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Although river protection is core to social and environmental well-being, the extent to which river conservation policies are effective is difficult to assess. This study reveals that, under all relevant protection mechanisms in the contiguous USA, only 12% of rivers are adequately protected.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) plays an important role in decarbonization pathways to meet climate goals, but some methods are land-intensive. Multimodel analysis reveals conflicts between biodiversity and CDR that are distributed unevenly, and shows that synergies are crucial to meet climate and conservation goals.

Landfalling tropical cyclones generally accelerate as they approach coastlines due to changes in surface roughness and thermal properties, according to numerical modelling simulations and global observations.

This study quantifies Brazil’s soil carbon debt (1.40 Pg C) and demonstrates that improved agricultural practices enhance carbon recovery. The findings reveal Brazil’s significant capacity to mitigate emissions and influence global carbon markets.

Predictions of human land-use expansion within existing terrestrial protected areas under four shared socio-economic pathways identify locations of particular vulnerability to natural habitat conversion and resulting effects on species’ habitat availability.

This study introduces a sediment-based method to reconstruct Antarctic fast-ice change during the late Holocene, revealing cyclic patterns linked to solar variability and offering insight into long-term cryosphere climate dynamics.

This study shows that oceanic extreme warm events, termed marine heatwaves, exacerbate extreme rainfall over land by 20–30%, increasing flood risks for coastal regions.

This study traces the origin of PYL-like proteins to bacterial symbionts, where their ABA-independent PP2C-binding ability first emerged and was subsequently maintained in land plants.

The study develops a global, long-term rice dataset (GlobalRice500) and reveals that paddy rice widely cools the land surface, reducing global mean daytime land surface temperature by up to 0.27 °C. The findings highlight the biophysical role of rice in climate regulation.

Earlier thawing of permafrost in northern high latitudes is reshaping the timing of spring growth and energy balance of Arctic ecosystems. This study suggests that advancing thaw increasingly stimulates land surface greening through enhanced water availability, earlier vegetation activity, and reduced albedo.

Urban ecology traditionally focuses on single cities, yet cities play key roles in ecological processes such as migration. Radar analysis across the continental USA reveals that nearly half of stopover hotspots concentrate in metropolitan areas, linked to urbanization.

By combining satellite observations with ground-based data and expert validation, this analysis demonstrates considerable misestimation of grassland extent and thereby carbon stock estimates in previous global assessments based on remote sensing.

Urban redevelopment is a key government policy and planning strategy to address various urban challenges. This study investigates where, how and to what extent China’s city hierarchy influences redevelopment activities within China’s rapidly evolving urban landscape.

The rapid expansion of agricultural irrigation raises concerns about exacerbating water scarcity, but land–atmosphere interactions are often overlooked. This study isolates irrigation impacts from other drivers using a multi-model framework to reveal that historical irrigation expansion substantially reduces net atmospheric water influx, intensifying drying trends and accelerating terrestrial water storage depletion, urging immediate mitigation strategies.

Freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity are declining quickly. By integrating global environmental, socioeconomic, and biological data, this study identifies the key conditions associated with imperilment of freshwater fishes.

Tropical cyclone rain rates rise by over 20% in the 60 hours before landfall, which is driven by land–sea thermal and friction contrasts, heightening coastal flood risk. In addition, this enhancement has implications for forecasting and preparedness.

Spatially variable surface-elevation changes across 40 global deltas using interferometric synthetic aperture radar are reported.

In Eastern Asia, vegetation greening, especially in perennial drylands, has increasingly reduced dust emissions since the early 2000s, with effects amplified over long timescales, underscoring the mitigating capacity of land-surface change for multi-decadal dust trends.

Many ecological studies assume that space-for-time substitution approaches can be suitable proxies for unavailable time series. Here the authors show congruence between the two approaches in the direction but not the magnitude of grassland plant and arthropod community responses to land-use intensification.

The authors find that historical deforestation has substantially altered regional observed precipitation over the southern Amazon basin through inter-regional atmospheric moisture transport, which is underestimated in current climate models.

Riparian vegetation reduced gulf turbidity up to 800 meters offshore, overlapping coral reefs and seagrasses, while pasture and gravel roads increased turbidity, according to a scalable framework using remote sensing and causal inference methods.

Survey-based indicators of wellbeing are often available for only large administrative units, like provinces. The authors use satellite-based machine learning models trained on such coarse data to make finer resolution estimates.

Tree cover gains in the moist tropics (1982–2015) were 56% naturally regenerated forests and 27% managed tree systems, with forest type influencing carbon recovery. Effective forest restoration requires robust tracking of forest types established by restoration efforts.

A national classification system of wetland hydrologic connectivity to streams, which could be applied globally, demonstrates and advances current understanding of how wetland connectivity affects surface water quality.

Global land cover conversions increased carbon uptake during 1982 to 2019, with newly established forests in the Northern Hemisphere driving gains that counterbalanced emissions from tropical deforestation.

Centennial-scale variations in methane carbon isotope ratios are attributed to changes in pyrogenic and biogenic sources that can be correlated with anthropogenic activities, such as varying levels of biomass burning during the period of the Roman empire and the Han dynasty, and changes in natural climate variability.

Between 2000 and 2015, reclamation for cropland in China undermined gains in wildlife habitat and the ecosystem services of water retention, sandstorm prevention, carbon sequestration and soil retention by 113.8%, 63.4%, 52.5%, 29.0% and 10.2%, respectively.

An analysis of the EPIC study demonstrates that dietary plant biodiversity presents benefits for human and planetary health, but adverse environmental impacts are associated with dietary animal species richness.

Treatment-seeking for fever is widely used to estimate treatment of childhood infections, but cross-country comparisons are problematic. Here, the authors estimate the probability of seeking treatment for fever at public facilities across 29 countries by quantifying person-level latent variables.

A re-assessment of the global carbon budget shows the natural land sink is substantially smaller than previously estimated, indicating emerging impacts of climate change on the evolution of the carbon sinks.

ENSO teleconnections are usually assumed to be stationary. Here the authors show that volcanic eruptions disrupt ENSO teleconnections with land summer temperatures, with crucial implications for Earth System Models and paleoclimate reconstructions.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

In this analysis of biomolecular and archaeological data from a ninth-century BCE mass grave in the Carpathian Basin, Fibiger et al. find evidence for the targeted killing of mostly unrelated women and children, challenging views of prehistoric violence.

A bookkeeping approach shows that disturbed tropical humid forests experienced net aboveground carbon loss during 1990–2020, primarily driven by small but persistent deforestation clearings owing to persistent land-use conversion without forest regrowth.

Direct human impact on land disturbances in the USA is declining, while less controllable, undirected wild disturbances are increasing, according to a long-term record of high-resolution satellite imagery.

Nonlinear climate and land-use interactions drive historical and future heatwave intensification across Africa, especially in Western South Africa, based on multivariate bias-correction and explainable AI applied to CMIP6 future projections.

Analysis of data on 971 bird species in natural habitat and cattle pasture in Colombia finds that near-national-scale losses of bird diversity greatly exceed losses recorded at the local scale, suggesting that extrapolations from local studies will severely underestimate biodiversity losses.

After forest loss, public subsidies often encourage reforestation with tree plantations. This modelling study finds that between 1986 and 2011, Chile’s forest subsidies probably reduced biodiversity without increasing carbon stored in aboveground plant material.

This study maps global hotspots of cropland expansion into non-forest ecosystems, revealing extensive conversion inside and outside protected areas that threatens biodiversity and underscores an urgent need for conservation efforts beyond forests.

Ohenhen et al. used space geodetic measurements to rigorously quantify land subsidence in the 28 most populous US cities. They find that over 20% of the area in each city is sinking, affecting approximately 34 million people and placing more than 29,000 buildings at high risk of damage.

Land cover change contributes to regional climate trends. Here, the authors use high-resolution land cover maps and state-of-the-art climate modelling to assess land cover change effects across Europe over 1992-2015, showing widespread cooling after agricultural abandonment but also different, region-specific effects.

In this study, the biodiversity impacts of the global food system from land use and climate change are estimated using the EXIOBASE model. The findings show that emissions from a single year’s food production are associated with global biodiversity loss equivalent to 2% or more of a region’s total land-driven biodiversity loss.

It is unclear whether the harsh abiotic conditions of drylands hinder biological invasions. This global analysis shows that drylands are vulnerable to non-native plants and are likely to become more so as native plant diversity declines and grazing pressure intensifies.

How landscapes are arranged affects soil pathogenic fungi worldwide. The authors reveal the global pattern and pronounced scale-dependency of landscape complexity and land-cover quantity on soil pathogenic fungal diversity.

Land plants diverged from streptophyte algae around 460 million years ago. Marine Charophyceae fossils from the Upper Ordovician confirm that morphological innovations key to the evolution of terrestrial flora predate the emergence of land plants.

Understanding how global changes affect both aboveground plants and belowground soil organisms is essential for preserving ecosystem functions and biodiversity. This study synthesizes extensive data, revealing decoupled responses in plant and soil biota to global changes across different biomes.

Gli and Hedgehog genes compound knockout fish exhibited a combination of actinopterygian fish and stem-tetrapod pectoral girdle characteristics, suggesting the evolutionary origin of terrestrial girdles as a tuning of a deeply conserved developmental program.