Aim Restoration benchmarks often assume an undisturbed historic range of variability, if they include historic information at all. However, recent research highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of shifting baselines and how to best incorporate past variabilities in modern management. We investigate trends in oyster size through time (ca. 250–2024 ce ) and space (ca. 1000 km 2 ) in the Tampa Bay Estuary to unders...

The horse ( Equus caballus ) varieties from Skyros and Rhodes islands (Greece) in the Aegean archipelago are extremely small, reaching shoulder heights of only about 1 m. Furthermore, the Japanese archipelago is home to eight small, native horse breeds. We investigated the evolutionary morphology and provided a review of historical documentations of these horses of cultural interest in Greece and Japan, thus providing a compar...

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Conservation Program supports the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) in the United States Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. NCRMP conducts standardized observations of biological, climatic, and socioeconomic indicators across American Samoa, Guam, the Main Hawaiian Islands, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, t...

Estimates of age‐specific survival probabilities are needed for age‐structured population models and to inform conservation decisions. However, determining the age of individuals in wildlife populations is often problematic. We present a hidden Markov model for estimating age‐specific survival from capture–recapture or capture–recapture–recovery data when age is unknown and indicators of age, such as size and growth layer coun...

Insect declines and biodiversity loss have attracted much attention in recent years, but lack of comprehensive data, conflicting interests among stakeholders and insufficient policy guidance hinder progress in preserving biodiversity. The project DINA (Diversity of Insects in Nature protected Areas) investigates insect communities in 21 nature reserves in Germany. All selected conservation sites border arable land, with agricu...

In this study, two parthenogenetic events within a family of the whitespotted bambooshark Chiloscyllium plagiosum are reported. A captive female produced multiple parthenogens. Unexpectedly, a single specimen of a total of nine parthenogens displayed external claspers characterizing the male sex in chondrichthyans. Upon dissection, internal sexual organs of this specimen were malformed or absent; however, the presence of clasp...