Projected losses of ecosystem services in the US disproportionately affect non-white and lower-income populations.

Addressing how ecosystem services (ES) are distributed among groups of people is critical for making conservation and environmental policy-making more equitable. Here, we evaluate the distribution and equity of changes in ES benefits across demographic and socioeconomic groups in the United States (US) between 2020 and 2100. Specifically, we use land cover and population projections to model potential shifts in the supply, demand, and benefits of the following ES: provision of clean air, protection against a vector-borne disease (West Nile virus), and crop pollination. Across the US, changes in ES benefits are unevenly distributed among socioeconomic and demographic groups and among rural and urban communities, but are relatively uniform across geographic regions. In general, non-white, lower-income, and urban populations disproportionately bear the burden of declines in ES benefits. This is largely driven by the conversion of forests and wetlands to cropland and urban land cover in counties where these populations are expected to grow. In these locations, targeted land use policy interventions are required to avoid exacerbating inequalities already present in the US.

Disaggregating the evidence linking biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services (ES) are an increasingly popular policy framework for connecting biodiversity with human well-being. These efforts typically assume that biodiversity and ES covary, but the relationship between them remains remarkably unclear. Here we analyse >500 recent papers and show that reported relationships differ among ES, methods of measuring biodiversity and ES, and three different approaches to linking them (spatial correlations, management comparisons and functional experiments). For spatial correlations, biodiversity relates more strongly to measures of ES supply than to resulting human benefits. For management comparisons, biodiversity of 'service providers' predicts ES more often than biodiversity of functionally unrelated taxa, but the opposite is true for spatial correlations. Functional experiments occur at smaller spatial scales than management and spatial studies, which show contrasting responses to scale. Our results illuminate the varying dynamics relating biodiversity to ES, and show the importance of matching management efforts to the most relevant scientific evidence.

Darwin's bee-trap: The kinetics of Catasetum, a new world orchid.

The orchid genera Catasetum employs a hair-trigger activated, pollen release mechanism, which forcibly attaches pollen sacs onto foraging insects in the New World tropics. This remarkable adaptation was studied extensively by Charles Darwin and he termed this rapid response "sensitiveness." Using high speed video cameras with a frame speed of 1000 fps, this rapid release was filmed and from the subsequent footage, velocity, speed, acceleration, force and kinetic energy were computed.