The impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on the human experience of nature.

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in extensive lockdowns implemented all around the world and billion of people have been asked to stay at home for several weeks. Although this global confinement has had potentially huge unintended consequences on the environment and on its associated wildlife, this study shows that it has also impacted the human experience of nature. Based on an online questionnaire, this study aims to assess how the significant changes in people's everyday lives induced by the French lockdown impacted their relationship with other species. Participants did not only observe and interact more with non human species, but also discovered new traits characterizing them, and felt less lonely thanks to them. The impact of the lockdown was stronger on people's relationship with their pets, farm animals, home plants and with birds than with other plants and animals. This study further demonstrates that participants with different profiles have been affected differently. In particular, women and people with better access to nature were clearly more sensitive to changes and have been more positively impacted in their relationships with other species. Acting as a real world experiment, the lockdown reveals to which extent our experience of nature is embedded in social, cultural and political contexts.

Unveiling African rainforest composition and vulnerability to global change.

Africa is forecasted to experience large and rapid climate change1 and population growth2 during the twenty-first century, which threatens the world's second largest rainforest. Protecting and sustainably managing these African forests requires an increased understanding of their compositional heterogeneity, the environmental drivers of forest composition and their vulnerability to ongoing changes. Here, using a very large dataset of 6 million trees in more than 180,000 field plots, we jointly model the distribution in abundance of the most dominant tree taxa in central Africa, and produce continuous maps of the floristic and functional composition of central African forests. Our results show that the uncertainty in taxon-specific distributions averages out at the community level, and reveal highly deterministic assemblages. We uncover contrasting floristic and functional compositions across climates, soil types and anthropogenic gradients, with functional convergence among types of forest that are floristically dissimilar. Combining these spatial predictions with scenarios of climatic and anthropogenic global change suggests a high vulnerability of the northern and southern forest margins, the Atlantic forests and most forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where both climate and anthropogenic threats are expected to increase sharply by 2085. These results constitute key quantitative benchmarks for scientists and policymakers to shape transnational conservation and management strategies that aim to provide a sustainable future for central African forests.

Using knowledge mapping to rethink the gap between science and action.

Scholars have long stressed the need to bridge the gap between science and action and seek the most efficient use of knowledge for decision making. Many contributors have attempted to consider and understand the sociopolitical forces involved in knowledge generation and exchange. We argue, however, that a model is still needed to adequately conceptualize and frame the knowledge networks in which these processes are embedded. We devised a model for knowledge mapping as a prerequisite for knowledge management in the context of conservation. Using great ape conservation to frame our approach, we propose that knowledge mapping should be based on 2 key principles. First, each conservation network results from the conglomeration of subnetworks of expertise producing and using knowledge. Second, beyond the research-management gradient, other dimensions, such as the scale of operation, geographic location, and organizational characteristics, must also be considered. Assessing both knowledge production and trajectory across different dimensions of the network opens new space for investigating and reducing the gap between science and action.

Uso del Conocimiento del Mapeo para Replantear la Separación entre la Ciencia y la Acción Resumen Durante mucho tiempo los académicos han hecho énfasis en la necesidad de cerrar la brecha entre la ciencia y la acción, así como encontrar el uso más eficiente del conocimiento para la toma de decisiones. Muchos contribuyentes han intentado considerar y entender las fuerzas sociopolíticas involucradas en la generación e intercambio de conocimiento. Sin embargo, argumentamos que todavía se necesita un modelo para conceptualizar y enmarcar adecuadamente las redes de conocimiento en las que están incorporados estos procesos. Diseñamos un modelo para el mapeo del conocimiento como prerrequisito para el manejo del conocimiento como parte del contexto de la conservación. Usamos la conservación de los grandes simios para enmarcar nuestra estrategia y proponemos que el mapeo del conocimiento debería estar basado en dos principios clave. Primero, cada red de conservación es resultado de la conglomeración de subredes de experiencias que produce y usa conocimiento. Segundo, más allá del gradiente de manejo de investigaciones, otras dimensiones como la escala de operación, la ubicación geográfica y las características de organización también deben considerarse. La evaluación de la producción y la trayectoria del conocimiento a través de diferentes dimensiones de la red de conservación abre un nuevo espacio para la investigación y la reducción de la brecha entre la ciencia y la acción.

Exploring spatial patterns of vulnerability for diverse biodiversity descriptors in regional conservation planning.

In this study, we developed a multi-criteria assessment of spatial variability of the vulnerability of three different biodiversity descriptors: sites of high conservation interest by virtue of the presence of rare or remarkable species, extensive areas of high ecological integrity, and landscape diversity in grid cells across an entire region. We assessed vulnerability in relation to (a) direct threats in and around sites to a distance of 2 km associated with intensive agriculture, building and road infrastructure and (b) indirect effects of human population density on a wider scale (50 km). The different combinations of biodiversity and threat indicators allowed us to set differential priorities for biodiversity conservation and assess their spatial variation. For example, with this method we identified sites and grid cells which combined high biodiversity with either high threat values or low threat values for the three different biodiversity indicators. In these two classes the priorities for conservation planning will be different, reduce threat values in the former and restrain any increase in the latter. We also identified low priority sites (low biodiversity with either high or low threats). This procedure thus allows for the integration of a spatial ranking of vulnerability into priority setting for regional conservation planning.