People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years.

Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth's land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as "natural," "intact," and "wild" generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis.

'The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like': measurement and engineering authority in nineteenth-century river management.

Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure and map dynamic river spaces, the paper analyses the relationship between engineering experience and judgement and the generation of data that engineers considered to be 'tolerably correct'. While measurement created an abstract and simplified version of the river that accommodated prediction, this abstraction had to be connected to and made meaningful in real river space despite acknowledged limitations to measuring practice. In response, engineers drew on experience gained through the measuring process to support claims to authoritative knowledge. This combination of quantification and experience was then used to support interventions in debates over the proper use and management of rivers. This paper argues that measurement in nineteenth-century engineering served a dual function, producing both data and expertise, which were both significant in underpinning engineering authority and facilitating engineers' intervention in decision making for river management.

Earth 2020: Science, society, and sustainability in the Anthropocene.

April 22, 2020, marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and the birth of the modern environmental movement. As we look back over the past half century, we can gain significant insights into the evolving human imprint on Earth's biophysical systems, and the role of science and scientists in driving societal transitions toward greater sustainability. Science is a foundation for such transitions, but it is not enough. Rather, it is through wide collaborations across fields, including law, economics, and politics, and through direct engagement with civil society, that science can illuminate a better path forward. This is illustrated through a number of case studies highlighting the role of scientists in leading positive societal change, often in the face of strong oppositional forces. The past five decades reveal significant triumphs of environmental protection, but also notable failures, which have led to the continuing deterioration of Earth's natural systems. Today, more than ever, these historical lessons loom large as we face increasingly complex and pernicious environmental problems.

Evolution of global marine fishing fleets and the response of fished resources.

Previous reconstructions of marine fishing fleets have aggregated data without regard to the artisanal and industrial sectors. Engine power has often been estimated from subsets of the developed world, leading to inflated results. We disaggregated data into three sectors, artisanal (unpowered/powered) and industrial, and reconstructed the evolution of the fleet and its fishing effort. We found that the global fishing fleet doubled between 1950 and 2015-from 1.7 to 3.7 million vessels. This has been driven by substantial expansion of the motorized fleet, particularly, of the powered-artisanal fleet. By 2015, 68% of the global fishing fleet was motorized. Although the global fleet is dominated by small powered vessels under 50 kW, they contribute only 27% of the global engine power, which has increased from 25 to 145 GW (combined powered-artisanal and industrial fleets). Alongside an expansion of the fleets, the effective catch per unit of effort (CPUE) has consistently decreased since 1950, showing the increasing pressure of fisheries on ocean resources. The effective CPUE of most countries in 2015 was a fifth of its 1950s value, which was compared with a global decline in abundance. There are signs, however, of stabilization and more effective management in recent years, with a reduction in fleet sizes in developed countries. Based on historical patterns and allowing for the slowing rate of expansion, 1 million more motorized vessels could join the global fleet by midcentury as developing countries continue to transition away from subsistence fisheries, challenging sustainable use of fisheries' resources.

Beyond the limit: carrying capacity (K) and the holism/reductionism debate.

As the debate about holism and reductionism in ecology has ebbed in the last twenty years, this article aims to reassess the traditional opposition between holistic and reductionist epistemologies during the development of population biology. The history of the notion of carrying capacity, the upper demographic limit of a viable population, will be analyzed as a paradigmatic case of the progressive imposition of reductionist strategies, from both an epistemological and a semantic point of view, since the middle of the twentieth century. Then, Richard Looijen's reduction of the carrying capacity concept to the niche partitioning theory will be assessed and rebuked for both empirical and logical reasons. Eventually, some recent "weak" and "hard" emergent conceptualizations of the notion of carrying capacity, in logistic map models or in coupled niche-population systems, will be presented in order to show how they call into question the nature and the use of the notion of carrying capacity as a predefined ecological limit.

Hamster numbers: biopolitics and animal agency in the dutch fields, circa 1870-present.

Numbers of European hamsters (Cricetus cricetus) in the Dutch Province of Limburg have been subject to much scrutiny and controversy. In the late nineteenth century, policymakers who considered them too numerous (and invasive) set up eradication programs. In the second half of the twentieth century, even when its domestic relative (Mesocricetus auratus) increasingly circulated as a pet in urban spaces, the numbers of European hamsters in the rural areas collapsed. Large-scale preservation campaigns and reintroduction programs ensued. According to some media, all this has turned the European hamster into the most expensive undomesticated animal of the Netherlands. A whole network of institutions became involved to save the species - ranging from local activist organizations, over zoos and universities, to federal ministries and international organizations. The interactions between the Dutch and 'their' hamsters, this article argues, were inscribed in various forms of biopolitics. The article highlights the changing discursive framings and spatial practices that have shaped the management of Cricetus cricetus over time and calls attention to the diversity of living and non-living agents that produced the multispecies choreographies of the present-day Limburg landscape. Finally, it alerts us to the (sometimes-paradoxical) kinds of agency that reside in the numbers of non-human animals.

Unraveling rain forest biodiversity: an interview with Thomas Couvreur.

Thomas Couvreur is a researcher and botanist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), based in Montpellier, France, studying tropical biosystems. He is using diverse approaches-from taxonomy, molecular phylogenetics, phylogeography, to modeling species distribution-to understand the evolution and resilience of biodiversity in rain forests. In this interview, Thomas describes the ongoing research in his lab, the most urgent challenges and opportunities in biodiversity research, and the importance of knowing how to code.

[Forests and health: Discourse and practises from the 18st to the 21st century]. / Forêt et santé : discours et pratiques du XVIIIe au XXIe siècle.

The relations between forests and health carry ambivalent representations anchored in a long history. The dangers of deforestation and the usefulness of woodland to counter the "miasmas" and later the "pollution" are consistent with a Hippocratic approach that was reinterpreted at the end of the 18th century in the light of new knowledge in chemistry and biology. As of the 1970's, biodiversity was taken into consideration for the purposes of protecting and preserving forests seen as indispensable factors for public health. Conversely, the threats coming from tropical forests, that had been recognized for at least three centuries, and forest zoonoses that have been better identified all over the world in recent decades, are the negative side of this health-oriented representation of the role of forests. The analysis conducted in this article focuses on showing how these seemingly opposite views are actually complementary: once the mechanisms behind the diseases are better understood, the conservation of forests and their renewal become major goals for the populations concerned and for public authorities on the local, national and international scales, acting through numerous scientific studies and the establishment of public and private organisations. In this area, the role played by France is still too limited. A scrutiny of the last three centuries provides a better understanding of the essential character of social demands, cultural representations and medical expertise in the implementation of forest therapy and health-oriented environmental policies.

Historical changes in grassland area determined the demography of semi-natural grassland butterflies in Japan.

Semi-natural grassland areas expanded worldwide several thousand years ago following an increase in anthropogenic activities. However, semi-natural grassland habitat areas have been declining in recent decades due to changes in landuse, which have caused a loss of grassland biodiversity. Reconstructing historical and recent demographic changes in semi-natural grassland species will help clarify the factors affecting their population decline. Here we quantified past and recent demographic histories of Melitaea ambigua (Lepidoptera; Nymphalidae), an endangered grassland butterfly species in Japan. We examined changes in demography over the past 10,000 years based on 1378 bp of mitochondrial COI gene. We then examined changes in its genetic diversity and structure during the last 30 years using nine microsatellite DNA markers. The effective population size of M. ambigua increased about 3000-6000 years ago. In contrast, the genetic diversity and effective population sizes of many populations significantly declined from the 1980s to 2010s, which is consistent with a recent decline in the species population size. Our data suggest that the M. ambigua demography can be traced to changes in area covered by semi-natural grasslands throughout the Holocene.

Historical dynamics in ecosystem service bundles.

Managing multiple ecosystem services (ES), including addressing trade-offs between services and preventing ecological surprises, is among the most pressing areas for sustainability research. These challenges require ES research to go beyond the currently common approach of snapshot studies limited to one or two services at a single point in time. We used a spatiotemporal approach to examine changes in nine ES and their relationships from 1971 to 2006 across 131 municipalities in a mixed-use landscape in Quebec, Canada. We show how an approach that incorporates time and space can improve our understanding of ES dynamics. We found an increase in the provision of most services through time; however, provision of ES was not uniformly enhanced at all locations. Instead, each municipality specialized in providing a bundle (set of positively correlated ES) dominated by just a few services. The trajectory of bundle formation was related to changes in agricultural policy and global trends; local biophysical and socioeconomic characteristics explained the bundles' increasing spatial clustering. Relationships between services varied through time, with some provisioning and cultural services shifting from a trade-off or no relationship in 1971 to an apparent synergistic relationship by 2006. By implementing a spatiotemporal perspective on multiple services, we provide clear evidence of the dynamic nature of ES interactions and contribute to identifying processes and drivers behind these changing relationships. Our study raises questions about using snapshots of ES provision at a single point in time to build our understanding of ES relationships in complex and dynamic social-ecological systems.

Science and Sentiment: Grinnell's Fact-Based Philosophy of Biodiversity Conservation.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to some familiar philosophical distinctions such as fact versus value, emotion versus reason and basic versus applied science. According to Grinnell, unlike sentiment-based generalizations, a fact-based generalization traces its diverse commitments and thus becomes tractable for its audience. We argue that foregrounding tractability better explains Grinnell's practice in the context of his time as well as in the context of current discourse among scientists over the political "biases" of biodiversity research and its problem of "reproducibility."

Early-career researchers: an interview with Jodie Rummer.

Jodie Rummer is an Associate Professor at James Cook University, Australia, where she specialises in conservation physiology. She received her Bachelor's degree in Marine Biology and her Master's degree from the University of West Florida, USA. Rummer then moved to the University of British Columbia, Canada, for her PhD in Zoology with Colin Brauner, after which she completed a short postdoc with Dave Randall at the City University of Hong Kong. She has been recognised with a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship and was one of the Australia Broadcasting Corporation's Top Five Scientists under 40 in 2016.

Genetic diversity of calcareous grassland plant species depends on historical landscape configuration.

BACKGROUND: Habitat fragmentation is considered to be a main reason for decreasing genetic diversity of plant species. However, the results of many fragmentation studies are inconsistent. This may be due to the influence of habitat conditions, having an indirect effect on genetic variation via reproduction. Consequently we took a comparative approach to analyse the impact of habitat fragmentation and habitat conditions on the genetic diversity of calcareous grassland species in this study. We selected five typical grassland species (Primula veris, Dianthus carthusianorum, Medicago falcata, Polygala comosa and Salvia pratensis) occurring in 18 fragments of calcareous grasslands in south eastern Germany. We sampled 1286 individuals in 87 populations and analysed genetic diversity using amplified fragment length polymorphisms. Additionally, we collected data concerning habitat fragmentation (historical and present landscape structure) and habitat conditions (vegetation structure, soil conditions) of the selected study sites. The whole data set was analysed using Bayesian multiple regressions. RESULTS: Our investigation indicated a habitat loss of nearly 80% and increasing isolation between grasslands since 1830. Bayesian analysis revealed a significant impact of the historical landscape structure, whereas habitat conditions played no important role for the present-day genetic variation of the studied plant species. CONCLUSIONS: Our study indicates that the historical landscape structure may be more important for genetic diversity than present habitat conditions. Populations persisting in abandoned grassland fragments may contribute significantly to the species' variability even under deteriorating habitat conditions. Therefore, these populations should be included in approaches to preserve the genetic variation of calcareous grassland species.