The > 25,000 km Flint Hills ecoregion in eastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma, USA, is an economically and ecologically important area encompassing the largest remaining tallgrass prairie ecosystem in North America. Prescribed fires are used routinely to control invasive woody species and improve forage production for the beef-cattle industry. However, burning releases harmful pollutants that, at times, contribute to air quality problems for communities across a multi-state area.

Historically, large-scale outbreaks of the European spruce bark beetle were initiated mainly by windthrows. However, after 2018, a severe drought triggered the hitherto largest bark beetle outbreak observed in Europe, signalling a major shift in the disturbance regime.

Habitat loss is widely recognized as a major threat to biodiversity, but the effects of habitat fragmentation, whether positive or negative, remain controversial. It has been suggested that these effects vary depending on the spatial scale studied (patch vs. landscape) and the biodiversity metric considered (α-, β-, or γ-diversity).

Land use change and deforestation drive both biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease transmission in tropical countrysides. For mosquito communities that can include disease vectors, forest loss has been linked to reduced biodiversity and increased vector presence. The spatial scales at which land use and tree cover shape mosquito communities present a knowledge gap relevant to both biodiversity and public health.

Marine restoration is increasingly recognized as a key activity to regenerate ecosystem integrity, safeguard biodiversity, and enable ocean sustainability. Global policies such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework include area-based targets to improve ecosystem integrity and connectivity. Achieving these targets requires scaling up restoration in ecologically and socially meaningful ways.

Sandy shorelines, including beaches and embryo dunes, are important spaces for both recreation and nature. Balancing these landscape functions remains a challenge. Directing recreation pressure via visitor footpaths (pathways) is widely used to mitigate recreation pressure in nature reserves. However, its potential to support multifunctionality on beaches is poorly quantified.

Invasive species pose a significant threat to biodiversity, creating a need for accurate methods to assess their spread. Although multiple introductions are common, estimates of expansion rates often assume a single introduction site due to limited knowledge of population structure.

Silviculture-managing tree establishment for landscape objectives-influences ecological outcomes of forests. While forest harvest impacts on wildlife are well-documented, silvicultural treatment effects remain unclear.

Spruce budworm (, Clem, SBW) is the largest defoliator of boreal and mixedwood forests in North America. Its impact is directly linked to the quality and availability of primary host species such as balsam fir (, (L.) Mill.) at the stand level. At the landscape level, the ability of SBW to disperse over long distances suggests that the configuration of available resources may also play an important role in affecting infestation success and outcomes.

Reversing the global biodiversity crisis requires not only conservation and management of species, but the habitats in which they live. While there is a long history of biodiversity recording by volunteers, at least in Europe, information on habitats is less frequently recorded. Habitat data is needed to map and monitor habitat extent and condition; to train and validate earth observation (EO) data; and to explain biodiversity change. The complexity of habitat classifications means that it is challenging to record habitat well, but citizen science provides diverse opportunities to improve the range and scale of habitat recording.

Understanding the effects of landscape composition on biodiversity is crucial, especially in human-dominated agricultural landscapes. This study focuses on dung beetles, an ecologically significant group, to explore how landscape composition and configuration influences species richness, abundance and community structure of dung beetles in Eastern Austrian agricultural areas.

Changes in landscape patterns, which refer to the composition and spatial configuration of land use and land cover (LULC) classes in a landscape, can have negative impacts on biodiversity and environmental processes such as carbon cycles. Such impacts are both dependent on the spatial extent of changes and which LULC classes are affected, but previous global-scale landscape pattern assessments have focused on single LULC classes or landscape-level measurements only. A comprehensive, multiscale analysis across multiple LULC types is therefore key for understanding the full impact of landscape pattern change on the environment.

Habitat loss and degradation caused by human land use change is one of the major drivers of global biodiversity decline. Understanding historical patterns of land use/land cover (LULC) change over multiple time periods is essential for improving our knowledge of the magnitude and scale of habitat loss, but also for predicting future changes and targeting biodiversity conservation and restoration policy and actions.

Landscape changes can alter habitat availability for species over time. There can be a time-lagged response of species to such changes, leading to possible extinction debts. In human-modified landscapes, understanding these dynamics is critical to inform conservation actions and mitigate biodiversity loss.

Connectivity is a key property of water, enabling the flow of energy, material and individuals within and between sites. Climate and land use changes can profoundly modify connectivity, yet few studies have quantified the patterns in connectivity among lakes at national scales.

Land-use intensification to increase yields is often detrimental to biodiversity undermining the provision of ecosystem services. However, it is questionable if ecosystem service providers contribute to ecological intensification by achieving the same or higher yields than conventional high-intensity agriculture.

Human activities, particularly intensive agriculture, have caused significant environmental degradation, reduced ecosystem diversity, and increased vulnerability to global change. Recent international policies, such as the Global Biodiversity Framework's 30 × 30 target, advocate for nature-based solutions (NbS) such as ecological restoration to address these impacts. In agricultural landscapes, however, there are concerns that restoration may impact food production.

As cities seek to provide more habitat for wildlife, there may be unintended consequences of increasing tick-borne disease hazards. In the United States, the Northeast is both highly urban and a hotspot for blacklegged ticks () and tick-borne disease emergence. Though tick-borne disease was once considered a suburban and rural problem, tick-borne hazards in urban landscapes are increasing.

Lakes can provide thermal refugia effects by buffering shoreline and inland temperatures, potentially delaying forest transitions. However, this effect has not been quantified for the majority of boreal Canada lakes, which are often excluded in general circulation model predictions of climate, thus potentially underestimating the effects of lake-mediated buffering.

Approaches estimating landscape effects on biodiversity frequently focus on a single extent, finding one 'optimal' extent, or use narrow extents. However, species perceive the environment in different ways, select habitat hierarchically, and respond to multiple selection pressures at extents that best predict each pressure.

In mammals, reproductive strategies and movement behavior can differ between sexes, influenced by biological and environmental factors. Whereas males typically adopt a "roam-to-mate" strategy, increasing movement to locate females, females may also adjust their behavior to enhance mating opportunities. Habitat and human disturbance can further shape the spatial structure of mating encounters.