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  1. ; ; ; ; ; ( , Infectious Diseases of Poverty)
    Abstract Background

    Neglected tropical diseases affect the most vulnerable populations and cause chronic and debilitating disorders. Socioeconomic vulnerability is a well-known and important determinant of neglected tropical diseases. For example, poverty and sanitation could influence parasite transmission. Nevertheless, the quantitative impact of socioeconomic conditions on disease transmission risk remains poorly explored.

     Methods

    This study investigated the role of socioeconomic variables in the predictive capacity of risk models of neglected tropical zoonoses using a decade of epidemiological data (2007–2018) from Brazil. Vector-borne diseases investigated in this study included dengue, malaria, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, and Brazilian spotted fever, while directly-transmitted zoonotic diseases included schistosomiasis, leptospirosis, and hantaviruses. Environmental and socioeconomic predictors were combined with infectious disease data to build environmental and socioenvironmental sets of ecological niche models and their performances were compared.

     Results

    Socioeconomic variables were found to be as important as environmental variables in influencing the estimated likelihood of disease transmission across large spatial scales. The combination of socioeconomic and environmental variables improved overall model accuracy (or predictive power) by 10% on average (P < 0.01), reaching a maximum of 18% in the case of dengue fever. Gross domestic product was the most important socioeconomic variable (37% relative variable importance, all individual models exhibitedP < 0.00), showing a decreasing relationship with disease indicating poverty as a major factor for disease transmission. Loss of natural vegetation cover between 2008 and 2018 was the most important environmental variable (42% relative variable importance,P < 0.05) among environmental models, exhibiting a decreasing relationship with disease probability, showing that these diseases are especially prevalent in areas where natural ecosystem destruction is on its initial stages and lower when ecosystem destruction is on more advanced stages.

     Conclusions

    Destruction of natural ecosystems coupled with low income explain macro-scale neglected tropical and zoonotic disease probability in Brazil. Addition of socioeconomic variables improves transmission risk forecasts on tandem with environmental variables. Our results highlight that to efficiently address neglected tropical diseases, public health strategies must target both reduction of poverty and cessation of destruction of natural forests and savannas.

     
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  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , Nature Communications)
    Abstract

    Trees are pivotal to global biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, yet accelerating global changes threaten global tree diversity, making accurate species extinction risk assessments necessary. To identify species that require expert-based re-evaluation, we assess exposure to change in six anthropogenic threats over the last two decades for 32,090 tree species. We estimated that over half (54.2%) of the assessed species have been exposed to increasing threats. Only 8.7% of these species are considered threatened by the IUCN Red List, whereas they include more than half of the Data Deficient species (57.8%). These findings suggest a substantial underestimation of threats and associated extinction risk for tree species in current assessments. We also map hotspots of tree species exposed to rapidly changing threats around the world. Our data-driven approach can strengthen the efforts going into expert-based IUCN Red List assessments by facilitating prioritization among species for re-evaluation, allowing for more efficient conservation efforts.

     
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  3. ; ; ; ; ; ( , Global Change Biology)
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  4. ; ; ( , Nature Ecology & Evolution)
    null (Ed.)
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  5. ; ; ; ; ( , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
    All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation. 
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  6. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al ( , Nature Communications)
    Abstract

    The emergence of alternative stable states in forest systems has significant implications for the functioning and structure of the terrestrial biosphere, yet empirical evidence remains scarce. Here, we combine global forest biodiversity observations and simulations to test for alternative stable states in the presence of evergreen and deciduous forest types. We reveal a bimodal distribution of forest leaf types across temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere that cannot be explained by the environment alone, suggesting signatures of alternative forest states. Moreover, we empirically demonstrate the existence of positive feedbacks in tree growth, recruitment and mortality, with trees having 4–43% higher growth rates, 14–17% higher survival rates and 4–7 times higher recruitment rates when they are surrounded by trees of their own leaf type. Simulations show that the observed positive feedbacks are necessary and sufficient to generate alternative forest states, which also lead to dependency on history (hysteresis) during ecosystem transition from evergreen to deciduous forests and vice versa. We identify hotspots of bistable forest types in evergreen-deciduous ecotones, which are likely driven by soil-related positive feedbacks. These findings are integral to predicting the distribution of forest biomes, and aid to our understanding of biodiversity, carbon turnover, and terrestrial climate feedbacks.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 1, 2025
  7. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al ( , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
    null (Ed.)
    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. 
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  8. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al ( , Global Ecology and Biogeography)
    Abstract Aim

    Ecological and anthropogenic factors shift the abundances of dominant and rare tree species within local forest communities, thus affecting species composition and ecosystem functioning. To inform forest and conservation management it is important to understand the drivers of dominance and rarity in local tree communities. We answer the following research questions: (1) What are the patterns of dominance and rarity in tree communities? (2) Which ecological and anthropogenic factors predict these patterns? And (3) what is the extinction risk of locally dominant and rare tree species?

     Location

    Global.

     Time period

    1990–2017.

     Major taxa studied

    Trees.

     Methods

    We used 1.2 million forest plots and quantified local tree dominance as the relative plot basal area of the single most dominant species and local rarity as the percentage of species that contribute together to the least 10% of plot basal area. We mapped global community dominance and rarity using machine learning models and evaluated the ecological and anthropogenic predictors with linear models. Extinction risk, for example threatened status, of geographically widespread dominant and rare species was evaluated.

     Results

    Community dominance and rarity show contrasting latitudinal trends, with boreal forests having high levels of dominance and tropical forests having high levels of rarity. Increasing annual precipitation reduces community dominance, probably because precipitation is related to an increase in tree density and richness. Additionally, stand age is positively related to community dominance, due to stem diameter increase of the most dominant species. Surprisingly, we find that locally dominant and rare species, which are geographically widespread in our data, have an equally high rate of elevated extinction due to declining populations through large‐scale land degradation.

     Main conclusions

    By linking patterns and predictors of community dominance and rarity to extinction risk, our results suggest that also widespread species should be considered in large‐scale management and conservation practices.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 1, 2025
  9. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al ( , Science Advances)
    Quaternary climate change reduced and homogenized angiosperm tree diversity across large landscapes worldwide. 
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  10. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al ( , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
    Safeguarding Earth’s tree diversity is a conservation priority due to the importance of trees for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services such as carbon sequestration. Here, we improve the foundation for effective conservation of global tree diversity by analyzing a recently developed database of tree species covering 46,752 species. We quantify range protection and anthropogenic pressures for each species and develop conservation priorities across taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity dimensions. We also assess the effectiveness of several influential proposed conservation prioritization frameworks to protect the top 17% and top 50% of tree priority areas. We find that an average of 50.2% of a tree species’ range occurs in 110-km grid cells without any protected areas (PAs), with 6,377 small-range tree species fully unprotected, and that 83% of tree species experience nonnegligible human pressure across their range on average. Protecting high-priority areas for the top 17% and 50% priority thresholds would increase the average protected proportion of each tree species’ range to 65.5% and 82.6%, respectively, leaving many fewer species (2,151 and 2,010) completely unprotected. The priority areas identified for trees match well to the Global 200 Ecoregions framework, revealing that priority areas for trees would in large part also optimize protection for terrestrial biodiversity overall. Based on range estimates for >46,000 tree species, our findings show that a large proportion of tree species receive limited protection by current PAs and are under substantial human pressure. Improved protection of biodiversity overall would also strongly benefit global tree diversity. 
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