BioScience最新文献

Establishing operational approaches to assess and forecast resilience is critical for understanding ecosystem responses to global change. Current methods fall short when applied to water-driven transitional ecosystems, which undergo periodic shifts between aquatic and terrestrial phases. These ecosystems are highly sensitive to changes in historical wet-dry regimes, yet existing approaches often neglect the interconnection and compensatory dynamics between phases, yielding unreliable resilience estimates. We propose a holistic approach that integrates the entire wet-dry cycle and treats aquatic and terrestrial phases as interconnected components of a scalable meta-ecosystem. This perspective captures key resilience mechanisms-species turnover and functional redundancy driving compensatory effects-that sustain biodiversity and functioning across phases. By framing resilience as an emergent ecosystem property, our system-wide approach identifies essential elements for reliable assessments and provides a functional pathway to make resilience evaluations more actionable, with broad implications for managing water-driven transitional ecosystems under global change.

In this study, we illustrate some of the most common challenges and pitfalls in payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme design, through Finland's METSO program, a major forest-based PES policy in the European Union. We use four fundamental PES design concepts: conditionality, permanence, administrative targeting, and impact on social motivations. We find that METSO has primarily managed to avoid common design pitfalls. However, we identify some of the drawbacks of using timber volume as an ecosystem proxy for the conditions of payment. We then broaden our analysis with two issues that are novel in the literature: implications of achieving conservations targets such as the European Union Biodiversity Strategy 2030 through a private land conservation scheme such as METSO and implications of warming climate on the design of forest-based PES schemes. These issues call attention to the design of future policy instruments. Finally, we propose recommendations to policymakers on PES design.

The United Nations General Assembly designated 2021-2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Meeting this international mandate requires developing, testing, refining, and implementing evidence-based approaches that will significantly increase restoration performance and accessibility. Approaches that apply ecological theories of community organization and species interactions have generally been underused in restoration but can enhance performance and provide opportunities for expanding multispecies conservation. We review how co-occurring habitat-forming species collectively enhance biodiversity, habitat heterogeneity, niche complementarity, and amelioration of physical stress. We show how successive beneficial interactions between foundation species-facilitation cascades-can be used in restoration to increase local biodiversity, enhance and provide additional ecosystem functions, and strengthen resistance to environmental stress and pace of regrowth. Approaches that incorporate co-occurring foundation species' interactions can create a critical step change to advance restoration of biodiverse and resilient ecosystems at the pace and scale required to achieve now seemingly out-of-reach restoration targets.

A global shuffling of biodiversity is underway, propelled by human transport across natural dispersal barriers. We review the dissolution of biogeographic isolation, showing that modern biotic mixing is global, accelerating, and characterized by a diversity of nonnative species. Strategies to curb introductions now exist, but understanding how impacts accumulate with additional invasions remains critical. To characterize the consequences of this Great Shuffle, we first synthesize evidence that multiple invaders, including those with modest effects, can collectively inflict substantial ecological harm. Second, we review paleontological studies of prehistoric biotic exchanges showing how the number of species exchanged and the spatial extent of mixing correlate with long-term consequences. Because modern invasions are occurring more frequently and over broader scales than ancient events, their consequences may be more severe. By integrating contemporary and prehistoric insights, we highlight research needs and offer a framework for understanding the cumulative and long-term impacts of multispecies invasions.

Biodiversity changes due to human activities highlight the need for efficient biodiversity monitoring approaches. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding offers a noninvasive method used for biodiversity monitoring and ecosystem assessment, but its accuracy depends on comprehensive DNA reference databases. Natural history collections often contain rare or difficult-to-obtain samples that can serve as a valuable resource to fill gaps in eDNA reference databases. In the present article, we discuss the utility of specimens from natural history collections in supporting future eDNA applications. Museomics-the application of -omics techniques to museum specimens-offers a promising avenue for improving eDNA reference databases by increasing species coverage. Furthermore, museomics can provide transferable methodological advancements for extracting genetic material from samples with low and degraded DNA. The integration of natural history collections, museomics, and eDNA approaches has the potential to significantly improve our understanding of global biodiversity, highlighting the continued importance of natural history collections.

Since the 1990s, evolutionary biologists have recognized the importance of explaining the ability of biological systems to evolve and how this ability itself evolves. This recognition of the need to explain evolvability emerged from an awareness that the kind and the amount of heritable variation available for natural selection require explanation. The concept of evolvability is now the focus of many research programs in diverse subdisciplines within evolutionary biology. In the present article, we first review and synthesise progress made in evolvability research. We then present key questions to set an agenda for future research on evolvability, identify challenges to answer these questions, and discuss opportunities to apply results from the evolvability research to conservation biology.

From satellite imagery to drones or camera traps, remote technologies are increasingly used to enhance wildlife crime detection worldwide. Whereas remotely tracking individuals allows for prompt detection of their illegal persecution, much less attention (concentrated in oceanic ecosystems) has been paid to tagged animals as sentinels to detect other species' poaching through their interspecific interactions. We illustrate this potential in terrestrial ecosystems by showing how GPS-tagged vultures, able to quickly locate dead animals, and GPS-collared wolves enabled the detection of poached wildlife of other species (i.e., illegally shot or snared wild ungulates and carrion-baited illegal snares) in Europe. We further discuss how these interspecific interactions could be systematically monitored to improve detectability of poaching events. Considering the wide variety of tracked wildlife across ecosystems, taking their interactions (e.g., scavenging) into account will enhance the utility of animal-borne technologies in addressing illegal wildlife persecution.

Sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) control in the Laurentian Great Lakes of North America is among the largest and most successful control programs of an invasive species anywhere on the planet. The effort began more than 75 years ago; it unites multiple nations, states, and provinces with the common goal of controlling this invasive species and protecting a valuable fishery. The science-based control program is administered by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC), a body arising from a treaty signed by the United States and Canada. In the present article, we share 10 lessons learned from decades of successful sea lamprey control with the hopes of informing ongoing and future control programs targeting biological invasions. The 10 lessons we identified are to act boldly in times of crisis, to maintain the social license, to invest in capacity building, to break down the silos, to support fundamental science, to diversify your portfolio of control measures, to strive for continuous improvement, to confront the trade-off between information and action, to keep your foot on the gas, and to keep your eyes on the prize. The GLFC has long fostered a framework that uses some military strategy and verbiage that extends across the lessons (e.g., know your enemy). Other lessons are more nascent as the GLFC reenvisions its relationship with Indigenous peoples and governments in a path to reconciliation where two-eyed seeing is being embraced. Through adaptive management, horizon scanning methods, and embracing implementation science, the lessons learned about sea lamprey control will continue to evolve, which is itself a lesson. We submit that the lessons shared in the present article will help guide invasive species control programs spanning taxa, ecosystems, and regions.

Fire is a defining feature of our biosphere, having appeared when the first plants colonized the land, and it continues to occur across the planet at different frequencies and intensities. Fire has been and remains as an evolutionary force in many plant and animal lineages and contributes to explaining the variability of our biodiversity. Fire has also shaped the structure of many ecosystems and the distribution of biomes, and it is an important contributor to the global biogeochemical cycles. In addition, fire has been a key factor in human evolution, and, in turn, humans have modified fire regimes with important consequences for the biosphere. Consequently, fire is an intrinsic factor on our planet. Our challenge now is to understand and predict the role of fire in a densely populated, highly technological world that imposes significant changes on the Earth.