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Ecology, evidence and perspective.
The same 50 wind-created canopy gaps and 50 controls were surveyed in 1988 and 2023; bird assemblages and canopy cover converged even though some forest-structure differences persisted.
A China-wide cropland survey plus isotope-tracing microcosms found microbial extracellular polymers contributing to mineral-associated soil carbon at rates comparable to cellular residues.
The new State of the World’s Forests report puts more than 460 million hectares of degraded forest inside a broader 1.56-billion-hectare land-degradation problem—and emphasizes multiple restoration pathways rather than one universal intervention.
Global modeling suggests that more than two-thirds of future inundated coastal land could be environmentally suitable for 122 established non-native marine animals, especially in mid-latitude estuaries.
A long-term ponderosa-pine experiment found five-year prescribed-fire intervals strongest for limiting litter and shrubs, while longer intervals retained more of some wildlife-useful understory structure.
Three years of paired inlet–outlet monitoring found strong runoff, sediment and particulate-pollutant retention, but dissolved phosphorus, sodium and some metals did not follow the same pattern.
A multi-month CSIRO voyage from Fiji toward Antarctica will collect ocean, atmosphere and plankton observations across Pacific island waters and the Southern Ocean; the signal is new observing capacity, not ecological results yet.
In two degraded Michigan oak savannas, prescribed fire and tree girdling opened parts of the system but produced limited recruitment of the desired herbaceous community, complicating the idea that restoring disturbance automatically restores composition.
Seven years after native-groundcover seeding in former cropland, restored herbaceous cover improved one restoration target while changing light and establishment conditions for naturally regenerating longleaf pine.
Reconnection of the Mfolozi and St Lucia systems shifted salinity and benthic assemblages away from prolonged hypersaline conditions, while increased siltation emerged as a new ecological constraint.
The third edition of the international restoration standards updates the field’s common framework for planning, reference ecosystems, monitoring and the integration of scientific, Indigenous, local and practitioner knowledge.
Three decades of Landsat indices around Ara, India, track declining open-water and vegetation signals alongside urban growth, offering a landscape-change warning without directly measuring species response.
Comparative measurements across constructed marshes show that restoration age or visible vegetation alone does not guarantee functional equivalence in nutrient and carbon cycling.
Pitfall sampling near Dodoma recorded substantial insect abundance in agroforestry, but measured richness/diversity did not make it the clear winner and overall community composition differences among habitats were not statistically significant.
A southern China chronosequence showed older mangrove stands with higher mean carbon stocks and changing carbon fractions, while total-stock differences among ages remained statistically uncertain.
In wild greater spear-nosed bats, urinary neopterin covaried with cortisol and showed sex- and age-dependent patterns, complicating its use as a stand-alone immune indicator.
Long-term aerosol observations combined with satellite and model data suggest warming could increase new-particle cloud nuclei in the high Arctic while reducing them in maritime Arctic air.
An unsupervised multi-stressor analysis of 2020 Baltic data identified species-rich areas where low bottom oxygen and fishing pressure combine into elevated ecological risk.
A five-year Arizona mine experiment found that physical microsites, native seeding and biocrust inoculation affected different pieces of recovery—arguing for treatment packages rather than one restoration lever.
A reconstruction of the western Baltic herring fishery around its sixteenth-century collapse points to interacting environmental and socioeconomic pressure rather than a single historical cause.
Community-based surveillance in Nunavut documented filarial infections and lesions in barren-ground caribou, showing how Indigenous harvesting networks can extend wildlife-health detection across a rapidly changing Arctic.
Across roughly 19,000 catchments, four decades of atmospheric drying produced far more heterogeneous streamflow-drought trends—showing how catchments can attenuate, delay or amplify climate pressure.
Three years after treatment in a Zhejiang secondary forest, heavy thinning raised species diversity and biomass growth but reduced functional richness—so the management response depends on which objective is being measured.
A 100-city landscape analysis paired with a plant–pollinator model suggests that heterogeneity and connectivity can delay extinction, while evolutionary feedbacks can erode some of that benefit.