High and rising economic costs of biological invasions worldwide.

Biological invasions are responsible for substantial biodiversity declines as well as high economic losses to society and monetary expenditures associated with the management of these invasions1,2. The InvaCost database has enabled the generation of a reliable, comprehensive, standardized and easily updatable synthesis of the monetary costs of biological invasions worldwide3. Here we found that the total reported costs of invasions reached a minimum of US$1.288 trillion (2017 US dollars) over the past few decades (1970-2017), with an annual mean cost of US$26.8 billion. Moreover, we estimate that the annual mean cost could reach US$162.7 billion in 2017. These costs remain strongly underestimated and do not show any sign of slowing down, exhibiting a consistent threefold increase per decade. We show that the documented costs are widely distributed and have strong gaps at regional and taxonomic scales, with damage costs being an order of magnitude higher than management expenditures. Research approaches that document the costs of biological invasions need to be further improved. Nonetheless, our findings call for the implementation of consistent management actions and international policy agreements that aim to reduce the burden of invasive alien species.

Forest mosaics, not savanna corridors, dominated in Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The dominant paradigm is that large tracts of Southeast Asia's lowland rainforests were replaced with a "savanna corridor" during the cooler, more seasonal climates of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (23,000 to 19,000 y ago). This interpretation has implications for understanding the resilience of Asia's tropical forests to projected climate change, implying a vulnerability to "savannization". A savanna corridor is also an important foundation for archaeological interpretations of how humans moved through and settled insular Southeast Asia and Australia. Yet an up-to-date, multiproxy, and empirical examination of the palaeoecological evidence for this corridor is lacking. We conducted qualitative and statistical analyses of 59 palaeoecological records across Southeast Asia to test the evidence for LGM savannization and clarify the relationships between methods, biogeography, and ecological change in the region from the start of Late Glacial Period (119,000 y ago) to the present. The pollen records typically show montane forest persistence during the LGM, while δ13C biomarker proxies indicate the expansion of C4-rich grasslands. We reconcile this discrepancy by hypothesizing the expansion of montane forest in the uplands and replacement of rainforest with seasonally dry tropical forest in the lowlands. We also find that smooth forest transitions between 34,000 and 2,000 y ago point to the capacity of Southeast Asia's ecosystems both to resist and recover from climate stressors, suggesting resilience to savannization. Finally, the timing of ecological change observed in our combined datasets indicates an 'early' onset of the LGM in Southeast Asia from ~30,000 y ago.

Demographic models predict end-Pleistocene arrival and rapid expansion of pre-agropastoralist humans in Cyprus.

The antiquity of human dispersal into Mediterranean islands and ensuing coastal adaptation have remained largely unexplored due to the prevailing assumption that the sea was a barrier to movement and that islands were hostile environments to early hunter-gatherers [J. F. Cherry, T. P. Leppard, J. Isl. Coast. Archaeol. 13, 191-205 (2018), 10.1080/15564894.2016.1276489]. Using the latest archaeological data, hindcasted climate projections, and age-structured demographic models, we demonstrate evidence for early arrival (14,257 to 13,182 calendar years ago) to Cyprus and predicted that large groups of people (~1,000 to 1,375) arrived in 2 to 3 main events occurring within <100 y to ensure low extinction risk. These results indicate that the postglacial settlement of Cyprus involved only a few large-scale, organized events requiring advanced watercraft technology. Our spatially debiased and Signor-Lipps-corrected estimates indicate rapid settlement of the island within <200 y, and expansion to a median of 4,000 to 5,000 people (0.36 to 0.46 km-2) in <11 human generations (<300 y). Our results do not support the hypothesis of inaccessible and inhospitable islands in the Mediterranean for pre-agropastoralists, agreeing with analogous conclusions for other parts of the world [M. I. Bird et al., Sci. Rep. 9, 8220 (2019), 10.1038/s41598-019-42946-9]. Our results also highlight the need to revisit these questions in the Mediterranean and test their validity with new technologies, field methods, and data. By applying stochastic models to the Mediterranean region, we can place Cyprus and large islands in general as attractive and favorable destinations for paleolithic peoples.

Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities.

Permafrost thawing and the potential 'lab leak' of ancient microorganisms generate risks of biological invasions for today's ecological communities, including threats to human health via exposure to emergent pathogens. Whether and how such 'time-travelling' invaders could establish in modern communities is unclear, and existing data are too scarce to test hypotheses. To quantify the risks of time-travelling invasions, we isolated digital virus-like pathogens from the past records of coevolved artificial life communities and studied their simulated invasion into future states of the community. We then investigated how invasions affected diversity of the free-living bacteria-like organisms (i.e., hosts) in recipient communities compared to controls where no invasion occurred (and control invasions of contemporary pathogens). Invading pathogens could often survive and continue evolving, and in a few cases (3.1%) became exceptionally dominant in the invaded community. Even so, invaders often had negligible effects on the invaded community composition; however, in a few, highly unpredictable cases (1.1%), invaders precipitated either substantial losses (up to -32%) or gains (up to +12%) in the total richness of free-living species compared to controls. Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities, such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks. Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change.

Estimating co-extinction threats in terrestrial ecosystems.

The biosphere is changing rapidly due to human endeavour. Because ecological communities underlie networks of interacting species, changes that directly affect some species can have indirect effects on others. Accurate tools to predict these direct and indirect effects are therefore required to guide conservation strategies. However, most extinction-risk studies only consider the direct effects of global change-such as predicting which species will breach their thermal limits under different warming scenarios-with predictions of trophic cascades and co-extinction risks remaining mostly speculative. To predict the potential indirect effects of primary extinctions, data describing community interactions and network modelling can estimate how extinctions cascade through communities. While theoretical studies have demonstrated the usefulness of models in predicting how communities react to threats like climate change, few have applied such methods to real-world communities. This gap partly reflects challenges in constructing trophic network models of real-world food webs, highlighting the need to develop approaches for quantifying co-extinction risk more accurately. We propose a framework for constructing ecological network models representing real-world food webs in terrestrial ecosystems and subjecting these models to co-extinction scenarios triggered by probable future environmental perturbations. Adopting our framework will improve estimates of how environmental perturbations affect whole ecological communities. Identifying species at risk of co-extinction (or those that might trigger co-extinctions) will also guide conservation interventions aiming to reduce the probability of co-extinction cascades and additional species losses.

Recent advances in availability and synthesis of the economic costs of biological invasions.

Biological invasions are a global challenge that has received insufficient attention. Recently available cost syntheses have provided policy- and decision makers with reliable and up-to-date information on the economic impacts of biological invasions, aiming to motivate effective management. The resultant InvaCost database is now publicly and freely accessible and enables rapid extraction of monetary cost information. This has facilitated knowledge sharing, developed a more integrated and multidisciplinary network of researchers, and forged multidisciplinary collaborations among diverse organizations and stakeholders. Over 50 scientific publications so far have used the database and have provided detailed assessments of invasion costs across geographic, taxonomic, and spatiotemporal scales. These studies have provided important information that can guide future policy and legislative decisions on the management of biological invasions while simultaneously attracting public and media attention. We provide an overview of the improved availability, reliability, standardization, and defragmentation of monetary costs; discuss how this has enhanced invasion science as a discipline; and outline directions for future development.

Opposing life stage-specific effects of ocean warming at source and sink populations of range-shifting coral-reef fishes.

Climate change is altering the latitudinal distributions of species, with their capacity to keep pace with a shifting climate depending on the stochastic expression of population growth rates, and the influence of compensatory density feedback on age-specific survival rates. We use population-abundance time series at the leading edge of an expanding species' range to quantify the contribution of stochastic environmental drivers and density feedbacks to the dynamics of life stage-specific population growth. Using a tropical, range-shifting Indo-Pacific damselfish (Abudefduf vaigiensis) as a model organism, we applied variants of the phenomenological Gompertz-logistic model to a 14-year dataset to quantify the relative importance of density feedback and stochastic environmental drivers on the separate and aggregated population growth rates of settler and juvenile life stages. The top-ranked models indicated that density feedback negatively affected the growth of tropical settlers and juveniles. Rates of settlement were negatively linked to temperatures experienced by parents at potential source populations in the tropics, but their subsequent survival and that of juveniles increased with the temperatures experienced at the temperate sink. Including these stochastic effects doubled the deviance explained by the models, corroborating an important role of temperature. By incorporating sea-surface temperature projections for the remainder of this century into these models, we anticipate improved conditions for the population growth of juvenile coral-reef fishes, but not for settlers in temperate ecosystems. Previous research has highlighted the association between temperature and the redistribution of species. Our analyses reveal the contrasting roles of different life stages in the dynamics of range-shifting species responding to climate change, as they transition from vagrancy to residency in their novel ranges.

Manipulating water for amphibian conservation.

Amphibian populations globally are in decline. One great threat is the abstraction of water resources that alter surface-water hydrology. Conservation actions aimed at restoring or manipulating surface water are employed as a management tool, but empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these approaches is scarce. In this systematic review, we summarized the global experience of manipulating water for amphibian conservation. We explored examples of manipulating water to conserve amphibian species and communities. Approaches varied in their frequency of implementation and in their success. Extending hydroperiod to match larval requirements showed encouraging results, as did off-season drying to control predators. Spraying water into the environment showed several potential applications, but successes were limited. Despite some promising interventions, we identified few (n = 17) empirically supported examples of successful water manipulation to benefit amphibians. It is unclear whether this stems from publication bias or if it is an artifact of language selection. However, manipulating water shows some potential in amphibian conservation, particularly at sites with a proximal water source and in regions where aridity is increasing due to climate change. Regardless of the scale of the intervention or its perceived probability of success, high-quality reporting of empirical results will further understanding of how water manipulations can benefit threatened amphibian populations.

Manipulación del Agua para la Conservación de Anfibios Resumen Las poblaciones mundiales de anfibios están en declinación. Una gran amenaza es la extracción de los recursos hídricos que alteran la hidrología superficial. Las acciones de conservación enfocadas en la restauración o manipulación del agua superficial se emplean como herramientas de manejo, pero la evidencia empírica de la efectividad de estas estrategias es escasa. En esta revisión sistemática resumimos la experiencia mundial de la manipulación del agua para la conservación de anfibios. Exploramos ejemplos de la manipulación del agua para conservar especies y comunidades de anfibios. Las estrategias variaron en la frecuencia de implementación y en el éxito que tuvieron. La extensión del periodo hídrico para que cumpla con los requerimientos de las larvas mostró resultados alentadores, así como lo hizo la sequía atemporal para controlar a los depredadores. La aspersión de agua en el ambiente mostró varias aplicaciones potenciales, pero el éxito fue limitado. A pesar de algunas intervenciones prometedoras, identificamos pocos (n = 17) ejemplos con respaldo empírico de la manipulación exitosa del agua para el beneficio de los anfibios. Todavía no está claro si esto proviene de un sesgo en las publicaciones o si es un artificio de la selección del lenguaje. Sin embargo, la manipulación del agua muestra cierto potencial en la conservación de los anfibios, particularmente en sitios próximos a una fuente de agua y en regiones en donde la aridez está incrementando debido al cambio climático. Sin importar la escala de la intervención o la probabilidad de éxito percibida, la comunicación de alta calidad de los resultados empíricos hará crecer el entendimiento de cómo la manipulación del agua puede beneficiar a las poblaciones amenazadas de anfibios.

Dietary generalism accelerates arrival and persistence of coral-reef fishes in their novel ranges under climate change.

Climate change is redistributing marine and terrestrial species globally. Life-history traits mediate the ability of species to cope with novel environmental conditions, and can be used to gauge the potential redistribution of taxa facing the challenges of a changing climate. However, it is unclear whether the same traits are important across different stages of range shifts (arrival, population increase, persistence). To test which life-history traits most mediate the process of range extension, we used a 16-year dataset of 35 range-extending coral-reef fish species and quantified the importance of various traits on the arrival time (earliness) and degree of persistence (prevalence and patchiness) at higher latitudes. We show that traits predisposing species to shift their range more rapidly (large body size, broad latitudinal range, long dispersal duration) did not drive the early stages of redistribution. Instead, we found that as diet breadth increased, the initial arrival and establishment (prevalence and patchiness) of climate migrant species in temperate locations occurred earlier. While the initial incursion of range-shifting species depends on traits associated with dispersal potential, subsequent establishment hinges more on a species' ability to exploit novel food resources locally. These results highlight that generalist species that can best adapt to novel food sources might be most successful in a future ocean.

Processes controlling programmed cell death of root velamen radicum in an epiphytic orchid.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Development of the velamen radicum on the outer surface of the root epidermis is an important characteristic for water uptake and retention in some plant families, particularly epiphytic orchids, for survival under water-limited environments. Velamen radicum cells derive from the primary root meristem; however, following this development, velamen radicum cells die by incompletely understood processes of programmed cell death (PCD). METHODS: We combined the use of transmission electron microscopy, X-ray micro-tomography and transcriptome methods to characterize the major anatomical and molecular changes that occur during the development and death of velamen radicum cells of Cymbidium tracyanum, a typical epiphytic orchid, to determine how PCD occurs. KEY RESULTS: Typical changes of PCD in anatomy and gene expression were observed in the development of velamen radicum cells. During the initiation of PCD, we found that both cell and vacuole size increased, and several genes involved in brassinosteroid and ethylene pathways were upregulated. In the stage of secondary cell wall formation, significant anatomical changes included DNA degradation, cytoplasm thinning, organelle decrease, vacuole rupture and cell wall thickening. Changes were found in the expression of genes related to the biosynthesis of cellulose and lignin, which are instrumental in the formation of secondary cell walls, and are regulated by cytoskeleton-related factors and phenylalanine ammonia-lyase. In the final stage of PCD, cell autolysis was terminated from the outside to the inside of the velamen radicum. The regulation of genes related to autophagy, vacuolar processing enzyme, cysteine proteases and metacaspase was involved in the final execution of cell death and autolysis. CONCLUSIONS: Our results showed that the development of the root velamen radicum in an epiphytic orchid was controlled by the process of PCD, which included initiation of PCD, followed by formation of the secondary cell wall, and execution of autolysis following cell death.

Increased population size of fish in a lowland river following restoration of structural habitat.

Most assessments of the effectiveness of river restoration are done at small spatial scales (<10 km) over short time frames (less than three years), potentially failing to capture large-scale mechanisms such as completion of life-history processes, changes to system productivity, or time lags of ecosystem responses. To test the hypothesis that populations of two species of large-bodied, piscivorous, native fishes would increase in response to large-scale structural habitat restoration (reintroduction of 4,450 pieces of coarse woody habitat into a 110-km reach of the Murray River, southeastern Australia), we collected annual catch, effort, length, and tagging data over seven years for Murray cod (Maccullochella peelii) and golden perch (Macquaria ambigua) in a restored "intervention" reach and three neighboring "control" reaches. We supplemented mark-recapture data with telemetry and angler phone-in data to assess the potentially confounding influences of movement among sampled populations, heterogeneous detection rates, and population vital rates. We applied a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate changes in population parameters including immigration, emigration, and mortality rates. For Murray cod, we observed a threefold increase in abundance in the population within the intervention reach, while populations declined or fluctuated within the control reaches. Golden perch densities also increased twofold in the intervention reach. Our results indicate that restoring habitat heterogeneity by adding coarse woody habitats can increase the abundance of fish at a population scale in a large, lowland river. Successful restoration of poor-quality "sink" habitats for target species relies on connectivity with high-quality "source" habitats. We recommend that the analysis of restoration success across appropriately large spatial and temporal scales can help identify mechanisms and success rates of other restoration strategies such as restoring fish passage or delivering water for environmental outcomes.

High-quality fossil dates support a synchronous, Late Holocene extinction of devils and thylacines in mainland Australia.

The last large marsupial carnivores-the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilis harrisii) and thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus)-went extinct on mainland Australia during the mid-Holocene. Based on the youngest fossil dates (approx. 3500 years before present, BP), these extinctions are often considered synchronous and driven by a common cause. However, many published devil dates have recently been rejected as unreliable, shifting the youngest mainland fossil age to 25 500 years BP and challenging the synchronous-extinction hypothesis. Here we provide 24 and 20 new ages for devils and thylacines, respectively, and collate existing, reliable radiocarbon dates by quality-filtering available records. We use this new dataset to estimate an extinction time for both species by applying the Gaussian-resampled, inverse-weighted McInerney (GRIWM) method. Our new data and analysis definitively support the synchronous-extinction hypothesis, estimating that the mainland devil and thylacine extinctions occurred between 3179 and 3227 years BP.

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas.

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world's major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve 'health': about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.

Species decline under nitrogen fertilization increases community-level competence of fungal diseases.

The artificial fertilization of soils can alter the structure of natural plant communities and exacerbate pathogen emergence and transmission. Although the direct effects of fertilization on disease resistance in plants have received some research attention, its indirect effects of altered community structure on the severity of fungal disease infection remain largely uninvestigated. We designed manipulation experiments in natural assemblages of Tibetan alpine meadow vegetation along a nitrogen-fertilization gradient over 5 years to compare the relative importance of direct and indirect effects of fertilization on foliar fungal infections at the community level. We found that species with lower proneness to pathogens were more likely to be extirpated following fertilization, such that community-level competence of disease, and thus community pathogen load, increased with the intensity of fertilization. The amount of nitrogen added (direct effect) and community disease competence (indirect effect) provided the most parsimonious combination of parameters explaining the variation in disease severity. Our experiment provides a mechanistic explanation for the dilution effect in fertilized, natural assemblages in a highly specific pathogen-host system, and thus insights into the consequences of human ecosystem modifications on the dynamics of infectious diseases.

Primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining tropical biodiversity.

Human-driven land-use changes increasingly threaten biodiversity, particularly in tropical forests where both species diversity and human pressures on natural environments are high. The rapid conversion of tropical forests for agriculture, timber production and other uses has generated vast, human-dominated landscapes with potentially dire consequences for tropical biodiversity. Today, few truly undisturbed tropical forests exist, whereas those degraded by repeated logging and fires, as well as secondary and plantation forests, are rapidly expanding. Here we provide a global assessment of the impact of disturbance and land conversion on biodiversity in tropical forests using a meta-analysis of 138 studies. We analysed 2,220 pairwise comparisons of biodiversity values in primary forests (with little or no human disturbance) and disturbed forests. We found that biodiversity values were substantially lower in degraded forests, but that this varied considerably by geographic region, taxonomic group, ecological metric and disturbance type. Even after partly accounting for confounding colonization and succession effects due to the composition of surrounding habitats, isolation and time since disturbance, we find that most forms of forest degradation have an overwhelmingly detrimental effect on tropical biodiversity. Our results clearly indicate that when it comes to maintaining tropical biodiversity, there is no substitute for primary forests.

Human population reduction is not a quick fix for environmental problems.

The inexorable demographic momentum of the global human population is rapidly eroding Earth's life-support system. There are consequently more frequent calls to address environmental problems by advocating further reductions in human fertility. To examine how quickly this could lead to a smaller human population, we used scenario-based matrix modeling to project the global population to the year 2100. Assuming a continuation of current trends in mortality reduction, even a rapid transition to a worldwide one-child policy leads to a population similar to today's by 2100. Even a catastrophic mass mortality event of 2 billion deaths over a hypothetical 5-y window in the mid-21(st) century would still yield around 8.5 billion people by 2100. In the absence of catastrophe or large fertility reductions (to fewer than two children per female worldwide), the greatest threats to ecosystems--as measured by regional projections within the 35 global Biodiversity Hotspots--indicate that Africa and South Asia will experience the greatest human pressures on future ecosystems. Humanity's large demographic momentum means that there are no easy policy levers to change the size of the human population substantially over coming decades, short of extreme and rapid reductions in female fertility; it will take centuries, and the long-term target remains unclear. However, some reduction could be achieved by midcentury and lead to hundreds of millions fewer people to feed. More immediate results for sustainability would emerge from policies and technologies that reverse rising consumption of natural resources.

Warming and fertilization alter the dilution effect of host diversity on disease severity.

An essential ecosystem service is the dilution effect of biodiversity on disease severity, yet we do not fully understand how this relationship might change with continued climate warming and ecosystem degradation. We designed removal experiments in natural assemblages of Tibetan alpine meadow vegetation by manipulating plot-level plant diversity to investigate the relationship between different plant biodiversity indices and foliar fungal pathogen infection, and how artificial fertilization and warming affect this relationship. Although pathogen group diversity increased with host species richness, disease severity decreased as host diversity rose (dilution effect). The dilution effect of phylogenetic diversity on disease held across different levels of host species richness (and equal abundances), meaning that the effect arises mainly in association with enhanced diversity itself rather than from shifting abundances. However, the dilution effect was weakened by fertilization. Among indices, phylogenetic diversity was the most parsimonious predictor of infection severity. Experimental warming and fertilization shifted species richness to the most supported predictor. Compared to planting experiments where artificial communities are constructed from scratch, our removal experiment in natural communities more realistically demonstrate that increasing perturbation adjusts natural community resistance to disease severity.

Explaining maximum variation in productivity requires phylogenetic diversity and single functional traits.

Many community experiments have shown a positive relationship between plant biodiversity and community productivity, with biodiversity measured in multiple ways based on taxonomy, function, and phylogeny. Whether these different measures of biodiversity and their interactions explain variation in productivity in natural assemblages has rarely been tested. In a removal experiment using natural alpine assemblages in the Tibetan Plateau, we manipulated species richness and functional diversity to examine how different measures of biodiversity predict aboveground biomass production. We combined different biodiversity measures (functional, phylogenetic, richness, evenness) in generalized linear models to determine which combinations provided the most parsimonious explanations of variation in biomass production. Although multivariate functional diversity indices alone consistently explained more variation in productivity than other single measures, phylogenetic diversity and plant height represented the most parsimonious combination. In natural assemblages, single metrics alone cannot fully explain ecosystem function. Instead, a combination of phylogenetic diversity and traits with weak or no phylogenetic signal is required to explain the effects of biodiversity loss on ecosystem function.

Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation.

Modern society uses massive amounts of energy. Usage rises as population and affluence increase, and energy production and use often have an impact on biodiversity or natural areas. To avoid a business-as-usual dependence on coal, oil, and gas over the coming decades, society must map out a future energy mix that incorporates alternative sources. This exercise can lead to radically different opinions on what a sustainable energy portfolio might entail, so an objective assessment of the relative costs and benefits of different energy sources is required. We evaluated the land use, emissions, climate, and cost implications of 3 published but divergent storylines for future energy production, none of which was optimal for all environmental and economic indicators. Using multicriteria decision-making analysis, we ranked 7 major electricity-generation sources (coal, gas, nuclear, biomass, hydro, wind, and solar) based on costs and benefits and tested the sensitivity of the rankings to biases stemming from contrasting philosophical ideals. Irrespective of weightings, nuclear and wind energy had the highest benefit-to-cost ratio. Although the environmental movement has historically rejected the nuclear energy option, new-generation reactor technologies that fully recycle waste and incorporate passive safety systems might resolve their concerns and ought to be more widely understood. Because there is no perfect energy source however, conservation professionals ultimately need to take an evidence-based approach to consider carefully the integrated effects of energy mixes on biodiversity conservation. Trade-offs and compromises are inevitable and require advocating energy mixes that minimize net environmental damage. Society cannot afford to risk wholesale failure to address energy-related biodiversity impacts because of preconceived notions and ideals.