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Urbanisation is accelerating across the globe, transforming landscapes, presenting organisms with novel challenges, shaping phenotypes and impacting fitness. Urban individuals are claimed to have duller carotenoid-based colouration, compared to their non-urban counterparts, the so-called ‘urban dullness’ phenomenon. However, at the intraspecific level, this generalisation is surprisingly inconsist

This article highlights the potential of degrowth as a transformative approach that can expand capacities necessary for socio-ecological sustainability. By addressing economic growth as a fundamental driver of unsustainability, degrowth offers a concrete pathway towards achieving sustainable outcomes. It calls for sustainability scientists to explicitly consider the role of economic growth, aligni

Current post-carbon transition trajectories are primarily focused on external solutions, while citizens’ inner lives and roles in collective transformation and system change processes are largely overlooked. To address this gap, this study aims to explore the potential role of citizens as active agents of change. Specifically, it examines how citizens perceive and address climate change, the facto

Bioenergy plays a major role in the renewable energy supply and is projected to be an important part of the path towards a decarbonised society. Over the past decade, increasing attention has been given to agricultural bioenergy to act as a multifunctional climate mitigation strategy. Energy crops may mitigate climate change while simultaneously contributing to reducing the negative environmental

Road verges can support high densities of flowers and could therefore provide new opportunities for the conservation of flower-visiting insects. One way of optimizing road verges for vascular plant diversity is to adjust mowing regimes, but to date it is unclear how this affects flower-visiting insects. Furthermore, for mobile organisms like wild bees and butterflies, there is a risk that the bene

Flowering time is an important phenological trait in plants and a critical determinant of the success of pollination and fruit or seed development, with immense significance for agriculture as it directly affects crop yield and overall food production. Shifts in the growth season, changes in the growth season duration and changes in the production rate are environmental processes (potentially link

Tudo o que comemos gera impactos ambientais: do uso do solo na lavoura, passando pelo transporte, processamento, consumo e descarte de embalagens e resíduos. Entender esse impacto ambiental da alimentação é complexo, mas já existem informações suficientes para orientar decisões mais bem informadas.

Bark beetle species of the genera Ips and Dendroctonus represent a threat to forests in both North America and Europe. Under normal circumstances, these beetles recycle dying trees into nutrients, but under certain conditions, growing populations can overcome healthy tree defenses and cause severe economic loss in forestry. The most economically relevant bark beetle species communicate with aggreg

In urban growth modeling methods, researchers typically determine an appropriate scale based on various factors such as the extent of the study area, the scale of available data, and the level of detail required. With rapid urbanization, cities and towns have grown dramatically, leading to the emergence of numerous megalopolitan areas worldwide. In these areas, which include small and large cities

Questions: Earth observation is an important tool in biological monitoring. Previous studies have shown that variation in grassland canopy reflectance can explain gradients in plant community composition. However, there is a need for methods that allow the interpretation of the overall spectral signal of complex grassland vegetation in terms of existing knowledge about individual species' habitat

Agricultural landscapes have changed fast in Europe, which has led to steep declines in farmland biodiversity. While this has differentially impacted “farmland species”, some of these seem to be able to use alternative man-made open habitats in forests, such as forest clear-cuts and powerline rights-of-way. We investigated the use of clear-cuts by two historically declining farmland birds, the Yel

Multiple trade-offs likely occur between pesticide use, pollinators and yield (via crop flowers) in pollinator-dependent, mass-flowering crops (MFCs), causing potential conflict between conservation and agronomic goals. To date, no studies have looked at both outcomes within the same system, meaning win-win solutions for pollinators and yield can only be inferred. Here, we outline a new framework

Recent studies have shown that dissolved organic matter (DOM) decomposed by ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi increases adsorptive properties of organic matter towards soil mineral surfaces. Concomitantly, ECM fungi secrete secondary metabolites with iron reducing capacity that are thought to participate in non-enzymatic Fenton-based decomposition of DOM. The aim of this study was to investigate if the

The global movement of bees for agricultural pollination services can affect local pollinator populations via hybridization. When commercial bumblebees are of the same species but of different geographic origin, intraspecific hybridization may result in beneficial integration of new genetic variation, or alternatively may disrupt locally adapted gene complexes. However, neither the existence nor t

To assess the biodiversity consequences of contemporary land-use trends in Northern Europe, where agriculture is being replaced by forestry, we need a better knowledge of the contributions of constituting habitats to biodiversity. Here, we use purposefully collected data from 87 sites to model how agricultural habitats, including semi-natural pastures, sown temporary grassland (leys), cereal crops