▪ Abstract Species extinctions and the deterioration of other biodiversity features worldwide have led to the adoption of systematic conservation planning in many regions of the world. As a consequence, various software tools for conservation planning have been developed over the past twenty years. These tools implement algorithms designed to identify conservation area networks for the representation and persistence of biodiversity features. Budgetary, ethical, and other sociopolitical constraints dictate that the prioritized sites represent biodiversity with minimum impact on human interests. Planning tools are typically also used to satisfy these criteria. This chapter reviews both the concepts and technical choices that underlie the development of these tools. Conservation planning problems can be formulated as optimization problems, and we evaluate the suitability of different algorithms for their solution. Finally, we also review some key issues associated with the use of these tools, such as computational efficiency, the effectiveness of taxa and abiotic parameters at choosing surrogates for biodiversity, the process of setting explicit targets of representation for biodiversity surrogates, and dealing with multiple criteria. The review concludes by identifying areas for future research, including the scheduling of conservation action over extensive time periods and incorporating data about site vulnerability.

Much biodiversity data is collected worldwide, but it remains challenging to assemble the scattered knowledge for assessing biodiversity status and trends. The concept of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) was introduced to structure biodiversity monitoring globally, and to harmonize and standardize biodiversity data from disparate sources to capture a minimum set of critical variables required to study, report and manage biodiversity change. Here, we assess the challenges of a ‘Big Data’ approach to building global EBV data products across taxa and spatiotemporal scales, focusing on species distribution and abundance. The majority of currently available data on species distributions derives from incidentally reported observations or from surveys where presence‐only or presence–absence data are sampled repeatedly with standardized protocols. Most abundance data come from opportunistic population counts or from population time series using standardized protocols (e.g. repeated surveys of the same population from single or multiple sites). Enormous complexity exists in integrating these heterogeneous, multi‐source data sets across space, time, taxa and different sampling methods. Integration of such data into global EBV data products requires correcting biases introduced by imperfect detection and varying sampling effort, dealing with different spatial resolution and extents, harmonizing measurement units from different data sources or sampling methods, applying statistical tools and models for spatial inter‐ or extrapolation, and quantifying sources of uncertainty and errors in data and models. To support the development of EBVs by the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), we identify 11 key workflow steps that will operationalize the process of building EBV data products within and across research infrastructures worldwide. These workflow steps take multiple sequential activities into account, including identification and aggregation of various raw data sources, data quality control, taxonomic name matching and statistical modelling of integrated data. We illustrate these steps with concrete examples from existing citizen science and professional monitoring projects, including eBird, the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring network, the Living Planet Index and the Baltic Sea zooplankton monitoring. The identified workflow steps are applicable to both terrestrial and aquatic systems and a broad range of spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. They depend on clear, findable and accessible metadata, and we provide an overview of current data and metadata standards. Several challenges remain to be solved for building global EBV data products: (i) developing tools and models for combining heterogeneous, multi‐source data sets and filling data gaps in geographic, temporal and taxonomic coverage, (ii) integrating emerging methods and technologies for data collection such as citizen science, sensor networks, DNA‐based techniques and satellite remote sensing, (iii) solving major technical issues related to data product structure, data storage, execution of workflows and the production process/cycle as well as approaching technical interoperability among research infrastructures, (iv) allowing semantic interoperability by developing and adopting standards and tools for capturing consistent data and metadata, and (v) ensuring legal interoperability by endorsing open data or data that are free from restrictions on use, modification and sharing. Addressing these challenges is critical for biodiversity research and for assessing progress towards conservation policy targets and sustainable development goals.

Background. Microbial inhabitants of soils are important to ecosystem and planetary functions, yet there are large gaps in our knowledge of their diver

Changes in Earth's climate are accelerating, prompting increasing calls to ensure that investments in ecological restoration and nature conservation accommodate such changes. To acknowledge this need, we propose the term “ecological renovation” to describe ecological management and nature conservation actions that actively allow for environmental change. To evaluate and progress the development of ecological renovation and related intervention options in a climate change context, we reviewed the literature and established a typology of options that have been proposed. We explored how these options address emerging principles underpinning climate‐adapted conservation goals and whether the balance of approaches reflected in our typology is likely to be sufficient given expected rapid rates of climate change. Our typology recognizes a matrix of 23 intervention option types arranged on the basis of underpinning ecological mechanisms (“ameliorate changing conditions” or “build adaptive capacity”) on one axis, and the nature of the tools used to manipulate them (“low regrets” or “climate targeted”) on the other. Despite a burgeoning literature since 2008, we found that the majority of effort has consistently focused on low‐regrets adaptation approaches that aim to build adaptive capacity. This is in many ways desirable, but a paradigm shift enabling greater attention to climate‐targeted approaches is likely to be needed as climate change accelerates. When assessed against five emerging principles for setting nature conservation goals in a changing climate, only one option type could deliver to all five, and we identified a conflict between climate‐targeted options and “wildness” values that calls for deeper evaluation. Importantly, much of the inference in the 473 reviewed studies was drawn from ecological reasoning and modeling, with only 16% offering new empirical evidence. We also noted significant biases toward North America and Europe, forest ecosystems, trees, and vertebrates. To address these limitations and help shift the paradigm toward humans as “renovators” rather than “restorers” of a prior world, we propose that ecological researchers contribute by (1) informing societal discourse toward adapting nature conservation goals to climate change, (2) adjusting and upscaling conservation planning to accommodate this suite of climate‐adapted goals, and (3) reconceptualizing experimental approaches to increase empirical evidence and expedite innovation of tools to address change.