Horizon scans identify potential changes, enabling proactive rather than reactive conservation strategies. Here, in a follow up to the 2020 horizon scan, 14 biodiversity professionals from different sectors identify ten emerging issues potentially relevant to biodiversity conservation in South Africa over the next 5–10 years. The issues identified highlight three critical needs: adaptive governance systems, cross-sectoral coll...

Pteropods are marine planktonic snails that are used as bioindicators of ocean acidification due to their thin, aragonitic shells, and ubiquity throughout the world’s oceans; their responses include decreased size, reduced shell thickness, and increased shell dissolution. Shell dissolution has been measured with a variety of metrics involving light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and computed tomography (CT). W...

Aim To identify the broad‐scale oceanic migration routes (‘marine flyways’) used by multiple pelagic, long‐distance migratory seabirds based on a global compilation of tracking data. Location Global. Time Period 1989–2023. Major Taxa Studied Seabirds (Families: Phaethontidae, Hydrobatidae, Diomedeidae, Procellariidae, Laridae and Stercorariidae). Methods We collated a comprehensive global tracking dataset that included the mig...

Biodiversity is critical for maintaining ecosystem function but is threatened by increasing anthropogenic pressures. In the Southern Ocean, a highly biologically productive region containing many endemic species, proactive management is urgently needed to mitigate increasing pressures from fishing, climate change, and tourism. Site‐based conservation is one important tool for managing the negative impacts of human activities o...

Hybridization plays a pivotal role in evolution, influencing local adaptation and speciation. However, it can also reduce biodiversity, which is especially damaging when native and non‐native species meet. Hybridization can threaten native species via competition (with vigorous hybrids), reproductive resource wastage and gene introgression. The latter, in particular, could result in increased fitness in invasive species, decre...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) attacks the corticomotor system, with motor cortex function affected early in disease. Younger females have a lower relative risk of succumbing to ALS than males and older females, implicating a role for female sex hormones in disease progression. However, the mechanisms driving this dimorphic incidence are still largely unknown. We endeavoured to determine if estrogen mitigates disease prog...

The mechanisms that determine patterns of species dispersal are important factors in the production and maintenance of biodiversity. Understanding these mechanisms helps to forecast the responses of species to environmental change. Here, we used a comparative framework and genomewide data obtained through RAD ‐Seq to compare the patterns of connectivity among breeding colonies for five penguin species with shared ancestry, ove...

Summary We sought to test whether stream bacterial communities conform to Rapoport's Rule, a pattern commonly observed for plants and animals whereby taxa exhibit decreased latitudinal range sizes closer to the equator. Using a DNA sequencing approach, we explored the biogeography of biofilm bacterial communities in 204 streams across a ∼1000 km latitudinal gradient. The range sizes of bacterial taxa were strongly correlated w...

The conservation of threatened species must be underpinned by phylogeographic knowledge. This need is epitomized by the freshwater fish Carassius carassius , which is in decline across much of its European range. Restriction site‐associated DNA sequencing ( RAD seq) is increasingly used for such applications; however, RAD seq is expensive, and limitations on sample number must be weighed against the benefit of large numbers of...

Summary We reconstructed the complete 2.4 Mb‐long genome of a previously uncultivated epsilonproteobacterium, C andidatus Sulfuricurvum sp. RIFRC ‐1, via assembly of short‐read shotgun metagenomic data using a complexity reduction approach. Genome‐based comparisons indicate the bacterium is a novel species within the S ulfuricurvum genus, which contains one cultivated representative, S . kujiense . Divergence between the speci...

Sex‐biased dispersal is an almost ubiquitous feature of mammalian life history, but the evolutionary causes behind these patterns still require much clarification. A quarter of a century since the publication of seminal papers describing general patterns of sex‐biased dispersal in both mammals and birds, we review the advances in our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary causes of sex‐biased dispersal, and those in sta...