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Since 2000, collaborative and multidisciplinary field inventories have helped quadruple park coverage in Peru’s richest region., Meeting international commitments to protect 17% of terrestrial ecosystems worldwide will require >3 million square kilometers of new protected areas and strategies to create those areas in a way that respects local communities and land use. In 2000–2016, biological and social scientists worked to increase the protected proportion of Peru’s largest department via 14 interdisciplinary inventories covering >9 million hectares of this megadiverse corner of the Amazon basin. In each landscape, the strategy was the same: convene diverse partners, identify biological and sociocultural assets, document residents’ use of natural resources, and tailor the findings to the needs of decision-makers. Nine of the 14 landscapes have since been protected (5.7 million hectares of new protected areas), contributing to a quadrupling of conservation coverage in Loreto (from 6 to 23%). We outline the methods and enabling conditions most crucial for successfully applying similar campaigns elsewhere on Earth.

Field photographs of plant species are crucial for research and conservation, but the lack of a centralized database makes them difficult to locate. We surveyed 25 online databases of field photographs and found that they harboured only about 53% of the approximately 125,000 vascular plant species of the Americas. These results reflect the urgent need for a centralized database that can both integrate and complete the photographic record of the world’s flora. Field photographs are essential for research and conservation, but are difficult to access since there is no central database or connection between archives. The 25 leading databases hold only 53% of the plant species of the Americas, illustrating the need for increased work on collecting and standardizing this valuable data.

Invasive plant species can alter belowground microbial communities. Simultaneously, the composition of soil microbial communities and the abundance of key microbes can influence invasive plant success. Such reciprocal effects may cause plant–microbe interactions to change rapidly during the course of biological invasions in ways that either inhibit or promote invasive species growth. Here we use a space-for-time substitution to illustrate how effects of soil microbial communities on the exotic legume Vicia villosa vary across uninvaded sites, recently invaded sites, and sites invaded by V. villosa for over a decade. We find that soil microorganisms from invaded areas increase V. villosa growth compared to sterilized soil or live soils collected from uninvaded sites, likely because mutualistic nitrogen-fixing rhizobia are not abundant in uninvaded areas. Notably, the benefits resulting from inoculation with live soils were higher for soils from recently invaded sites compared to older invasions, potentially indicating that over longer time scales, soil microbial communities change in ways that may reduce the success of exotic species. These findings suggest that short-term changes to soil microbial communities following invasion may facilitate exotic legume growth likely because of increases in the abundance of mutualistic rhizobia, but also indicate that longer term changes to soil microbial communities may reduce the growth benefits belowground microbial communities provide to exotic species. Our results highlight the changing nature of plant–microbe interactions during biological invasions and illustrate how altered biotic interactions could contribute to both the initial success and subsequent naturalization of invasive legume species.

Premise of the Study Biological collections are uniquely poised to inform the stewardship of life on Earth in a time of cataclysmic biodiversity loss. Efforts to fully leverage collections are impeded by a lack of trained taxonomists and a lack of interest and engagement by the public. We provide a model of a crowd-sourced data collection project that produces quality taxonomic data sets and empowers citizen scientists through real contributions to science. Entitled MicroPlants, the project is a collaboration between taxonomists, citizen science experts, and teachers and students from universities and K–12. Methods We developed an online tool that allows citizen scientists to measure photographs of specimens of a hyper-diverse group of liverworts from a biodiversity hotspot. Results Using the MicroPlants online tool, citizen scientists are generating high-quality data, with preliminary analysis indicating non-expert data can be comparable to expert data. Discussion More than 11,000 users from both the website and kiosk versions have contributed to the data set, which is demonstrably aiding taxonomists working toward establishing conservation priorities within this group. MicroPlants provides opportunities for public participation in authentic science research. The project's educational component helps move youth toward engaging in scientific thinking and has been adopted by several universities into curriculum for both biology and non-biology majors.

Tolerance, or the capacity of a genotype to survive and reproduce following herbivore damage, varies widely across the plant kingdom. One proximate cause of this variation is resource availability, which can influence tolerance through mechanisms such as growth rate and photosynthesis. We examined the effect of high and low soil nutrient levels on the relationship between tolerance and two of its underlying mechanisms, biomass regrowth and photosynthetic upregulation, among genotypes of the Mediterranean annual grass Avena barbata. Although defoliated plants did not reach the same biomass as controls, biomass regrowth was higher at high nutrients. However, increased seed abortion at high nutrients caused tolerance to be the same in both nutrient treatments. Increased seed abortion also uncoupled biomass regrowth from tolerance at high nutrients. We found no evidence for photosynthetic upregulation in defoliated compared to control plants in either nutrient treatment. However, tolerance was positively correlated with predefoliation photosynthetic efficiency at high nutrients. Thus, constitutive photosynthetic efficiency may be a better predictor of tolerance than photosynthetic responses following herbivory in A. barbata. More generally, our results highlight the possibility that the mechanisms of tolerance can differ across resource environments even if tolerance is the same.