BioScience最新文献

Reversing biodiversity loss and the sustainability crisis requires approaches that explicitly consider human-nature interdependencies. Social-ecological networks, which incorporate social and ecological actors and entities, as well as their interactions, provide such an approach. Social-ecological networks have been applied to a range of complex issues, including sustainable resource use, management of ecosystem services and disservices, and collective action. However, the application of social-ecological networks to invasion science remains limited so far, despite their clear potential for studying human contributions to introduction pathways of nonnative species, invasion success, direct and indirect impacts, and their management. In the present article, we review past applications of social-ecological networks to biological invasions, provide guidance on how to construct and analyze such networks, with an illustrative example, and outline future opportunities of social-ecological networks in invasion science. We aim to inform and inspire the applications of social-ecological networks to improve our ability to meet the diverse challenges facing invasion science.

Developing ecosystem models has traditionally been limited to a small global community of experts because of the complex skills and resources required. However, the emergence of user-friendly artificial intelligence (AI) tools with powerful generative capabilities could democratize ecosystem modeling, enabling both experts and nonspecialists to build models. We explore a speculative future where AI enables automated end-to-end model development and application. Although such tools could accelerate and enhance modeling tasks, their widespread adoption raises concerns about data integrity, bias, interpretation reliability, and the potential erosion of human expertise. We argue that regardless of AI's technical advancement, human engagement and control remain essential. The global community must respond by identifying key factors that distinguish desirable outcomes and developing infrastructure, standards, and ethical guidelines to ensure AI use in ecosystem modeling remains scientifically robust while supporting sustainable and equitable outcomes.

Sustainable pastoralism represents a primary strategy for supporting goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Sixty-seven percent of biodiversity hotspots and 38% of key biodiversity areas globally include rangelands, but international conventions seldom recognize this vast biodiversity repository. We summarize four synergies between pastoralism and biodiversity conservation: working lands conservation, continuation of vital disturbance regimes, connectivity through transhumance corridors, and community-led governance. Actions that leverage these synergies offer critical opportunities to mitigate biodiversity loss through the creation of a vast conservation network that includes working lands and protected areas. This will require that the contemporary conservation paradigm envision pastoralists as an asset rather than a threat to biodiversity conservation and recognize grazing and fire as ecological disturbances vital to the maintenance of biodiversity. Greater inclusion of rangelands and sustainable pastoralism within global conservation frameworks has high potential to enhance attainment of global biodiversity targets.

A traditional goal of science and environmental communication, including climate communication, has been to encourage disinterested or uninformed audiences to pay more attention to the world around them and to shift disinterest and apathy toward positive engagement with nature and proenvironment lifestyles. We conducted an empirical investigation of audience responses to key aspects of the world scientists' "2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous Times on Planet Earth," focusing on whether the language of this article manages to sway readers to rethink their attitudes toward climate change. Across many variations, the textual prompts we gave to readers did not overwhelmingly move the needle of public attitudes regarding climate change, suggesting that political affiliation and ideologies may be a much stronger indicator of public actions and attitudes than exposure to scientific information. Regarding climate change, we seem to be living in a time of information saturation and ideological entrenchment.

Climate change presents challenges for forest managers in determining strategies and actions to enable forest ecosystems to adapt to rapid and uncertain change. The Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) Network emerged in direct response to an acute need for experimentally robust and professionally credible examples of climate-adaptive forest management strategies. The ASCC Network advances the field of climate adaptation by applying a replicated resistance-resilience-transition and no-action framework to test coproduced, operational-scale experimental trials that incorporate locally specific desired future conditions and adaptation tactics, tailored to different forest types. It exemplifies timely, practical, and scientifically rigorous application of climate adaptation actions while fostering manager-scientist collaboration. Given the collaborative framework, outcomes from the experimental treatments can directly inform local management actions for practitioners now and into the future while serving as a model framework for coproduction of adaptation science applicable to other contexts and ecosystems.

Traditional scientific values are often described as agentic (e.g., independence, competition); however, scientists identifying as racially minoritized and marginalized (RMM) or as women are also often highly motivated by communal values (e.g., collaboration, prosocial behaviors). Although alignment of one's values in one's work facilitates a persistence in motivation, it is not well understood if STEM faculty researchers are aware of the communal values their student researchers often hold. Here we focus on a key engine of the university research enterprise-graduate students-and ask if faculty mentors are cognizant of and make explicit their attunement to the communal values of their graduate student researchers. We found that when describing the values of graduate students, faculty underestimate the communal values that members of RMM groups are more likely to hold. When faculty communicated communal values, this correlated positively with a more diverse research lab and several measures of faculty success.

Hotspots of cave biodiversity were mapped globally on the basis of recently published species lists of cave-limited invertebrates and vertebrates. Lists of sites with 20 aquatic or 20 terrestrial cave-limited taxa were mapped on a global scale, with special reference to Pleistocene glaciation, and present-day ecoregions. Twelve sites had 20 or more aquatic species; 17 had 20 or more terrestrial species. Only three sites from the Dinaric Karst had both 20 aquatic and 20 terrestrial species. Aquatic sites were either chemolithoautotrophic or along a ridge at about 45 (Europe) and at about 35 degrees north (in the United States). The terrestrial sites were chemolithoautotrophic or along the ridge but were also found in moist forests in tropics and subtropics. We describe emerging patterns of biodiversity hotspots and discuss the drivers of these patterns, including historical climate change, cave systems density, and resource availability, and highlight conservation challenges associated with protecting these unique ecosystems.

Biodiversity conservation needs to adjust and keep adjusting to changing conditions. This is largely a matter of connections-across land uses, between people and the landscapes they inhabit, and between sectors and governance levels. Connections play an important role in shaping landscape dynamics and in the ability of conservation practitioners to be able to draw on resources outside their often limited mandates or authority. Focusing on disruptions, in this study, we discuss the current understanding of three interlinked aspects of conservation where active work with building and strengthening connections can help make recovery easier: landscape cohesion, societal appreciation and support for conservation, and the ability to rewire collaborations and bridge organizational and administrative boundaries. Specifically, we highlight how emerging insights on temporal shifts in connections, from spatial ecology to environmental psychology and crisis preparedness, inform and outline a research agenda for better situating conservation in complex landscapes undergoing frequent changes and disruptions.

Biodiversity collections in the United States hold over a billion specimens and are essential to understanding the history of life on Earth, as well as patterns of biodiversity in response to environmental change. Each specimen is linked by metadata to an organism's name and the place and time of its collection. Extensive data have been collected on Earth's geology, hydrology, climate, and organisms-past and present-but the data remain largely fragmented. We report in the present article on community discussions to develop a roadmap and identify action items for the Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (BIOFAIR) Data Network, directly linking the various types of biological and environmental data. The roadmap is organized into five themes: stocktaking and gap analysis, technological capacity building, best practices, education and training, and community building. Together, these themes chart a path from initial resource inventories and skill building to infrastructure development, cross‑disciplinary collaboration, and the establishment of FAIR‑compliant workflows and governance.

Estimating the monetary value of ecosystem services bridges biophysical and economic systems, facilitating dialogue and decision-making among diverse stakeholders of nature. However, the more we translate natural phenomena into monetary units to unify diverse perspectives of nature's value, the more we risk losing. The search for a single underlying unit of existence (a monad) is a long-standing philosophical concept (monism) that has aided scientific progress. In the present article, we examine major monads in natural science en route to an exploration of the risks inherent to inadvertently adopting money as a monad (monetarianism). Through a cautionary tale and case study of an urban greenspace, we highlight the hazards of monetary representations of nature and present a new view of the potential for miscalculation. A monetary monism risks obscuring the true worth of biophysical processes behind an economic sleight of hand that could lead to the loss of ecosystem services and their monetary value.