Both resilience and regeneration are relevant concepts in sustainability science. Resilience thinking has led to improved understanding of cross-scale cycles of growth and renewal, regime shifts, and ...

Most freshwater mussels (FM) in Europe have dramatically declined and are now facing extinction due to human disturbances. Given the recent EU initiatives to protect and restore freshwater ecosystems,...

This paper examines the concept of balance within Indigenous knowledge systems and its role in weed management and ecological restoration. Aboriginal cultural knowledge holders and weed managers view ...

The convergent extinction crisis—characterized by the simultaneous loss of biological and cultural diversity—poses a critical threat to the resilience of socio-ecological systems. To address this chal...

In the expanding urban landscape, a major challenge is to ensure the resilience of plant communities developed in stressful conditions, with limited soil resources and exposed to high disturbance regi...

The Amazon—the most biodiverse biome in the world—faces huge conservation challenges. Multiple institutional and technological actors, organized in environmental networks, collaborate to support improved environmental governance. However, these efforts are understudied and underrecognized, particularly in the case of the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon. Employing a social network analysis, this study evaluates the actors, the institutional–technological relationships, and the network addressing socio-environmental challenges. We identified 392 development actors (nodes) with different levels of international, national, and regional participation. They use transnational technologies, but have limited integration of local actors where environmental challenges are most pressing. To combat the biome's rapid degradation, these countries could strengthen their environmental agendas, governance, and policy design—for greater environmental impact—by effectively integrating cooperation between international and local partners. Both countries should develop their local networks, create participatory collaborative spaces to enhance national capacities, and promote diverse and coordinated coalitions.

Debate has arisen on the use of “re-wilding” to promote biodiversity conservation. We contend that approaches aiming for strict non-intervention to restore “wilderness” may be conceptually inconsistent when applied to human-shaped landscapes. Several ecosystems of high biodiversity value, often misclassified as “pristine” have been shaped over millennia of human use, a context rarely acknowledged by re-wilding approaches. Rural abandonment in Europe is seen as an opportunity to promote biodiversity conservation through “re-wilding”, but management neglect may favor forest species at the expense of open-habitat species. In Mediterranean regions, where cultural ecosystems have high conservation value, management neglect may reduce biodiversity and increase wildfire hazard, especially under climate change. Using three Mediterranean basin case studies, we argue that wilderness-focused re-wilding, if applied uncritically, can have unintended negative consequences. While recognizing the diversity of re-wilding concepts, we highlight the need for context-specific strategies, where active management remains essential.

Calls for social-ecological restoration have emerged to help transcend traditional ecological boundaries by including plural values as well as transdisciplinary processes. Inspired by the IPBES values typology, we used questionnaires to assess four multi-layered perspectives characterizing local actors in two transdisciplinary grassland restoration projects in Germany: Broad values, specific values, knowledge, and visions for restoration outcomes. Varimax rotated principal component analysis yielded 16 factors across these dimensions. A subsequent hierarchical cluster analysis revealed three clusters based on these factors compatible with the Life Framework of Values: restoration for… (1) living with nature, (2) living in nature, and (3) living from nature. The three clusters demonstrate the diversity of values-based perspectives among participants of the real-world laboratories. These perspectives capture the multi-layered values underpinning engagement in restoration. Accounting for these perspectives without jeopardizing one perspective over the others provides a basis for more inclusive restoration efforts.

Community values toward landscapes, particularly before mining begins, are often overlooked in conventional social impact assessments in the mining industry. These emotional, cultural and relational v...

This paper offers a new perspective on the valuation of the impacts of industrial ocean pollution. Rising levels of industrial pollutants have a profound impact on marine resource-dependent peoples, p...

Eutrophication adversely affects coastal areas, but most indicators of eutrophication demonstrate temporal or large-scale changes in eutrophication. These usually cannot be used in local actions, such as restoration or conservation. Eutrophication also results in increased accumulation of particulate matter and here we assess the usefulness of particulate accumulated matter (PAM) as an indicator for marine habitat condition in the northern Baltic Sea. We use > 50 000 observations of PAM, to spatially model the accumulation of PAM at shallow benthic substrates, and subsequently demonstrate the use of PAM as an indicator for benthic habitat quality. Predictions show only 4.8% of the shallow marine area as not affected by PAM and the abundance of PAM negatively affected the occurrence of Fucus habitats. Estimates of amount of PAM can be used for determining areas that will benefit from restoration and nutrient abatement actions and for locating the most pristine areas in need of conservation action.

European wolf populations are expanding into human-dominated landscapes, triggering novel interactions with citizens and public concerns that may disrupt the traditional urban–rural divide in wolf att...

Biodiversity loss is a global challenge that requires conservation policies integrating ecological, social, and economic considerations. While scientific evidence guides policy decisions, public prefe...

Global water conflicts are increasing due to climate stress, rising demand, and declining availability. Conflict resolution requires determination of their causes. This study aims to establish and ana...

Natural ecosystems face significant pressure from climate change, biodiversity loss, and increasing socio-economic and political stressors—all of which are exacerbated by military conflict. This paper...

Social perceptions of wild ungulates depend on their abundance and the socioeconomic context. These perceptions shape attitudes toward management and explain social behavior toward the species. Our ob...

This study assesses the agrobiodiversity richness, traditional knowledge, and conservation status associated with four key crops—banana, taro, pumpkin, and mustard green—in Northwest Vietnam. Using th...

The lived, everyday dimensions of climate change have generally been ignored in mainstream climate research, despite their ability to reveal new insights on this phenomenon. Capturing everyday lived e...

Life cycle thinking is a fundamental concept of sustainability endeavors in most disciplines. The share of non-expert users applying life cycle thinking-based methodologies and tools is nowadays alrea...

Nature-based solutions to adapt to climate change have attracted increasing interest in recent years and have developed in different directions. This study aims to provide an updated overview of this ...

Ocean sustainability matters to everyone because planetary health depends on the ocean and a healthy ocean requires a sustainability transformation across society, land and sea. The ocean is a critica...

The agricultural sector of the EU is affected by several political and economic crises and dissatisfaction with policy has been voiced loudly. Against this background, the EU Commission presented a Vi...

Nature connectedness is increasingly recognised as a causal issue in environmental crises and a powerful strategy for transformative change. However, little is known about how it varies across countri...