Reviews & Analysis

The Red List of Ecosystems is a headline indicator in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This Progress illustrates how the Red List of Ecosystems can be used by Parties to the Framework to contribute to its implementation and monitoring.

An assessment of time series of riverine fish communities from several continents finds positive trends in abundance and richness but also strong changes in community composition, driven in part by increased proportions of non-native species.

Systematic conservation planning in the European Alps suggests that priorities to safeguard multifaceted plant diversity will shift from low to high elevations and across latitudes, necessitating a coordinated and transboundary conservation strategy.

This Perspective proposes that the driving force of photoreceptor diversity was visual–motor perception with colour discrimination evolving as a secondary function.

A multidisciplinary study of the Shiyu archaeological site in northern China reveals a complex human behavioural record that currently is the oldest of its kind in Northeast Asia and provides insight into the nature of the northward dispersal of modern humans across Asia.

Efforts to monitor genetic diversity in populations vary greatly among European countries. The populations and species that are most likely to experience the greatest impacts of climate change are not well covered by these efforts, which suggests an urgent need for a substantial expansion in their monitoring.

Floristic homogenization — an increase in plant similarity within a given region — threatens biodiversity. By studying the taxonomic similarity of the floras of South Pacific islands over the past 5,000 years, we find that initial human settlement was probably a major driver of floristic homogenization.

Sequencing of a hagfish genome — one of the two jawless vertebrate lineages (cyclostomes) — constrains the timing and nature of genome duplication events that characterize early vertebrate evolution. Genome duplications occurred among ancestral vertebrates and cyclostomes, but genome-doubling in ancestral jawed vertebrates was caused by hybridization, which resulted in an unparalleled morphological diversification.

Data that span 15 generations reveal how gene flow and selection in a subordinate mesopredator are affected by pathogen-driven declines in the population density of a top predator. This work highlights the evolutionary impacts of interspecific competition and elucidates landscape-scale effects of an indirect interaction between a pathogen and nonhost species.

Two recent studies come to different yet complementary conclusions about the factors — species traits, climate conditions and past disturbances — that determine the responses of bird species to forest loss and fragmentation.