National plans submitted ahead of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP16 in Colombia should prioritize action over empty ambition, and must integrate with other nations’ plans to constructively work towards global aims.

This Perspective charts the development of the Monitoring Framework for tracking progress towards the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, including details on the process of indicator selection, and discusses what is still needed for implementation of the Monitoring Framework.

The Red List of Ecosystems is a headline indicator in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This Progress illustrates how the Red List of Ecosystems can be used by Parties to the Framework to contribute to its implementation and monitoring.

Based on co-expression fingerprint analysis between homologous genes in the X and Y chromosomes (gametolog pairs) across >40 human tissues, the authors suggest that X and Y gametologs have diverged in function.

The authors collate a meta-collection of ex situ living plant diversity held in 50 botanical collections worldwide, spanning a century of data and currently containing ~500,000 accessions. Their analyses examine the capacities and constraints within living plant collections, reveal the impact of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its consequences for material exchange and conservation, and call for the re-evaluation of strategic priorities.

Community resilience to stress is affected by factors such as pre-exposure to the same stress and intercommunity dispersal. The authors show that pre-exposing the most dominant members of a 23-species bacterial community to different levels of antibiotic stress leads to rapid evolution of resistance that improves metacommunity resilience even under high levels of dispersal.

Boreal forests have been experiencing both gains and losses in recent decades. Here, the authors show that boreal forest resilience is more sensitive to forest cover losses than to gains, indicating that functional declines due to forest loss outpace improvements following forest recovery.

As wood growth in deciduous tree stems halts during winter, it has been assumed that wood growth in coarse roots follows the same pattern. This study on the growth of stem and coarse roots of four European tree species challenges the assumption of winter halt in below-ground wood growth of temperate deciduous trees.

Predicting invasion outcomes in microbial communities is challenging. Here the authors demonstrate that these outcomes in both theoretical and experimental microbial communities can be predicted based on community dynamics, diversity and species interactions.

We revisit some of the outstanding articles published in our pages over the past 12 months and reflect on some of the year’s events in ecology, evolution and conservation.

The inaugural Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference took place on 14–16 June 2024. We talked to the co-conveners of this conference, Ajith Kumar and Jayashree Ratnam, about how the event fostered connections among Indian wildlife ecologists, and their future plans.

Archaeologist with a wide view of prehistory and a passion for innovative collaboration.

Robust debate and discussion are crucial ingredients in the advancement of science, but should always be conducted with respect and civility.

Armed conflicts inflict a massive toll on people and nature, but hope exists in the recognition that lasting peace can be closely tied to ecosystem restoration