Comment

Seminar series are a key part of academic culture. We present practices that are aimed at increasing the diversity of seminar speakers, and thus broadening associated opportunities to more members of the ecology and evolutionary biology research community.

With growing attention on the remains of people held by museums and universities around the world, we outline ethical considerations that researchers working with human remains in anthropology must bear in mind.

We argue that naming species in honour of a specific person is unjustifiable and out of step with equality and representation. Reforming taxonomy to remove eponyms will not be easy but could bring multiple benefits for both conservation and society.

Projecting and managing the feedback between tropical deforestation and global Earth system dynamics, and identifying potential critical thresholds or tipping points, will be key to our species’ future on this planet. By understanding the major historical processes that underpin the origins of this interaction, and bringing natural and social systems together in interdisciplinary models, we can evaluate the degree to which past human impacts on tropical forests resulted in observable planetary ramifications that have left legacies for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Transforming the rapidly growing ocean economy into a ‘blue economy’ based on principles of sustainability, equity and inclusivity is crucial. We contend that marine biotechnology is not on this trajectory and that a more holistic approach for people and nature is needed to bring marine biotechnology into the blue economy.

Calls to decolonize disciplines and institutions circulate in the scientific community. In ecology, only the surface of the colonial structure has been scratched. We propose that two gaps must be filled to decolonize the ‘decolonial turn’ itself: recognition of decolonial theories produced in the Global South and a deeper historical and socioeconomic analysis of forms of production and validation of knowledge in ecology.

Over the past seventy-five years, long-term population studies of individual organisms in their natural environments have been influential in illuminating how ecological and evolutionary processes operate, and the extent of variation and temporal change in these processes. As these studies have matured, the incorporation of new technologies has generated an ever-broadening perspective, from molecular and genomic to landscape-level analyses facilitated by remote-sensing.

Many academics move countries in pursuit of career opportunities. With every move, personal identities are renegotiated as people shift between belonging to majority and minority groups in different contexts. Institutes should consider people’s dynamic and intersectional identities in their diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

To facilitate evolutionary adaptation to climate change, we must protect networks of coral reefs that span a range of environmental conditions — not just apparent ‘refugia’.

Recent breakthroughs have led to the development of biodegradable sensors which, after collecting data, break down into byproducts that are harmless to their surroundings. Using these sensors to collect ecological data on vast scales and in fine resolution could transform our management and understanding of natural ecosystems.

Life emerged from and amidst non-living phenomena that already possessed some of the hallmarks now used four billion years later to recognize fossil organisms. It may be next to impossible to distinguish the earliest signs of life against this background. What can we still learn from fossil-like materials on the early Earth and elsewhere?

Humans have influenced global fire activity for millennia and will continue to do so into the future. Given the long-term interaction between humans and fire, we propose a collaborative research agenda linking archaeology and fire science that emphasizes the socioecological histories and consequences of anthropogenic fire in the development of fire management strategies today.

Data on tropical forests are in high demand. But ground forest measurements are hard to sustain and the people who make them are extremely disadvantaged compared to those who use them. We propose a new approach to forest data that focuses on the needs of data originators, and ensures users and funders contribute properly.

Achieving net-zero targets and climate stabilization will require better accounting for the immense amount of carbon naturally stored belowground. We propose ‘carbon parks’ as a conservation tool and financial instrument to protect and value carbon-rich ecosystems.

Approaches to financing biodiversity conservation tend to focus on funding gaps, but fail to address underlying political and economic drivers. We propose two strategies — tax reform and debt justice — to supercharge public financing for biodiversity and deflate harmful financial flows, while chipping away at the causes of state austerity.

Advances in spatial biodiversity science and nationally available data have enabled the development of indicators that report on biodiversity outcomes, account for uneven global biodiversity between countries, and provide direct planning support. We urge their inclusion in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

Comparative analysis using cross-cultural data has a long tradition in anthropology and applications by ecologically minded researchers have exploded in the past decade. Here we discuss problems and recommend solutions for use of cross-cultural datasets in ecology.

Global spatial information on biodiversity, carbon storage and land-use abound. Yet maps are conspicuously absent from national climate and biodiversity strategies, hampering integrated approaches to meeting economic, social and environmental objectives, including those under the forthcoming Global Biodiversity Framework.

Global priority maps have been transformative for conservation, but now have questionable utility and may crowd out other forms of research. Conservation must re-engage with contextually rich knowledge that builds global understanding from the ground up.

Recent advances in AI-based 3D protein structure prediction could help address health-related questions, but may also have far-reaching implications for evolution. Here we discuss the advantages and limitations of high-quality 3D structural predictions by AlphaFold2 in unravelling the relationship between protein properties and their impact on fitness, and emphasize the need to integrate in silico structural predictions with functional genomic studies.