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Fire dramatically changes the ground layer of savanna vegetation in the short term, but the system is highly resilient, quickly recovering the pre-fire state. Recovery involves different strategies, which we categorized into five functional groups of plant species: grasses, seeders, bloomers, undergrounders and resprouters. Knowledge of these diverse strategies should be used as a tool to assess conservation and restoration status of fire-resilient ecosystems in the cerrado.

Our results indicate that forests growing over shallow water tables—relatively under-studied vegetation that nonetheless occupies one-third of Amazon forests—are remarkably resistant to drought. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that local hydrology and its interactions with climate strongly constrain forest drought effects, and has implications for climate change feedbacks. This work enhances our understanding of integrated drought effects on tropical forest dynamics and highlights the importance of incorporating neglected forest types into both the modelling of forest climate responses and into public decisions about priorities for conservation.

Editor's Choice

Tree planting, along with other strategies to increase tree cover in appropriate locations and contexts, can make a valuable contribution to ensuring the ecological and social well-being of our planet in coming decades, but only if these efforts are considered as one component of multifaceted solutions to complex environmental problems and are carefully planned, implemented and monitored over a sufficiently long time-scale with stakeholder engagement and broader consideration of socio-ecological complexities.

The high variability in biodiversity responses to loss of native riparian vegetation suggests caution in the use of a single riparian width for conservation actions or policy definitions nationwide. The most sensitive bioindicators can be used as early warning signals of abrupt changes in freshwater biodiversity. In practice, maintaining at least 50-m wide riparian reserves on each side of streams would be more effective to protect freshwater biodiversity in Brazil. However, incentives and conservation strategies to protect even wider riparian reserves (~100 m) and also taking into consideration the regional context will promote a greater benefit. This information should be used to set conservation goals and to create complementary mechanisms and policies to protect wider riparian reserves than those currently required by the federal law.

Decisions about which control method to use depend heavily on the invasive plant species' growth forms, the local economic situation where the restoration sites are located and resources available for control. More developed countries tend to use more chemical control, whereas less developed ones use mainly non-chemical methods. Since most of the reviewed studies were performed in countries with very high Human Development Index, we lack information from developing countries, which concentrates global hotspots for biodiversity conservation and global commitments of forest and landscape restoration.

We present target values of visitation rates for some globally important pollinator-dependent crops and provide guidance on why monitoring the number and diversity of pollinators is important, and how this information can be used for decision-making. The implementation of flower monitoring programmes will improve management in many aspects, including enhanced quality and quantity of crop yield and a more limited spillover of managed (often exotic) pollinators from crop areas into native habitats, reducing their many potential negative impacts.

Using the Argentinean Chaco as an example, we demonstrate how combining fine-scale land-use maps with biophysical models provides deep insights into the spatiotemporal patterns of changes in ecosystem services, and their trade-offs with agricultural production. The periodic updating of maps of trade-offs and bundles of change in ecosystem services provides key inputs for the adaptive management of highly dynamic and threatened landscapes, such as those in tropical and subtropical deforestation frontiers.

A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Environmental reviews exhibit a considerable variation in conduct and reporting. This systematic map protocol aims to assess the reliability of restoration evidence syntheses (in terms of objectivity, comprehensiveness, and transparency) by applying the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence Synthesis Assessment Tool (CEESAT), which consists of a set of criteria designed in alignment with environmental systematic review methodology.

Pine invasion reduced native species abundance, plant cover, richness and diversity, with an increase over time since invasion. Species diversity and richness were lower in the managed area than in the area that had not been invaded. Restoration activities are therefore required to increase native species diversity.