The findings carry weight well beyond the two bat species themselves. Frugivorous phyllostomid bats are keystone agents of forest regeneration, moving seeds across fragmented landscapes, pollinating chiropterophilous plants, redistributing nutrients through guano deposits, and maintaining genetic connectivity among plant populations. If V. caraccioli contracts across the Amazon, the study’s authors warn, the disruption could ripple through seed-dispersal networks and compromise the natural regeneration of one of the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Both species are currently listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, but the researchers argue that this label, based largely on broad geographic ranges, may mask vulnerabilities that only become visible when climate data are brought into the picture.

The genus Vampyrodes has long been a taxonomic puzzle. Originally proposed as a subgenus in 1889 and later treated as a single species with two subspecies, it was only in 2011 that phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial cytochrome b gene sequences, combined with a comprehensive review of cranial morphology, confirmed that V. major and V. caraccioli are distinct species. V. major occupies Central America from southern Mexico into Colombia, while V. caraccioli ranges across northern and eastern South America, dominating in the Amazon basin, the Andean foothills, and tropical southern Brazil. Because these bats depend on intact forest for both food and roosting sites, they have traditionally been treated as bioindicators of well-preserved forest, although recent records from restoring secondary vegetation hint that their tolerance may be broader than once assumed.

To build their models, the researchers compiled 190 verified occurrence records, 77 for V. major and 113 for V. caraccioli, drawn from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the published literature, deliberately excluding citizen-science observations because the cryptic morphology of these bats raises the risk of misidentification in non-vouchered records. The team filtered the data to remove duplicates and non-georeferenced points, then thinned the records spatially to a minimum separation of ten kilometers to reduce autocorrelation. Fifteen bioclimatic variables from the WorldClim 2.1 database were screened, with four excluded due to geographic discontinuities, and a Spearman correlation threshold of 0.75 narrowed the predictor set to six variables capturing annual mean temperature, temperature seasonality, temperature annual range, warmest-quarter temperature, annual precipitation, and wettest-month precipitation.

The modeling itself used the Maxent algorithm, implemented through the Wallace platform in R, with 120 candidate parameter combinations tested per species. The final model for V. major relied on linear features with a regularization multiplier of one, while V. caraccioli required a more complex linear-quadratic-hinge configuration with a multiplier of three. Model selection followed established statistical criteria, requiring omission rates below five percent and minimizing the corrected Akaike information criterion. Variable importance outputs revealed telling differences: temperature annual range dominated the V. major model at 67.9 percent permutation importance, whereas V. caraccioli’s suitability hinged primarily on annual precipitation at 37.2 percent, followed by temperature annual range and annual mean temperature. In other words, the Central American species is chiefly constrained by thermal variability, while its Amazonian relative is governed by moisture availability.

Niche comparisons in multivariate environmental space showed that the two species share broad climatic ground but are not identical. The first two principal components explained 75.7 percent of environmental variance, and the observed overlap was moderate, with Schoener’s D at 0.398 and the Hellinger-based I at 0.575. Randomization tests found no evidence that similarity exceeded what background environments would predict, and equivalency could not be strictly rejected, but the niche centroids were measurably displaced and the non-overlapping components were asymmetric. The authors interpret this pattern as partial niche conservatism: a shared evolutionary climatic background, consistent with the genus’s recent crown age of roughly two million years, superimposed with early differentiation along axes of temperature seasonality and dry-season moisture. A companion study published in 2026 reached a similar conclusion, linking seasonal climatic gradients to morphological divergence between the two species.

The future projections are where the story turns stark. The team ran an ensemble of five CMIP6 general circulation models under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for the period 2041 to 2060: SSP1-2.6, a sustainability-oriented scenario limiting warming to below two degrees, and SSP5-8.5, a fossil-fuel-intensive pathway with substantially higher warming. For V. major, roughly 98 percent of currently suitable area remained stable under both scenarios, with gains and losses each staying below two percent. V. caraccioli told a different story: suitable area shrank by about 44 percent under the low-emission scenario and 51 percent under the high-emission scenario, with the losses concentrated across the Amazon basin in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname. Multivariate environmental similarity surfaces confirmed that most projections fell within the range of training conditions, lending credibility to the forecasts, though the authors caution that extrapolation risk is not uniform across Amazonia.

The protected-area analysis added a sobering dimension. Under current conditions, about 25.5 percent of V. caraccioli’s climatically suitable habitat, roughly 91,217 square kilometers, falls within protected areas, mostly in the Amazon. By mid-century, that figure collapses: protected suitable area drops to about 48,517 square kilometers under SSP1-2.6 and 39,795 square kilometers under SSP5-8.5, meaning more than 46 percent of the species’ current protected habitat could lose its climatic suitability. V. major, by contrast, holds steady, with around 20.5 percent of its suitable area within protected zones across all scenarios. The message is clear: existing reserves, however crucial, may be insufficient to safeguard V. caraccioli if climate and land-use changes continue unabated, and static protected-area networks cannot track dynamically shifting climates.

The authors are careful to note the limitations of their approach. Macroclimatic niche models capture regional suitability but miss fine-scale determinants such as roost microclimates, cave and cavity buffering, riparian corridors, and topography-driven microrefugia that can decouple local conditions from broad climate layers. Occurrence records for V. caraccioli also remain sparse across large portions of Amazonia, meaning the projected contractions could be conservative if suitable climates exist in poorly sampled subregions. Bats’ strong attachment to home ranges and roosts may further limit their ability to track shifting suitability through dispersal, since long-distance migration is restricted to a subset of species. The team recommends pairing multi-season fieldwork on roost and foraging ecology with population genomics to identify locally adapted, climate-resilient populations, an approach shown in other systems to reduce predicted range losses.

The conservation prescriptions that emerge from the study are deliberately species-specific. For V. caraccioli, the priorities are strengthening protected-area networks, restoring degraded habitats, and designing ecological corridors that connect humid forest zones across the Amazon, allowing bats to move toward microclimatic refugia while preserving the seed-dispersal services on which forest regeneration depends. For V. major, climatic stability should not be mistaken for invulnerability: ongoing deforestation and agricultural expansion across Central America continue to fragment habitats and erode connectivity, so corridor networks and intact-forest preservation remain urgent there as well. Because suitable areas and potential refugia span national borders, the authors argue that coordinated transboundary planning will be essential. In a warming world where the Amazon has just recorded unprecedented drought and warmth, the fate of these unassuming seed dispersers may serve as an early warning for the mutualistic webs that hold tropical forests together.

Subject of Research: Climate-driven habitat suitability and conservation of Vampyrodes fruit bats in the Neotropics

Article Title: Habitat characterization and climate-driven niche shifts of Vampyrodes bats reveal contrasting futures for V. major and V. caraccioli

Article References: Hernández-Rodríguez, S., Martínez-Borrego, D., Jácome-Flores, M., & Cruz, D. D. (2026). Habitat characterization and climate-driven niche shifts of Vampyrodes bats reveal contrasting futures for V. major and V. caraccioli. Web Ecology, 26(2), 157-173. https://doi.org/10.5194/we-26-157-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/we-26-157-2026

Keywords: Vampyrodes, fruit bats, ecological niche modeling, climate change, seed dispersal, Amazon basin, Maxent, protected areas, Neotropics, habitat loss, SSP scenarios, conservation corridors

The research, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, examined 116 free-ranging adult tortoises captured across 22 localities spanning roughly 2,600 square kilometers of coastal mountains between the provinces of Almería and Murcia. This region, a recognized biodiversity hotspot that has endured centuries of human intervention, presents a mosaic of land uses: Mediterranean shrubland still covers about 53 percent of the sampled area, traditional dryland crops account for 24 percent, intensified agriculture 10 percent, pine plantations 7 percent, and unproductive land such as urban zones and infrastructure the remaining 6 percent. The team searched each one-square-kilometer site for at least seven and a half hours with three searchers, capturing, marking, and measuring every tortoise they encountered.

Each animal was sexed, aged from the growth rings of its carapace, and measured for weight, height, plastron width, and carapace length. A growth rate score was then calculated using the von Bertalanffy model, a mathematical framework that assumes growth declines with age and reconstructs an individual’s growth trajectory from birth to the moment of capture. Freshly collected fecal samples were kept cool for 48 hours before adult nematodes were extracted, preserved in ethanol, cleared in Amann’s lactophenol, and identified to species level using established taxonomic keys. The result was an unusually complete picture of the nematode communities inhabiting wild tortoises, a topic that had previously been studied almost exclusively in captive animals, where oxyurid infections can become pathogenic and even life threatening.

The scale of infestation was striking: 68 percent of all sampled tortoises carried nematodes, with 43 of 66 females and 34 of 50 males infected. Individual worm counts ranged from zero to a remarkable 4,901 nematodes in a single female and up to 3,368 in a male. Yet despite these enormous loads, the mean infestation intensity did not differ significantly between the sexes, averaging about 183 worms per infected female and 130 per infected male. In total, the researchers identified 15 nematode species, all belonging to the order Oxyurida and the family Pharyngodonidae, the pinworms characteristic of herbivorous reptiles.

The critical discovery emerged when the researchers linked infestation to body traits and growth. For males, higher nematode loads were significantly associated with lower body weight and shorter carapace length, and growth rates told an even more nuanced story: at low infestation levels, males actually grew faster than females, but as worm burdens climbed, male growth slowed dramatically while female growth remained unaffected. Statistical models confirmed that the effect of infestation on growth depended on sex, and a principal components analysis, which explained 78.3 percent of the variation in the data, cleanly separated males from females, with growth rate and nematode infestation emerging as the variables contributing most to the divergence between the sexes.

Why would males suffer while females do not? The authors point to a familiar pattern in vertebrate biology: across birds and mammals, mature males typically carry heavier parasite loads and suffer greater consequences, a phenomenon attributed in part to the immunosuppressive effects of testosterone and the physiological stress of mating displays. In tortoises, the behavioral differences between the sexes may be equally important. Males roam over larger distances in search of mates, potentially increasing their exposure to infective stages of the worms, which are transmitted through orofecal routes, geophagy, and possibly sexual contact. Females, which are considerably larger and heavier than males, move within patches offering high-quality food and suitable nesting sites, and their greater food intake may simply accommodate the worms without measurable cost. The researchers also caution that causality could run in reverse: nematode communities might depend on the host’s developmental stage rather than shaping it, and they call for future work to disentangle these mechanisms.

The landscape itself added another layer to the story. Growth rates were positively associated with the proportion of unproductive, vegetation-free land in a tortoise’s home range, regardless of sex, while nematode infestation declined as unproductive land increased. This counterintuitive finding suggests that open, degraded terrain, harsh as it appears, may actually benefit tortoises by allowing more effective thermoregulation. Reptiles depend on external heat sources to optimize digestion, and with no shrub cover to shade the ground, tortoises in barren areas may digest more efficiently and allocate more resources to growth rather than immune defense. Moreover, bare ground lacking vegetation, litter, and exposed soil offers fewer refuges for the free-living stages of nematodes, which spend part of their life cycles in the environment. Previous work by the same team had shown that the tortoise-nematode relationship flips from mutualistic in preserved habitats to negative in disturbed ones, but the new study is the first to show that these effects are filtered through sex.

The nematode communities themselves differed subtly between the sexes. Using coverage-based rarefaction methods that standardize diversity estimates regardless of sample size, the researchers found that species richness, the effective number of equally common species, and the effective number of dominant species were all significantly higher in females than in males, and female worm communities were slightly more even in their relative abundances. Compositional dissimilarity between the sexes, however, was very low at just 6 percent, with no species replacement detected at all; the same suite of worms infects both sexes, and only a single female harbored a unique species, Thaparia thapari, previously recorded only in captive tortoises. This suggests that female hindguts can sustain a richer, more balanced community of endosymbionts, possibly because the larger female gut provides more resources, or because competition among worm species plays out differently under the two sexes’ distinct physiological conditions.

Perhaps the most innovative part of the analysis was the construction of individual-based ecological networks, treating each tortoise as a node connected to the nematode species it carries. Both male and female networks were significantly nested, meaning that worms infecting few tortoises tended to be subsets of the worms found in heavily infected hosts, a structure that can facilitate coinfections spreading through the population. Female networks showed greater nestedness and higher interaction diversity than male networks, hinting that they may be more stable. Two species, Tachygonetria dentata and Tachygonetria longicollis, emerged as core species in both sexes, and the authors speculate that these abundant worms may even play a mutualistic role, contributing nitrogenous excretions that enhance their host’s digestion of tough plant matter.

For a species listed as threatened across its entire Mediterranean range, these findings carry real conservation weight. Negative effects of parasites on individual fitness are most concerning for vulnerable chelonians, and habitat degradation could exacerbate parasite impacts on wildlife communities. The study’s central message is that sex cannot be ignored: males and females of the same species, living in the same landscapes and carrying similar worm burdens, can experience fundamentally different biological outcomes. Conservation management of spur-thighed tortoises, and likely of other sexually dimorphic reptiles, will need to account for sex-specific susceptibility to parasites and for the quality of the habitats that sustain not just the animals themselves, but the intricate communities of symbionts they carry.

Subject of Research: Sex-biased interactions between spur-thighed tortoises and their hindgut nematode communities in Mediterranean landscapes

Article Title: Sex‐Biased Interactions Between Spur‐Thighed Tortoises (Testudo graeca) and Hindgut Nematodes

Article References: Benítez‐Malvido, J., Graciá, E., Giménez, A., Ávila‐Eulogio, I., Méndez, D. M., Rodríguez‐Caro, R. C., Ybáñez, R. R.-D., & Traveset, A. (2026). Sex‐Biased Interactions Between Spur‐Thighed Tortoises ( Testudo graeca ) and Hindgut Nematodes. Ecology and Evolution, 16(10), Article e74377. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74377

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74377

Keywords: spur-thighed tortoise, Testudo graeca, nematodes, parasitology, sex-biased parasitism, host-parasite interactions, ecological networks, habitat loss, Mediterranean shrubland, growth rates, conservation, oxyurid pinworms

The research team, led by Bryan Joel S. Mariano and Denise Margaret S. Matias of Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, together with colleagues from the Philippines and Europe, approached the problem through an unusual analytical lens. Rather than treating pangolin decline as a purely biological issue, they applied the Social-Ecological Systems framework originally developed by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and refined with Michael McGinnis in 2014. This framework dissects conservation problems into four interacting subsystems: the resource system, meaning the forest ecosystems where pangolins live; the resource units, meaning the pangolins themselves; the governance systems, meaning the institutions and laws regulating wildlife use; and the actors, meaning everyone from Indigenous hunters to smugglers and enforcement officers. By mapping existing research onto these subsystems, the team could reveal not just what is known about the species, but where the critical blind spots lie.

The methodology behind the review was rigorous. The researchers searched Web of Science and Google Scholar using the terms “Philippine pangolin” and “Manis culionensis,” generating 369 articles published between 1965 and July 2024. After two rounds of screening that removed non-English or non-Filipino publications, duplicates, and papers without substantive focus on the species, only 36 articles remained, and just 16 papers made the final analytical cut, supplemented by three additional papers found through a broader Google search. That tiny number tells its own story. A previous review by Heighton and Gaubert had already identified the Philippine pangolin as the most understudied of all eight extant pangolin species, and this new analysis confirms it. The 16 publications spanned 2005 to 2023, with human geography dominating the disciplinary mix at six papers, followed by zoology and ecology with three each, anthropology with two, and single papers each from political science and psychology.

The trafficking statistics buried in the reviewed literature are staggering. Between 2000 and 2017, authorities recorded 39 seizure incidents representing an estimated 740 Philippine pangolins. Then the trade exploded: in just 2018 and 2019, officials seized 2,008 kilograms of pangolin scales, equivalent to roughly 6,820 animals, plus 74 live or dead individuals. The sharp rise in seizures and retrievals outside the species’ home range coincided with an influx of foreign nationals involved in the physical and online gambling industry in the Philippines. Projections cited in the review suggest the species could lose more than 80 percent of its population within two decades due to overexploitation and habitat destruction. Because poaching is clandestine, the true scale can never be fully measured, but seizure data offers the clearest window into trafficking dynamics, and that window shows a market accelerating in both volume and price.

The economics of the trade reveal a chilling escalation. In 2006, hunters received about 1.50 US dollars per kilogram of pangolin. By 2012, pangolin scales fetched around 71 dollars per kilogram, and between 2011 and 2019 the mean price paid from harvester to intermediary reached 178 dollars per kilogram. By 2022, harvesters were receiving 59 dollars per kilogram for live pangolins. The review also mapped the intricate supply chains that move animals from Palawan’s forests to distant markets. At the base are harvesters, hunters, and collectors, often local community members or non-local specialists; above them sit intermediaries including logisticians, specialist smugglers, vendors, transporters, and buyers; and at the top, exporters and distributors feeding local restaurants and international trade networks. Boats are the most common transport mode, followed by fishing vessels, motorcycles, shuttle vans, jeepneys, and planes, exploiting Palawan’s archipelagic geography to conceal smuggling routes toward Metro Manila and, ultimately, international destinations.

Ecologically, the reviewed studies sketch a species intimately tied to its forest home. Philippine pangolins occupy primary and secondary lowland forests, riverine areas, mangrove edges, agricultural ecosystems, and even cultivated plantations. They show a marked affinity for fig trees, which provide shelter while their fruits attract the ants that form the pangolin’s primary diet. Documented prey includes red ants of the species Odontomachus infandus, black ants of the genus Diacamama, and black termites of the genus Nasutitermes. Camera traps have even recorded pangolins alongside domesticated dogs, which unfortunately also serve as hunting companions for poachers. Yet despite these behavioral insights, the review found a glaring absence: no comprehensive quantitative population study of the species exists. Anecdotal accounts from hunters and local communities consistently report substantial declines in recent decades, but without baseline data, conservation planning proceeds largely in the dark.

The governance picture is equally paradoxical. The Philippine pangolin has been listed under CITES since 1995, received a zero export quota for commercial purposes in 2000, and was moved to CITES Appendix I, prohibiting international trade of wild-caught specimens, in 2017. Domestically, the species is protected under the Strategic Environmental Plan for Palawan and the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act of 2001, which prohibits killing, injuring, trading, hunting, possessing, and transporting wildlife without permits. The IUCN lists it as critically endangered, as does the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development, though the national environment department’s 2019 Red List assessed it as only endangered, an inconsistency that itself complicates enforcement. The review found that legal frameworks and strategies are formally in place, yet poaching persists, hampered by weak enforcement, low conviction rates, limited technical capacity among wildlife officers, and an inability to scientifically identify confiscated specimens for prosecution.

One of the review’s most provocative findings concerns Indigenous Peoples. Only three of the 16 studies explicitly involved Palaw’an and Tagbanua communities as research participants, even though these communities have long valued the pangolin for subsistence, folk medicine, and ritual. Traditional uses documented in the literature include treatments for asthma, stomach aches, joint and body pain, skin diseases, and prostate conditions, alongside cultural practices such as burning scales for protection against bad spirits and drinking pangolin blood for rejuvenation. Here the law creates a genuine tension: the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997 promotes customary sustainable use of natural resources, but because the pangolin is classified as threatened, even customary use is now prohibited under a blanket hunting ban. The authors argue this legal ambivalence, mirrored in cases from South Africa to Australia, demands deeper anthrozoological research and fresh frameworks such as socioecological harm reduction and multispecies justice to navigate the collision between conservation law and cultural rights.

The review’s ultimate call is for interdisciplinary, multistakeholder knowledge co-production. Poverty in Palawan has risen, with the lower poverty limit climbing from 9.5 percent in 2018 to 14.2 percent in 2023, pushing some residents toward poaching as a supplementary income alongside farming, charcoal-making, and fishing. The authors caution that simply offering alternative livelihoods can backfire, adding income sources rather than replacing illegal hunting. They also highlight promising collaborations, including a university-government wildlife forensics partnership, NGO-led outreach such as the Zoological Society of London’s Balik Balikon program, and the Palawan Pangolin Conservation Strategy 2018-2043 developed by government agencies, the IUCN Pangolin Specialist Group, and conservation organizations. What emerges is a species whose fate depends less on any single intervention than on untangling the feedback loops connecting forests, markets, laws, and livelihoods, before the world’s most trafficked mammal loses one of its last strongholds.

Subject of Research: Social-ecological dimensions of Philippine pangolin conservation in Palawan

Article Title: Examining the social-ecological dimensions of Philippine pangolin (Manis culionensis) conservation

Article References: Mariano, B. J. S., Sy, E. Y., Pabico, L. A., Bacani-Tabi, N., Loor, C. G., & Matias, D. M. S. (2025). Examining the social-ecological dimensions of Philippine pangolin (Manis culionensis) conservation. Discover Conservation, 2(1), Article 46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-025-00069-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-025-00069-5

Keywords: Philippine pangolin, Manis culionensis, Palawan, wildlife trafficking, social-ecological systems, CITES, Indigenous Peoples, conservation policy, illegal wildlife trade, habitat loss, systematic review, biodiversity

The scale of the global context makes the Australian gap especially concerning. Long-term monitoring in Germany recorded a 76 percent decline in flying insects over 27 years, while studies in Puerto Rico documented losses of 75 to 98 percent across 35 years. A recent global analysis suggests the number of bee species recorded has fallen by roughly a quarter since the 1990s, a figure that may partly reflect changes in reporting but could signal a genuine erosion of bee diversity. Australia, with few long-term insect datasets, cannot currently say whether similar declines are underway among its own bees. Only three native species hold formal federal threatened listings under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, and the review argues the true number warranting protection is far higher.

The plight of already-listed species illustrates how precarious life can be for specialised bees in a modified landscape. Leioproctus douglasiellus survives in just three locations within the Perth metropolitan area, occupying a mere 0.2 square kilometres and visiting only two plant species, both of which are themselves listed as priority flora. Neopasiphae simplicior has been found at five sites, but recent surveys failed to detect it at two of them. Hesperocolletes douglasi was presumed extinct until a single specimen surfaced in 2015 in a woodland remnant of Western Australia’s Southwest Floristic Region; despite subsequent searching, no further individuals have been found. Perhaps most striking is Pharohylaeus lactiferus, rediscovered after more than a century without a record, which still lacks any formal conservation listing despite meeting the relevant criteria.

Fire has emerged as a particularly acute threat. Modelling of the catastrophic 2019 and 2020 bushfires found that nine native bee species qualified for listing as Vulnerable and two as Endangered based on habitat loss alone, while two-thirds of Australia’s bee species could not be assessed at all because there were insufficient collection records. The large carpenter bee Xylocopa aerata, which vanished from mainland South Australia and Victoria through a combination of land clearing and burning, now persists only on Kangaroo Island, around Sydney and along the Great Dividing Range. Conservationists had installed artificial nesting stalks on Kangaroo Island after 2007 fires, enabling nearly 300 females to reproduce, but the January 2020 blaze destroyed more than 150 of these nests and left only about 5 percent of the island’s habitat intact.

The review also weighs the contested role of the introduced European honeybee, which dominates many Australian bee assemblages. Evidence for competitive harm is mixed but mounting: hive introductions have reduced native bee flower visits, honeybee presence lowered the fecundity of the native bee Hylaeus alcyoneus, and competition can skew offspring sex ratios toward males. Recent work shows the impact depends on context, with negative associations strongest where floral resources are abundant, niche overlap high and habitats are residential gardens, and where vulnerable species are floral specialists or larger-bodied bees. Honeybees may also transfer pathogens to native species through shared flowers, a concern sharpened by the recent arrival of the Varroa destructor mite, whose establishment could cost Australian crop pollination between 0.63 and 1.31 billion dollars over three decades.

Urbanisation presents a genuinely two-sided picture. On the country’s east coast, results diverge: native bees in Melbourne preferred less urbanised sites, yet bee hotels in Sydney were occupied regardless of urbanisation intensity, and stingless bees in Queensland actually foraged more successfully in city environments. Western Australian studies tell a more consistent story of harm, with remnant bushland supporting richer, more specialised assemblages than residential gardens. Generalist species, including the honeybee and certain native Amegilla, Exoneura and Lasioglossum, dominate gardens, while specialist Euryglossinae, Leioproctus and Megachile cling to bushland remnants. Because over half of Australia’s bee species are pollen specialists, or oligolectic, relying on narrow lineages of native plants, introduced flora that displaces native vegetation can strip away the very resources these bees cannot substitute.

Pesticides add another layer of risk that is poorly quantified locally. Neonicotinoids, among the most widely used insecticides worldwide, impair learning, navigation and foraging in honeybees and bumblebees, reduce wild bee density and nesting, and cut reproductive output in solitary species. Yet nearly all risk assessments rest on the eusocial honeybee, whose biology differs radically from the solitary lifestyle that characterises most of the world’s 20,000 bee species, including the vast majority of Australia’s fauna. The review notes with concern that Australia continues to deploy neonicotinoids such as imidacloprid that other countries have restricted or banned over pollinator risks, while dedicated studies on native Australian bees remain scarce.

Not every anthropogenic influence is negative, and the review documents surprising winners. The wide-ranging Ceratina australensis is projected to expand under climate change. Leioproctus plumosus nests readily in suburban gardens, Hylaeus ruficeps kalamundae has adapted to nesting in human materials at densities never seen in nature, and the stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria forages more successfully in urban environments than in macadamia plantations or natural vegetation. Freshly burnt landscapes can temporarily boost bee abundance and species richness by exposing the bare ground that most Australian bees, roughly 60 to 83 percent of species, need for nesting burrows. These gains, however, accrue mainly to generalists, and the authors caution that Australia’s long co-evolutionary history between plants and pollinators means Northern Hemisphere management prescriptions, such as soil nutrient enrichment, can backfire by favouring invasive weeds.

The economic and cultural stakes are substantial. Wild pollinators contribute an estimated 20 to 25 million Australian dollars annually to dryland lucerne seed production, and native species show genuine promise as managed crop pollinators: nine blue-banded bees, Amegilla chlorocyanea, in a caged trial of 100 plants outperformed a nucleus hive of 500 honeybee workers, and native species capable of buzz pollination, including Xylocopa, Amegilla and Lipotriches, are well suited to tomatoes and similar crops. Stingless bees already pollinate macadamias, blueberries, raspberries and lychees. Beyond agriculture, sugarbag bees have held deep significance for First Nations peoples for more than 65,000 years, with beeswax used in rock art for at least four millennia and honey and wax woven into diet, medicine, ceremony and toolmaking, knowledge that the review describes as amounting to a semi-domestication long before European arrival.

The authors’ roadmap is unambiguous. They call for urgent investment in taxonomy, with an estimated 300 to 500 species still undescribed and synonymisation rates revealing shaky foundations; for long-term monitoring using methods matched to species, since pan and vane traps miss many taxa while targeted netting captures both abundance and foraging data; for behavioural research on the learning, memory and decision-making that underpin bees’ capacity to adapt; and for expanded citizen science, building on initiatives such as the Wild Pollinator Count, which logged more than 20,000 insect observations in a single week in 2020. Distribution modelling can anticipate where threats will bite hardest before they become unmanageable. With Australia holding the worst mammal extinction record of any country over the past two centuries, the review warns that bees may be following a similar trajectory unseen, and that the window for building the knowledge base needed to prevent it is closing fast.

Subject of Research: Conservation of Australian native bees under environmental and anthropogenic change

Article Title: The Future of Native Bees in Australia Under Environmental and Anthropogenic Change

Article References: Howard, S. R., & Prendergast, K. S. (2026). The Future of Native Bees in Australia Under Environmental and Anthropogenic Change. Ecology and Evolution, 16(10), Article e74363. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74363

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74363

Keywords: native bees, Australia, pollinators, biodiversity, habitat loss, climate change, bushfires, European honeybee, pesticides, urbanisation, stingless bees, conservation

The research team, led by scientists affiliated with Hawassa University and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, compiled more than 6,800 occurrence records for Loxodonta africana from field surveys in Ethiopian national parks, published literature, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. After removing duplicate and spatially redundant records, 4,298 verified presence points remained, spanning eight East African countries: Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. The authors restricted the dataset to records documented since the 1990s to avoid contaminating the models with historical distributions that no longer reflect where elephants actually live.

To translate those sightings into a predictive map, the researchers built an ensemble species distribution model that combined seven algorithms: three regression-based methods, namely generalized linear models, generalized additive models, and multivariate adaptive regression splines, and four machine-learning approaches, including boosted regression trees, maximum entropy, random forests, and support vector machines. Each algorithm was trained on 70 percent of the occurrence data and validated on the remaining 30 percent using a ten-fold subsampling scheme, with 10,000 background points generated across the study area to represent pseudo-absences. The final ensemble prediction was produced by averaging the individual model outputs, weighting each by its true skill statistic, a standard technique for reducing the uncertainty inherent in any single algorithm.

The environmental backbone of the models came from twenty predictor variables: nineteen bioclimatic layers drawn from the WorldClim 2.1 database at roughly one-kilometer resolution, plus a human footprint index that quantifies cumulative pressure from roads, settlements, agriculture, and infrastructure. Because many climate variables are strongly correlated with one another, the team screened them for multicollinearity, retaining only predictors with pairwise correlations below 0.7 and variance inflation factors under 5. Ten variables survived the filtering. Future projections relied on the HadGEM3-GC global circulation model from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6, run under two shared socioeconomic pathways: SSP2-4.5, an intermediate emissions scenario, and SSP5-8.5, a very high emissions pathway in which atmospheric carbon dioxide roughly triples by 2100.

The models performed exceptionally well. The average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve reached 0.94, with random forests and support vector machines delivering the strongest individual results, and the machine-learning algorithms significantly outperformed the regression-based approaches. Sensitivity and specificity values of 0.91 and 0.86 respectively indicated that the models were both reliable at identifying where elephants can live and where they cannot. Importantly, the predicted current suitable habitat of approximately 887,000 square kilometers under the weighted-mean threshold closely matched the species’ extant range of about 889,000 square kilometers delineated by the IUCN, lending the projections considerable credibility.

Which environmental factors mattered most? Not the human footprint, surprisingly. At the broad regional scale of the analysis, the dominant drivers of elephant habitat suitability were climatic: precipitation of the warmest quarter, isothermality, the mean temperature of the driest quarter, and precipitation of the driest month. These variables govern water availability, forage productivity, and thermal stress tolerance, all of which directly shape elephant distribution, migration corridors, and survival. The authors note that while climate determines the overall pattern of suitable habitat across East Africa, human pressures such as agricultural expansion, roads, and poaching remain critical local threats that fragment landscapes and squeeze the corridors elephants need to move between resource patches.

The future projections are where the study turns alarming. Under the intermediate SSP2-4.5 scenario, mean suitable habitat is projected to decline by 51.9 percent by 2050 and 52.6 percent by 2070 compared with the current average of roughly 821,000 square kilometers. Under the worst-case combinations, losses reach as high as 71.3 percent by 2050 and 73 percent by 2070, depending on the threshold applied. New habitat gains are minimal, amounting to only about 4 to 5 percent of the current range, meaning the species faces a net contraction of nearly half its climatic niche. The Horn of Africa fares worst of all: suitable areas in South Sudan and Somalia are projected to become unsuitable entirely, and the already fragmented habitats of Eritrea and eastern Ethiopia shrink to isolated patches.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerns protected areas. East Africa’s protected area network covers about 573,000 square kilometers, yet only 17.2 to 17.9 percent of the currently suitable elephant habitat falls inside it. More than 82 percent of predicted suitable habitat lies outside formal protection, exposed to agricultural conversion, charcoal production, and infrastructure development. The concept of Anthropocene refugia, areas that remain climatically suitable and protected over time, offers a framework for identifying the landscapes most likely to sustain elephants through the coming decades. The study found that only about 21 percent of the remaining stable habitat projected for 2050 and 2070 sits within protected areas, and these refugia themselves decline under the harsher emissions scenario, shrinking by more than 21,000 square kilometers between the moderate and severe 2050 projections.

The authors caution that legal designation alone does not guarantee viable habitat. Substantial portions of the existing protected area network are already climatically unsuitable for elephants, and many reserves face severe encroachment and anthropogenic pressure. Elephants surviving in marginal or degraded habitats may function as refugee species, confined to forests and fragments to avoid people rather than occupying the landscapes their climatic tolerances would predict. This behavioral compression can mask the true extent of range loss and complicates conservation planning, particularly in the Horn of Africa where continuous population monitoring is limited and corridor establishment remains insufficient.

The study’s conclusions point toward an urgent agenda: reassess and realign protected area boundaries so that future climatic refugia are actually captured within conservation networks, establish transboundary corridors to maintain connectivity across national borders, strengthen community engagement and stewardship, and protect current habitats even where models forecast future unsuitability, especially for the vulnerable populations of Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan. Neither the suitable habitats inside protected areas nor those outside them, the authors conclude, can by themselves guarantee the long-term survival of the species. With Africa’s savanna elephants already down 30 percent over recent decades according to continent-wide surveys, and roughly 415,000 individuals of both African elephant species remaining, the window for proactive, climate-informed conservation in East Africa is narrowing rapidly. Mapping where elephants can persist, and securing those places before the climate closes them off, may be the difference between a managed decline and a functional extinction across much of the species’ eastern range.

Subject of Research: Climate-driven habitat suitability and Anthropocene refugia for the African savanna elephant in East Africa

Article Title: Persistence Vulnerability of the African Savanna Elephant Loxodonta africana to Anthropocene Threats in East Africa

Article References: Ahmed, A. S., Melese, D., Aligaz, M. A., Atickm, A., & Kufa, C. A. (2026). Persistence Vulnerability of the African Savanna Elephant Loxodonta africana to Anthropocene Threats in East Africa. Ecology and Evolution, 16(9), Article e74389. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74389

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74389

Keywords: African savanna elephant, Loxodonta africana, species distribution modeling, climate change, Anthropocene refugia, East Africa, protected areas, habitat loss, ensemble models, human-elephant conflict, conservation planning, Horn of Africa

The research, led by Zhixin Zhang of the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology and Xuan Liu of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with an international team spanning Japan, Hungary, Italy, Finland, Canada and the United States, set out to answer a deceptively simple question. Climate change is redistributing life on Earth, and ecologists have invested heavily in forecasting how warming temperatures will shift the ranges of non-native species on land and in surface waters. But one pathway has been almost entirely overlooked: when the sea floods coastal land, that newly inundated ground becomes potential marine habitat, and the species best positioned to occupy it are the non-native animals already living in the neighboring ecoregion.

To quantify that risk, the team combined several layers of geospatial and ecological data. They mapped the coastal areas projected to fall below future sea levels under the SSP2-4.5 emissions scenario, a moderate pathway of future warming, using high-resolution coastal elevation data refined through machine-learning approaches such as CoastalDEM, which corrects the canopy and building errors that plague standard elevation models. They then modeled the climatic and environmental niches of 122 established non-native marine animals, drawing occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the Ocean Biodiversity Information System, the Atlas of Living Australia, the National Biodiversity Network Atlas and published literature. Marine environmental predictors came from Bio-ORACLE version 3.0, a data suite aligned with the latest CMIP6 Earth system models, and the analyses were executed at scale on Google Earth Engine.

The modeling framework was deliberately rigorous. The researchers used ensemble species distribution modeling, combining multiple algorithms and correcting for the sampling biases that notoriously distort marine occurrence data, since records cluster around ports, research stations and popular diving sites. Spatially structured cross-validation was applied to avoid overfitting, and threshold-selection methods were used to convert continuous habitat-suitability scores into binary predictions of where each species could plausibly establish. The team then aggregated these predictions across all 122 species and overlaid them onto the inundation maps, producing a global picture of where flooded land would be simultaneously reachable and environmentally congenial to invaders waiting just offshore.

The headline result is striking in its scale. By the middle and the end of this century, approximately 290,000 to 470,000 square kilometers of newly inundated coastal land, an area larger than many European countries, is projected to be environmentally suitable for the 122 non-native marine animals already established in adjacent marine ecoregions. In other words, over two-thirds of the land the sea reclaims will, on paper, be colonizable by invaders. The geography of this risk is not uniform. The study identifies the estuaries of mid-latitude regions as particular hotspots, a pattern that reflects both where inundation will be extensive and where the environmental conditions of flooded land, including salinity regimes and temperature ranges, will match the tolerances of established non-native species.

Estuaries have long been recognized as the most heavily invaded of marine environments. Historical work on systems such as San Francisco Bay documented an accelerating invasion rate decades ago, and the reasons are structural: estuaries concentrate shipping, aquaculture and human population, they are naturally disturbed and productive, and their brackish waters filter out some native competitors while tolerating a broad range of colonists. The new study effectively extends this logic into the future. As sea-level rise pushes saline water up rivers and over coastal plains, it will convert farmland, wetlands and urban periphery into a mosaic of shallow marine and estuarine habitat, and the species that dominate nearby ports and bays will have first access to it.

History offers sobering precedents for what happens when the sea suddenly floods land. During the wartime inundation of Walcheren island in the Netherlands between 1944 and 1945, deliberately flooded polders were rapidly colonized by marine organisms, an episode documented in contemporary natural-history records. More recent studies of managed coastal realignment projects, in which seawalls are deliberately breached to restore saltmarsh, show that newly flooded habitats are colonized quickly by benthic macrofauna, and that the identity of the earliest arrivals can shape the community for years to come. Ecologists call these priority effects: the species that gets there first can lock in advantages that later arrivals struggle to overcome. If non-native crabs, ascidians, mollusks or worms reach flooded land before native species do, the resulting communities may remain invasion-dominated indefinitely.

The wider stakes are considerable. Biological invasions are already among the leading drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide, and their economic costs, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, are rising. Invasions also interact with public health, with research showing that invasive species can facilitate the emergence of zoonotic diseases. Climate change amplifies these pressures by shifting species ranges, opening Arctic shipping routes, and, as this study demonstrates, physically constructing new habitat at the land-sea boundary. Yet most invasion risk assessments and most national biosecurity frameworks do not currently treat sea-level-driven inundation as an invasion pathway at all. The authors argue that this blind spot needs to be closed, and that sea-level rise scenarios should be built into invasion risk predictions as a matter of standard practice.

There are also practical implications for how coastal adaptation is planned. Around the world, governments are weighing managed retreat, wetland restoration and realignment schemes as defenses against flooding, and these interventions will determine which lands are allowed to flood and how. The study suggests that the timing and design of such projects matter ecologically, not just hydrologically. Rapid colonization by natives, or management actions that suppress invaders during the vulnerable early window after inundation, could tip newly created habitats toward desirable ecological trajectories. Conversely, leaving flooded land unmanaged and connected to heavily invaded port waters could produce exactly the priority-effect lock-in that favors invaders. Early-warning systems, targeted monitoring of inundation zones, and proactive management strategies will be critical as coastal lands continue to be reclaimed by the ocean.

The researchers have made their occurrence records, habitat-suitability predictions and analysis scripts openly available through the South China Sea Ocean Data Center, allowing other teams to scrutinize and extend the work. Like all projections, the estimates carry uncertainties, from the trajectory of future emissions to the ecological details of how individual species respond to newly flooded terrain. But the central message is difficult to escape: the same rising water that threatens homes, infrastructure and farmland is also quietly redrawing the map of biological invasion. As the authors conclude, the world’s coastlines are becoming a new invasion front, and recognizing that front now, before the water arrives, may be the last affordable chance to manage what comes ashore with it.

Subject of Research: Projected colonization of sea-level-rise inundated coastal lands by established non-native marine animals

Article Title: Global sea-level rise will create a new biological invasion front

Article References: Zhang, Z., Yan, Z., García Molinos, J., Yu, G., Bede-Fazekas, Á., Carlton, J. T., Kass, J. M., Kulp, S. A., MacIsaac, H. J., Mammola, S., Ding, L., Du, Y., Jin, L., Li, X., Liao, W., Xin, Y., Lin, Q., & Liu, X. (2026). Global sea-level rise will create a new biological invasion front. Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03181-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41559-026-03181-4

Keywords: sea-level rise, biological invasions, marine invasive species, climate change, estuaries, species distribution modeling, coastal ecosystems, biodiversity, inundation, biosecurity, Nature Ecology & Evolution, priority effects

The stakes are unusually high for this particular population. Taiga Bean Geese wintering in central Jutland belong to a subgroup of only about 1,500 to 2,000 individuals breeding across northeastern Norway, northern Sweden, Finland and northwest Russia, and the species is a conservation concern after past population declines. What makes the Danish fields so important is a behavioral quirk: extreme site fidelity. Nearly all geese in this subgroup shift from their main wintering site at Lille Vildmose to Vinge when cold weather strikes, turning the agricultural landscape into a critical cold-weather refuge. Roughly 70 percent of geese tagged in Denmark returned to central Jutland as their cold-spell refuge across multiple winters, concentrating on the same core areas year after year.

To quantify what losing that refuge would cost, the researchers built an energy budget model adapted from earlier work on Barnacle Geese, recalibrated for Taiga Bean Geese using species-specific measurements wherever available. The approach tracks daily energy intake against daily expenditure and converts any surplus or deficit into body mass change — a positive energy budget adds tissue at a rate of one gram per 29 kilojoules, with a storage efficiency of 0.8, while a deficit burns reserves at the same conversion rate with full efficiency. Eleven adult geese were captured in November 2023 at Lille Vildmose and fitted with solar-powered GPS-GSM neck collars; seven of them used the central Jutland wintering area that season, providing the movement data that anchored the simulations.

The technical machinery behind the model is considerable. Because no basal metabolic rate measurements exist for Taiga Bean Geese, the team scaled values from the closely related Greylag Goose to the birds’ body mass, which started at an average of 3,487 grams. Activity costs came from a machine-learning classifier trained on tri-axial accelerometer data paired with synchronized video recordings of the tagged birds — 6.75 hours of annotated footage covering foraging, preening, sleeping, resting and flying. The resulting extreme gradient boosting model achieved 91 percent overall accuracy and a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.87, allowing the researchers to reconstruct each bird’s daily time budget. Each behavior was assigned a metabolic multiplier: 1.6 times basal rate for foraging, 1.5 for inactivity, 1.9 for preening, and a striking 13.7 times basal rate for flight.

Thermoregulation added another layer. The model estimated heat loss as a function of body mass, ambient temperature, wind speed adjusted to bird height and global radiation, assuming a body temperature of 40 degrees Celsius and plumage insulation values averaged from Barnacle and Brent Geese. Crucially, heat generated during activity was credited toward thermoregulation, so extra thermoregulatory costs were only charged when environmental heat loss exceeded activity-derived heat production. Energy intake, meanwhile, was reconstructed from dropping rates, fecal composition and plant energy content measured separately on freezing days with snow and frost and on milder days above zero, ensuring the foraging data matched the simulated weather.

The team ran four scenarios over a 56-day simulation window from early January to late February. The worst case, pasture-cold, restricted geese to semi-natural pastures during a prolonged cold spell — effectively mimicking the complete loss of winter cereal fields to the energy cluster. Two contrasting cold scenarios maintained cereal access, either exclusively or split evenly with pastures, mirroring the habitat mix geese actually use during cold periods. A final mild-winter scenario kept geese on pastures alone. Weather inputs were drawn from real conditions in winter 2023/2024, with cold scenarios parameterized on days averaging below zero and the mild scenario on days above zero. Each scenario was run 500 times with parameters sampled from their measurement uncertainties to produce confidence intervals.

The results tell a clear story about winter severity. In all cold scenarios, energy intake fell short of the elevated expenditure driven by thermoregulation, and simulated body mass declined — daily energy intake ranged from 1,167 to 1,835 kilojoules while expenditure reached up to 1,728 kilojoules. But the habitat configuration determined how fast the reserves drained. By the end of the simulation, geese confined to pastures were up to 8 percent lighter than those with winter cereal access, and the gap widened almost perfectly linearly over time, at 0.14 percent per day compared with exclusive cereal foraging. That translated into an additional mass loss of nearly 5 grams per day for pasture-only geese versus cereal foragers, and about 2.7 grams per day versus geese using both habitats. Under mild conditions, by contrast, geese maintained stable body mass on pastures alone.

The implications ripple far beyond a single winter. Body stores accumulated on the wintering grounds fuel spring migration, condition at arrival on the breeding grounds, and ultimately reproductive success — female geese arriving in better condition are known to breed more successfully, meaning a bad winter can generate carry-over effects that suppress the population years of effort are meant to protect. The modeled reductions of 9 to 17 percent in the cold scenarios are broadly comparable to declines documented in other goose species, including roughly 20 percent modeled over two months in wintering Brent Geese and 13 percent across a winter in Barnacle Geese. Geese can compensate to some degree — by extending nocturnal foraging, which the GPS data showed peaks around full moon, or by shifting to agricultural grasslands — but each strategy carries costs, from predation risk at night to the energy price of longer flights, estimated at 10.5 joules per meter flown.

There is a real irony in the situation the study exposes. The renewable energy cluster is part of Denmark’s legally mandated push toward climate neutrality by 2050, yet its footprint falls on the precise fields that make cold-spell survival possible for a threatened goose population. The researchers stress that their findings do not argue against the green transition, but they do show that land-use change must be evaluated against both resource quality and environmental context. Pastures suffice in mild winters; cereals become lifelines in cold ones. Since climate change is expected to increase variability even as average temperatures rise — 12 of the past 16 Danish winters included at least one week-long cold spell, and the winter of 2026 delivered 44 subzero days — those lifelines will keep being needed.

The study’s most actionable message concerns how to plan the escape routes. For site-faithful species like Taiga Bean Geese, alternative habitat works best when it is familiar habitat: the researchers suggest converting fields the geese already use, close to low-disturbance natural areas such as the Nørreådalen river valley, where the project has proposed establishing compensatory winter cereal fields. They recommend doing this before infrastructure is built, within an adaptive management framework, so geese can learn and adjust to the new fields while the old ones still exist. Field selection by geese depends not just on food quality but on field size, elevation, distance from roads and roosts, and the weight of tradition and memory — factors that no energy-siting map currently captures. As the world builds out renewable capacity at unprecedented speed, this Danish case offers a template: budget the energy of the animals that live where the turbines will stand, and design the green transition so its gains for the climate do not become losses for the biodiversity it is meant to protect.

Subject of Research: Energetic consequences of renewable energy habitat loss for wintering Taiga Bean Geese in Denmark

Article Title: Habitat Loss Through Renewable Energy Infrastructure: Budgeting the Energetic Consequences for Wintering Geese

Article References: Vergin, L., Madsen, J., Linssen, H., Nolet, B. A., & Clausen, K. K. (2026). Habitat Loss Through Renewable Energy Infrastructure: Budgeting the Energetic Consequences for Wintering Geese. Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02632-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02632-9

Keywords: Taiga Bean Goose, renewable energy, habitat loss, wind turbines, solar panels, energy budget, thermoregulation, GPS tracking, site fidelity, winter cereals, Denmark, conservation planning

The stakes are far higher than the question might suggest. The authors compile a sobering catalogue of cases where disrupted microbiomes have translated into real consequences for wild species. In coral reefs, extremely polluted environments alter the bacterial communities of corals in ways that culminate in bleaching, the loss of the symbiotic microbes and algae on which the animals depend. Honey bees exposed to in-hive pesticides show significant alterations to their gut bacterial communities, undermining their ability to metabolise essential nutrients. The critically endangered Egyptian vulture, which forages on livestock carcasses contaminated with antibiotics, suffers life-threatening oral fungal infections that restrict population growth. Perhaps most strikingly, rising temperatures linked to climate change have shifted the faecal microbiota of wild meerkats, leading to reduced body condition and greater exposure to disease.

These examples illustrate a central point of the new perspective: microbiome disruption may be the easily overlooked mechanism that tips a struggling population toward collapse. The authors argue that while microbial adaptation can sometimes buffer hosts against environmental change, rapid or extreme perturbation can overwhelm that capacity. In a world of accelerating habitat loss, contamination, emerging disease and climate disruption, they contend that conservation biology cannot afford to treat microbes as an afterthought. Ignoring them, they warn, may impose a hidden toll on conservation efforts, quietly undermining interventions that appear sound on every other measure.

To bring microbiome thinking into mainstream conservation practice, the researchers first clarify what shapes microbial communities in the first place. They define drivers as influences that cause changes in the state of a microbiome, either by introducing new microbes or by exerting selective pressures that filter the microbes already present. Drivers fall into two broad categories. Endogenous drivers originate within the host and include genetics, relatedness, physiology, anatomy, age and reproductive stage. Exogenous drivers come from outside the host and include habitat type, season, diet, social interactions and anthropogenic impacts such as pollution. The diversity and magnitude of these drivers vary enormously across individuals, populations, species and environments, which is precisely what makes them so difficult to disentangle.

The problem, as the authors see it, is that many microbiome studies in wild animals attempt to identify a single driver without accounting for the fact that drivers are intertwined, correlated, confounded or simply not sampled. They point to the example of beluga whales, whose skin microbiomes were found to differ between two geographical areas. That observation alone, they note, does not reveal why the difference exists. Without evaluating host population data, it remains uncertain whether the divergence reflects population genetics, an endogenous driver, or environmental conditions, an exogenous one. Simply documenting that two populations host different microbes, they argue, does not inform conservation. What managers need to know is which factor dominates, because that determines what kind of action might help.

The framework the team proposes is deliberately simple, designed to be applied by ecologists across any taxon and any body site, not just the gut. It works by comparing the microbiomes of two or more populations that differ in their host characteristics, their environmental characteristics, or both. Host similarity is confirmed using molecular tools such as genomic distance analysis, while environmental similarity can be measured through geographical distance, diet type or other relevant variables. Microbial similarity is quantified using standard dissimilarity and distance indices that compare community composition. The comparisons are organised into four quadrants: similar hosts in similar environments, similar hosts in different environments, different hosts in similar environments, and different hosts in different environments. Depending on whether the microbiomes of the compared populations turn out to be similar or different, the framework points to either an endogenous or an exogenous key driver, or indicates that a third population must be sampled to resolve the ambiguity.

Worked examples drawn from the published literature show the framework in action. In central Ghana, social grouping in the white-thighed black-and-white colobus monkey explained differences in gut microbial composition even though the groups shared the same semi-deciduous forest habitat, with age, collection site, reproductive status and relatedness all ruled out as predictors. Identifying the driver as exogenous underscores the importance of protecting habitat and maintaining connectivity for this critically endangered primate. In Lithuania, by contrast, the gut microbial composition of voles, shrews and mice was more similar within species than between them, regardless of habitat, pointing to host identity as the dominant force. Olympia oysters from the same parental family showed gut bacteria that varied by field site, apparently in response to differences in temperature and dissolved oxygen, an exogenous signal with direct implications for restoration management.

Further examples reinforce the framework’s versatility. In a Malagasy reserve, gut microbiome structure across six mammal species was primarily driven by species type, with genetic distance a significant predictor even after controlling for diet and geography, though species sharing terrestrial habitat also showed similar microbial structure, hinting at bacterial transmission between ground-dwelling animals and possible shared vulnerability to disease. Among Darwin’s finches, eleven of twelve species sampled across nine islands had similar gut microbiomes, suggesting remarkable conservation of these communities over short evolutionary timescales. And in Oregon, genetic divergence, rather than environment or location, best predicted gut microbiome composition in wild threespine stickleback, a conclusion made possible only because the underlying study sampled multiple populations across estuarine and freshwater environments at both coastal and inland sites.

The conservation payoffs flow in two directions. Where an exogenous driver dominates, managers can act on the environment itself. Marine sponges offer a pertinent case: these animals depend on symbiotic bacteria for nutrients, and when water temperatures exceed suitable conditions they undergo a bleaching process akin to that of corals, losing their microbial communities and dying. Because tropical and subtropical environments, rather than host phylogeny, correlate with sponge microbiomes worldwide, populations in rapidly warming waters can be prioritised for protection, for example through marine protected areas that reduce compounding threats like overexploitation. Where an endogenous driver dominates, microbiome data can instead serve as a window into population connectivity, health status and disease risk. Host genetic diversity, for instance, plays a key role in structuring the skin microbiomes of amphibians, and understanding population genomics can identify which populations are most susceptible to the devastating chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, informing both monitoring and direct interventions such as probiotic strategies.

The authors are candid about the framework’s limits. Drivers may not operate in isolation, historic exposures can shape present-day susceptibility, and when populations share similar environments or diets the key driver may be genuinely ambiguous. Temporal scale matters too, since the dominant driver can change over an individual’s lifespan or across seasons. Composition, moreover, is not the same as function: microbial communities can differ in their constituent species yet perform identical roles through functional redundancy, or lose critical functions despite superficially similar composition, as illustrated by Père David’s deer, where wild and captive populations showed functional differences only at finer taxonomic resolution. Even so, the researchers argue that measuring composition is cheaper, faster and more accessible than measuring function, making it a practical first step. Their broader message is historical as much as technical: conservation has progressed from a focus on individuals in the 1960s, to genetic diversity in the 1980s, to behaviour and genetic structure in later decades, and the next frontier is the microbial communities that wildlife hosts. Without ensuring microbiome continuance, they warn, there may be a collapse of the entire edifice, and taking a precautionary approach means protecting microbiomes before it is too late to understand what their changes mean.

Subject of Research: Disentangling endogenous and exogenous drivers of wildlife microbiome composition for conservation

Article Title: A framework for disentangling drivers of microbiome composition for wildlife conservation

Article References: Morris, V., Pitcher, B. J., Harcourt, R., Charrier, I., & Chariton, A. (2026). A framework for disentangling drivers of microbiome composition for wildlife conservation. Discover Conservation, 3(1), Article 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-026-00088-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-026-00088-w

Keywords: microbiome, wildlife conservation, endogenous drivers, exogenous drivers, host genetics, microbial ecology, population comparisons, habitat loss, climate change, disease susceptibility, probiotics, biodiversity

The research team, led by Olivier Lepais of BIOGECO at the University of Bordeaux and INRAE, together with Maya Gonzalez of ISPA and Marie-Lise Benot, set out to answer a question that population geneticists have rarely tackled at the scale of an entire ecological community. Most studies of demographic history examine a single species at a time, inferring past population trajectories from patterns of genetic variation. But species that share a habitat are exposed to the same storms, the same shifting sands, and the same episodes of habitat loss. If past environmental changes were strong enough, the argument goes, they should leave comparable genetic fingerprints across many unrelated species at once. Testing that idea required a sampling effort of unusual breadth: the researchers developed species-specific microsatellite markers for eight dune plants and genotyped 3,116 individuals collected along the French Atlantic coast.

Microsatellites, also known as simple sequence repeats, are stretches of DNA in which a short motif of two to six base pairs is repeated over and over. Because the number of repeats changes relatively quickly through mutation, microsatellites are superb recorders of recent demographic events. Allelic richness, the number of distinct repeat-length variants circulating in a population, responds within generations to changes in effective population size, the genetically meaningful size of a population that determines how fast diversity is lost. The catch is that this fast mutation rate also means microsatellites saturate over longer timescales, blurring signals from the deeper past. To recover that deeper history, the team turned to the DNA sequences flanking each microsatellite, where point substitutions accumulate far more slowly. Heterozygosity at these flanking sites preserves a memory of ancient population sizes that the rapidly evolving repeat tracts have long since overwritten.

Combining the two marker types in a single inference framework is what gives the study its temporal reach. The researchers built a simple demographic model in which each population underwent a single change in size at some point in the past, and they used coalescent simulations to generate genetic data under a wide range of scenarios: different ancient and modern effective population sizes, different timings of the change, and different mutation rates. These simulated datasets were then compared with the observed genetic data using approximate Bayesian computation, or ABC, a family of methods that sidesteps the need for an analytical likelihood by simulating millions of datasets and retaining those that resemble the real one. In a further refinement, the team employed ABC random forests, a machine learning approach in which summary statistics computed from the genetic data act as predictors of the underlying demographic parameters, allowing the inference to weigh which combinations of statistics carry the most information.

The results were reassuringly clear on the quantities that matter most. Recent effective population sizes were well recovered, informed chiefly by allelic richness at the microsatellite repeats, while ancient effective population sizes were reliably estimated from heterozygosity in the flanking sequences. The timing of the demographic event proved harder to pin down for any single species, but the combined summary statistics, which mix microsatellite variation with flanking substitutions, sharpened the estimates considerably. This division of labor between fast and slowly mutating markers is the technical heart of the paper, and it demonstrates that sequencing-based microsatellite genotyping can do double duty: the same sequencing reads that yield repeat counts also yield the surrounding nucleotide variation needed to anchor the timeline.

What emerged from the analysis was a demographic signature shared across the community. Most of the eight species showed a strong and roughly synchronous decline in effective population size, with the timing of the crash estimated at between 135 and 450 years before the present. That window overlaps squarely with the Little Ice Age, the cold period lasting roughly from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century during which the North Atlantic storm belt intensified. For the Aquitaine coast, historical and geological records document exactly what intensified storminess means: waves of sand mobilization, known as sand drift, that buried vegetation and rolled inland across the coastal plain. Previous work on late Holocene sand invasion along this coast, including studies of the Médoc peninsula and the wider Aquitaine basin, has mapped these dune incursions and linked them to cold climate events. The genetic data now provide a biological mirror of that geomorphological story.

The mechanism the researchers propose is habitat loss. Open sand dune vegetation, the early-successional communities that colonize bare, mobile sand, depends on exactly the disturbance regime that storms once provided. But when storm-driven sand drift became too intense, it likely wiped out most of the open dune habitat rather than creating it, squeezing the specialist plants into a narrow strip along the shoreline where they remain today. A community-level contraction of habitat translates into a community-level contraction of effective population size, and that is precisely the synchronous decline the genomes record. Because the eight species are ecologically distinct, with different life histories and dispersal strategies, their shared demographic trajectory is best explained by a shared external driver rather than by any species-specific process.

The study also carries a cautionary note for conservation. Effective population size, not census count, determines a population’s capacity to maintain genetic diversity and adapt to changing conditions, and the classic 50/500 benchmarks for short- and long-term viability are measured in these terms. A historical crash that reduced effective population sizes across an entire community constrains the evolutionary options of every member species, even those that appear locally abundant today. The authors argue that this legacy of past habitat loss will limit how sand dune plants respond to future environmental change, including the ongoing transformation of European dunes by stabilization, afforestation, and development. Restoration efforts, other researchers have argued, must specifically consider species that require open and early-successional dune habitats, and the new genetic evidence underscores why: these species may already be running on reduced genetic capital accumulated through centuries of contraction.

Methodologically, the paper joins a growing movement in population genetics toward joint analysis of different mutation classes at the same loci. Earlier work on rear-edge oak populations by members of the same team showed that combining microsatellite repeat variation with flanking sequence substitutions could illuminate complex demographic histories involving gene flow and vicariance. The present study extends that approach from a single species to a whole community, and from a proof of concept to a comparative framework. The researchers also made their raw data available, depositing low-coverage whole genome sequences used for marker development in the European Nucleotide Archive, alongside extensive supplementary analyses that test how marker number, sample size, and mutation rate estimates affect the reliability of the demographic inference.

For ecologists and conservation biologists, the broader message is that genomes can serve as community-level archives. When multiple species sharing a landscape tell the same demographic story, with the same timing and the same direction of change, the case for a common environmental cause becomes compelling in a way that single-species studies cannot achieve. The dune plants of southwest France, it turns out, all recorded the same stormy centuries in their DNA. Reading that record required 3,116 genotyped individuals, hundreds of newly developed markers, and a simulation framework capable of extracting timing from a mixture of fast and slow mutations, but the payoff is a demonstration that past climate-driven habitat loss left a coherent, measurable signature across an entire plant community, one that continues to shape its capacity to face the changes still to come.

Subject of Research: Shared demographic history of coastal sand dune plant communities inferred from microsatellites and flanking sequence variation

Article Title: Joint analysis of microsatellites and flanking sequences shows shared demographic response of coastal sand dune plant communities to past environmental changes

Article References: Lepais, O., Gonzalez, M., & Benot, M.-L. (2026). Joint analysis of microsatellites and flanking sequences shows shared demographic response of coastal sand dune plant communities to past environmental changes. Heredity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-026-00881-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41437-026-00881-2

Keywords: population genetics, microsatellites, flanking sequences, approximate Bayesian computation, effective population size, coastal sand dunes, Little Ice Age, habitat loss, community ecology, Aquitaine coast, plant conservation, demographic history

The research, conducted by Bruno Lucas Fontes and Ricardo Bovendorp of the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz in Bahia, Brazil, applied ecological niche modeling to understand where Cabassous tatouay can live today and where it might persist in the coming decades. The team compiled 352 georeferenced occurrence records from peer-reviewed and gray literature, museum databases such as GBIF and VertNet, and their own camera-trap surveys in the Brazilian state of Bahia. After rigorous quality control to remove impossible coordinates, duplicates, and records clustered around cities, museums, and administrative centers, the dataset was spatially thinned to retain only one record per ten-kilometer radius, yielding 220 spatially independent occurrences for model calibration. This careful filtering was essential because the species is rare, cryptic, and solitary, producing sparse and biased records that can undermine model reliability.

The technical architecture of the study reflects the current state of the art in species distribution modeling. Environmental predictors were drawn from the WorldClim database at approximately one-kilometer resolution, with nine bioclimatic variables retained after removing strongly correlated temperature and precipitation metrics. Future climate projections came from two independent Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 general circulation models, MIROC6 and IPSL-CM6A-LR, run under three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways spanning intermediate to high emissions: SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5. The researchers used the MaxEnt algorithm, tuning model complexity across alternative feature classes and regularization multipliers, and validated performance with geographically structured block cross-validation to guard against spatial autocorrelation inflating accuracy estimates. Consensus maps were generated for the years 2050, 2070, and 2090, and continuous suitability surfaces were converted into binary suitable-versus-unsuitable classifications using a conservative tenth-percentile training presence threshold.

Under historical climate conditions averaged across 1970 to 2000, the model projected approximately 1.94 million square kilometers of climatically suitable habitat, concentrated in southern and southeastern Brazil, particularly within the Atlantic Forest and Pampa biomes and adjacent Cerrado regions. Suitability declined along a latitudinal gradient toward the warmer, drier north and northeast of the species’ range. When the selected model was projected into future climates, every combination of emission scenario and time period produced a net loss of suitable area. Under the intermediate SSP2-4.5 pathway the losses were substantial; under the extreme SSP5-8.5 scenario by 2090, suitable habitat contracted to roughly 1.04 million square kilometers, a reduction of 54 percent relative to the historical baseline.

Perhaps the most striking result was what the models did not find: no newly suitable areas anywhere in any scenario. Gain was zero across the board, meaning the species’ future range dynamics are driven entirely by habitat loss rather than expansion into novel territory. The authors note that this pattern is unlikely to be an artifact of modeling constraints, since projections were conducted within a broadly defined calibration area based on continuous suitability outputs. For a species that cannot simply shift its range elsewhere, the contraction represents a genuine narrowing of livable space, with the remaining favorable environments becoming spatially concentrated and increasingly fragmented.

The geography of the losses matters as much as their magnitude. Reductions in suitability were proportionally greatest in the central and northern portions of the distribution, especially within Brazil’s warmer and semi-arid regions such as the Caatinga biome in the northeast, where high temperatures and limited rainfall already push the species toward its physiological limits. Projected warming and altered precipitation in these areas may intensify existing climatic constraints beyond what even the armadillo’s burrowing behavior can buffer. In contrast, southern areas retained comparatively higher suitability across all scenarios, producing a progressive southward concentration of the species’ climatic envelope. The projections hint at a potential discontinuity between northern and southern populations, which could restrict gene flow and dispersal, compounding extinction risk for a fossorial mammal with presumed limited movement capacity.

The study also examined how these shifts intersect with the protected-area network, treating national parks, reserves, and indigenous territories as a single static category. Historically, protected areas encompassed 9.60 percent of the species’ suitable habitat, about 186,307 square kilometers. By 2090 under SSP5-8.5, suitable habitat within protected boundaries fell to 113,398 square kilometers, an absolute loss of nearly 73,000 square kilometers. Yet because suitability declined even faster outside reserves, the proportional share of the remaining suitable habitat inside protected areas rose to about 10.88 percent. This counterintuitive result means protected areas are not becoming more climatically favorable; rather, the surrounding unprotected landscape is deteriorating more rapidly, making the parks and reserves that retain suitability disproportionately valuable as potential refugia and stepping stones.

Why should the fate of one little-studied armadillo command global attention? Armadillos are what physiologists call imperfect homeotherms, characterized by low basal metabolic rates, high thermal conductance, and a bony armored carapace, traits that constrain their ability to regulate body temperature in hot environments. While burrows and dense vegetation offer partial thermal buffering, these behavioral strategies may prove insufficient under rapid climatic shifts. Moreover, Cabassous tatouay is an ecosystem engineer: its excavation activities modify soil structure, influence aeration, water infiltration, microbial communities, and nutrient redistribution, and create subterranean microhabitats used by many other organisms. The species also occupies threatened biomes, the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado, where habitat destruction and fragmentation are already eroding its adaptive capacity, and where hunting and land-use change may further interact with climatic stress in ways the models did not capture.

The study has clear limitations that the authors acknowledge. Ecological niche models assume that species-environment relationships remain stable over time, which may not capture adaptive responses or shifting ecological interactions. The models relied exclusively on climatic variables, omitting land-use change, biotic interactions, and dispersal constraints that shape distributions at finer scales. Consequently, the results should be read as estimates of potential climatic suitability rather than realized distributions. Even so, consistent patterns across two independent climate models and multiple emission scenarios lend robustness to the central conclusion that the species faces rising climatic exposure and potential spatial isolation, and comparative evidence suggests similar contractions may await other Xenarthra, including giant armadillos and giant anteaters.

The practical implications point toward urgent, spatially targeted conservation. The authors argue for strengthening ecological corridors between fragmented habitats, expanding protected-area networks to include regions projected to retain suitable conditions, and aligning habitat protection with mapped climatic refugia, particularly in southern portions of the range. Because the species remains classified as Least Concern globally despite being Data Deficient in Brazil and Near Threatened in Argentina, proactive planning may be the only buffer before declines become detectable. The findings reinforce a broader lesson for twenty-first-century conservation: strategies grounded solely in current distributions are already obsolete, and safeguarding climate-sensitive mammals will require anticipating where suitable conditions will survive, not merely where they exist today, alongside aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to limit the magnitude of the change itself.

Subject of Research: Climate change impacts on climatically suitable habitat and protected area coverage for the greater naked-tailed armadillo (Cabassous tatouay)

Article Title: Climate change threatens future climatically suitable habitat and protected area coverage of the greater naked-tailed armadillo (Cabassous tatouay)

Article References: Fontes, B. L., & Bovendorp, R. (2026). Climate change threatens future climatically suitable habitat and protected area coverage of the greater naked-tailed armadillo (Cabassous tatouay). Discover Conservation, 3(1), Article 27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-026-00096-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-026-00096-w

Keywords: ecological niche modeling, Cabassous tatouay, climate change, protected areas, climatic refugia, habitat connectivity, Neotropical mammals, species distribution modeling, biodiversity conservation, fossorial mammals, MaxEnt, SSP scenarios