The bii4africa dataset of faunal and floral population intactness estimates across Africa's major land uses.

Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species' population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate 'intactness scores': the remaining proportion of an 'intact' reference population of a species group in a particular land use, on a scale from 0 (no remaining individuals) to 1 (same abundance as the reference) and, in rare cases, to 2 (populations that thrive in human-modified landscapes). The resulting bii4africa dataset contains intactness scores representing terrestrial vertebrates (tetrapods: ±5,400 amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) and vascular plants (±45,000 forbs, graminoids, trees, shrubs) in sub-Saharan Africa across the region's major land uses (urban, cropland, rangeland, plantation, protected, etc.) and intensities (e.g., large-scale vs smallholder cropland). This dataset was co-produced as part of the Biodiversity Intactness Index for Africa Project. Additional uses include assessing ecosystem condition; rectifying geographic/taxonomic biases in global biodiversity indicators and maps; and informing the Red List of Ecosystems.

Diverse values of nature for sustainability.

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis3 still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature's diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property rights, which determine whose values and which values of nature are acted on. A better understanding of how and why nature is (under)valued is more urgent than ever4. Notwithstanding agreements to incorporate nature's values into actions, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)5 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals6, predominant environmental and development policies still prioritize a subset of values, particularly those linked to markets, and ignore other ways people relate to and benefit from nature7. Arguably, a 'values crisis' underpins the intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and climate change8, pandemic emergence9 and socio-environmental injustices10. On the basis of more than 50,000 scientific publications, policy documents and Indigenous and local knowledge sources, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessed knowledge on nature's diverse values and valuation methods to gain insights into their role in policymaking and fuller integration into decisions7,11. Applying this evidence, combinations of values-centred approaches are proposed to improve valuation and address barriers to uptake, ultimately leveraging transformative changes towards more just (that is, fair treatment of people and nature, including inter- and intragenerational equity) and sustainable futures.

Understanding protected area resilience: a multi-scale, social-ecological approach.

Protected areas (PAs) remain central to the conservation of biodiversity. Classical PAs were conceived as areas that would be set aside to maintain a natural state with minimal human influence. However, global environmental change and growing cross-scale anthropogenic influences mean that PAs can no longer be thought of as ecological islands that function independently of the broader social-ecological system in which they are located. For PAs to be resilient (and to contribute to broader social-ecological resilience), they must be able to adapt to changing social and ecological conditions over time in a way that supports the long-term persistence of populations, communities, and ecosystems of conservation concern. We extend Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework to consider the long-term persistence of PAs, as a form of land use embedded in social-ecological systems, with important cross-scale feedbacks. Most notably, we highlight the cross-scale influences and feedbacks on PAs that exist from the local to the global scale, contextualizing PAs within multi-scale social-ecological functional landscapes. Such functional landscapes are integral to understand and manage individual PAs for long-term sustainability. We illustrate our conceptual contribution with three case studies that highlight cross-scale feedbacks and social-ecological interactions in the functioning of PAs and in relation to regional resilience. Our analysis suggests that while ecological, economic, and social processes are often directly relevant to PAs at finer scales, at broader scales, the dominant processes that shape and alter PA resilience are primarily social and economic.

Cross-scale feedbacks and scale mismatches as influences on cultural services and the resilience of protected areas.

Protected areas are a central strategy for achieving global conservation goals, but their continued existence depends heavily on maintaining sufficient social and political support to outweigh economic interests or other motives for land conversion. Thus, the resilience of protected areas can be considered a function of their perceived benefits to society. Nature-based tourism (NBT), a cultural ecosystem service, provides a key source of income to protected areas, facilitating a sustainable solution to conservation. The ability of tourism to generate income depends, however, on both the scales at which this cultural service is provided and the scales at which tourists respond to services on offer. This observation raises a set of location-, context-, and scale-related questions that need to be confronted before we can understand and value cultural service provision appropriately. We combine elements of resilience analysis with a systems ecology framework and apply this to NBT in protected areas to investigate cross-scale interactions and scale mismatches. We postulate that cross-scale effects can either have a positive effect on protected area resilience or lead to scale mismatches, depending on their interactions with cross-scale feedbacks. To demonstrate this, we compare spatial scales and nested levels of institutions to develop a typology of scale mismatches for common scenarios in NBT. In our new typology, the severity of a scale mismatch is expressed as the ratio of spatial scale to institutional level, producing 25 possible outcomes with differing consequences for system resilience. We predict that greater differences between interacting scales and levels, and greater magnitudes of cross-scale interactions, will lead to greater magnitudes of scale mismatch. Achieving a better understanding of feedbacks and mismatches, and finding ways of aligning spatial and institutional scales, will be critical for strengthening the resilience of protected areas that depend on NBT.

Sharks shape the geometry of a selfish seal herd: experimental evidence from seal decoys.

Many animals respond to predation risk by forming groups. Evolutionary explanations for group formation in previously ungrouped, but loosely associated prey have typically evoked the selfish herd hypothesis. However, despite over 600 studies across a diverse array of taxa, the critical assumptions of this hypothesis have remained collectively untested, owing to several confounding problems in real predator-prey systems. To solve this, we manipulated the domains of danger of Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) decoys to provide evidence that a selfish reduction in a seals' domain of danger results in a proportional reduction in its predation risk from ambush shark attacks. This behaviour confers a survival advantage to individual seals within a group and explains the evolution of selfish herds in a prey species. These findings empirically elevate Hamilton's selfish herd hypothesis to more than a 'theoretical curiosity'.