Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment最新文献

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.

Global conservation targets include protecting genetic diversity within species. Yet few studies have assessed whether protected areas (PAs) include genetically diverse populations across species globally. A first step is understanding the availability of population genetic data that could be used in these assessments. We surveyed georeferenced population-level nuclear (as opposed to mitochondrial or plastid-based) genetic data across continents and marine biomes (36,354 populations, 2809 species) and found substantial geographic and taxonomic gaps. Most data were concentrated in Europe and North America, with major gaps in Africa and Asia. For most taxonomic groups, data were available for <1% of described species. Globally, 52.08% of the total areal extent of PAs lacked genetically sampled populations. These gaps in data availability highlight the need for targeted genetic data collection, harmonization, and sharing to improve genetic diversity monitoring and conservation planning. Combined with proxy-based genetic indicators, such data are needed to inform PA assessments, bolster area-based conservation initiatives like 30 × 30, and support achievement of global genetic conservation targets.

Blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs) are well-recognized for their considerable potential in climate mitigation. However, current understanding of carbon (C) gains and losses of BCEs is rarely based on a net ecosystem carbon budget (NECB) framework, which incorporates all C budget components. We propose a comprehensive NECB framework for BCEs that includes C inputs from riverine flows, exchanges between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere, burial in sediments, and exchanges between BCEs and the continental shelf. Focusing on the Yellow River estuary in China as a case study, we applied the proposed NECB framework to quantify the C budget of this BCE. We show that C balance assessments of BCEs that rely solely on limited measurements of C accumulation rates or C flux are characterized by large degrees of uncertainty. The proposed NECB framework could improve our understanding of the role of BCEs in climate mitigation. We emphasize the need for revisiting the C balance of BCEs using an NECB framework, which integrates multi-disciplinary approaches.

The Montreal-Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) substantially advances biodiversity protection. We systematically reviewed the scholarly literature published during the UN Decade on Biodiversity (2010–2020) to assess whether GBF targets align with scientific approaches and improve upon the Aichi Targets in recognizing the complexity of marine biodiversity. Our findings showed that the new targets have improved to address the full suite of essential biodiversity variable (EBV) classes, reducing the risk of changes in crucial aspects of biodiversity being overlooked. We observed a high degree of alignment between research and policy in EBVs and a relative increase in the reliance of the GBF on secondary variables such as ecosystem function. While this alignment mirrors that within other global frameworks, we caution against overemphasizing secondary variables at the expense of foundational variables such as community composition. Our analysis demonstrates that global policy targets align well with scientific understanding of marine biodiversity. Future efforts should focus on improving national-level implementation and refining indicators to foster transformative change in biodiversity conservation.

Pathways to achieving net-zero and net-negative greenhouse-gas (GHG) emission targets rely on land-based contributions to carbon (C) sequestration. However, projections of future contributions neglect to consider ecosystems, climate change, legacy impacts of continental-scale fire exclusion, forest accretion and densification, and a century or more of management. These influences predispose western North American forests (wNAFs) to severe drought impacts, large and chronic outbreaks of insect pests, and increasingly large and severe wildfires. To realistically assess contributions of future terrestrial C sinks, we must quantify the amount and configuration of stored C in wNAFs, its vulnerability to severe disturbance and climatic changes, costs and net GHG impacts of feasible transitions to conditions that can tolerate active fire, and opportunities for redirecting thinning-derived biomass to uses that retain harvested C while reducing emissions from alternate products. Failing to adopt this broader mindset, future forest contributions to emission targets will go up in smoke.

Industrialized agriculture often uses marginal-land restoration to reduce environmental impacts, seeking to generate ecosystem services while maintaining food production on better soils. Here, we describe benefit trajectories for biodiversity, nutrient retention, and soil organic carbon (SOC) accumulation up to a decade after conversion of marginal farmlands to grasslands or wetlands. Even in small areas that were restored, biodiversity increased across most trophic levels, driven by colonization of non-agronomic taxa. Nutrient retention by grassland buffers was substantive but seasonal, with losses common outside of the growing season. Although initial SOC gains were modest, a 20-fold increase in recalcitrant root biomass to a depth of 60 cm suggests that SOC storage will accelerate. Overall, even if it were unable to unilaterally and immediately offset nutrient pollution or SOC loss, restoration created multiple benefits. Marginal-land restoration can serve as a necessary and critical component to improved sustainable intensification, especially if partnered with on-field crop management targeting nutrient retention and SOC accumulation.