The Milpa System is an ancestral Mesoamerican agroecosystem centered on maize grown with companion plants. Its best-known form is the Mesoamerican triad of maize, beans and squash. Other configurations include crops such as chili and tomatoes, as well as fruit and timber trees. The review assessed literature relating ecosystem services to the Milpa System while broadening its scope to include maize-based polycultures more generally, where direct research on milpas was limited.

The researchers searched Scopus in October 2023. An initial query combining “ecosystem services” with “milpa” in titles, abstracts and keywords returned eight publications. A broader query combining “ecosystem services” with “maize” returned 252 publications. Together, the searches produced 259 works for abstract screening; the expanded query did not represent 252 additional publications beyond the initial set.

Two reviewers independently screened abstracts using Abstrackr, excluding studies focused on monocultures, crop rotations, agroecosystems without maize, or work that did not discuss ecosystem services in an agroecosystem. Full-text assessment added criteria requiring clear identification and evaluation of services, methodological transparency, robust designs such as randomized controlled trials or longitudinal studies, and a focus on milpas or maize-based intercropping polycultures. The reviewers recorded service mentions in a spreadsheet and standardized them under the CICES framework: provisioning, regulation and maintenance, and cultural services.

Five provisioning services accounted for 48 mentions, with plant-based food provision the most recurrent. Studies in the review associated polycultures with higher food yields and economic gains than monocultures, alongside more efficient use of water and soil nutrients, microclimate and greenhouse-gas regulation, biodiversity conservation, and cultural benefits such as aesthetic value, education and recreation. One cited study reported that polycultures in Yucatán met the basic needs of more than 50,000 families and had yields 31% to 53% higher than maize monocultures; that result came from the cited study, not from a new analysis by the reviewers.

Regulation and maintenance formed the largest category, with 20 services recorded across 151 mentions. Biodiversity conservation appeared in 24 articles, and soil fertility processes in 23. Other reported services included groundwater recharge and conservation, erosion and wind control, carbon sequestration, pest and weed control, pollination, flood mitigation and microclimate regulation. In a three-year experiment cited by the review, maize grown with beans and buckwheat produced total carbon deposits above 24.9 and 23.0 metric tons per hectare at soil depths of 0–10 cm and 10–20 cm, respectively.

A separate 36-year mathematical simulation cited in the review estimated that integrating legumes into maize polycultures could increase soil carbon by 7% and reduce nitrogen leaching by 41% compared with other monoculture techniques. These were modeled projections rather than direct field observations made by the review. The reviewed evidence also associated multi-layered crop structures with habitat for predators, beneficial arthropods and pollinators, natural pest control, and resilience to extreme weather conditions.

Thirteen cultural services received 51 mentions. Aesthetic beauty appeared in nine articles, while education, cultural identity and recreation were also prominent. Studies connected traditional milpa agriculture with social identity, community cohesion, knowledge transmission, physical and mental health, and spiritual or intellectual stimulation. Research in the Lacandon Jungle examined songs, stories and beliefs associated with traditional ecological knowledge, while other studies considered scenic attractiveness and combinations of milpa with timber-tree production. Cultural services were discussed in 12 articles overall and were the least-studied category.

The reviewers supplemented the review with a bibliometric analysis using the R implementation of Bibliometrix. Publication output was relatively stable, averaging seven articles per year from 2017 to 2023, with two articles in 2017 and ten in 2021. Mexican authors were the largest national group in the reviewed corpus. The authors also applied an ecosystem-services cascade model to interpret how ecosystem structure and biophysical processes support ecological functions and service flows contributing to human well-being.

The review’s main limitation is the scarcity of research directly examining ecosystem services in the Milpa System, especially outside Mexico. Because much of the evidence concerns broader maize-based polycultures rather than milpas specifically, the findings cannot be generalized fully beyond the Mexican context. Cultural services also pose difficulties for standardized quantification and economic valuation because they are intangible, community-specific and often lack direct market value. The authors concluded that the documented services demonstrate the multifunctionality of the Milpa System, while the limited and geographically uneven evidence base constrains stronger claims about its performance in other settings.

Subject of Research: Systematic review of ecosystem services provided by the Milpa System and related maize-based polycultures

Article Title: Ecosystem Services in the Milpa System: A Systematic Review

Article References: Romero-Natale, A., Acevedo-Sandoval, O., & Sanchez-Porras, A. (2024). Ecosystem Services in the Milpa System: A Systematic Review. One Ecosystem, 9, Article e131969. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.9.e131969

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.9.e131969

Keywords: Milpa System, ecosystem services, maize polycultures, agroecosystems, food provision, biodiversity conservation, soil fertility, cultural services, systematic review, Ecosystem, Services, Milpa

The stakes are far higher than one park in the Western Tien Shan. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting, or SEEA-EA, is the international statistical standard adopted by the United Nations to record ecosystems and their services in both physical and monetary terms, aligned with the System of National Accounts that produces GDP. Because the basis of national accounts is the concept of exchange value — the price actually paid in a market transaction — the SEEA-EA seeks to apply exchange values to ecosystem services. For provisioning services like food, fibre and fuel, and for regulating services like carbon sequestration, established valuation techniques already exist. Cultural services, however, are the stubborn case.

Cultural ecosystem services have the character of public goods: they are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, which makes them vulnerable to free-riding. People hike, picnic and ski without paying for the underlying ecological contribution, so these services are not traded on markets and have no directly observable price. The SEEA-EA defines cultural services as benefits arising from direct or indirect interaction of people with ecosystems during recreation, knowledge development, relaxation and spiritual reflection. Without a universal benchmark, valuers have developed several distinct approaches, and the new study put four of them head to head: resource rent, travel cost, simulated exchange value and consumer expenditure.

The resource rent method, often highlighted as appropriate for ecosystem accounting, calculates the difference between the total revenue of production and the costs of labour, intermediate inputs and produced assets. In the case study, the researchers drew on statistics from Uzbekistan’s Statistics Agency for 64 hotels, 18 tourist and leisure camps, and 59 restaurants and cafes in the Bostanlik Region, using the formula RR = TR − (IC + LC + FC). Total revenue for accommodation and catering came to US$5.136 million in 2018, and after deducting US$3.516 million in combined costs, the resource rent for the park’s recreation was US$1.62 million — the lowest estimate of the four.

The travel cost method works on a completely different logic, tracing back to Harold Hotelling’s 1947 proposal. Instead of measuring what businesses earn, it measures what visitors spend — fuel, accommodation, food and fees — to reveal the value they attribute to a site. The researchers surveyed 600 respondents at four spots in the park between August and October 2018, categorising them as Tashkent citizens or domestic visitors, each on one-day or multiple-day trips. Using an Individual Travel Cost Method with a Poisson count data model, they constructed a demand curve in which the number of trips falls as travel costs rise. Integrating that curve yields a consumer surplus per trip of US$53.78 for one-day Tashkent visitors and as much as US$166.78 for multiple-day Tashkent visitors. Scaled across an estimated 612,000 annual visits, the consumer surplus approach produced the highest value of all: US$65.19 million per year.

But there is a catch. Consumer surplus measures welfare — the maximum visitors would be willing to pay — and the SEEA-EA explicitly excludes it, because exchange values assume that, on average, all buyers pay the same price. Using consumer surplus in accounting would imply that each visitor pays their personal maximum, an assumption the study calls potentially too strong for simulating a market. So the highest estimate, while revealing the park’s full welfare value, is incompatible with the accounting standard it was meant to serve.

The third method, simulated exchange value, offers a way out. Introduced by Caparrós and colleagues, it simulates market transactions where prices do not exist by combining a supply function with a demand curve estimated through non-market valuation. In a technical first, the researchers used the demand curve from the travel cost survey to simulate an entrance fee for the park, which currently has free access. Because maintenance costs are independent of visitor numbers, the marginal cost of a visit is zero, and the simulation sought the fee that maximises revenue under conditions of monopolistic competition — justified because Uzbekistan has few recreational areas and Ugam Chatkal is the only park close to the capital. The first-order condition of the revenue function yields a simulated fee equal to −1/β₁, mathematically identical to the consumer surplus per trip in this model. The resulting exchange value was US$24.46 million per year — lower than the consumer surplus, higher than the resource rent, and, crucially, aligned with SEEA-EA principles.

The fourth method, consumer expenditure, simply totals what visitors actually spend on travel, accommodation, food and entertainment. Testing basic and full expenditure packages for one-day and multiple-day visitors, the method valued the park’s recreation between US$8.74 million and US$13.50 million annually. This sits close to the average of the other approaches and uses raw travel cost data that represent exchange values, keeping it compatible with accounting. The researchers note that without the ecosystems and the cultural services they provide, these consumer expenses would not occur at all — visitors see meals at cafes within the park’s natural surroundings as integral to the recreational experience.

The study’s conclusion is pointed: the resource rent method likely underestimates the true value of the service when used for accounting, because all expenses made to offer consumer surplus are deducted from the service’s value, whereas expenditure-based methods treat those costs as an expression of value. The authors postulate that the simulated exchange value method seems best aligned with the valuation needs for cultural services under SEEA-EA, since it provides a market-conforming value in the case that such a market would exist, matching the valuation principles of the System of National Accounts. Notably, the research confirms a proposition by Caparrós et al. (2017) that the travel cost method, which estimates a Marshallian demand function, can be used to simulate exchange values — meaning the travel cost method can be applied in three distinct ways: with actual expenses as a value indicator, to construct a demand curve for consumer surplus, or to construct a demand curve that simulates exchange value.

The choice of method, the study argues, must depend on the purpose of the valuation. If the full welfare value of recreation needs to be shown, the travel cost method with consumer surplus is the appropriate choice. If a suitable entrance fee needs to be estimated for a public park, the simulated exchange value indicates which fee generates maximum revenue — though a park manager may deliberately opt for a lower fee to serve education or habitat restoration rather than revenue optimisation. The confidence intervals estimated for the survey-based approaches indicate considerable uncertainty within each estimate, but the difference between approaches is substantially larger, suggesting that the choice of method is a more important source of uncertainty than the standard error in the estimates themselves. As the UN standard moves from paper to practice, the study recommends further application of simulated exchange value for valuing the tourism and recreation services of ecosystems — and demonstrates that standardising method choice in SEEA guidelines matters even more than refining the data behind them.

Subject of Research: A comparison of valuation methods for cultural ecosystem services in support of ecosystem accounting

Article Title: A comparison of valuation methods for cultural ecosystem services in support of ecosystem accounting

Article References: Bronzes, A., Hein, L., Groeneveld, R., & Pulatov, A. (2025). A comparison of valuation methods for cultural ecosystem services in support of ecosystem accounting. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e108556. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e108556

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e108556

Keywords: comparison, valuation, methods, cultural, ecosystem, services, support, accounting, scientific research

The research team, led by Shaffi Mdala of the International Centre for Eye Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, together with colleagues from Kamuzu University of Health Sciences in Malawi and partner institutions, analysed 129 reports from 58 countries. Using the Arksey and O’Malley scoping review framework and reporting according to PRISMA-ScR guidelines, they searched MEDLINE, Embase, Global Health and CENTRAL for studies published between 2000 and December 2025, supplementing their search with targeted grey literature. Their goal was to describe operational service delivery models across the entire continuum of diabetic retinopathy care — screening, referral and treatment — and to assess the nature and scope of evidence on their effectiveness in resource-limited settings.

The burden driving this work is projected to increase disproportionately in low- and middle-income countries, precisely where health systems are least equipped to respond. Blindness from diabetic retinopathy is preventable through organised screening and prompt treatment, yet most of these nations lack structured service delivery models because of resource constraints. The review reveals that most of the documented programmes were conducted in lower-middle-income countries, which accounted for 50.4 percent of reports, and upper-middle-income countries, which accounted for 42.6 percent — a distribution that itself highlights how thin the evidence base remains for the poorest nations.

Perhaps the most striking technical finding concerns how screening is actually delivered. In the majority of programmes, screening was opportunistic, meaning patients were examined when they happened to come into contact with the health system rather than through systematic recall, and this approach accounted for 61.1 percent of reports. Screening was most commonly delivered at the primary level of care, representing 50.9 percent of reports. In most programmes, screening was offered alongside routine diabetes services at various levels of the health system, documented in 77 of 94 reports, or 81.9 percent. Physically, screening was delivered within diabetes or non-communicable disease clinic settings in 36 of 109 reports, or 33.0 percent — a decentralisation strategy that embeds eye care directly into the clinics patients already visit.

The review also documents a profound restructuring of the workforce delivering these services. Task-sharing with non-eye health cadres was documented in 28.6 percent of reports, while task-shifting models appeared in 16.1 percent. These approaches delegate retinal examination and grading to nurses, general practitioners, or community health workers rather than relying solely on ophthalmologists, who remain scarce across much of the developing world. This workforce redesign is supported by a technological backbone: digital retinal imaging was used in 75.5 percent of reports, telemedicine in 42.9 percent, and artificial intelligence-assisted grading in 9.8 percent. Together, these tools allow fundus photographs to be captured by minimally trained personnel, transmitted to remote reading centres, and graded either by human graders working at a distance or, increasingly, by algorithms trained to detect retinopathy.

Yet the review exposes a critical asymmetry at the heart of diabetic retinopathy care in poorer nations. While screening has become increasingly decentralised, treatment services remain largely centralised, concentrated in tertiary hospitals and specialised eye centres that many patients cannot easily reach. Referral pathways were described in the literature, but the evidence on whether those pathways actually function is startlingly thin. Only five studies reported referral adherence, seven reported treatment uptake, and nine reported post-treatment visual outcomes. This means that for the vast majority of documented programmes, researchers simply do not know whether patients identified with sight-threatening retinopathy ever received the laser treatment, injections, or surgery they needed — or whether that treatment preserved their vision.

The economic evidence offers a brighter thread. Organised screening and combined screening and treatment programmes were reported as cost-effective in the reviewed literature, suggesting that systematic approaches can deliver value for money even in severely constrained budgets. This finding matters enormously for policy makers weighing whether to invest scarce resources in structured programmes rather than continuing with opportunistic, ad hoc responses. However, the review notes that evidence on the performance of referral pathways or treatment outcomes remains limited, tempering the confidence with which any single model can be recommended.

What emerges from this review is a portrait of health systems adapting under pressure, using whatever cadres, technologies and integration points are available. The convergence of decentralised screening, workforce task-sharing and technology-assisted approaches represents a coherent response to the fundamental constraint: too few eye health specialists for too many people living with diabetes. The integration of screening within routine diabetes care, documented in over 80 percent of programmes, reflects a pragmatic recognition that patients are already in the system — the challenge is to add retinal examination without adding separate infrastructure.

The implications for the coming decade are significant. As diabetes prevalence continues to climb in low- and middle-income countries, the number of people at risk of retinopathy will grow in tandem, and the window for building organised services before the epidemic overwhelms available capacity is narrowing. The review’s mapping of existing models — from primary-level opportunistic screening supported by digital imaging to telemedicine-linked grading networks — provides policy makers and programme designers with a technical catalogue of what has actually been implemented, rather than what might theoretically work. The researchers, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research as part of a Global Health project, with Matthew Burton supported by the Wellcome Trust, emphasise that their synthesis is intended to inform policy and programme design in resource-limited settings.

The gaps the review identifies may prove as consequential as the models it documents. Without better evidence on referral adherence, treatment uptake and post-treatment visual outcomes, health systems cannot know whether their screening investments translate into saved vision. The researchers suggest that future work must close this evidence loop, tracking patients from identification through treatment and beyond. For now, the review stands as the most comprehensive technical map of how the world’s poorer nations are confronting a preventable cause of blindness — revealing both the ingenuity of their adaptations and the distance still to travel.

Subject of Research: Delivery models of diabetic retinopathy services in low- and middle-income countries: a scoping review

Article Title: Delivery models of diabetic retinopathy services in low- and middle-income countries: a scoping review

Article References: Mdala, S., Kayange, P., Zungu, T., Heatley, A. C., Maluwa-Yairo, C., Siwinda, S., Puddu, M., Gordon, I., Evans, J. R., Marques, A. P., Burton, M., & Bascaran, C. (2026). Delivery models of diabetic retinopathy services in low- and middle-income countries: a scoping review. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15711-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15711-8

Keywords: Delivery, models, diabetic, retinopathy, services, low-, middle-income, countries, scoping, review, scientific research

The research team applied linguistic preprocessing to the official documents, systematically searching for the exact term ecosystem services and its Chinese equivalent shengtai xitong fuwu, as well as for green infrastructure and its Chinese counterpart luse jichu sheshi. To be sensitive to possible loss of information through translation, they also identified additional Chinese keywords showing terminological proximity to the concepts, consulting experts from Tongji University in Shanghai for reliable translations. The machine translation of the Chinese documents into English, combined with postediting and native-speaker consultations, is an accepted resource-efficient method for cross-language research. Each passage was then interpreted according to its context-specific appearance and rated on a score system from 0 to 3, reflecting whether a service was merely mentioned, linked to a problem or aim, tied to an action, or accompanied by concrete goals and assessments.

The result is unambiguous on one point: the term ecosystem services did not appear in any of the ten documents, neither in the municipal master plan nor in the district plans for Baoshan, Chongming, Fengxian, Jiading, Jinshan, Minhang, Pudong, Qingpu and Songjiang. Instead, the researchers found similar terms used 33 times across the documents. The most frequent, appearing twelve times, was ecological benefits, shengtai xiaoyi, which surfaced in all master plans at least once except Baoshan and Songjiang, often directly related to specific ecosystems such as farmland, forests or water. Another closely related term, ecological service, shengtai fuwu, differs from the original only by dropping the two characters for system and appeared in Fengxian, Jiading, Songjiang and the Shanghai master plan. Ecological service function and, in a single exceptional Minhang passage, ecological landscape service rounded out the terminology. None of the plans specified or elaborated on what ecological benefits actually entail, which complicates judging whether this reflects deliberate adoption of the international concept or coincidental linguistic similarity.

Despite the missing vocabulary, individual ecosystem services are referenced throughout the plans with varying importance. Cultural services dominate, accounting for roughly half of all mentioned services, with the districts of Fengxian and Songjiang exceeding even that average. The uptake is most significant for recreation and mental and physical health, for which all plans contain specific targets. This appreciation is hardly surprising given that the Chinese garden tradition has long emphasized aesthetics and harmony between humans and nature, and it contrasts with the underrepresentation of cultural services in international scientific discourse. Provisioning services, particularly food supply tied to farmland protection and water supply, form the second pillar, covering between fifteen and twenty-eight percent of named services depending on the district. The plans even name specific local products, from grain and vegetables to the Baihe strawberry of Qingpu.

Regulating services present the most diverse and weakest integration. Although they include the largest number of individual services, ten in total, they cover only between eight percent in Songjiang and twenty-six percent in Jinshan of all references. Water-related regulating services, including wastewater treatment, runoff mitigation and moderation of extreme events such as flood protection, were consistently well covered in Jiading and Jinshan and relatively well in Shanghai and Minhang, but neglected or mentioned only as problems in most other plans. The researchers attribute the relative importance of water-related services to Shanghai’s coastal location and to pressing water pollution and flood risks in the Yangtze River Basin. An illustrative example is the Sponge City idea introduced in the Shanghai master plan, which addresses urban water management through nature-based approaches.

More striking is what the plans omit. Air quality regulation, noise reduction and local climate regulation are highly relevant urban ecosystem services and known environmental problems in Shanghai, yet they are insufficiently covered even though the problems themselves are addressed. In Minhang and Pudong, only indistinct references to pollution barrier forests were found, and only in Jinshan is the relationship between vegetation and air pollution reduction expressed clearly. Carbon sequestration and storage is selectively referenced, while biological control and noise reduction were hardly considered at all. Pollination and raw material supply are absent from every plan. Disservices, such as insecurity in the night, shading of farmland and pollution by volatile organic compounds, appear in a few plans but are rarely acknowledged as such and never linked to goals or actions. The researchers warn that a too severe focus on only a few services risks undermining the integrated character of the ecosystem services approach.

Green infrastructure shows a similar pattern of partial uptake. Nearly all master plans mention natural elements, and the network characteristics of green infrastructure, meaning connectivity between individual green spaces planned as a coherent system, are evident for roughly fifty to seventy-five percent of all references. The city-wide ecological network consists of green belts, ecological corridors, green wedges, parks at multiple scales, ecological reserves and water bodies, further linked to a greenway system that combines ecological objectives with human usage. The multiscale approach appears in 28.6 percent of green infrastructure references in the Shanghai master plan and up to 47.9 percent in Minhang. Yet the researchers found deficits in a majority of plans because at least one core aspect of the concept, whether network connectivity, multiple benefits or the strategic planning idea, is usually missing. In Baoshan only one passage, 2.6 percent, demonstrates all aspects, while Fengxian manages at least twelve comprehensive passages. Minhang and Chongming have precisely adopted the concept, which the researchers view as a promising starting point for deeper planning considerations.

The analysis also reveals a spatial logic: the district master plans reflect the land use proportions within their administrative areas. Districts bordering the inner city have large shares of built-up land and correspondingly emphasize cultural services. The southern districts of Jinshan and Fengxian are dominated by cropland, so their plans frequently address provisioning services. Chongming and Qingpu are characterized by extensive water bodies and marshes, areas with potential for supporting and habitat-related services, and these receive more than average attention there. The researchers calculated descriptive Pearson correlation coefficients between land use categories and service mentions, finding that districts with high degrees of water bodies and marshes give supporting and habitat services more attention, whereas highly urbanized districts rarely mention them. This implicit prioritizing means the plans mirror the natural landscape characteristics of each district, even without a consistent conceptual framework.

One policy stands out as a direct, if invisible, integration of ecosystem services: the ecological protection red line. In areas delineated by a red line, construction is prohibited to protect important services. The scientific process behind suggesting the red lines for the Shanghai master plan included assessing ecosystem services as a core element, limited to carbon sequestration and storage, water storage, water purification, soil conservation and biodiversity hotspots. The master plan itself never mentions this basis. The red line policy is the strongest and most consistent conservation action related to ecosystem services and green infrastructure within the plans, yet the underlying assessment remains unacknowledged in the planning documents, a curious case of science informing policy without the discourse following.

The Shanghai findings align with international research showing that explicit references to ecosystem services in urban plans are rare and the framework is seldom considered as a whole, consistent with studies from Europe, Australia and parts of the United States. Cultural services such as recreation and tourism dominate while pollination and biological control are neglected, mirroring patterns found in Italian, German and Polish contexts. Notably, the best example of integration was found in district master plans rather than the municipal one, contradicting findings from other studies that lower-level plans are generally weaker on environmental aspects. The researchers conclude that while ecological protection has been promoted and green infrastructure and ecosystem services are implicitly considered, a complete discursive shift towards a new ecological approach to urban planning has not yet been achieved. The implicit uptake provides an extendible basis for further integration, with the greatest need for improvement identified in Baoshan, Songjiang and Pudong, and positive examples set by Minhang, Fengxian and Jinshan. For a megacity that sees itself as a role model for urban planning well beyond China, closing the vocabulary gap may prove the decisive step toward fully exploiting the urban potential of ecosystem services.

Subject of Research: Ecosystem services and green infrastructure in Shanghai urban planning

Article Title: Ecosystem Services Concept and Terminology as reflected in Shanghai Urban District Master Planning

Article References: Knöll, V., Falke, M., Jing, G., Chen, Z., Dong, N., & Zepp, H. (2025). Ecosystem Services Concept and Terminology as reflected in Shanghai Urban District Master Planning. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e154549. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e154549

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e154549

Keywords: ecosystem services, green infrastructure, urban planning, Shanghai, master plans, ecological civilization, spatial planning, China, sustainability, science-policy interface, Ecosystem, Services

The setting matters as much as the numbers. The Aravalli Range, one of the oldest geological formations in India, stretches from Gujarat through Rajasthan and Haryana into Delhi, where it forms the Delhi Ridge and serves as a natural barrier against desertification. Urban expansion in Delhi, Gurugram, and Jaipur has fragmented these habitats, stripped vegetation, and disrupted hydrological systems, while aggressive invaders such as Neltuma juliflora, formerly known as Prosopis juliflora, have colonized degraded tracts and displaced native plant communities. Within this pressured landscape, the roughly 1,019-acre JNU campus, with its undulated quartzite terrain, semi-arid climate, and forest patches rich in soil organic carbon, functions as a relatively protected ecological refuge, a role the authors argue could position university landscapes as Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures in rapidly urbanizing cities.

To capture the campus’s socio-ecological gradient, the team selected six contrasting sites: the high-use Yamuna Hostel zone, the protected quartzite outcrop of Parthasarathy Rocks, the New Transit House gardens, the low-lying Chandrabhaga Lake wetland, the isolated JNU Caves woodland, and the busy Brahmaputra-Mahanadi Hostel complex. Between November 2022 and March 2023, they laid transect lines at intervals of up to 100 meters and surveyed 76 quadrats, each measuring 10 by 10 meters, recording every woody plant with the help of handheld GPS, citizen science platforms such as Pl@ntNet and iNaturalist, and classic references including the Flora of Delhi and Trees of Delhi. Scientific names were verified against the Plants of the World Online database, and species were classified as native, introduced, or invasive following an established catalogue of India’s alien flora.

The field survey documented 57 woody plant species across the six sites, comprising 36 tree species from 17 families and 21 shrub species from 16 families. The overwhelming majority, 42 species or 73.68 percent, were native, with 11 introduced and only 4 invasive. Diversity indices revealed pronounced spatial variation: Shannon diversity values ranged from 1.61 to 2.41, and Menhinick Richness Index values from 0.52 to 1.07. Parthasarathy Rocks emerged as the standout site, recording the highest Simpson’s Diversity Index at 0.88, the highest Shannon Index at 2.41, and the highest richness at 1.07, driven by its wealth of native species. Statistical comparisons confirmed these differences were real, with significant variation among sites for dominance, Simpson’s diversity, Shannon diversity, and evenness, though shrub richness did not differ significantly, likely because the invasive shrub Lantana camara homogenized understory communities across the campus.

That homogenizing force is the study’s central warning. Despite accounting for only a small fraction of total species richness, invasive taxa dominated the vegetation structure. Lantana camara recorded the highest Importance Value Index of any shrub at all six sites, with values ranging from 37.60 to 72.45, forming dense thickets that suppress native shrubs and block regeneration. Among trees, Leucaena leucocephala dominated at three sites with IVI values as high as 81.62, aided by prolific seed production and allelopathic effects that chemically inhibit neighboring plants, while Neltuma juliflora dominated the two interior woodland sites with IVI values of 73.87 and 48.29. The authors stress that these invaders, though few in number, exert outsized ecological influence, contributing to biotic homogenization and limiting opportunities for native regeneration even as overall canopy cover expands.

The satellite analysis adds a crucial temporal dimension. Using Landsat imagery from 1992, 2002, 2012, and 2025, averaged over winter months to minimize seasonal and cloud effects, the team computed the Fractional Vegetation Index, a remote sensing parameter that estimates the proportion of vegetation within each pixel on a scale from 0 for bare surface to 1 for complete cover. The index was derived from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index using a pixel dichotomy model with a bare-soil endmember of 0.05 and a vegetation saturation threshold of 0.70. Maximum FVI climbed from 0.33 in 1992 to 0.47 in 2002, 0.51 in 2012, and 0.60 in 2025, with the greatest expansion around the JNU Caves and the Brahmaputra-Mahanadi hostel complex. But the authors caution that this greening must be read alongside species composition, since higher cover can mask invasive dominance rather than signal ecological improvement.

What makes the study resonate beyond ecology is its social layer. An online survey of 68 stakeholders, 94.1 percent of them students, rated the campus greenery exceptionally high for physical wellbeing at 4.51 on a five-point scale and emotional and mental wellbeing at 4.49, with the overall importance of campus greenery scoring 4.67. Wildlife encounters were woven into daily life: 91 percent of respondents reported seeing birds, 89.6 percent the Nilgai, Asia’s largest antelope, and 88.1 percent squirrels, with peacocks, monkeys, and porcupines also commonly observed. Walking was universal, nature observation reached 95.5 percent, and photography 68.7 percent. Air quality improvement was the most valued ecosystem service at 95.5 percent, followed by biodiversity conservation at 88.1 percent, and the campus is known to register lower air pollution levels than the rest of Delhi.

The most striking statistical finding links these two worlds. Pearson correlation analysis showed that public preference for revisiting sites correlated strongly and positively with Menhinick Species Richness at r = 0.822, and moderately with Shannon diversity at r = 0.615, while dominance by a few species correlated negatively at r = −0.499. Parthasarathy Rocks, the most diverse site, was also the most preferred destination. The authors interpret this biodiversity-perception nexus carefully, noting it is an association across only six site-level observations rather than proof of causation, and that accessibility, aesthetics, and familiarity also shape preferences. Still, the pattern aligns with global evidence that vegetation diversity boosts aesthetic appreciation, psychological restoration, and user satisfaction in urban green spaces, and it suggests that maintaining diverse native vegetation may simultaneously serve ecological integrity and human wellbeing.

The policy implications are direct. If left unmanaged, passive succession will keep increasing canopy cover while invaders erode understory evenness and richness, so the authors recommend targeted eradication of Lantana camara and enrichment planting of diverse native species as ecologically justified measures that protect both conservation value and the cultural ecosystem services people clearly cherish. To turn research into stewardship, the team also built an open-access digital repository, the JNU Campus Flora database, consolidating photographs and taxonomic records of the campus’s woody plants as a permanent resource for biodiversity assessment and environmental literacy in the National Capital Territory. Funded through the Anusandhan National Research Foundation’s PAIR programme, the work offers a scalable model for ecologically sensitive campus planning in rapidly urbanizing environments.

In an era when cities are the primary engines of biodiversity loss, the message from this Delhi campus is quietly viral: universities can be more than places of learning, they can be living laboratories where multi-decadal greening, native species conservation, and human nature connectedness grow together. The greening paradox reminds us that ecological quality is measured not by green cover alone but by the diversity, composition, and evenness beneath the canopy. If a 57-year-old campus on an ancient mountain ridge can double its vegetation density while teaching a new generation to see the difference between green and truly alive, the blueprint for urban conservation may already be written on the grounds of the world’s universities.

Subject of Research: University campus green spaces’ potential for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services

Article Title: University campus green spaces’ potential for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services

Article References: Panwar, M., Sharma, R., Mina, U., & Verma, N. (2026). University campus green spaces’ potential for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 14, Article 1886362. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2026.1886362

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2026.1886362

Keywords: University, campus, green, spaces, potential, biodiversity, conservation, ecosystem, services, scientific research

The research team, working from an exhaustive global review of ecosystem service indicators, set out to bridge a stubborn gap between broad ecological frameworks and the gritty, site-specific knowledge farmers need. Ecosystem services — defined as the contributions ecosystems make to human well-being — include provisioning services like food, fibre and biofuel outputs, regulating services like climate regulation, soil quality regulation, pollination and biological pest control, and cultural services such as recreation and education. Agroecosystems can also generate dis-services: pest damage to crops and soil erosion are negative contributions that arise when services are not adequately provided. While the concept of leveraging these services through agricultural management has gained political momentum, comprehensive lists of indicators applicable directly within crop fields remained scarce.

To build their collection, the researchers started from a previously published list of 507 indicators applicable across various ecosystem types, compiled from 405 peer-reviewed papers. They then applied a series of strict filtering criteria: indicators had to be applicable to crop fields, sit at measurable levels of the ecosystem service cascade model — including ecosystem property, ecosystem function and human benefit, but excluding monetary value — and rely on direct data collection methods such as field observation or remote sensing, excluding all indirect approaches like modelling, expert judgement or literature extraction. Cultural services were excluded because their provision depends on landscape-level factors that can overshadow the effects of local cultivation practices. The filtering process first yielded 59 indicators, from which 20 assemblies of multiple indicators were disaggregated into single components, ultimately producing the final collection of 128 indicators drawn from 66 peer-reviewed articles published between 2006 and 2014.

The cascade model, central to the study’s analytical framework, represents ecosystem service supply as a flow through five levels. Upstream, within the ecological system, biophysical structures called ecosystem properties influence ecosystem functions, which in turn influence final ecosystem services. Downstream, within the socio-economic system, benefits and values derive from service supply. Properties are biophysical structures of the ecosystem, while functions are biological, chemical or physical changes or reactions. Notably, none of the reviewed indicators aligned uniquely with the conceptual centre of the cascade — the final ecosystem service level — so the researchers treated it as a global concept encompassing both the ecosystem function and human benefit levels. Each indicator in the new collection was explicitly tagged with its cascade level, allowing future users to design assessments that integrate both ecological and socio-economic dimensions.

The distribution of the 128 indicators revealed striking disparities. Only 8 per cent related to provisioning services, while 92 per cent related to regulating services — a gap that cannot be explained by the number of services in each section alone, since provisioning services accounted for 44 per cent of the total. In terms of the cascade, the imbalance was even more pronounced: for provisioning services, 80 per cent of indicators measured human benefits, while only 20 per cent measured ecosystem properties. For regulating services, the pattern reversed, with 63 per cent of indicators related to properties and 31 per cent to functions, and only 6 per cent to human benefits or dis-services. Soil quality regulation topped the list with 56 indicators, followed by pollination with 18. Remarkably, no indicator met the filtering criteria for three services — water provision, air quality regulation and life cycle maintenance — all of which are output services without direct income for the farmer.

The analysis of how the original 66 reference papers applied these indicators in practice was equally revealing. Most articles — 64 per cent — assessed a single ecosystem service, 22 per cent assessed two, and only 14 per cent assessed three to six. Just 14 per cent of studies measured both provisioning and regulating services simultaneously. Only four papers used both ecological and socio-economic indicators: one evaluated pollination through function and benefit measures, one assessed soil retention through function and dis-service, and two evaluated water purification. Most studies focused on a single cascade level per service, suggesting that the theoretical ideal of comprehensive, multidimensional assessments integrating both ecological and socio-economic perspectives remains rarely realised in empirical field research.

The researchers explored several explanations for these gaps. Some services, like water provision, function at spatial scales — river basins, watersheds — too large for meaningful field-level measurement, since processes like groundwater recharge depend on water flows and land uses at the basin scale. Others, like air quality regulation, are dominated by ecosystems with dense perennial vegetation such as forests and urban parks, which are considered more relevant hotspots for pollutant removal than crop fields. For services like life cycle maintenance, in situ assessment is so resource-intensive — requiring significant time, expertise and materials to characterise species survival and reproduction — that researchers often favour modelling or mapping instead. The abundance of indicators for soil quality regulation reflects both the complexity of soil as a multidimensional system and the lack of scientific consensus on how to best measure soil quality or health, a concept that remains contested across disciplines.

The study also raises a provocative conceptual question about the relationship between input and output services. Input services — provided by the cultivated field and its surroundings for the benefit of the farmer — support crop production through processes like pollination, soil retention, microclimate regulation and nutrient cycling, and can substitute off-farm inputs. Output services, delivered from agroecosystems for the benefit of society, include food and fibre production, water purification and climate change mitigation. The researchers observed that indicators for each service tended to cluster either on the ecological or on the socio-economic side of the cascade, and they suggest that input services could represent the ecological side of the ecosystem, driving the delivery of output services on the socio-economic side. This raises the opportunity of reclassifying input services as property and function indicators of output services, rather than as independent services — though the precise benefits of input substitution, such as human irrigation being replaced by water regulation, could also be biophysically quantified.

Encouragingly, 91 per cent of the indicators in the collection can be obtained through field observation, and all services except the three absent ones can be quantified in crop fields this way. Remote sensing, currently limited to property indicators for five services, is identified as a major area of growth. The researchers advise future users to explore new remote sensing applications — especially for plant production, water regulation and climate-related services — and to engage with researchers in adjacent disciplines when indicators are lacking, since well-established biophysical measures from fields like air quality research may already exist without being labelled as ecosystem service research. Recent innovations in soil health research, such as soil enzyme production measures and refined reference ranges for soil organic carbon, are also highlighted as examples of indicators emerging from growing research interest.

The collection is available as an interactive dataset, including an Excel file on the Zenodo repository and a Shiny application for exploring the indicators online. The researchers acknowledge that their methodology carries biases — including the specific ecosystem service terminology adopted in the original review and the limitation of references to literature published until 2014 — but they argue that the pronounced disparities in indicator distribution are unlikely to change significantly with more recent studies, since many underlying causes are not time-dependent. By providing a flexible yet robust set of indicators, explicitly tagged with cascade levels and linked to detailed protocols, the collection aims to support researchers and practitioners in selecting context-specific measures that enhance site-specific knowledge for developing sustainable cropping systems — a foundational step toward making ecologically intensive agriculture not just a theoretical ideal, but an empirically grounded practice.

Subject of Research: A collection of field-based indicators for assessing ecosystem services in crop fields

Article Title: A collection of field-based indicators for assessing ecosystem services in crop fields

Article References: Leveau, L., Biot, N., Lobet, G., & Bertin, P. (2025). A collection of field-based indicators for assessing ecosystem services in crop fields. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e151491. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e151491

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e151491

Keywords: collection, field-based, indicators, assessing, ecosystem, services, crop, fields, scientific research

The study, led by Mahugnon Maxime Obe and colleagues, systematically reviewed the economic valuation literature on agricultural and agroforestry ecosystem services using the PRISMA framework, the standardized protocol that governs how systematic searches, screening decisions, and inclusion criteria are documented. From this process, 146 studies entered the quantitative synthesis. Rather than simply counting which services had been valued, the team combined effect sizes through meta-analytic modeling, allowing them to estimate central tendencies while explicitly quantifying how variable and how biased the underlying literature might be. They then applied spatial autocorrelation analyses to test whether valuation results cluster geographically, a question that matters because policy transfer between regions often assumes that values travel.

The first headline finding concerns methodological dominance. Market price valuation, which anchors values in observed transactions, accounted for 25.8 percent of the reviewed studies, making it the single most common approach. Contingent valuation, a survey-based method that asks people directly what they would pay for non-market benefits such as scenic beauty or biodiversity, came second at 20.8 percent. Together, these two methods account for nearly half of the field. That concentration matters because each method carries its own assumptions and its own vulnerabilities. Market price methods are grounded in real behavior but only capture services that happen to have markets, while contingent valuation reaches non-market values but is sensitive to how questions are framed and to hypothetical bias among respondents.

Beyond frequency, the analysis mapped which methods connect which service categories. Contingent valuation and life cycle impact assessment, or LCIA, emerged as the interdisciplinary bridges of the field, linking all ecosystem service categories in the reviewed literature. This connectivity is significant for anyone trying to build integrated assessments. Provisioning services such as food, fiber, and fuel are relatively easy to value through markets, but cultural, regulating, and supporting services often require methods that can cross disciplinary boundaries between economics, ecology, and environmental systems analysis. The finding suggests that the architecture of interdisciplinary ecosystem service research currently runs through a small number of methodological hubs.

The meta-analytic models then delivered a sobering diagnosis of the evidence base itself. The authors found extreme heterogeneity in effect sizes for cultural, provisioning, and regulating services, meaning that reported values for the same categories of benefits vary enormously across studies. Alongside this variability, statistical tests revealed significant publication bias for all three categories, indicating that studies reporting certain kinds of results are more likely to enter the literature than others. In practical terms, a policy analyst pulling average values from this literature may be working with estimates that are both imprecise and systematically skewed, a combination that undermines the reliability of any single number used in decision-making.

What drives this variability? The analysis points to two major culprits: the choice of valuation method and the practices used to standardize units. Methods such as market price valuation and benefit transfer, in which values estimated in one location are adjusted and applied to another, strongly influenced valuation outcomes. Equally important, effect sizes decreased when values were standardized to United States dollars per hectare per year. This is a crucial technical insight. Studies reporting values in different currencies, time frames, and spatial units are not directly comparable, and the act of converting them into a common unit such as USD per hectare per year systematically shifts the magnitude of the estimates. Standardization, which is supposed to enable comparison, appears to reshape the very values being compared.

The geographic analysis offered a partial reassurance. Spatial autocorrelation, the statistical tendency for nearby locations to produce similar valuation results, was minimal across the dataset. In other words, the value assigned to an ecosystem service in one region does not reliably predict the value assigned in a neighboring region. The authors interpret this as evidence of the overriding importance of local context in valuation outcomes. For benefit transfer practitioners, who routinely apply values estimated in one place to policy questions in another, this finding is a warning: the local ecological, economic, and cultural conditions that shape how people value ecosystem services do not average out across space.

Temporal trends added another layer of nuance. Rather than showing steady improvement or decline, the relative effectiveness of valuation approaches changed episodically over time, suggesting that shifts in data availability, methodological fashion, and research priorities have produced uneven progress across the field. The empirical robustness analysis quantified this unevenness in a striking way. Market price valuation showed greater robustness, at 18 percent, than contingent valuation, which exhibited greater sensitivity to data constraints, at 16 percent. These percentages capture how much each method’s performance depends on the quality and completeness of the underlying data. Contingent valuation, which relies on carefully designed surveys of human preferences, is inherently more exposed to data limitations than methods anchored in observed market transactions.

The implications reach well beyond academic bookkeeping. Payment for ecosystem services schemes, green agricultural subsidies, and agroforestry promotion programs all depend on credible valuations to set payment levels and justify public spending. If the underlying evidence is heterogeneous, publication-biased, and highly sensitive to methodological choices, then the numbers embedded in these policies inherit those weaknesses. The authors argue that the field should prioritize data quality and context specificity within standardized valuation frameworks, rather than assuming that standardization alone will produce comparable and policy-relevant results. Standardized units are necessary but not sufficient; the evidence flowing into them must be representative and methodologically transparent.

Perhaps the most urgent gap identified concerns the services that have received the least attention. Cultural services, which encompass recreation, heritage, spiritual values, and landscape identity, and supporting services, such as nutrient cycling and habitat provision that underpin all other services, remain underrepresented in the valuation literature. This neglect is consequential precisely because these categories are the hardest to value through markets and the most dependent on contingent and interdisciplinary methods. As climate change intensifies pressure on agricultural landscapes and agroforestry systems are promoted as nature-based solutions, the economic case for protecting the full spectrum of ecosystem services will rest on a literature that must first learn to value what it has long overlooked. This meta-analysis provides the diagnostic baseline for that transformation, showing exactly where the numbers are strong, where they are fragile, and what it will take to make nature’s price tag trustworthy.

Subject of Research: Economic valuation methods for agricultural and agroforestry ecosystem services

Article Title: Economic valuation of ecosystem services in agriculture and agroforestry: A meta-analysis

Article References: Obe, M. M., Kpadé, C. P., Singbo, A., Epule, T. E., & Poirier, V. (2026). Economic valuation of ecosystem services in agriculture and agroforestry: A meta-analysis. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360792. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360792

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360792

Keywords: ecosystem services, economic valuation, agriculture, agroforestry, meta-analysis, PLOS One, Economic, valuation, ecosystem, services, scientific research

The study, led by F. Alnafjan of Macquarie University together with an international team including A. C. Davis, C. M. McMahon, M. K. Pichora-Fuller, and K. L. Tremblay, surveyed 9,510 English-speaking adults aged 60 and older in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States between 2016 and 2018. That timing matters enormously. The data were collected after the United States Congress passed the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act in 2017 but before the pandemic and before the Food and Drug Administration’s 2022 ruling that authorized OTC hearing aids to be sold directly to consumers without a medical exam, prescription, or professional fitting. In other words, the survey captured the attitudes of a generation at the exact moment policymakers were betting they would embrace retail channels.

What makes the survey unusual is its methodology. Rather than imposing researchers’ assumptions about what options consumers might want, the team held focus groups in London, Seattle, Sydney, and Toronto and co-created the survey questions and response options with older adults themselves. Participants vetted every item through cognitive interviewing, deciding what content belonged, what wording was clear, and what alternatives deserved inclusion. This participatory design means the response options reflect what older consumers actually consider when thinking about hearing care, not what a market analyst imagines they might. If self-testing, mobile apps, or technology stores appeared as options, it was because focus group participants chose to include them.

The survey asked three questions. First, where would you prefer to get information about hearing health care, with 14 response options and 8,151 respondents? Second, where would you most like to get your hearing tested, with 8 options and 8,035 respondents? Third, from which places would you most like to get hearing aids if you needed them, with 11 options and 8,151 respondents? Participants could select multiple answers for the first and third questions. The results were remarkably consistent. Across all three questions, respondents overwhelmingly preferred traditional medical over nonmedical locations. Radio and internet advertisements ranked as the least preferred sources of information, while doctors and medical or government sources ranked highest. For testing, medical settings such as hospitals, family doctors’ offices, and audiologists’ offices beat supermarkets, pharmacies, community centers, homes, and technology retail stores. For devices, audiologist offices, doctors’ offices, and hospitals were the most favored choices, while technology stores and mail order ranked last.

Crucially, these preferences did not vary by degree of hearing loss, prior help-seeking experience, survey mode, age band, or country. The team measured hearing thresholds in person using the validated Home Hearing Test, an automated computer-based pure-tone audiometry tool that yields better-ear pure-tone averages comparable to gold-standard clinical audiometry. For online respondents who could not be tested, hearing categories were imputed using ordinal regression modeling. Whether someone had normal hearing, mild loss, moderate loss, or worse, whether they had never sought help or already wore hearing aids, whether they completed the survey online or in person, the pattern held. Respondents in England showed a somewhat stronger preference for family doctor and hospital settings, while participants elsewhere leaned toward audiologists’ offices, but the medical-versus-nonmedical divide was universal.

The findings land hard against the central assumption of the OTC policy experiment. The 2022 FDA ruling was designed to expand hearing care delivery beyond traditional medical settings, reduce clinical barriers, attract new technology companies to the market, increase competition, and lower prices. Policymakers assumed consumers would prefer these channels. Consumers told researchers otherwise. And the market data since then confirm the disconnect. In 2024, only about 2 percent of American adults aged 40 and older with hearing difficulties had purchased an OTC device, and only 4 percent planned to do so within the next year. The 2025 MarkeTrak survey found OTC devices accounted for just 1 to 2 percent of total hearing aids sold. Meanwhile, hearing aid adoption rates remain modest even in countries where costs are heavily subsidized. Australia’s government-funded Hearing Services Program covers many older adults, yet adoption among people with self-reported hearing loss was only 45 percent in 2021 and 2025. England’s National Health Service often covers devices fully, yet adoption reached just 50.5 percent in 2025. The United States, where consumers incur significant out-of-pocket expenses, reached 39 percent in 2025 including OTC options. Canada, with partial public and private coverage, sat at roughly 33 percent in 2019. If cost were the only barrier, adoption should be dramatically higher in subsidized systems. It is not.

Why do older adults cling to medical settings? The researchers point to trust and familiarity. Clinical locations signal diagnostic rigor and professional oversight in ways that retail outlets and online channels do not. A 2023 survey of Americans older than 50 found 84 percent would choose an in-person pathway with direct professional interaction. In the 2022 MarkeTrak survey, 78 percent of respondents preferred obtaining future hearing aids through traditional in-person medical channels rather than remote or self-fitting options. By 2025, 85 percent of hearing aid owners said they would prefer to repurchase in person with professional assistance. Even among OTC owners planning to repurchase, over half said they would buy in person from a hearing care provider. In EuroTrak UK and AustraliaTrak studies, doctors and hearing care professionals were the most important sources of information, with print ads and magazine sources least preferred. When Australians were asked where they would prefer to get hearing aids, 93 percent identified hearing aid clinics, ENT offices, and hospitals, with only 2 percent selecting online. These recent findings align almost perfectly with the 2016 to 2018 survey data, suggesting preferences have not shifted in the intervening years despite the pandemic’s acceleration of telehealth.

There is a deeper psychological dimension. Older participants have experienced decades of health communication and services in traditional medical settings, where trust and perceived quality of care are closely tied to long-standing relationships and shared decision-making. Disrupting this continuity generates uncertainty and reduces confidence in care. Unfamiliar systems and technologies increase anxiety and reduce willingness to adopt new care models, especially for older adults. The researchers also note that focus group participants used the term doctor loosely, often not knowing the job titles of the people who treat them. They focused more on where they would prefer to receive services than who would serve them, perhaps assuming that medical-type clinics deliver professional, trustworthy care by a doctor or under a doctor’s direction. This suggests one viable strategy: offer both in-person and OTC services within medical-type settings that older adults perceive as trustworthy, delivered by audiologists alongside trained, supervised hearing care personnel, with follow-up remote services introduced once trust and basic competencies are established.

The researchers caution that relying solely on medical channels poses its own problems. Age-related hearing loss is not routinely addressed in primary care. Fewer than 40 percent of doctors surveyed in the United States reported screening for hearing loss during initial visits, and similar findings emerge from Australia and England. Even when hearing loss is identified, only about half of doctors suggest a comprehensive hearing evaluation, and fewer counsel patients on causes or treatment options. Doctors have themselves been described as a barrier to help-seeking. Yet now that hearing loss has been identified as a potentially modifiable risk factor for dementia, some countries such as Canada have introduced geriatric guidelines recommending primary care hearing screenings. The World Health Organization’s ICOPE handbook includes hearing screening and training tools for primary care and community settings, and there is growing support for task-shifting hearing screening to trained community health workers, volunteers, and retail staff as a scalable strategy for early detection. The study’s authors encourage future researchers to use the same questions to track changes in consumer preferences over time, particularly as telecare adoption increases and generational differences may emerge. The convenience sample was primarily white respondents, limiting generalizability, and preferences may partly reflect the hearing care structures participants were accustomed to at the time of data collection. Still, the message is unambiguous: older consumers prefer to seek hearing care information, testing, and treatment in medical-type settings, and this preference held regardless of hearing loss severity, prior experience, survey mode, or country. As other countries contemplate adopting OTC policies, including parts of Canada and the United Kingdom, which recently granted certain hearing devices the ability to be sold directly to consumers, the lesson from four nations and nearly ten thousand older adults is clear. Access to a trusted hearing care professional continues to be the key factor influencing consumer preferences, and any new hearing care system that ignores this demand risks building services nobody uses.

Subject of Research: Health Policy

Article Title: Consumer preferences for hearing health care information and services as described by older adults surveyed in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States

Article References: Alnafjan, F., Davis, A. C., Lee, M. L., McMahon, C. M., Mokdad, A. H., Mosley, C. L., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Tremblay, K. L. (2026). Consumer preferences for hearing health care information and services as described by older adults surveyed in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States. BMC Geriatrics, 26(1), Article 1285. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-07819-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-07819-7

Keywords: Consumer, preferences, hearing, health, care, information, services, described, older, adults, surveyed, Australia

The stakes are considerable. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples define health holistically, encompassing the social, emotional, spiritual, and cultural wellbeing of both individuals and whole communities. Yet the measurable health gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians remains stark: according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 35 percent of that gap is attributed to social determinants, while another 35 percent remains unexplained, potentially reflecting cultural determinants that national health surveys simply do not capture. Following colonisation, persistent political, economic, and health inequalities have been driven by structural disadvantage, systematic discrimination, and racism. Despite this, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities continue to demonstrate remarkable strengths and resilience, drawing on social, cultural, and economic protective factors that promote community health and wellbeing.

ACCHOs have been central to this since 1971, providing holistic, comprehensive, culturally safe primary care that attends to social, cultural, and biomedical determinants of health. In 2019, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, NACCHO, formalised this commitment within the ACCHO Core Services and Outcomes Framework, enshrining a sector-wide mandate for community health promotion and empowerment. Internationally and within non-Indigenous Australian contexts, linking patients to social wellbeing and other support services such as housing, income support, employment, physical activity groups, art therapy, meditation, community gardens, and music has been referred to as social prescribing or social referral initiatives. These kinds of connections are already commonplace within ACCHOs’ model of care, but are rarely labelled as social prescribing. A recent national feasibility study on social prescribing in the Australian context advocates for learning from and supporting the integrated models of care pioneered by ACCHOs, and this new framework responds directly to that call.

To build the framework, the research team, led by Uday Narayan Yadav with colleagues including Chelsea Liu, Reece Griffin, Rosemary Wyber, Isabel Hanson, and Odette Pearson, conducted a targeted, concept-driven critical review across Google Scholar, PubMed, and publicly available ACCHO and NACCHO publications, identifying work that explicitly considered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in relation to social and cultural determinants of health. Using a conventional content analysis approach, they systematically coded ACCHO service functions related to social wellbeing and other support services, identifying distinct meaningful categories of ACCHO involvement across diverse programs and activities. The team then tested the resonance of the emerging framework with two ACCHOs and a NACCHO representative during development, and presented it at the Lowitja Institute’s International Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Conference in 2025 to gather sector feedback from researchers, practitioners, and community-controlled stakeholders.

The result is a six-domain framework that maps the increasing levels of ACCHO involvement against the degree of control, oversight, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural input in program and service delivery. The first domain is direct delivery of services, where funded services or initiatives are provided directly by the ACCHO to individuals, consuming ACCHO resources directly, such as Tackling Indigenous Smoking and Social and Emotional Wellbeing programs. The second is delivery through hosting or partnerships, where ACCHOs provide services indirectly by partnering with other providers or co-locating them within the ACCHO space, such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, health justice, and food insecurity responses. The third is commissioning of services, where ACCHOs allocate funding and contract with other organisations to provide services they cannot provide directly, including allied health, training for clinicians and staff, or research contracts for needs assessment and evaluation, giving them financial and contractual control but less day-to-day operational involvement.

The remaining three domains describe lighter-touch but still significant forms of engagement. The fourth is referral to other services, where ACCHOs navigate or connect people to other providers through a formal referral process, such as Rangers programs, homelessness support, Men’s and Women’s Shed programs, and walking groups. The fifth is promoting services, where ACCHOs passively provide information about other services through social media, pamphlets, information sessions, or posters, without partnering, referring, or contacting providers directly, such as displaying information about the Aboriginal Quitline. The sixth and broadest domain is improving social capital and social cohesion, encompassing employment creation, capacity-building training opportunities to obtain qualifications, supporting families in educating their children, community empowerment initiatives, cultural immersion workshops, and advocacy, including championing alcohol-related harm reduction in local Aboriginal communities.

The framework comes to life through concrete sector examples. In Perth, a social and emotional wellbeing team uses yarning-style conversations to assess holistic needs and provide services such as cultural connection through travel to country, engagement with family members, participation in cooking or hobby groups, and making new friends. In Far North Queensland, individuals are invited into programs depending on their needs, including Tackling Indigenous Smoking, a needle exchange, youth diversion, home maintenance, parenting groups, men’s and women’s groups, and healthy cooking groups. Some ACCHOs partner with legal service providers to offer on-site legal support for credit and debt, fines, payday loans, Centrelink issues, housing, family breakdown, family violence, child protection, and minor crime. Others support Elders in navigating residential aged care, home care, and day respite services, establishing referral clinics that connect health and community programs to aged care providers who assess Elders for cleaning, lawn mowing, home modifications, transport, showering, dressing, and mobility support. The Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services established the Solid Connections program to help people discover new skills and career pathways.

Beyond these specific services, ACCHOs function as a hub or one-stop shop for patients, addressing social and cultural determinants through an extraordinarily wide remit. They are the largest employer of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, employing over 3,500 Aboriginal people who comprise 55 percent of the total ACCHO workforce, and they are the primary setting for training Aboriginal Health Workers through in-service traineeship models and pathways to tertiary education. Their activities extend to accommodations for homeless people, justice-related services including co-located services in clinics, communities, and prisons, and post-release support for incarcerated people and their families. In some settings, particularly remote areas, they provide breakfast programs, elders’ lunches, aged care facilities, and assistance for the homeless. They also contribute to disaster preparedness and response during bushfires, floods, cyclones, and the COVID-19 pandemic, and play a leading role in providing culturally appropriate health information through health promotion resources, social media, and informal conversations.

The authors argue that describing this spectrum has several important benefits. First, it enables ACCHOs to clearly articulate their level of input to community members and governance bodies, including the extent to which they have control or influence over particular services, which is important for accountability where externally provided services vary in cultural safety. Second, a structured framework can help make visible the often-unrecognised work undertaken by ACCHOs, such as when they host in-reach services or display promotional materials, implicitly endorsing those services through their trusted community relationships, creating cultural and reputational responsibilities that are frequently unfunded. Third, a systemic approach to defining roles may support inter-agency collaboration by establishing shared goals, values, language, and understanding of partnership, which is often challenged by complex and unstable service networks, insecure funding mechanisms, and limited accountability for the cultural safety of partner-delivered services. Recent evidence from Far North Queensland shows that over 80 percent of upstream social, emotional, and wellbeing services were delivered by non-governmental organisations, raising questions about Indigenous participation in decision-making and control over service delivery.

The authors also acknowledge significant challenges. ACCHOs are often expected to support a broad range of activities despite already stretched organisational resources, and this work is frequently not recognised in funding models that prioritise clinical key performance indicators over holistic, community-identified needs. Where ACCHOs hold advisory rather than controlling roles, their capacity to influence service quality through cultural standards may be limited, posing reputational risks that require clear governance and escalation pathways when external providers do not meet agreed standards. Funding structures, commissioning arrangements, and workforce shortages may limit ACCHOs’ ability to expand their full remit, even when community demand is strong, and the authors argue that coordinated action across policy, commissioning, and workforce bodies is needed, alongside a national funding model to adequately support the sector. Ultimately, the six-domain framework offers care providers, researchers, and policymakers an opportunity to test this approach and expand foundational consultations with ACCHOs, highlighting the need for national-level research to understand and showcase best-practice initiatives, control, and financial needs in addressing the social and cultural determinants of health across the broader Australian context.

Subject of Research: “Indigenous models of social prescribing”–a six-domain framework for social wellbeing and other support services delivered by Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations

Article Title: “Indigenous models of social prescribing”–a six-domain framework for social wellbeing and other support services delivered by Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations

Article References: Yadav, U. N., Liu, C., Griffin, R., Wyber, R., Hanson, I., & Pearson, O. (2026). “Indigenous models of social prescribing”–a six-domain framework for social wellbeing and other support services delivered by Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, 75, Article 101999. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101999

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101999

Keywords: Indigenous, models, social, prescribing, six-domain, framework, wellbeing, other, support, services, delivered, Aboriginal

Cultural ecosystem services, or CES, are the non-material benefits people draw from nature: recreation, aesthetic pleasure, spiritual meaning, and the formation of cultural identity. For years, researchers have treated these services as somewhat soft outcomes, valuable but difficult to trace into action. That picture is changing. Place attachment and place identity, the emotional bonds people form with specific landscapes, have been shown in meta-analyses to be positively associated with conservation behavior. The Hachioji study extends this logic into an unexpected arena: the school song, an institutionally embedded text performed repeatedly by every generation of students within a defined community.

The logic of the hypothesis is elegant. Unlike popular songs, whose references to ecosystems tend to be generic and untied to any particular place, school songs are bound to a specific institution and its surrounding landscape. Their lyrics frequently incorporate natural symbols from the local environment. If singing about a nearby mountain year after year reinforces local ecological identity, then schools with such songs might be expected to translate that symbolic attachment into tangible practices: outdoor learning, excursions into nearby green spaces, and community engagement with local ecosystems.

To test this, the researchers turned to Hachioji City, a core city of roughly 560,000 residents in western Tokyo. The city’s identity is inseparable from Mt. Takao, a landmark that dominates local culture, history, and tourism, so much so that the official tourism portal is named “Let’s go to HACHIOJI, TAKAOSAN.” The study focused on public schools rather than private ones for a deliberate reason: public elementary and junior high schools have designated school districts, so students live in the neighborhoods surrounding their schools. The local environment, the researchers reasoned, is therefore more likely to be reflected in the lyrics of their school songs.

The methods combined lyric analysis with a questionnaire survey. The team collected school songs from the official websites of all 104 public schools in the city, comprising 67 elementary schools, 35 junior high schools, and two integrated elementary-junior high schools whose divisions were counted separately when their songs differed. From the Japanese lyrics, they extracted mountain-related keywords: the term “Takao” itself, plus general words for mountain, peak, base of the mountain, elevated area, and hill range. Educational practices were measured through a questionnaire administered between August 4 and September 7, 2021, with schools asked to report their situation as it stood before fiscal year 2018, since the COVID-19 pandemic had canceled many outdoor events. Valid responses came from 63 schools, a response rate of 60.6 percent.

The lyric analysis revealed how deeply the mountain is woven into Hachioji’s institutional culture. Seven school songs explicitly contained the term “Takao,” while the general words for mountain and peak appeared in the songs of 14 and 15 schools respectively. In total, 30 of the 63 songs, roughly half, contained at least one mountain-related term. On the activity side, 29 schools reported running nature-based outdoor school programs, and 42 schools reported using nearby green spaces in their educational activities. Only three schools participated in the activities of local nature conservation organizations, too few for statistical analysis.

The statistical core of the study used generalized linear models with a binomial error distribution and a logit link, assessing significance with Wald tests. The dependent variables were yes/no indicators of each educational activity, and the explanatory variables captured whether a school’s song contained the term “Takao,” whether it contained any mountain-related word, and how many such words it contained. The results were selective in an informative way. Neither the presence of the term “Takao” nor the mountain-related words showed any significant relationship with nature-based outdoor school programs. But for the use of nearby green spaces, both the presence and the number of mountain-related words in school songs were significantly and positively associated with the activity.

Why the split? The researchers offer a compelling interpretation centered on distance. Nature-based outdoor school programs typically involve overnight stays in more distant natural settings, so their implementation may not depend on local place attachment. Using nearby green spaces, by contrast, is an everyday, place-based practice, exactly the kind of behavior that symbolic attachment to the local landscape might motivate. The recurrent singing of songs that reference local mountains may reinforce the symbolic importance of those landscapes, thereby nudging schools to incorporate the surrounding ecosystems into curricular and extracurricular activities. Interestingly, the explicit name “Takao” itself was not associated with any activity, suggesting that generic mountain imagery, rather than a single named landmark, carried the statistical signal.

The study situates its result within a broader body of evidence. Previous research has shown that folk music reflects the natural conditions of its regions, including mountain ranges, terrain, and rivers, acting as a carrier of local ecological identity. Music has also been identified as one of the most effective tools for environmental education, capable of enhancing environmental consciousness. Childhood experiences in nature are well established as a strong influence on adult environmental awareness, and schools located in ecologically rich settings or with nature-emphasizing curricula tend to produce students with stronger nature connection and outdoor engagement. The Hachioji findings extend this line by demonstrating that cultural symbols institutionalized in school songs are associated with tangible behavioral outcomes in educational settings.

The authors are careful about causality. It is possible that both the creation of the lyrics and the design of outdoor programs reflect broader community values related to nature, so the observed association does not prove that songs drive behavior. The keyword approach also captures only mountain references, leaving rivers, forests, and locally significant species unexplored. Longitudinal and qualitative approaches could help disentangle these dynamics. Still, the implications are striking. If cultural representations embedded in school traditions can mediate concrete human-nature interactions, then the cultural dimensions of environmental education and conservation planning deserve far more attention than they typically receive. A song sung at every assembly, it turns out, may be doing quiet ecological work.

Subject of Research: Are cultural ecosystem services expressed in school songs associated with nature-related educational activities?

Article Title: Are cultural ecosystem services expressed in school songs associated with nature-related educational activities?

Article References: Miyauchi, K., & Osawa, T. (2026). Are cultural ecosystem services expressed in school songs associated with nature-related educational activities?. Nature Conservation, 63, 237-245. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.63.180492

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/natureconservation.63.180492

Keywords: cultural, ecosystem, services, expressed, school, songs, associated, nature-related, educational, activities, scientific research