The scientific motivation behind the call is stark. Climate disruption, extreme weather events, land-use transformation, urban expansion, pollution, biological invasions and over-exploitation of natural resources are jointly reshaping biodiversity across virtually every biome on the planet. Each of these pressures operates on its own spatial and temporal scale, yet their interactions frequently produce effects that no single driver could generate alone. A drought superimposed on a fragmented landscape, for example, can push a forest community past a threshold from which natural recovery is slow, incomplete or impossible. The journal’s editors emphasize that ongoing biodiversity loss does not merely reduce species counts; it erodes the underlying machinery of ecosystems, diminishing productivity, stability, multifunctionality, resistance to disturbance, adaptive capacity and the potential for recovery after shocks. In practical terms, this means that ecosystems are losing the very properties that allow them to buffer human societies against climate extremes, safeguard water and soil resources, and sustain the flow of ecosystem services on which economies depend.

Contemporary research in this field is undergoing a methodological shift that the special issue is designed to capture. For decades, much of ecology advanced through reductionist studies that isolated a single driver and a single species, an approach that yielded clean results but limited predictive power in the real world. The emerging paradigm instead embraces multiple stressors acting simultaneously, multi-trophic interaction networks that link plants, herbivores, predators, decomposers and microbes, cross-scale feedback loops connecting local processes to regional and global dynamics, and the identification of ecological tipping points where gradual change gives way to abrupt, sometimes irreversible reorganization. Tipping-point science has become particularly prominent as researchers attempt to define early-warning indicators, such as slowing recovery rates and increasing spatial autocorrelation in monitoring data, that could signal an approaching threshold before collapse becomes apparent. The special issue explicitly invites work on stability metrics, threshold identification and resilience indicators, reflecting a recognition that anticipating regime shifts is now as important as documenting them after the fact.

Equally significant is the evolution of restoration ecology itself. The editors note that restoration practice has moved beyond local structural reconstruction, the planting of trees or the recontouring of terrain, toward a more ambitious framework centered on ecological integrity, recovery trajectories, climate adaptation and long-term durability. Modern restoration must also confront trade-offs among competing objectives: maximizing biodiversity, sequestering carbon for climate mitigation, and sustaining ecosystem services for local communities do not always align, and honest accounting of these tensions is essential for credible policy. The call for papers welcomes studies of passive restoration, in which degraded land is simply released from disturbance and allowed to recover naturally; assisted restoration, which involves targeted interventions such as removing invasive species or reintroducing key functional groups; and active restoration, which entails comprehensive engineering of community composition and ecosystem processes. Comparative evaluations of these strategies, particularly across different degradation severities and climate contexts, remain scarce, and the editors appear keen to fill that gap.

One of the most technically forward-looking elements of the call concerns the soil microbiome. Below-ground communities of bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms govern nutrient cycling, carbon storage, plant health and biogeochemical feedbacks, yet they are routinely overlooked in restoration monitoring. Evidence is accumulating that above-ground recovery can mask persistent below-ground dysfunction, and that inoculation with native soil communities or the re-establishment of mycorrhizal networks can accelerate plant community reassembly. By explicitly listing soil-microbiome restoration and biogeochemical feedback among accepted topics, the special issue is signaling that subterranean ecology has moved from a specialist interest to a central pillar of resilience science. Related topics include degradation diagnostics and the establishment of recovery baselines, a deceptively difficult problem because degraded systems often lack intact reference sites, forcing ecologists to reconstruct historical baselines from paleoecological archives, historical surveys and modeling.

The methodological toolkit available to ecologists has expanded dramatically, and the special issue invites contributions that harness it. Remote sensing now delivers repeated, wall-to-wall observations of vegetation structure, phenology and productivity at resolutions fine enough to track individual restoration plots. Environmental DNA, or eDNA, allows researchers to inventory entire communities, from soil fungi to aquatic invertebrates, from trace genetic material in water or soil samples, dramatically reducing the labor of biodiversity monitoring. Artificial-intelligence workflows are being applied to classify satellite imagery, detect anomalies in long-term datasets, predict species responses to novel climates and optimize the spatial design of restoration networks. The call explicitly welcomes climate-smart restoration evaluation and monitoring tools built on these technologies, alongside adaptive governance frameworks that treat management as an iterative learning process rather than a one-time intervention. Adaptive governance, which integrates monitoring results into revised policies and engages stakeholders across jurisdictions, is increasingly viewed as indispensable because ecological boundaries rarely coincide with administrative ones.

The guest editors framed the intellectual core of the issue in a statement accompanying the announcement: We seek contributions that advance our capacity to predict, interpret and foster ecosystem resilience amid accelerating anthropogenic pressures, supporting evidence-based restoration and adaptive management worldwide. That framing places causal inference at the center. Clarifying the links connecting biodiversity, ecosystem responses, stability and resilience is described as critical for global-change risk assessment, biodiversity conservation, degraded-land restoration, deployment of nature-based solutions and adaptive ecosystem management. Nature-based solutions, which range from mangrove restoration for coastal protection to urban green infrastructure for heat mitigation, depend entirely on the assumption that restored ecosystems will function reliably under future conditions, an assumption that current evidence supports only patchily. Rigorous, long-term, mechanistic studies are needed to validate that assumption, and the special issue is positioned as a venue for exactly such work.

The scope of acceptable contributions is deliberately broad, spanning fundamental theory, technical innovation, long-term monitoring datasets, integrated assessments and real-world restoration case studies that bridge biodiversity conservation, ecosystem management and restoration ecology. Among the specific themes listed are multi-dimensional biodiversity-ecosystem-function relationships; above-ground-below-ground multitrophic networks; combined impacts of multiple global-change stressors; landscape connectivity and cross-scale ecosystem responses; and community reassembly and ecological-process recovery. Long-term monitoring data deserve particular emphasis: many resilience phenomena, such as legacy effects of drought or the slow reorganization of soil communities, unfold over decades and can only be detected through sustained observation. Journals that actively solicit such datasets, and that waive financial barriers to publication, play a quiet but consequential role in preserving the observational infrastructure of ecology.

Practical details of the call are straightforward. All submissions must comply with the journal’s author instructions, and authors must identify the special issue in the submission system by answering the dropdown question asking whether the submission is for a special issue. Article processing charges are fully waived for the issue, removing a common obstacle for research groups in biodiversity-rich but funding-limited regions, which are often precisely the places where restoration evidence is most urgently needed. Biological Diversity, which carries ISSN 2994-4139, is indexed in the Chemical Abstracts Service and the Directory of Open Access Journals and publishes original research, reviews, commentaries and short communications across disciplines including botany, zoology, microbiology, taxonomy, phylogenetics, genomics, ecology, climatology, economics and policy theory. With a deadline of 31 August 2027, the editors have allowed an unusually generous window, a choice that may reflect the time required to assemble multi-year datasets and completed restoration case studies. For a field racing to understand whether nature can keep pace with global change, the special issue represents both a scientific agenda and an invitation: the evidence gathered under its banner could shape how ecosystems are managed, restored and defended for decades to come.

Subject of Research: A special journal issue on biodiversity, ecosystem resilience and ecological restoration under global change

Article Title: Biological Diversity launches special issue on resilient nature: ecosystem responses and ecological restoration under global change

Article References: Biological Diversity launches special issue on resilient nature: ecosystem responses and ecological restoration under global change. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, ecological restoration, global change, tipping points, nature-based solutions, soil microbiome, adaptive management, ecosystem services, remote sensing, eDNA, South China Botanical Garden