support adaptation planning that accounts for uncertainty, considers a broad range of strategies and actions, makes transparent and robust choices, evaluates outcomes, and is flexible and responsive to the decision context.

Strict protection is a fundamental component of any strategy for biodiversity protection and ecosystem restoration. Most Western countries, however, currently fail to acknowledge its relevance in their conservation programs. The European Green Deal (EGD)—the climate neutrality strategy launched by the European Union (EU) in 2019—is a marked exception. By identifying strict protection as one of the key solutions to ensure ecosystem health, the EGD reasserts the importance of strict protection both at the regional and global level. However, its approach is far from perfect. To harness the full potential of strict protection, the EU must clarify the existing regulatory framework and strengthen its commitment to ecological sustainability.

Strict protection is a specific type of ecosystem management, one characterized by control and limitation of human visitation, use, and impacts in particular areas, with a view to ensure protection of their high biodiversity value and geological and geomorphological features (Dudley 2008).

Strict protection falls under land-sparing approaches, which can be integrated with diverse land-sharing management solutions to form a cohesive conservation strategy. But it is particularly relevant to ecosystems that require, by reason of their distinguishing features, a high degree of ecological protection and a restrictive management approach—as is the case with primary and old-growth forests and other wilderness areas, such as wetlands, peatlands, and grasslands. Strict reserves are recognized as the most effective solution in area-based conservation, offering better protection for natural spaces against human pressures (eg Jones et al. 2018). While some local economic activities might face initial adjustments, the success of strict protection hinges on effective enforcement and community engagement, fostered through clear communication and financial mechanisms like payments for ecosystem services (Wang et al. 2024).

Despite its potential, however, strict protection does not enjoy great consideration in the Western world, particularly in relation to primary and old-growth forests, which continue to decline at alarming rates both in Europe and globally (Mikolāš et al. 2023). Despite the implementation of important international initiatives, such as the inclusion of forests in natural and mixed UNESCO World Heritage sites, we are witnessing a daily erosion of the unique biodiversity heritage contained in the planet’s ecosystems, including but not limited to those in the tropical biome. The situation is particularly negative in the US, where the US Forest Service announced in January 2025 that it would no longer “prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Land Management Plan Direction for Old-Growth Forest Conditions Across the National Forest System”.

In this global context, the EU is a remarkable exception. As open

Distributed experimental networks have emerged as a powerful approach in field ecology, enabling experimental replication across global gradients. These networks use standardized treatments at dispersed sites to identify factors like climate or soil that shape biotic responses. Reserving space for future “add-on” work fosters discovery by transforming distributed networks into distributed experimental infrastructure. However, challenges include balancing feasibility, plot impacts, and demands on site scientists. Using the Disturbance and Recovery Across Grasslands Network (DRAGNet) as a case study informed by lessons learned in the Nutrient Network (NutNet), we outline effective practices for designing add-on work to retain the original experiment’s integrity while effectively using the resources of the network participants. By following guidelines for hypothesis-driven, inclusive research that engages contributors intellectually, minimizes plot impacts using field-tested protocols, and maximizes scientific impact and inclusion, distributed networks can become valuable infrastructure for advancing ecological understanding.

Protected areas influence their surroundings in a variety of ways. These “spillover effects” can change an area’s conservation value and affect its social license. Advanced statistical tools for quantifying protected area spillovers are well established, but underlying assumptions about spillover geography and measurement often lack clarity. Although spillover effects should decline with increasing distance from a protected area, there are no published guidelines for determining the rate, magnitude, or scale of decline and there is no conceptual framework to guide tests of alternative hypotheses. Current practices heavily increase the risk of Type II errors (detecting spillover where none exists), particularly at distances far from protected areas. I propose an approach that recognizes alternative forms for ecological and biophysical spillovers and background variance as competing hypotheses. In particular, careful consideration must be given to the question of how many measurements are needed to rigorously distinguish spillovers from background variance in study environments.

Understanding and managing landscape dynamics (for example, spatiotemporal fluxes in abiotic and biotic features within watersheds) is critical to ensure the sustainability of ecosystems and human well-being. This perspective underscores the importance of integrating landscape dynamics into global sustainability strategies, emphasizing the interplay between ecosystems and socioeconomic values. Exploration of how natural and human systems are connected via abiotic and biotic flows can result in improved understanding and management of connections across landscapes. The novelty of this approach lies in its holistic framework for managing landscape dynamics and enhancing resilience to global change. By managing the complex dynamics among human–natural systems, we can unlock their potential to maximize essential socioeconomic benefits and address the impacts of environmental change.

As the social–ecological challenges facing society grow in complexity and variability, transformative measures—those that seek to re-imagine conventional systems of sustainability and resource management—are increasingly needed. One system that has successfully demonstrated a degree of sustainability is that of Indigenous Knowledge (IK)—a long-standing societal system that places Indigenous Peoples’ relationship with the environment above all else. As a body of knowing, IK is inextricably linked to Indigenous existence and identity as the means of maintaining the well-being of the living and non-living. Rarely investigated is the braiding of CEAM (cumulative effects assessment and management) with IK systems. Conventional resource management has long struggled to harness cumulative effects assessments and could be improved through the re-positioning of cumulative effects assessments and IK. The strengths of these systems together offer insight into how current conventional governance can be transformed to ensure a more equitable and sustainable future for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples alike.

Fire regimes are context-dependent, as are the ways that animals respond. However, most information on animal responses to fire comes from short-term local field studies, which are hard to extrapolate across large areas for fire management while also capturing spatial variation. To address this challenge, we modeled data from eBird to map the direction, magnitude, and importance of fire regime associations at 27-km resolution across the ranges of six bird species used to guide management decisions in the US: red-cockaded woodpecker (Leuconotopicus borealis), Bachman’s sparrow (Peucaea aestivalis), greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), pinyon jay (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus), American goshawk (Astur atricapillus), and olive-sided flycatcher (Contopus cooperi). Our findings revealed previously undocumented landscape-scale variation in fire impacts on birds. Critically, the strength of fire regime associations varied widely in magnitude even when the direction of those associations (positive, neutral, or negative) remained constant. This analytical workflow provides not only a flexible approach for assessing macroecological fire impacts but also finer-scale information sufficient for resource prioritization and decision-making.

Amazonian freshwaters have large influences on regional and global climate, harbor remarkable and unique species, and are vital to human society. Nevertheless, as compared to their terrestrial counterparts in the Amazon, these freshwaters have received less attention from the international conservation community. There is an urgent need to better integrate Amazonian freshwaters into conservation strategies. To guide this integration, we suggest an approach built upon three foundational pillars: hydroclimate, biodiversity, and human dimensions. The hydroclimate pillar reflects the Amazon’s role in regional and global climate, water cycling, and carbon storage. The biodiversity pillar reflects the unparalleled variety of freshwater species and their role in ecosystems, emphasizing endemism and ecological function. The human dimensions pillar reflects the rich biocultural heritage of the Amazonian peoples and their reliance on freshwaters for millennia. Heightened attention to these three pillars can help steer the way to a more sustainable future for Amazonian freshwaters.