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The Ocean Equity Index provides a systematic, twelve-criteria framework to assess and improve equity in ocean initiatives, projects and policies, producing structured data that guide evidence-based decisions and support more equitable outcomes for coastal communities and ecosystems.

Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episodic memory enables flexible decision-making.

Palaeoenvironmental analysis reveals the ecological history of the Andean–Amazonian corridor, where European colonization resulted in depopulation, land-use decline and forest succession such that by the nineteenth century the region came to be seen as a pristine natural environment.

Global shark and ray populations have declined sharply, driven by expanding fisheries and inequitable gaps in catch, trade and distribution data. This Review assesses global status, highlights drivers of decline, and outlines the regulatory, market-based and conservation actions needed to reduce mortality and reverse shark and ray biodiversity loss.

Data from the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative challenge the small- versus large-scale fisheries dichotomy, identifying five global archetypes to guide targeted policy and food systems transformation.

As wildfires become more frequent and severe, efforts to improve the resilience of forests must be grounded in data and led by Indigenous Peoples.

The spread of wheat and barley involves evolutionary and human adaptation but has been difficult to date properly. Findings from a cave site suggest a much earlier transfer of cereal grains across Eurasia.

The Nature Relationship Index offers a new way to measure and engage human aspirations to shape a better future for people and all life on Earth.

A study aimed at revealing the role of small-scale fisheries in sustainable development shows they provide at least 40% of the global fishing catch and affect the livelihoods of 1 in 12 people in the world, among other important contributions.

Federated learning (FL) algorithms have emerged as a promising solution to train models for healthcare imaging across institutions while preserving privacy. Here, the authors describe the Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) challenge for the decentralised benchmarking of FL algorithms and evaluation of Healthcare AI algorithm generalizability in real-world cancer imaging datasets.

Geospatial modelling shows an overall decline in morbidity and mortality due to lower respiratory infections in Africa from 2000 to 2017, but also identifies subnational areas with residual high risk.

Identifying biomarkers associated with risk of severe COVID-19 disease could inform clinical management. Here, the authors identify a long noncoding RNA associated with severe disease using data from three European countries, and validate their finding in data from Canada.

Subsidies for coastal management and tax advantages for high-income property owners dampen the negative effects of climate risks on coastal property values. Without subsidies or tax advantages market prices better reflect climate risks, but coastal gentrification could accelerate.

Low read depth sequencing of whole genomes and high read depth exomes of nearly 10,000 extensively phenotyped individuals are combined to help characterize novel sequence variants, generate a highly accurate imputation reference panel and identify novel alleles associated with lipid-related traits; in addition to describing population structure and providing functional annotation of rare and low-frequency variants the authors use the data to estimate the benefits of sequencing for association studies.

World Heritage Sites are under threat of severe impacts due to climate change. This Perspective discusses three facets of management—integrating pluralistic values, adopting holistic methods and ensuring Indigenous leadership—that can assist the conservation of sites.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

Genome-wide ancient DNA data from 225 individuals who lived in southeastern Europe between 12000 and 500 bc reveals that the region acted as a genetic crossroads before and after the arrival of farming.

Wildlife hunting can support diets and socio-economic well-being in communities around the world, but overexploitation can have cascading ecosystem effects. This study examines socio-cultural, economic and landscape factors associated with wildlife hunting in tropical forests in Africa.

The existence of complex musical instruments is accepted to be an indication of fully modern behaviour and advanced symbolic communication. The discovery of bone and ivory flutes that are around 35,000 years old at Hohle Fels in southwestern Germany now demonstrates the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.

Federated ML (FL) provides an alternative to train accurate and generalizable ML models, by only sharing numerical model updates. Here, the authors present the largest FL study to-date to generate an automatic tumor boundary detector for glioblastoma.

Dominic Kwiatkowski and colleagues report a large multicenter genome-wide association study of Plasmodium falciparum resistance to artemisinin. They identify markers of a genetic background on which kelch13 mutations conferring artemisinin resistance are likely to emerge.

Wildlife are central to nature’s contributions to people (NCP) but are often overlooked in NCP policy and management. This Perspective presents evidence for the integral role of wildlife in supporting human well-being and proposes their recognition and incorporation into conservation decision-making as wildlife’s contributions to people (WCP).

This Analysis estimates the health benefits and economic value of enhancing social determinants of mental health in Brisbane South, Australia, home to 1.2 million people. Crosland et al. analyze the impact of a 5% improvement in social cohesion, childhood difficulties, substance misuse, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness and staying engaged with education over 11 years.

Cities may host surprisingly diverse and functionally distinct biological communities. This global analysis on 5302 vertebrate and invertebrate species finds evidence of 4 trait syndromes in urban animal assemblages, modulated by spatial and geographic factors.

Achieving inclusive and sustainable ocean economies, long-term climate resilience and effective biodiversity conservation requires urgent and strategic actions from local to global scales. We discuss fundamental changes that are needed to allow equitable policy across these three domains.

Land-based carbon dioxide removals are critical for meeting the low-warming targets, yet their availability is limited when avoiding excessive risks to sustainability. Scenario-based analysis suggests that they should only be used to compensate for emissions from hard-to-abate sectors and overshoot.

Alternative stable states in forests have implications for the biosphere. Here, the authors combine forest biodiversity observations and simulations revealing that leaf types across temperate regions of the NH follow a bimodal distribution suggesting signatures of alternative forest states.

Gene duplication and subsequent paralogue diversification are major obstacles to genotype-to-phenotype predictability.

The rate and extent of global biodiversity change is surpassing our ability to measure, monitor and forecast trends. We propose an interconnected worldwide system of observation networks — a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) — to coordinate monitoring worldwide and inform action to reach international biodiversity targets.

Wood density is an important plant trait. Data from 1.1 million forest inventory plots and 10,703 tree species show a latitudinal gradient in wood density, with temperature and soil moisture explaining variation at the global scale and disturbance also having a role at the local level.

Polysaccharides are the primary structural cell wall and energy storage molecules of seaweed. Here, the authors show how the geographically restricted dietary polysaccharide agarose is selectively utilized by the human intestinal bacterium Bacteroides uniformis, providing insight into how carbohydrate metabolism evolves within the human microbiome.

Antarctic coastal polynyas have a critical role in the Earth system, influencing the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and biosphere. This Review outlines the importance of Antarctic coastal polynyas and documents their changes over time.

Dominic Kwiatkowski and colleagues report a population genomic analysis of 228 clinical samples of Plasmodium vivax from 13 countries, with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. They analyze patterns of genetic structure within individual infections and find evidence for regional adaptation at the population level.

We consider the shift from broad, population-level medicine to ultra-precise, individualized medicine using emerging therapeutic constructs, AI, deep phenotyping, and individual-centered trials to optimize health across diverse individual genetic and physiological profiles.

In this Perspective, the authors discuss how to robustly consider climate change impacts in ecosystem risk assessments. They highlight challenges in defining impacts, indicators and thresholds, in collating data, and in estimating and reporting risk, and propose solutions to inform conservation.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.