Simeon Bezeng Bezeng

Africa boasts high biodiversity while also being home to some of the largest and fastest-growing human populations. Although the current environmental footprint of Africa is low compared to other continents, the population of Africa is estimated at around 1.5 billion inhabitants, representing nearly 18% of the world’s total population. Consequently, Africa’s rich biodiversity is under threat, yet only 19% of the landscape and 17% of the seascape are under any form of protection. To effectively address this issue and align with the Convention on Biological Diversity’s ambitious ‘30 by 30’ goal, which seeks to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030, substantial funding and conservation measures are urgently required. In response to this critical challenge, as scientists and conservationists working in Africa, we propose five recommendations for future directions aimed at enhancing biodiversity conservation for the betterment of African society: (i) accelerate data collection, data sharing and analytics for informed policy and decision-making; (ii) innovate education and capacity building for future generations; (iii) enhance and expand protected areas, ecological networks and foundational legal frameworks; (iv) unlock creative funding channels for cutting-edge conservation initiatives; and (v) integrate indigenous and local knowledge into forward-thinking conservation strategies. By implementing these recommendations, we believe Africa can make significant strides towards preserving its unique biodiversity, while fostering a healthier society, and contributing to global conservation efforts. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future’.

Pressures are mounting for the adoption of a Global Biodiversity Framework that transforms conservation and sustainable use efforts worldwide. Underlying this challenge is the biodiversity paradox: biological diversity predominantly concentrates in the tropics, while human, institutional, and financial resources are primarily located at higher latitudes both north and south. Addressing the biodiversity paradox requires the expansion and mobilization of human, institutional and financial resources around the world. We outline a model championed by the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) that builds on the Species Conservation Cycle (Assess-Plan-Act-Network-Communicate) and recognizes that most conservation action occurs at the national or local level. Various strategies are applied to this end by the partners of Reverse the Red, a global movement that ignites strategic cooperation and science-based action to ensure the survival of wild species and ecosystems. The SSC contributes to Reverse the Red through two primary strategies: National Species Specialist Groups and Centers for Species Survival. By building on existing expert networks and catalyzing efforts with established local institutions, we aim to significantly expand capacity to implement conservation action at the national level and reverse the negative trends indicated by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and the Red List of Ecosystems.

Although protected areas (PAs) are declared to provide sanctuaries for biodiversity, they are increasingly threatened by the synergistic effects of anthropic factors, invasive alien species and climate change. Consequently, interventions are required to minimize the impacts of these threats on PAs’ integrity. To inform these interventions in the South African context and under the current climate change scenario, we tested for geographic patterns of alien woody species across the network of 1,453 PAs using three alien invasion indices – alien species abundance, invaded area ratio and alien species richness. Our analysis shows that, under current climate change scenario, none of the PAs would be effective in shielding against alien plants and PAs that are geographically close tend to share similar invasion patterns. In addition, PAs that are hotspots of alien species are also geographically clustered but these findings are biome-dependent. Our outlier analysis reveals not only an island of disproportionately rich PAs in alien species, but also identifies some alien-poor PAs. We suggest that PAs that are hotspots of alien species as well as outliers of disproportionately rich PAs in alien species should be priority in monitoring and invasion control programmes in the context of the ongoing climate change.

Globally, crustaceans represent one of the most taxonomically diverse and economically important invertebrate group. Notwithstanding, the diversity within this group is poorly known because most crustaceans are often associated with varied habits, forms, sizes and habitats; making species identification by conventional methods extremely challenging. In addition, progress towards understanding the diversity within this group especially in southern Africa has been severely hampered by the declining number of trained taxonomists, the presence of invasive alien species, over exploitation, etc. However, the advent of molecular techniques such as “DNA barcoding and Metabarcoding” can accelerate species identification and the discovery of new species. To contribute to the growing body of knowledge on crustacean diversity, we collected data from five southern African countries and used a DNA barcoding approach to build the first DNA barcode reference library for southern African crustaceans. We tested the reliability of this DNA barcode reference library to facilitate species identification using two approaches. We recovered high efficacy of specimen identification/discrimination; supported by both barcode gap and tree-base species identification methods. In addition, we identified alien invasive species and specimens with ‘no ID” in our DNA barcode reference library. The later; highlighting specimens requiring (i) further investigation and/or (ii) the potential presence of cryptic diversity or (iii) misidentifications. This unique data set although with some sampling gaps presents many opportunities for exploring the effect and extent of invasive alien species, the role of the pet trade as a pathway for crustacean species introduction into novel environments, sea food authentication, phylogenetic relationships within the larger crustacean groupings and the discovery of new species.

The African Centre for DNA Barcoding (ACDB) was established in 2005 as part of a global initiative to accurately and rapidly survey biodiversity using short DNA sequences. The mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase 1 gene (CO1) was rapidly adopted as the de facto barcode for animals. Following the evaluation of several candidate loci for plants, the Plant Working Group of the Consortium for the Barcoding of Life in 2009 recommended that two plastid genes, rbcLa and matK, be adopted as core DNA barcodes for terrestrial plants. To date, numerous studies continue to test the discriminatory power of these markers across various plant lineages. Over the past decade, we at the ACDB have used these core DNA barcodes to generate a barcode library for southern Africa. To date, the ACDB has contributed more than 21 000 plant barcodes and over 3000 CO1 barcodes for animals to the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD). Building upon this effort, we at the ACDB have addressed questions related to community assembly, biogeography, phylogenetic diversification, and invasion biology. Collectively, our work demonstrates the diverse applications of DNA barcoding in ecology, systematics, evolutionary biology, and conservation.

Climate change is ranked as one of the most severe threats to global biodiversity. This global phenomenon is particularly true for reptiles whose biology and ecology are closely linked to climate. In this study, we used over 1,300 independent occurrence points and different climate change emission scenarios to evaluate the potential risk of changing climatic conditions on the current and future potential distribution of a rock-dwelling lizard; the velvet gecko. Furthermore, we investigated if the current extent of protected area networks in Australia captures the full range distribution of this species currently and in the future. Our results show that climate change projections for the year 2075 have the potential to alter the distribution of the velvet gecko in southeastern Australia. Specifically, climate change may favor the range expansion of this species to encompass more suitable habitats. The trend of range expansion was qualitatively similar across the different climate change scenarios used. Additionally, we observed that the current network of protected areas in southeast Australia does not fully account for the full range distribution of this species currently and in the future. Ongoing climate change may profoundly affect the potential range distribution of the velvet gecko population. Therefore, the restricted habitat of the velvet geckos should be the focus of intensive pre-emptive management efforts. This management prioritization should be extended to encompass the increases in suitable habitats observed in this study in order to maximize the microhabitats available for the survival of this species.

Invasive species are considered a major threat to ecosystem functioning and native biodiversity. Their negative impacts on ecosystems and the provisioning of ecosystem services have been widely documented. South Africa faces one of the most significant challenges from invasive species globally, and the South African government spent an estimated US $100 million to mitigate impacts of non‐native species between 1995 and 2000 alone. Here, we modeled the current climatic niche of 162 non‐native trees and shrubs within South Africa and explored potential shifts in their distribution with projected climate change. Our results indicate that over half of these species will experience a decrease in their suitable climate over the next decades, although not uniformly so and ranges are predicted to expand into some regions. We also compared recent vs. historical introductions and showed similar patterns, indicating that possible violation of equilibrium assumptions in our distribution models likely does not strongly influence our findings. We suggest that climate change may therefore provide a window of opportunity for more effective invasive species control within South Africa, but that large range shifts are likely for many non‐natives in the future, and new invasive threats might emerge.

Summary: Invasive species are detrimental ecologically and economically. Their negative impacts in Africa are extensive and call for a renewed commitment to better understand the correlates of invasion success. Here, we explored several putative drivers of species invasion among woody non‐native trees and shrubs in southern Africa, a region of high floristic diversity. We tested for differences in functional traits between plant categories using a combination of phylogenetic independent contrasts and a simulation‐based phylogeneticanova. We found that non‐native species generally have longer flowering duration compared with native species and are generally hermaphroditic, and their dispersal is mostly abiotically mediated. We also revealed that non‐native trees and shrubs that have become invasive are less closely related to native trees and shrubs than their non‐invasive non‐native counterparts. Non‐natives that are more closely related to the native species pool may be more likely to possess traits suited to the new environment in which they find themselves and thus have greater chance of establishment. However, successful invaders are less closely related to the native pool, indicating evidence for competitive release or support for the vacant niche theory. Synthesis. Non‐native trees and shrubs in southern Africa are characterized by a suite of traits, including long flowering times, a hermaphroditic sexual system and abiotic dispersal, which may represent important adaptations promoting establishment. We suggest that differences in the evolutionary distances separating the native species pool from invasive and non‐invasive species might help resolve Darwin's naturalization conundrum.