Despite decades of awareness about the biodiversity crisis, it remains a wicked problem. Besides preservation and restoration strategies, one approach has focused on increasing public concern about biodiversity issues by emphasizing opportunities for people to experience natural environments. In this article, we endeavor to complicate the understanding of these experiences of nature (EoN). Because EoN are embedded in social and cultural contexts, transformative or new EoN are emerging in combination with societal changes in work, home, and technology. Policies that acknowledge and accept a diversity of culturally situated EoN, including negative EoN, could help people reconnect with the complexity and dynamics of biodiversity. A new conceptualization of EoN that encompasses diverse experiences and reflects the sociocultural context could help to stimulate a broader transformation in the relationship between society and nature, one that better integrates the two spheres. Such a transformation is necessary to more effectively address the biodiversity crisis.

A decadal resolution time series of sea surface temperature (SST) spanning the last two millennia is reconstructed by combining a proxy record from a new sediment sequence with previously published data from core MD99–2275, north of Iceland. The alkenone based SST reconstruction is validated with historic observational data and compared to a new similar temporal resolution reconstruction obtained from sediment core RAPiD21–3K, in the subpolar North Atlantic. The two SST paleorecords show consistent multidecadal scale coolings throughout the interval and similar expressions during the contrasted climatic periods ‘colloquially known’ as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA) and Little Ice Age (LIA). In order to further understand the temporal and spatial SST variations and investigate the influence of natural forcings on the observed SST changes during the last millennium, we compare our time series to simulations using the Institut Pierre‐Simon Laplace IPSLCM4‐v2 climate model. This comparison highlights the potential importance of volcanism as a natural forcing driving coherent abrupt cooling events captured in the subpolar North Atlantic records.

Two decades ago, Gaston and O'Neill (2004) deliberated on why automated species identification had not become widely employed. We no longer have to wonder: This AI-based technology is here, embedded in numerous web and mobile apps used by large audiences interested in nature. Now that automated species identification tools are available, popular, and efficient, it is time to look at how the apps are developed, what they promise, and how users appraise them. Delving into the automated species identification apps landscape, we found that free and paid apps differ fundamentally in presentation, experience, and the use of biodiversity and personal data. However, these two business models are deeply intertwined. Going forward, although big tech companies will eventually take over the landscape, citizen science programs will likely continue to have their own identification tools because of their specific purpose and their ability to create a strong sense of belonging among naturalist communities.

Modern lifestyles have increased a separation between humans and nature while also integrating technology into daily life. The use of technology has not only supplanted people's traditional experiences with nature but begun to change them: Through videos and documentaries, we can discover windows opened onto wilderness, landscapes, places, and species we would not be able to reach and see otherwise. Even video games contribute to this phenomenon. Can gaming play a role in the relationship between humans and nature? The current study focused on how players relate to nature in the world's number-one online role-playing game, the World of Warcraft (WoW). We distributed an online questionnaire to 1,173 French-speaking gamers to assess their preferred landscapes in the virtual environment, their relations to nature in real life, and their motivations to play. The results indicate that players prefer virtual areas displaying a significant amount of green vegetation and specific open landscapes but that this preference is not related to their connectedness with nature nor to their motivation to play, which is mostly to escape from their daily life. We showed also that people that declared being motivated to play for nature-based reasons are those that declare being less connected with nature in real life. We discuss these results as a reflection of biophilia in a virtual context, that is, an attraction to virtual landscapes that are healthy and full of vegetation, when it has become difficult to reach such landscapes in real life. Key Words: Virtual experience of nature—Biophilia—Online universe—Virtual nature—Video games—Connection to nature.