KEVIN J GASTON

Diamant, E.S., Oswald, K.N., Awoyemi, A.G., Gaston, K.J., MacGregor-Fors, I., Berger-Tal, O. & Roll, U. 2025. The importance of biome in shaping urban biodiversity. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in press.

Humanity is urbanizing, with vast implications on natural systems. To date, most research on urban biodiversity has centered on temperate biomes. Conversely, drylands, collectively the largest terrestrial global biome, remain understudied. Here, we synthesize key mechanistic differences of urbanization’s impacts on biodiversity across these biomes. Irrigation shapes dryland urban ecology, and can lead to greener, sometimes more biodiverse, landscapes than local wild-lands. These green urban patches in drylands often have a different species composition, including many non-native and human-commensal species. Socio-economic factors – locally and globally – can mediate how biomes shape urban biodiversity patterns through the effects of irrigation, greening, and invasive species. We advocate for more research in low-income dryland cities, and for implementing biome-specific, scientifically grounded management and policies.

Phillips, B.B., Garrett, J.K., Elliott, L.R., Lovell, R., Kibowski, F., Lamont, R. & Gaston, K.J. 2025. The Renewing Biodiversity Longitudinal Survey (ReBLS): Protocol for a panel study. People and Nature 7, 815-827.

1. Biodiversity renewal activities are causing major changes to landscapes and ecological assemblages in some areas. Initiatives are inherently intertwined with local people and communities, who can be drivers, inhibitors and beneficiaries of renewal efforts. It is therefore critical to understand how biodiversity renewal impacts people’s pro-nature attitudes and behaviours, health and well-being.

2. Research to date has established that exposure to nature is linked to health and well-being, as well as to pro-environmental behaviours. However, most studies have been cross-sectional, hindering causal inference, or have focused on attitudes and behaviours relating to the environment in general, rather than on the impacts of biodiversity or environmental improvement efforts. Relatively little is known about how people’s interactions with nature vary, or which components contribute to pro-nature attitudes and behaviours, health, or well-being over time.

3. Here we introduce the Renewing Biodiversity Longitudinal Survey (ReBLS), a pioneering new longitudinal panel study exploring people’s pro-nature attitudes and behaviours, health and well-being and whether these are affected by processes of environmental change and the renewal of biodiversity (both actual and perceived). This will be one of the first attempts to track changes in environmental responses, attitudes and behaviours over time within individuals.

4. The survey will involve a national sample of approximately 18,000 adults from across England. The panel will be invited to complete the survey once a year for 3 years initially. We will link the longitudinal survey data with highly localised spatial information about the environment where participants live, including land cover, habitats and species distributions. We will measure participants’ exposure to biodiversity renewal using several approaches, including self-reported awareness of and direct and indirect involvement in biodiversity renewal activities, as well as a spatial assessment based on an audit of renewal activities within England.

Unnithan Kumar, S., Baker, D.J., Maclean, I.M.D. & Gaston, K.J. 2025. Spatial prioritisation for nature recovery with multiple options for habitat creation. Journal of Applied Ecology 62, 2688-2700.

1. The creation of habitat in landscapes which have been largely cleared of natural vegetation and depleted of wildlife has become a key focus in research and policy addressing declines in biodiversity. 

2. A major challenge for nature recovery in such landscapes, particularly those with long histories of agricultural use, is how to meet species population targets effectively when (i) complex and intersecting realities of land use mean that available land for habitat creation is limited, (ii) multiple habitats could be viable within any given land parcel, because restoration of historical habitat states may be neither possible nor desirable and (iii) the potential suitability of actions varies with regional species priorities and other landscape-specific requirements. 

3. In the context of nature recovery, existing spatial prioritisation approaches have tended to be used for, and have been best suited to, restoring historical habitat states. This does not tackle the issue of deciding between different available habitats for creation at each land parcel, nor how the desirability of habitat in a given land parcel is contingent on such choices being made in the surrounding landscape. 

4. In this paper, we introduce a spatial prioritisation model, Ebrel, which is designed for landscapes where any one of multiple habitat types could be supported within a single land parcel, based on present environmental conditions. The model also accounts for the spatial configuration of actions and species dispersal thresholds, so that newly created habitats iteratively contribute to population targets for collectives of species with differing habitat requirements. 

5. We demonstrate the approach using a case study from The Lizard peninsula of Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, and how this method can be used to meet nature recovery targets for multiple species with varying resource requirements and dispersal traits. 

6. Synthesis and applications. The Ebrel model provides a flexible approach to the challenge of identifying priority areas, and meeting biodiversity targets, for nature recovery in landscapes where there are multiple choices for habitat creation at any given available land parcel.

Unnithan Kumar, S. & Gaston, K.J. 2026. Auditory perception and the ecology of human-nature interactions: effects of hearing loss on listening to birdsong. People and Nature 7, 3282-3296.

1. The human sensory systems are a primary means through which people experience and connect with nature. Understanding and improving people’s personalised ecologies—their embodied, sensory interactions with other organisms—is key to addressing the causes and consequences of the extinction of experience and ecological grief prevalent in industrialised society.

2. Despite this importance, to date there has been little quantitative research into how varying sensory capabilities may result in people having very different personalised ecologies.

3. In this paper, we investigate how human–nature interactions can vary for people with different hearing acuities. We combine data on age-related hearing loss with frequency-amplitude profiles of birdsong for ten bird species in the United Kingdom, to estimate how the ability to hear bird vocalisations at a given distance may change with age.

4. Our results suggest that the ability to perceive birdsong, and the distances at which songs can be heard, are likely to decrease dramatically for older listeners, with perceptual differences being more pronounced for birds which sing at higher frequencies. Moreover, with age-related hearing loss, birdsong may lose its perceived richness, become apparently more similar between species, and be less distinguishable from other sounds, particularly for higher frequency vocalisations.

5. These findings have significant implications for personalised ecologies and citizen science. We advocate for greater attention to the primacy of sensory perception in human–nature interactions, and an awareness of how variation in sensory capabilities may result in people experiencing nature very differently.

Baker, D.J., Gaston, K.J., Metcalfe, K. & Maclean, I.M.D. 2025. Systematic conservation planning for nature recovery. BioScience 75, 472-489.

Nature conservation is increasingly focused on recovering depleted populations and ecosystems. The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2021–2030 the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and global commitments to ecosystem restoration in response to biodiversity, climate, and sustainable development targets are now considerable, with over 100 nations committed to halting and revers- ing forest loss and land degradation by 2030. The impacts of these resources on nature recovery will depend on how actions are identified and implemented. Systematic conservation planning has historically been used to prioritize areas for protection but has shown great potential to guide nature recovery actions that are underpinned by principles of spatial conservation planning. In the present article, we advocate for systematic conservation planning to target resources for nature recovery and show how well-established systematic conservation planning frameworks can be developed appropriately, particularly by integrating models for forecasting ecological, social, and economic conditions with spatial prioritization methods designed to target nature recovery resources. 

Zhang, W., Gaston, K.J., Sheldon, B.C. & Grenyer, R., 2025. Intentional and unintentional changes to avian and mammalian diversities in the U.K. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 23, e2842.

Rewilding is emerging as a promising restoration strategy to tackle the challenges posed by global change and maintain natural ecosystems and their biodiversity. However, rewilding has also been criticized for the absence of a consistent definition and insufficient knowledge about its possible outcomes. Here, we explored the effects of rewilding on filling functional gaps created by the extirpation of native species. We contrasted rewilding with three other mechanisms for change in community composition—species extirpation, species introduction, and unassisted colonization—in terms of their impacts on changes in avian and mammalian diversity in the UK. We found that (i) while rewilding increases functional diversity most on average, introduced/naturalized birds contribute more functional uniqueness to native functional space than other groups of birds; and (ii) changes in functional diversity associated with “rewilded” organisms were species-dependent and idiosyncratic. Our results suggest that although rewilding can expand or infill native functional trait space to some extent, such effects require careful assessment.