Amidst the collective push to establish nature conservation initiatives, little attention has been paid to ensuring that they persist over time. The abandonment of conservation commitments is a blind spot that threatens progress towards global environmental goals.

A species-level dataset of sediment-dwelling macrofauna, sampled 2 years before and 2 months after a test of a commercial deep-sea mining machine, reveals losses of macrofaunal density and species richness within the machine’s tracks and community-level effects in both the tracks and an area impacted by sediment plumes.

The interplay between speciation and extinction rates shapes clade diversity dynamics. Using a novel phylogenetic model that includes living and fossil lineages, the authors estimate speciation and extinction rates for each lineage and show that diversity dynamics are governed by a lineage tendency of macroevolutionary fitness decline, rather than clade-level processes.

Microbial carbon use efficiency is a strong predictor of soil organic carbon stocks. Here the authors reveal that the microbial growth rate is a more reliable and informative predictor, and that modelling approaches tend to overemphasize the role of biotic over abiotic controls compared to empirical data.

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.

A juvenile iguanodontian from the Lower Cretaceous of China preserves both spikes and scales in its skin that are different from integumentary structures in either non-avian dinosaurs or extant squamates and may have had a defensive function.

HORBEC are protein complexes involved in the regulation of redox balance and energy conservation. The authors develop a bioinformatic tool for HORBEC annotation in bacterial and archaeal genomes and reconstruct the evolutionary history of these fundamental enzymes.

The authors leverage experimental and phylogenetic data to propose that anammox bacteria during the Archaean period could have harvested photoholes from cyanobacterial mats for use as an electron acceptor prior to the availability of nitrite.

A comparative analysis of trait data combined with a mathematical model suggests that dietary specialization drives selection towards the smallest and largest body sizes in terrestrial mammals, as generalists outcompete specialists at intermediate sizes.

Hafiz Muhammed Wariss and Wenjun Li are captivated by a pungent but threatened medicinal plant.

Recent expanded Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) listings for sharks and rays are welcome — yet seizing this opportunity requires that international trade policy is treated not as an end point, but as a catalyst for wider regulatory and market-based reforms.

Sometimes our editors can be spotted out in the wild at conferences and institute visits. We look back at some of our activities over the past year and look forward to what’s on the horizon in 2026.