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Biodiversity conservation requires prioritization to be effective. Biodiversity hotspots and conservation planning identify where to focus conservation efforts, but it is unclear when conservation is most successful. Our goals were to: (a) investigate if hot moments for conservation occur, (b) calculate how important and prevalent they are, and (c) discuss what may catalyze hot moments for conservation. We analyzed the worldwide network of protected areas since inception, analyzing both all countries, and those 35 countries that contained at least 1% of either the total count or the total area protected globally. The evidence for hot moments for conservation was very strong. Among all countries, 44% protected more than half of their protected area in 1 year, and 61% did so in one 5-year period. The 35 countries that contain most of the protected area globally (77%) protected 23% and 49%, respectively, within 1 or 5 years. Hot moments often coincided with societal upheaval such as the collapse of the USSR or the end of colonialism. Conservationists need to account for hot moments for conservation to be most effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Red List Index (RLI) measures change in the aggregate extinction risk of species. It is a key indicator for tracking progress toward nine of the Aichi and many proposed post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework Targets. Here, we consider two formulations of the RLI used for reporting biodiversity trends at national scales. Disaggregated global RLIs measure changing national contributions to global extinction risk and are currently based on five taxonomic groups, while national RLIs measure changing national extinction risk and are based on taxonomic groups assessed multiple times in country. For 74% of nations, the disaggregated global RLI is currently based on three or fewer taxonomic groups. Meanwhile, national RLIs from selected pilot countries Finland, South Africa, and Brazil are computed from twelve, eight, and nine taxonomic groups, respectively. The national RLI and the disaggregated global RLI measure different aspects of biodiversity, in that the former detects national trends in populations of species for which each country is responsible while the latter provides standardized comparisons of nations' contributions to the global extinction risk of the same species groups. As governments commit to the post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, we encourage them to monitor a standard set of taxonomic groups representing different biomes using both RLI formulations to ensure effective target tracking and accurate feedback on their conservation investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity, essential to delivering the ecosystem services that support humanity, is under threat. Projections show that loss of biodiversity, specifically increases in species extinction, is likely to continue without significant intervention. Human activity is the principal driver of this loss, generating direct threats such as habitat loss and indirect threats such as climate change. Often, these threats are induced by consumption of products and services in locations far-removed from the affected species, creating a geographical displacement between cause and effect. Here we quantify and categorise extinction-risk footprints for 188 countries. Seventy-six countries are net importers of extinction-risk footprint, 16 countries are net exporters of extinction-risk footprint, and in 96 countries domestic consumption is the largest contributor to the extinction-risk footprint. These profiles provide insight into the underlying sources of consumption which contribute to species extinction risk, a valuable input to the formulation of interventions aimed at transforming humanity's interactions with biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List is a central tool for extinction risk monitoring and influences global biodiversity policy and action. But, to be effective, it is crucial that it consistently accounts for each driver of extinction. Climate change is rapidly becoming a key extinction driver, but consideration of climate change information remains challenging for the IUCN. Several methods can be used to predict species' future decline, but they often fail to provide estimates of the symptoms of endangerment used by IUCN. We devised a standardized method to measure climate change impact in terms of change in habitat quality to inform criterion A3 on future population reduction. Using terrestrial nonvolant tetrapods as a case study, we measured this impact as the difference between the current and the future species climatic niche, defined based on current and future bioclimatic variables under alternative model algorithms, dispersal scenarios, emission scenarios, and climate models. Our models identified 171 species (13% out of those analyzed) for which their current red‐list category could worsen under criterion A3 if they cannot disperse beyond their current range in the future. Categories for 14 species (1.5%) could worsen if maximum dispersal is possible. Although ours is a simulation exercise and not a formal red‐list assessment, our results suggest that considering climate change impacts may reduce misclassification and strengthen consistency and comprehensiveness of IUCN Red List assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online digital data from media platforms have the potential to complement biodiversity monitoring efforts. We propose a strategy for integrating these data into current biodiversity datasets in light of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Online digital data from traditional and social media platforms has the potential to complement biodiversity monitoring efforts. In this Perspective, the authors propose a strategy for integrating these data into current biodiversity datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a correction notice for an article published in PLOS ONE. The correction states that the authors of the article did not cite a preprint of a similar article published by Palacio et al. in Diversity and Distributions. Both articles address similar research questions and use different methods to build species distribution maps. The PLOS ONE study included more details and discussion of limitations compared to the Diversity and Distributions study. The authors of the correction notice are listed at the end. [Extracted from the article]

Global biodiversity targets have far-reaching implications for nature conservation worldwide. Scenarios and models hold unfulfilled promise for ensuring such targets are well founded and implemented; here, we review how they can and should inform the Aichi Targets of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity and their reformulation. They offer two clear benefits: providing a scientific basis for the wording and quantitative elements of targets; and identifying synergies and trade-offs by accounting for interactions between targets and the actions needed to achieve them. The capacity of scenarios and models to address complexity makes them invaluable for developing meaningful targets and policy, and improving conservation outcomes. Highlights The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 commits countries to achieve specific conservation targets (the Aichi Targets). How such targets are designed and implemented has far-reaching implications for biodiversity worldwide. Scenarios and models hold great promise for ensuring that conservation targets are well founded, effectively implemented, and lead to good conservation outcomes, but are not currently being used to their full potential. In particular, scenarios and models can ensure quantitative targets are based on scientific evidence. Our review highlights information gaps, where data and models are lacking, and implementation gaps, where the theory and tools exist but have seen little use. Both gaps present opportunities for collaboration between decision-makers and researchers as the global community moves towards new sets of conservation targets beyond 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Stopping declines in biodiversity is critically important, but it is only a first step toward achieving more ambitious conservation goals. The absence of an objective and practical definition of species recovery that is applicable across taxonomic groups leads to inconsistent targets in recovery plans and frustrates reporting and maximization of conservation impact. We devised a framework for comprehensively assessing species recovery and conservation success. We propose a definition of a fully recovered species that emphasizes viability, ecological functionality, and representation; and use counterfactual approaches to quantify degree of recovery. This allowed us to calculate a set of 4 conservation metrics that demonstrate impacts of conservation efforts to date (conservation legacy); identify dependence of a species on conservation actions (conservation dependence); quantify expected gains resulting from conservation action in the medium term (conservation gain); and specify requirements to achieve maximum plausible recovery over the long term (recovery potential). These metrics can incentivize the establishment and achievement of ambitious conservation targets. We illustrate their use by applying the framework to a vertebrate, an invertebrate, and a woody and an herbaceous plant. Our approach is a preliminary framework for an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Green List of Species, which was mandated by a resolution of IUCN members in 2012. Although there are several challenges in applying our proposed framework to a wide range of species, we believe its further development, implementation, and integration with the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species will help catalyze a positive and ambitious vision for conservation that will drive sustained conservation action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The successful implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity's post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will rely on effective translation of targets from global to national level and increased engagement across diverse sectors of society. Species conservation targets require policy support measures that can be applied to a diversity of taxonomic groups, that link action targets to outcome goals, and that can be applied to both global and national data sets to account for national context, which the species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric does. To test the flexibility of STAR, we applied the metric to vascular plants listed on national red lists of Brazil, Norway, and South Africa. The STAR metric uses data on species' extinction risk, distributions, and threats, which we obtained from national red lists to quantify the contribution that threat abatement and habitat restoration activities could make to reducing species' extinction risk. Across all 3 countries, the greatest opportunity for reducing plant species' extinction risk was from abating threats from agricultural activities, which could reduce species' extinction risk by 54% in Norway, 36% in South Africa, and 29% in Brazil. Species extinction risk could be reduced by a further 21% in South Africa by abating threats from invasive species and by 21% in Brazil by abating threats from urban expansion. Even with different approaches to red‐listing among countries, the STAR metric yielded informative results that identified where the greatest conservation gains could be made for species through threat‐abatement and restoration activities. Quantifiably linking local taxonomic coverage and data collection to global processes with STAR would allow national target setting to align with global targets and enable state and nonstate actors to measure and report on their potential contributions to species conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the number of observations submitted to the citizen science platform iNaturalist continues to grow, it is increasingly important that these observations can be identified to the finest taxonomic level, maximizing their value for biodiversity research. Here, we explore the benefits of acting as an identifier on iNaturalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsustainable exploitation of wild species represents a serious threat to biodiversity and to the livelihoods of local communities and Indigenous peoples. However, managed, sustainable use has the potential to forestall extinctions, aid recovery, and meet human needs. We analyzed species‐level data for 30,923 species from 13 taxonomic groups on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species to investigate patterns of intentional biological resource use. Forty percent of species (10,098 of 25,009 species from 10 data‐sufficient taxonomic groups) were used. The main purposes of use were pets, display animals, horticulture, and human consumption. Intentional use is currently contributing to elevated extinction risk for 28–29% of threatened or near threatened (NT) species (2752–2848 of 9753 species). Intentional use also affected 16% of all species used (1597–1631 of 10,098). However, 72% of used species (7291 of 10,098) were least concern, of which nearly half (3469) also had stable or improving population trends. The remainder were not documented as threatened by biological resource use, including at least 172 threatened or NT species with stable or improving populations. About one‐third of species that had use documented as a threat had no targeted species management actions to directly address this threat. To improve use‐related red‐list data, we suggest small amendments to the relevant classification schemes and required supporting documentation. Our findings on the prevalence of sustainable and unsustainable use, and variation across taxa, can inform international policy making, including the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Article impact statement: Of 10,098 species on the IUCN Red List that are harvested, use is likely biologically unsustainable for 16% and sustainable for 34%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This is the fifth in our annual series of horizon scans published in TREE. [•] We identify 15 issues that we considered insufficiently known by the conservation community. [•] These cover a wide range of issues. Four relate to climate change, two to invasives and two to disease spread. [•] This exercise has been influential in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species underpins much decision-making in conservation and plays a key role in monitoring the status and trends of biodiversity. However, the shortage of funds and assessor capacity slows the uptake of novel data and techniques, hampering its currency, applicability, consistency and long-term viability. To help address this, we developed sRedList, a user-friendly online platform that assists Red List assessors through a step-by-step process to estimate key parameters in a standardised and reproducible fashion. Through the platform, assessors can swiftly generate outputs including species' range maps, lists of countries of occurrence, lower and upper bounds of area of occupancy, habitat preferences, trends in area of habitat, and levels of fragmentation. sRedList is compliant with the IUCN Red List guidelines and outputs are interoperable with the Species Information Service (SIS; the IUCN Red List database) in support of global, regional and national assessments and reassessments. sRedList can also help assessors prioritise species for reassessment. sRedList was released in October 2023, with a complete documentation package (including text documentation, 'cheatsheets', and 15 video tutorials), and will soon be highlighted in the official Red List online training course. sRedList will help to bridge the gap between extinction risk research and Red List assessment practice, increase the taxonomic coverage and consistency of assessments, and ensure the IUCN Red List is up-to-date to best support conservation policy and practice across the world. • While central in conservation, the Red List faces major challenges to expand and update. • Methods aiming to support assessors with automated tools remain mostly academic exercises. • sRedList was developed to bridge that gap and make science easily accessible to Red List assessors. • It enables compiling information and calculating key parameters of Red List assessments. • sRedList will help to make the Red List more complete, up-to-date, and standardised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological baselines—reference states of species' distributions and abundances—are key to the scientific arguments underpinning many conservation and management interventions, as well as to the public support to such interventions. Yet societal as well as scientific perceptions of these baselines are often based on ecosystems that have been deeply transformed by human actions. Despite increased awareness about the pervasiveness and implications of this shifting baseline syndrome, ongoing global assessments of the state of biodiversity do not take into account the long-term, cumulative, anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Here, we propose a new framework for documenting such impacts, by classifying populations according to the extent to which they deviate from a baseline in the absence of human actions. We apply this framework to the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) to illustrate how it can be used to assess populations with different geographies and timelines of known or suspected impacts. Through other examples, we discuss how the framework can be applied to populations for which there is a wide diversity of existing knowledge, by making the best use of the available ecological, historical and archaeological data. Combined across multiple populations, this framework provides a standard for assessing cumulative anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global variation in species richness is widely recognized, but the explanation for what drives it continues to be debated. Previous efforts have focused on a subset of potential drivers, including evolutionary rate, evolutionary time (maximum clade age of species restricted to a region), dispersal (migration from one region to another), ecological factors and climatic stability. However, no study has evaluated these competing hypotheses simultaneously at a broad spatial scale. Here, we examine their relative contribution in determining the richness of the most comprehensive dataset of tetrapods to our knowledge (84% of the described species), distinguishing between the direct influences of evolutionary rate, evolutionary time and dispersal, and the indirect influences of ecological factors and climatic stability through their effect on direct factors. We found that evolutionary time exerted a primary influence on species richness, with evolutionary rate being of secondary importance. By contrast, dispersal did not significantly affect richness patterns. Ecological and climatic stability factors influenced species richness indirectly by modifying evolutionary time (i.e. persistence time) and rate. Overall, our findings suggest that global heterogeneity in tetrapod richness is explained primarily by the length of time species have had to diversify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim To evaluate how environment and evolutionary history interact to influence global patterns of mammal trait diversity (a combination of 14 morphological and life-history traits). Location The global terrestrial environment. Taxon Terrestrial mammals. Methods We calculated patterns of spatial turnover for mammalian traits and phylogenetic lineages using the mean nearest taxon distance. We then used a variance partitioning approach to establish the relative contribution of trait conservatism, ecological adaptation and clade specific ecological preferences on global trait turnover. Results We provide a global scale analysis of trait turnover across mammalian terrestrial assemblages, which demonstrates that phylogenetic turnover by itself does not predict trait turnover better than random expectations. Conversely, trait turnover is consistently more strongly associated with environmental variation than predicted by our null models. The influence of clade-specific ecological preferences, reflected by the shared component of phylogenetic turnover and environmental variation, was considerably higher than expectations. Although global patterns of trait turnover are dependent on the trait under consideration, there is a consistent association between trait turnover and environmental predictive variables, regardless of the trait considered. Main conclusions Our results suggest that changes in phylogenetic composition are not always coupled with changes in trait composition on a global scale and that environmental conditions are strongly associated with patterns of trait composition across species assemblages, both within and across phylogenetic clades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Examining the biogeography of body size is crucial for understanding how animal communities are assembled and maintained. In tetrapods, body size varies predictably with temperature, moisture, productivity seasonality and topographical complexity. Although millennial-scale human pressures are known to have led to the extinction of primarily large-bodied tetrapods, human pressure history is often ignored in studies of body size that focus on extant species. Here, we analyse 11,377 tetrapod species of the Western Hemisphere to test whether millennial-scale human pressures have left an imprint on contemporary body mass distributions throughout the tetrapod clade. Location Western Hemisphere. Time period Contemporary. Major taxa studied Tetrapods (birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles). Methods We mapped the distribution of assemblage-level median tetrapod body mass at a resolution of 110 km across the Western Hemisphere. We then generated multivariate models of median body mass as a function of temperature, moisture, productivity seasonality and topographical complexity, as well as two variables capturing the history of human population density and human-induced land conversion over the past 12,000 years. We controlled for both spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation effects on body mass-environment relationships. Results Human pressures explain a small but significant portion of geographical variation in median body mass that cannot be explained by ecological constraints alone. Overall, the median body mass of tetrapod assemblages is lower than expected in areas with a longer history of high human population density and land conversion, but there are important differences among tetrapod classes. Main conclusions At this broad scale, the effect of human pressure history on tetrapod body mass is low relative to that of ecology. However, ignoring spatial variation in the history of human pressure is likely to lead to bias in studies of the present-day functional composition of tetrapod assemblages, at least in areas that have long been influenced by humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Whether the gradients of global diversity conform to equilibrium or non-equilibrium dynamics remains an unresolved question in ecology and evolution. Here, we evaluate four prominent hypotheses which invoke either equilibrium (more individuals, niche diversity) or non-equilibrium dynamics (diversification rate, evolutionary time) to explain species richness and functional diversity of mammals worldwide. Location Global. Methods We combine structural equation modelling with simulations to examine whether species richness and functional diversity are in equilibrium with environmental conditions (climate, productivity) or whether they vary with non-equilibrium factors (diversification rates, evolutionary time). We use the newest and most inclusive phylogenetic, distributional and trait data for mammals. Results We find that species richness and functional diversity are decoupled across multiple regions of the world. While species richness correlates closely with environmental conditions, functional diversity depends mostly on non-equilibrium factors (evolutionary time to overcome niche conservatism). Moreover, functional diversity plateaus with species richness, such that species-rich regions (especially the Neotropics) host many species that are apparently functionally redundant. Main conclusions We conclude that species richness depends on environmental factors while functional diversity depends on the evolutionary history of the region. Our work further challenges the classic notion that highly productive regions host more species because they offer a great diversity of ecological niches. Instead, they suggest that productive regions offer more resources, which allow more individuals, populations and species to coexist within a region, even when the species are apparently functionally redundant (the more individuals hypothesis). Together these findings demonstrate how ecological (the total amount of resources) and evolutionary factors (time to overcome niche conservatism) might have interacted to generate the striking diversity of mammals and their life histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]