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The actions that lead to conservation successes and failures are the result of decision-making by individuals and organizations about what to conserve and how to conserve it. The psychology of decision-making should be considered when assessing conservation outcomes.
The pernicious problem of evidence complacency, illustrated here through conservation policy and practice, results in poor practice and inefficiencies. It also increases our vulnerability to a ‘post-truth’ world dealing with ‘alternative facts’.
Cancer evolution is central to poor outcomes of cancer therapies, enabling tumour progression and the acquisition of drug resistance. Joint efforts of evolutionary biologists, oncologists and cancer researchers are necessary to understand the principles of cancer evolution and to derive therapeutic strategies that can control it.
Increasingly, the pathogens that pose the greatest threats to humans are those that evolve to escape prior immunity and pharmaceutical interventions. In response, we need to employ evolutionary thinking to manage infectious disease.
Evolutionary principles and tools harbour the potential to revolutionize the struggle against medical challenges such as antibiotic resistance, infectious disease and cancer.
We speak to An Cliquet, a professor in the Department of European, Public and International Law at Ghent University, about working at the interface between conservation, biodiversity and law.
Similarities in planning, development and culture within urban areas may lead to the convergence of ecological processes on continental scales. Transdisciplinary, multi-scale research is now needed to understand and predict the impact of human-dominated landscapes on ecosystem structure and function.
In 2018 technologies on the International Space Station will provide ∼1 year of synchronous observations of ecosystem composition, structure and function. We discuss these instruments and how they can be used to constrain global models and improve our understanding of the current state of terrestrial ecosystems. Author Correction (05 September 2017)
Years before they conquered the Internet, cats colonized our sofas. But they haven’t spent the last ten thousand years just snoozing. A new study reveals that tamed cats swept through Eurasia and Africa carried by early farmers, ancient mariners and even Vikings. The researchers analysed DNA from over 200 cat remains and found that farmers in the Near East were probably the first people to successfully tame wild cats 9,000 years ago, before a second wave of cat domestication a few thousand years later in ancient Egypt.
