Introduction: Most global biodiversity is in developing economies. Decades of capacity building should have built sufficient in-country capacity to develop biodiversity baselines; yet has effort provided the expertise to build these baselines?Methods: Grants and access to research opportunities are often linked to success in publishing, with the H-index providing the main metric of academic success. Recent compilations of “Top Researchers in Ecology and Evolution” included 5,419 researchers, but where these researchers are and how representative they are has not been well studied. We explored the global distribution of “Top Researchers in Ecology and Evolution” and explored the representation of Women, non-Caucasians, and non-Caucasian women, as well as the representation of “local” top researchers in different regions.Results: Over half Top Researchers in Ecology and Evolution are from just three countries (United States, United Kingdom, and Australia), and 83% come from 12 higher-income countries. Even in lower-income economies the majority of the few “high impact” researchers are originally from higher-income economies. Only China had a high proportion of their high-impact non-Caucasian researchers, with the majority of researchers coming from that region. Women were also underrepresented across the globe, only three countries had more than 20% of top-performing ecologists being female.Discussion: Ultimately, despite decades of capacity building, we are still failing to build in-country capacity for research or to provide sufficient support for female ecologists to publish and lead the field. Here we discuss why these issues persist, and how we might improve representation and access to opportunity and support for all groups, and provide the analysis needed to provide solutions to global challenges in biodiversity conservation, which require diverse representation to develop effective, and nuanced solutions.

Destruction of natural habitat, land-use changes and biological invasion are some of the major threats to biodiversity. Both habitat alteration and biological invasions can have impacts on pollinator communities and pollination network structures. This study aims to examine the effect of an invasive plant, praxelis (Praxelis clematidea; Asteraceae), and land-use types on pollinator communities and the structure of pollination networks. We conducted the study in smallholder orchards which are either invaded or non-invaded by P. clematidea. We estimated the pollinator richness, visitation rates, and pollinator diversity and evaluated the network structures from 18 smallholder orchards in Northeastern Thailand. The effect of landscape structure in the vicinity of the orchards was investigated, with the proportion of agricultural, forest, and urban landscape within a 3 km radius analyzed. The invasive species and land-use disturbance influence the pollinator communities and pollination network structure at species level was affected by the presence of P. clematidea. Bees were the most important pollinator group for pollinator communities and pollination networks of both invaded or non-invaded plots, as bees are a generalist species, they provide the coherence of both the network and its own module. The urban landscape had a strong negative influence on pollinator richness, while the proportions of agriculture and forest landscape positively affected the pollinator community.

Aim: Anthropogenic habitats commonly favour introduced species. However, there is little information regarding the responses of pollinators to native and introduced plants across anthropogenic landscapes. The main goal of the study is to investigate pollinator interactions of native and introduced plants across smallholder tropical orchards in Thailand, as these plantations are essential to local food security. Location: Smallholder tropical orchards in Thailand. Methods: We compiled data from four recent studies on plant–pollinator networks in 65 smallholder tropical orchards across Thailand. Using network analyses, we compared species degree (i.e., the number of pollinator species visiting a plant) and specialisation ( d' ) between native and introduced plant species, with the latter further categorised into non‐naturalised, naturalised and invasive groups. Analyses were conducted using linear mixed‐effects models (LMMs), treating individual plant species as the unit of analysis and incorporating orchard identity nested within study as a random effect. Additionally, we examined whether variation in surrounding anthropogenic landscapes (i.e., the proportion of agricultural and urbanised areas) and the proportional representation of introduced plant species influenced the structure of plant–pollinator networks. Results: Overall, specialisation ( d' ) of the native plants was significantly greater than that of the introduced plants, while pollinators exhibited no preference towards naturalised or invasive plants over non‐naturalised ones. We found a decrease in species degree of native plants as well as connectance and linkage density with increasing proportion of anthropogenic areas, likely due to limited floral resources and nesting availability. However, we also found an increase in network specialisation ( H ₂ ′ ) with a higher proportion of urban area. Main Conclusions: Understanding the impact of land‐use changes with the presence of introduced plant species is important for predicting community stability of plant–pollinator interactions as well as for habitat management strategies. Surrounding natural habitat and important food plants should be preserved and promoted to maintain pollinator interactions in human‐dominated areas.