Biological invasions impose substantial ecological and socio-economic burdens, yet the global economic impacts of invasive plants remain incompletely quantified. Here, we provide the first comprehensive global synthesis of reported monetary costs associated with invasive plants using the InvaCost database. After data validation and filtering for highly reliable, observed estimates, we identified a total cost of US$ 361.8 billion in documented costs worldwide between 1960 and 2022, representing a conservative baseline of invasive plant impacts at global level. Costs were strongly uneven across taxa and regions, with a small number of species and families accounting for the vast majority of costs and North America dominating reported expenditures. Terrestrial environments and the agricultural sector bore the greatest economic burden, while damage costs exceeded more than three times those related to management, and preventive investments remained negligible. Annual costs increased markedly from the 1990s onward, reaching peak values exceeding US$ 50 billion in some years. Cumulative damage costs followed sigmoidal trajectories, indicating rapid escalation over recent decades and suggesting substantial long-term economic liabilities under business-as-usual conditions. Socio-economic context and country size were key predictors of reported costs, highlighting strong reporting and capacity biases. Despite the magnitude of documented impacts, plant invasion costs remain severely underestimated due to taxonomic, geographic and sectoral data gaps. Our synthesis reveals the scale, concentration and accelerating trajectory of invasive plant costs globally, underscoring the urgent need for improved reporting, proactive prevention and more effective management to limit future economic losses.

Including societal perspectives can lead to more just, informed and supported national coastal climate change adaptation policy and management. However, the stated importance, preferred prioritisation and fair distribution of public coastal benefits are not yet known. This research identified how the Dutch public values, prioritises and fairly distributes these benefits. We distributed surveys to a representative sample of the national public (N = 1024). Respondents indicated their perceived importance of the 10 Ocean Health Index benefits on a Likert scale, prioritised these through best-worst scaling, and indicated the preferred distribution of coastal protection, recreational opportunities and nature conservation by justice principles of equality, merit, need or utility. We found that all coastal benefits were perceived as important. Clean and healthy water was prioritised most, and tourism and recreation least. While biodiversity, special places and special species were regarded as almost equally important, special species were prioritised. Respondents preferred an egalitarian approach to distributing coastal protection and recreational opportunities, and a need-based principle for distributing nature conservation. Our findings suggest strong support for multifunctional adaptation policies, and for prioritising clean and healthy coastal water first, and coastal protection second. If adaptation policies aim to benefit nature, they can focus on culturally important species. Moreover, the fair distribution of coastal benefits depends on the benefit provided, and fairness principles can inform prioritisation. Our results suggest increasing support for egalitarian distributions of benefits as climate change impacts increase. Integrating these perspectives allows for more effective coastal adaptation policy and management.

Multispecies justice (MSJ) seeks to extend justice beyond humans. This concept may appear to improve environmental stewardship, however its openness risks undermining well-established principles of conservation and justice. Its open interpretation facilitates conceptual ambiguity, hindering practical operationalisation, risking moralising natural processes, while overlooking complexities of human-nature interactions and potentially weakening conservation efforts by opening the door for political misuse. In contrast, existing ethical and conservation frameworks already provide approaches to include nonhumans in justice, conservation and policy considerations. Building on three normative ethical theories (consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethics), we demonstrate how nonhumans can already be included in ethical considerations. Applying these theories enhances applicability through alignment with historic, juridical, scientific and religious moral systems. We therefore advocate strengthening established conservation and justice principles to address environmental crises. Future development of MSJ should build on its current popularity while integrating established, applicable ethical insights for including nonhumans in moral considerations.

Urban nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly promoted for their capacity to simultaneously deliver multiple benefits for biodiversity and human well-being, yet empirical evidence on how this multifunctionality emerges across different NbS types remains limited. We provide a high spatial resolution, field-based assessment of multifunctionality across four NbS types (natural park, semi-natural park, residential green and roadside green) in The Hague, the Netherlands, based on 110 sampling sites. By integrating environmental measurements, biodiversity observations, crowd-sourced activity data and geospatial datasets within a consistent typological framework, we evaluated individual benefit provision, their interactions and resulting multifunctionality patterns across the four urban NbS categories. Results show that park-type NbS consistently exhibited significantly higher multifunctionality than roadside green. Even when NbS types showed similar multifunctionality, these outcomes arise from distinct underlying benefit compositions. Furthermore, synergistic and trade-off relationships among benefits varied across NbS types. At the individual-benefit level, only bird richness and physical activity intensity showed significant differentiation among NbS types, while indicators of regulation services and invertebrate biodiversity showed substantial within-type variability. Importantly, observed patterns were sensitive to indicator selection and methodological choices in indicator aggregation. While averaging-based multifunctionality responded strongly to the inclusion of specific indicators, threshold-based approaches were comparatively more robust. These findings highlight that multifunctionality is a NbS type-dependent and context-sensitive outcome shaped by benefit composition, interactions and assessment approaches. By grounding multifunctionality in empirical, high spatial resolution evidence, this study provides a decision-relevant basis for more transparent and evidence-informed urban NbS planning and design.

The species Alternanthera philoxeroides is a flood-tolerant plant that has to cope with the hypoxic stress under submergence. However, the pith cavity in stems of this species is interrupted and partitioned by low-porosity diaphragms at the nodes. To date little knowledge is available about whether discontinuous pith cavities are functional for internal gas transport in plants. To disclose the role of stem discontinuous pith cavities in internal gas transport, the diffusive transport capacity of O2, the tissue O2 status of intact plants, and the influence of restricting longitudinal O2 supply on whole-plant growth during partial submergence were assessed. We found that stem pith cavities were the main pathway for diffusional supply of molecular O2; blocking only one internode significantly decreased the O2 flux to lower internodes, and the reduced O2 flux translated into reduced growth in partially submerged plants. A major output component of the study is a model that uses normalized tissue dimensions and concentration gradients to establish a fair foundation for comparison of contrasting species under different experimental conditions. We therefore predict that future studies will use this approach to further broaden the scope and value of resistance and flux measurement in target species.

Plant functional traits play a crucial role in determining how terrestrial ecosystems function. However, most Earth system models (ESMs) oversimplify this information, representing it with a limited number of static, empirically fixed values assigned to a selection of plant functional types (PFTs). This results in a reduction of the diversity of plant communities into a relatively small number of categories and the loss of key variability within individual PFTs. As a result, local processes occurring within ESM grid cells are not well represented, leading to uncertainties in predicting ecosystem functions.The TRY global plant traits database is home to the most extensive collection of in-situ trait observations for a broad spectrum of species across the globe. Nonetheless, despite the numerous species and samples included in TRY, it still falls short compared to the overall richness and diversity of species and ecosystem functions worldwide. As a result, various initiatives have emerged to create global maps of plant traits. In this study, we created maps of essential plant traits, such as specific leaf area (SLA), leaf nitrogen content (LNC), and leaf phosphorus content (LPC), at a spatial resolution of 1 km. We took an innovative approach by leveraging the use of biodiversity, trait databases, and remote sensing data as primary sources of information. Additionally, we provide ancillary data layers that indicate regions where data gaps currently exist and where more samples are needed to improve trait representation in TRY.We compared our results to plot-level estimates for thousands of sites globally. The comparison demonstrated strong correlations (r > 0.5) and low relative errors (rME < 6% and rRMSE < 11%) for all considered traits despite the challenges in scaling up from local to global scales. Our results reveal the non-Gaussian nature of trait distributions at a global scale when computing community representative mean trait values and further statistical descriptors, including standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis estimations. These higher-order moments provide a more detailed and nuanced view of plant functional diversity and distribution. Using these new data to parameterize global ecological models could lead to more accurate predictions and a better understanding of the main drivers of different ecosystem processes.

AimGlobal biodiversity loss resulting from anthropogenic land-use activities is a pressing concern, requiring precise assessments of impacts at large spatial extents. Existing models mainly focus on species richness and abundance, lacking insights into ecological mechanisms and species' roles in ecosystem functioning. To bridge this gap, we conducted an extensive analysis of the impact of human land use on vascular plant functional diversity across diverse land-use classes and bioregions in Europe, comparing it to traditional metrics.LocationEurope.Time Period1992-2019.Major Taxa StudiedVascular plants.MethodsIntegrating extensive databases of vegetation plots with spatial data on land use and land cover, we paired plots from areas actively used and modified by humans with plots from natural habitats under similar environmental conditions. Using species occurrences and traits, in each plot we computed three complementary functional diversity metrics (functional richness, evenness and divergence), species richness and abundance. We assessed the impact of land use by comparing the metrics in the paired plots.ResultsOur findings revealed that, compared to natural habitats, anthropogenic land use exhibits lower functional richness and divergence but higher functional evenness across most land-use classes and bioregions. The response of functional richness was more marked than the other two metrics and especially pronounced in croplands and urban areas and in northern bioregions. Functional richness exhibited a pattern that did not fully overlap with the trend in species richness, providing useful complementary information.Main ConclusionsWe provide a large-scale precise assessment of anthropogenic land-use impacts on functional diversity across Europe. Our findings indicate that: (i) human disturbance significantly alters plant functional diversity compared to natural habitats; (ii) this alteration goes in the direction of functional homogenisation within sites; (iii) functional diversity metrics complement traditional metrics by offering deeper insights into the ecological mechanisms in response to anthropogenic land use.

Rapid urbanization alters habitat quality and connectivity, influencing species dispersal and ultimately shaping community assembly. Increasingly, urban environments and their vegetation are shown to be important for the conservation of biodiversity. However, urban species distributions remain poorly understood. By integrating DNA-based sampling with species distribution models (SDMs), we aim to quantitatively assess urban community assembly while using a novel green infrastructure classification framework intended to assess both urban biodiversity and ecosystem services.We sampled invertebrate distributions in The Hague, the Netherlands, using two complementary DNA-based methods: traditional bulk trapping (n = 205) and environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling (n = 207). Species were identified using DNA sequencing and Operational Taxonomic Units, with presence-absence data used to develop SDMs driven by vegetation and anthropogenic indicators.The SDMs generally outperformed random models (59.5 %) and performed strong during calibration (90.4 %, AUC > 0.70). They highlighted that vegetation density, structure, and proximity to water are the primary drivers of invertebrate distributions, while direct anthropogenic pressures play a minimal role. At the same time, very few models (1.3 %) performed well during validation.This finding indicates challenges in predicting species distributions and suggest that dispersal is not a limiting factor in The Hague’s urban environment, as current green infrastructures appear sufficient to support many species. The model overfitting and low validation performance also indicate the need to refine biodiversity indicators for urban environments, as typically used vegetation indicators do not predict species distributions well. The absence of dispersal limitations that suggest that the urban environment acts as one large meta-community, indicates that ensuring sufficient green infrastructure in the urban environment should be the first priority to enhance biodiversity in the urban environment.

While there is an emerging body of research showing the consequences of land use intensity on soil biodiversity, most studies focus on biodiversity responses to a single or a limited number of agricultural practices in controlled settings or at a single field site, neglecting that multiple practices are simultaneously applied by farmers in real agroecosystems. The combined effects of various agricultural practices have, until now, been largely overlooked in agroecosystems.Here, we conducted a field soil sampling campaign on 87 farms with two land use types (39 arable fields and 48 grasslands) to investigate the relationship between land use intensity, determined by various agricultural practices, and multiple soil communities (bacteria, fungi, protists and invertebrates) at regional scales.We found that land use intensity influenced the diversity and community composition of various soil taxa differently, and these impacts strongly depended on land use type. Soil fungi were most susceptible to land use intensity in both arable fields and grasslands. Specifically, irrigation and pest control were the main practices shaping soil communities in arable fields, while phosphorus and nitrogen fertilization were the main practices structuring soil communities in grasslands. Furthermore, an increase in land use intensity led to greater soil network complexity in arable fields.Our findings reveal regional on-farm patterns of land use intensity effects on various soil communities and identified key agricultural practices that structure soil communities. A key strength of this study is that these patterns can be generalized because the samples were collected from 87 farmlands where multiple agricultural practices were implemented simultaneously. Overall, this work provides a comprehensive perspective on the different responses of multiple soil communities and their associations to land use intensity in agroecosystems.

Freshwater ecosystems worldwide are under pressure from neonicotinoid insecticides. While it is recognised that communities of species are responsible for ecosystem functioning, it remains unknown if neonicotinoid-induced community transformations negatively affect ecosystem functioning. Therefore, we employed an experimental approach with 36 naturally established freshwater ecosystems exposed to increasing field-realistic concentrations of the neonicotinoid thiacloprid. Upon exposure, we found severe degradation of ecosystem functioning in the form of loss of organic matter consumption and dramatic shifts in primary productivity. This functional decline coincides with strongly eroded species co-occurrence networks to the point that these are indistinguishable from randomised assemblages of species. Together, these findings show how current environmental concentrations of a neonicotinoid can strongly disrupt freshwater ecosystem functioning via degradation of the invertebrate food web. Since this dramatic ecosystem degradation occurs below nearly all identified ecotoxicological risks, we call here for the reconsideration of the use of these insecticides.

Wild birds serve as reservoirs and vectors for many different pathogens. Changes in their distribution and abundance, due to environmental change, will influence disease risk. We investigated potential changes in abundance for three commonly occurring species that are likely major drivers of a wide range of diseases: blackbirds, mallards and house sparrows. These are competent hosts for avian influenza and West Nile virus, among other pathogens. Using the Netherlands as a case study, we created random forest models for predicting the distribution and (relative) abundance of these species, both now (1991–2020) and in the future (2036–2065). The three species had different spatial distributions, largely related to their preferred habitat and food availability. In the future, mallard and house sparrow populations were predicted to increase, while there was little change for blackbirds. These changes in abundance have a potentially strong relationship with disease risk, since species abundance is linked to the size of pathogen reservoirs. We demonstrate this relationship by linking blackbird abundance to cases of Usutu virus in the Netherlands. Our work illustrates the potential value of forecasting (relative) abundance to estimate future disease risk and to assist planning of disease management actions.

Urban forests and grasslands provide diverse services from their unique characteristics. Optimizing green spaces by understanding urban residents' preferences is a critical challenge for sustainable city development amid limited land resources. However, the mechanism influencing exposure across various types of green remains unclear. This study utilized multi-temporal mobile signal data from Shanghai to quantify the exposure intensity (EI) and density (ED) for forests and grasslands. These metrics addressed the gap by revealing spatiotemporal variations in exposure preference (EP) and related socioeconomic influences. Specifically, the study addressed two key questions: (1) Do urban residents exhibit preferences between forests and grasslands in terms of EI and ED? (2) How do socioeconomic features influence these preferences? Results showed: (1) Forests had almost double the annual EI (542.86 p/h) and ED (2.69 p/m(2)/h) of grasslands (P < 0.001). However, grasslands in central regions exhibited significantly higher ED (13.60 vs. 11.83 p/m(2)/h; P < 0.001). (2) Commercial House (34.4 % importance) and Sports & Recreation (15.7 %) maximized green exposure, while Road Furniture reduced it. (3) Evening exposure peaks in central regions extended by 1 hour due to commercial-cultural synergies. Forest ED, highly driven by Commercial House, clustered in central cores and specific non-central communities, whereas Road Furniture most negatively impacted central periphery communities. These findings directly inform differentiated urban planning strategies: forests should prioritize improving accessibility to sustain prolonged exposures, while grasslands need spatial optimization to accommodate peak social demand. By aligning green space planning with socioeconomic drivers, cities can enhance the effectiveness of their service under land constraints.

The multifunctional character of nature-based solutions (NbS) in cities, benefiting both biodiversity and human well-being, is gaining increasing attention. Designing multifunctional NbS in cities requires insights in how NbS contribute to biodiversity, since biodiversity supports ecosystem stability and resilience, and benefits for people. While knowledge of urban biodiversity has increased, a comprehensive understanding of how NbS contribute to biodiversity is still lacking. We analyzed the outcomes of 185 urban NbS cases in 87 cities across 33 countries, based on data collected in a systematic literature review. Our results show that 78% of NbS cases contribute positively to improving biodiversity when compared to non-NbS. In some cases, their performance was comparable to that of natural reference sites. Twenty-eight NbS cases evaluating multiple outcomes, beyond biodiversity, predominantly demonstrate win–win solutions for biodiversity and human well-being, although the evidence base remains limited. We showed that current evidence is limited to specific taxa (mostly animals), NbS types (e.g., gardens, forests), and commonly used metrics (e.g., species richness, abundance). We also found that only 39% of cases integrated baseline data, highlighting a lack of comparative studies effectively assessing NbS contributions to biodiversity. Our research provides insights for indicator selection to facilitate the evaluation of NbS for biodiversity and beyond, advancing the understanding of multifunctional NbS, and expanding NbS evaluations to provide accessible information for decision-making and policy.

Ecosystems are threatened by increasing droughts under climate change. A multitude of plant physiological regulation processes determine the overall drought resistance of ecosystems. So far, these physiological strategies to resist drought are poorly understood at large scales across different ecosystem types because the detection of these physiological regulation processes is mostly limited to in situ measurements on individual plants. In this study, by using high-resolution remote sensing data, we evaluated drought strategies of different ecosystem types throughout Europe by evaluating three key physiological regulation aspects (evapotranspiration, water content, and carbon regulation) based on their associated vegetation attributes. We found that different ecosystem types show divergent responses in these physiological attributes, suggesting different optimization strategies with respect to water saving versus spending, water content stabilizing versus fluctuating, and leaf conserving versus shedding strategies facing drought. These drought strategies from remote sensing provide timely ecosystem response information, facilitating earth system model predictions and aiding the protection against future droughts at large scales.

Eutrophication results from nutrient overload in aquatic ecosystems and affects primary productivity patterns, which impacts the living conditions of aquatic organisms. The rivers in the catchment area of the Baltic Sea are greatly affected by eutrophication, but impacts on fish functional diversity are poorly understood. This study, therefore, evaluates the effects of freshwater eutrophication on fish functional diversity in the rivers of the Baltic Sea catchment area. Total phosphorus is used as the eutrophication indicator. Functional richness, evenness, and divergence values were calculated using comprehensive fish trait and occurrence databases. Functional evenness was found to be negatively related to eutrophication. In contrast, functional divergence demonstrated a positive relation. Functional richness showed no or a negative response, depending on whether environmental covariates were considered. As a comparison, species richness revealed a negative relationship and was the most responsive to increasing eutrophication of all measures evaluated. Hence, this study demonstrates the varying nature of responses of multiple diversity indices and comprehensively describes the response of fish communities to increasing eutrophication in the area. The results show that functional redundancy helps to reduce adverse effects of species losses on functional diversity, which provides an important starting point for impact assessment. The findings illustrate that actions to limit nutrient discharge to freshwater are needed to maintain sustainable riverine ecosystems.

Priming effects can influence the efficiency with which organic amendments sequester carbon in the soil. Yet, few soil models currently include priming effects. Those models that do are often based on operationally defined soil pools and implicitly allow only for positive priming effects. This limits the verification of model processes with experimental data and hinders the optimization of our carbon sequestration strategies. To address these shortcomings, we developed MiPrime, which offers a framework for the mechanistic modelling of organic amendment impacts on microbially mediated transformation of carbon fractions that are quantifiable through parsimonious soil extraction methods. MiPrime allows for assessment of organic amendment impacts on soil carbon dynamics, including priming effects, by simulating changes in mineralized, microbial biomass, dissolvable, hot water extractable and insoluble carbon fractions in soil exogenous (i.e. organic amendment-derived) and endogenous (i.e. soil) pools. After calibration of model parameters using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to incubation data of three types of isotopically labelled roadside grasses (a fresh grass product, a compost thereof, and a Bokashi-fermented product thereof), MiPrime was able to simulate changes in carbon fractions of the soil with a good degree of accuracy for five compositionally complex organic amendments, namely the three types of roadside grasses, as well as non-isotopically labelled wood chips and water weeds and reeds. Validation of the model results with experimental data demonstrates that changes in total carbon were very well predicted but that there is room for improvement in predicting mineralization rates and changes in dissolvable, hot water extractable and insoluble carbon fractions in the soil endogenous pool. MiPrime thus offers an initial step towards the mechanistic modelling of organic amendment impacts on measurable soil carbon fractions and can operate as a new tool for designing effective carbon sequestration strategies and understanding organic amendment impacts.

Plant trait expressions and their trade-offs reflect the responses and long-term ecological adaptation to environmental gradients. However, how such expressions and trade-offs help plants to acclimate to a new environment remains poorly understood, which is a fundamental preset for plants' survival under a global change scenario. By comparing the trait-trait relationships of 4403 tree species from different climatic regions and the variation in trait trade-offs of 746 tree species that have been transplanted to a tropical botanical garden for several decades, our results reveal convergent but consistent alteration in trait-trait relationships of trees transplanted from different climatic regions to a common environment. The convergent trends enhance the capability of tree species in buffering the impacts of climate change through allocating more resources to growth and tolerance. We propose that altered trait-trait relationships may be the key mechanisms that underlie the long-term ecological stability and resilience of tree species.

In response to multiple societal challenges faced in cities, nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining prominence as means to support sustainable and resilient urban planning. However, NbS are being implemented in cities around the globe without comprehensive evidence on their effectiveness in addressing urban challenges. Based on a systematic mapping methodology, we synthesized 547 empirical cases of NbS in 197 cities globally, yielding 799 outcomes encompassing biodiversity, health well-being, and regulating ecosystem services. To structure this evidence we developed an urban NbS classification and categories of urban challenges and outcomes. Effectiveness of NbS was assessed through synthesizing which urban challenges are addressed by NbS, which outcomes are generated, and how these outcomes perform compared to alternative solutions. Our analysis suggests that specific urban challenges were mostly linked to closely related outcomes, but rarely to multiple outcomes. Specifically, forests & trees and general parks were commonly used to enhance health and well-being, while grassland and gardens were applied to mitigate biodiversity loss. Furthermore, urban NbS generally yielded positive effects compared to non-NbS, particularly in relation to microclimate mitigation and mental health outcomes. However, we note a scarcity of evidence on multifunctional NbS, especially on studies that report multiple outcomes related to biodiversity and well-being simultaneously. Our study provides a foundation for further understanding NbS effectiveness and can inform urban planners and policymakers with measurable evidenced-based targets for the application of NbS.