Environmentalists have argued that ecological degradation will lead to declines in the well-being of people dependent on ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment paradoxically found that human well-being has increased despite large global declines in most ecosystem services. We assess four explanations of these divergent trends: (1) We have measured well-being incorrectly; (2) well-being is dependent on food services, which are increasing, and not on other services that are declining; (3) technology has decoupled well-being from nature; (4) time lags may lead to future declines in well-being. Our findings discount the first hypothesis, but elements of the remaining three appear plausible. Although ecologists have convincingly documented ecological decline, science does not adequately understand the implications of this decline for human well-being. Untangling how human well-being has increased as ecosystem conditions decline is critical to guiding future management of ecosystem services; we propose four research areas to help achieve this goal.

Global environmental changes have direct effects on aquatic ecosystems, as well as indirect effects through alterations of adjacent terrestrial ecosystem structure and functioning. For example, shifts in terrestrial vegetation communities resulting from global changes can affect the quantity and quality of water, organic matter, and nutrient inputs to aquatic ecosystems. The relative importance of these direct and terrestrial-vegetation-mediated effects is largely unknown, but understanding them is essential to our ability to predict the consequences of global changes for aquatic ecosystems. Here, we present a conceptual framework for considering the relative strengths of these effects and use case studies from xeric, wet and temperate, and boreal ecosystems to demonstrate that the responses of aquatic ecosystems to drivers of global changes may not be evident when the pathways are studied separately. Future studies examining changes in aquatic ecosystem structure and functioning should consider the relative contributions of both direct and terrestrial-vegetation-mediated effects of global changes.

Climatic changes are predicted to significantly affect the frequency and severity of disturbances that shape forest ecosystems. We provide a synthesis of climate change effects on native bark beetles, important mortality agents of conifers in western North America. Because of differences in temperature-dependent life-history strategies, including cold-induced mortality and developmental timing, responses to warming will differ among and within bark beetle species. The success of bark beetle populations will also be influenced indirectly by the effects of climate on community associates and host-tree vigor, although little information is available to quantify these relationships. We used available population models and climate forecasts to explore the responses of two eruptive bark beetle species. Based on projected warming, increases in thermal regimes conducive to population success are predicted for Dendroctonus rufipennis (Kirby) and Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, although there is considerable spatial and temporal variability. These predictions from population models suggest a movement of temperature suitability to higher latitudes and elevations and identify regions with a high potential for bark beetle outbreaks and associated tree mortality in the coming century.

The way communities are assembled is an old ecological question currently experiencing renewed interest thanks to the recent advances in molecular biology and phylogenetics. The generality of these new methods has allowed us to understand the structure of communities of organisms from different kingdoms and at different scales. Concomitant with this growing interest, new methods, metrics, terms, and software have appeared that independently solve similar questions, but with different approaches. Here we provide a unifying framework on methods for community structure based on the relationships between four key concepts: phylogeny, phenotype, environment, and co-occurrence. The different approaches are based on different community representations of traits, the phylogenetic relationships of species in the community, or species occurrence along the environmental gradients. We finally provide insights on future directions of this emerging discipline.

We contend that there is a continuing culture of hopelessness among conservation biologists, one that will affect whom we recruit to academic halls of conservation science, and that will influence our ability to mobilize conservation action among the general public. We explore the repercussions of hopelessness for the field of conservation biology and challenge conservation scientists to better balance realism with hope. People must believe that their actions make a difference. Although others have suggested a need for hope, conservation biologists have not yet found an effective way to address this continuing problem. We advocate for the establishment of professional rituals that force us to regularly confront despair and seek out the positive, even when things take a turn for the worse. These measures may seem drastic, but history proves this wrong: Unless we are reminded, we conservationists are stingy with our hope.

Biology is changing and becoming more quantitative. Research is creating new challenges that need to be addressed in education as well. New educational initiatives focus on combining laboratory procedures with mathematical skills, yet it seems that most curricula center on a single relationship between scientific knowledge and scientific method: that of the validity of knowledge claims, judged in terms of their consistency with data. Collecting data and obtaining results (however quantitative) are commonly part of science, but are not science itself. We envision that the operative use of the complete scientific method will play a critical role in providing the necessary underpinning for the integration of math and biology at various professional levels.