Benjamin S. Halpern

International conservation goals have driven rapid expansion of protected areas. This growth has favored quantity over quality, and often results in residual reserves (i.e., areas where species already experience minimal anthropogenic impact). Spatial prioritization is commonly used to help design protected area networks that represent species while minimizing costs to stakeholders. This approach can result in the siting of protected areas that do not decrease impacts on species of conservation concern. Here, we show how measures of cumulative impacts on species can be used in a spatial prioritization to site protected areas to reduce impacts on species of conservation concern. We use a trait-based vulnerability framework and anthropogenic stressor maps to quantify cumulative impacts from four human activities, and incorporate those impacts into spatial prioritizations. We demonstrate that the inclusion of cumulative impacts on species in spatial prioritization can more efficiently protect biodiversity, balance socioeconomic objectives, and avoid residual reserve outcomes.

Fishmeal (FM) remains a key ingredient in aquaculture feeds, with approximately 87% of FM produced used for aquaculture. While traditionally produced from whole forage fish, FM is also derived from fish processing by-products, or ‘trimmings’. Yet there is a lack of comprehensive data on the amount of trimmings in feed, and the taxonomic composition, geographic origins, and trade patterns of trimmings-derived FM, hindering sustainability assessments and policy development. Here, we use the Aquatic Resource Trade in Species (ARTIS) database combined with a literature review to examine global FM trade from 1996 to 2020, with particular focus on estimating the volume and origins of FM derived from trimmings. When focusing only on finfish-derived meal, our results align with industry statistics, which indicate that more FM is produced from whole fish than from trimmings. However, when including all taxonomic origins, like shrimp meal, we find a majority of FM derived from trimmings rather than whole fish. Furthermore, we find that trimmings-derived FM production is a major component of FM production across Europe and Asia. Our results indicate substantial untapped potential for expanding the use of trimmings to better support growing aquaculture demand. The enhanced transparency in FM sourcing demonstrated here can support industry accountability, inform policy, and guide future efforts towards better marine resource use.

The net environmental implications of shifting aquaculture feed provisioning from wild-caught fishmeal to crop-based ingredients remain understudied, with little attention paid to multiple environmental pressures or the importance of where ingredients are sourced from. Here we model the change in environmental footprint (a cumulative and spatial measure of greenhouse gas emissions, habitat disturbance, excess nutrient and water consumption pressures) of shifting dependence from largely fish-based to plant-based ingredients in feeds for Atlantic salmon farming. We show that average differences exist between feeds in their cumulative and individual environmental pressures, but more importantly, the locations where feed raw materials are produced and processed drives far more variability in footprint within a feed than the typical variation between feeds. We demonstrate that responsible sourcing will be critical for sustainable feed production across all farming systems as the next generation of ingredients is developed.

Pressures from human activities are expected to increase significantly, impacting marine ecosystems globally. To plan for a sustainable future, we need to forecast distributions of cumulative impacts from multiple pressures. Here we mapped (10km resolution) future cumulative impacts of ten climate, land-based, fishing and other pressures on twenty marine habitats under two climate scenarios at midcentury (~2050). We found cumulative impacts are projected to increase 2.2 to 2.6 times globally, with coastal habitats facing higher impacts but offshore regions facing faster increases, especially in equatorial regions. Furthermore, many countries dependent on marine resources will have large increases in impacts. Incorporating these results into strategic policy and management will support more sustainable use and protection of marine ecosystems and the services provided to people.

Efforts to conserve and restore biodiversity rely on widespread, accurate, and timely monitoring to understand where and how fast biodiversity is changing and develop appropriate responses. The current landscape of biodiversity assessments typically requires time-intensive and costly field surveys that rarely match the pace of monitoring needs. Automated biodiversity monitoring could increase the speed and accuracy at which information on species and ecosystems is gathered, and thus improve the data used in conservation decision making. However, the extent of existing monitoring with these ‘digital assets’ is not well characterized, limiting how and where current data can be used and our understanding of where key gaps remain. Here, we catalog existing digital assets for monitoring living organisms globally, finding that they predominantly come from satellite data (68%) and monitor plants at coarse taxonomic resolutions. Additionally, the spatial coverage is biased towards regions in North America and Europe, and data availability frequently lags well behind its collection. We also developed a framework to describe key steps in creating digital assets that can be used to identify bottlenecks in their production, and suggest strategies to address barriers. In particular, investing in developing data processing algorithms, building and automating workflows, and increasing accessibility of existing data could help rapidly increase the availability of digital assets for biodiversity monitoring. Accelerating and expanding development of automated biodiversity assessments should pay broad dividends for managing and conserving biodiversity globally.

Mariculture is one of the fastest growing global markets. Although it has potential to improve livelihoods and facilitate economic growth, it can negatively impact marine biodiversity. Here we estimate local cumulative environmental impacts from current and future (2050) mariculture production on marine biodiversity (20,013 marine fauna), while accounting for species range shifts under climate change. With strategic planning, the 1.82-fold increase in finfish and 2.36-fold increase in bivalve production needed to meet expected global mariculture demand in 2050 could be achieved with up to a 30.5% decrease in cumulative impact to global marine biodiversity. This is because all future mariculture farms are strategically placed in sea areas with the lowest cumulative impact. Our results reveal where and how much mariculture impacts could change in the coming decades and identify pathways for countries to minimize risks under expansion of mariculture and climate change through strategic planning.

The production and consumption of food is one of the main drivers of environmental change globally. Meanwhile, many populations remain malnourished due to insufficient or unhealthy diets. Increasingly, dietary shifts are proposed as a means to address both environmental and health concerns. We have a limited understanding of how dietary shifts could alter where food is produced and consumed and how these changes would affect the distribution of environmental pressures both globally and across different groups of people. Here we combine new food flow data linking producing to consuming country with environmental pressures to estimate how a global shift to each of four diets (Indian, EAT-Lancet, Mediterranean, and mean Food Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDGs)) could affect environmental pressures at the global, country income group, and country level. Globally, cumulative pressures decrease under the Indian, EAT-Lancet, and Mediterranean scenarios and increase under FBDGs. On average, low income countries increase their cumulative consumption and production pressures while high income countries decrease their consumption pressures, and typically decrease their production pressures. Increases in low income countries are likely due to the nutritional inadequacy of current diets and the corresponding increases in consumption quantities with a shift to our diet scenarios. Despite these increases, we believe that three out four of our simulated dietary shifts can be seen as a net benefit by decreasing global pressures while low income countries increase pressures to adequately feed their populations. Additionally, considering principles of fairness applied, some nations are more responsible for causing historical environmental pressures and should shoulder more of the change. To facilitate more equitable shifts in global diets, resources, capacity, and knowledge sharing of sustainable agricultural practices are critical to minimize the increases in pressures that low income countries would incur to adequately feed their populations.

The cultural keystone species (CKS) concept (i.e. ‘species that shape in a major way the cultural identity of a people’ as defined by Garibaldi and Turner in 2004) has been proposed as part of a common framing for the multiple entangled relationships between species and the socioecological systems in which they exist. However, the blurred and prolific definitions of CKS hamper its univocal application. This work examines the current use of the term CKS to reconcile a definition and explore its practical applications for biocultural stewardship. We ran a search for the words ‘cultural’ AND ‘keystone’ AND ‘species’. Our search was limited to peer‐reviewed articles published in English between 1994 and 2022 (inclusive) and was conducted using Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. We extracted and analysed bibliometric information as well as information on (i) the CKS components, (ii) humans' support for CKS and (iii) the definitions of CKS. From the 313 selected documents, the CKS concept appears to be increasingly accepted, as evidenced by a growing corpus of literature. However, the absence of a systematic and precise way of documenting CKS precludes global cross‐cultural comparisons. The geographical distribution of authors using the concept is biased. We found that 47% of all the CKS reported and 38% of the works identified in our review were located in North America. Beyond ‘supporting identity’, several other of nature's contributions to people are associated with the CKS definitions. However, the contributions of the sociocultural group to the survival and conservation of the CKS (i.e. stewardship) are made explicit only in one‐third of the documents reviewed. To advance biocultural stewardship as a conservation paradigm, we suggest (a) defining CKS as an indissoluble combination of a non‐human species and one or more sociocultural groups; (b) acknowledging that species and sociocultural group relations should be classified in a continuum, according to gradients of relationship intensity; and (c) explicitly acknowledging the reciprocal relationships between sociocultural groups and species. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.