Spatial structure of species change: Biodiversity is undergoing rapid change driven by climate change and other human influences. Blowes et al. analyze the global patterns in temporal change in biodiversity using a large quantity of time-series data from different regions (see the Perspective by Eriksson and Hillebrand). Their findings reveal clear spatial patterns in richness and composition change, where marine taxa exhibit the highest rates of change. The marine tropics, in particular, emerge as hotspots of species richness losses. Given that human activities are affecting biodiversity in magnitudes and directions that differ across the planet, these findings will provide a much needed biogeographic understanding of biodiversity change that can help inform conservation prioritization. Science , this issue p. 339 ; see also p. 308

Communities are comprised of individual species that respond to changes in their environment depending in part on their niche requirements. These species comprise the biodiversity of any given community. Common biodiversity metrics such as richness, evenness, and the species abundance distribution are frequently used to describe biodiversity across ecosystems and taxonomic groups. While it is increasingly clear that researchers will need to forecast changes in biodiversity, ecology currently lacks a framework for understanding the natural background variability in biodiversity or how biodiversity patterns will respond to environmental change. We predict that while species populations depend on local ecological mechanisms (e.g., niche processes) and should respond strongly to disturbance, community‐level properties that emerge from these species should generally be less sensitive to disturbance because they depend on regional mechanisms (e.g., compensatory dynamics). Using published data from terrestrial animal communities, we show that community‐level properties were generally resilient under a suite of artificial and natural manipulations. In contrast, species responded readily to manipulation. Our results suggest that community‐level measures are poor indicators of change, perhaps because many systems display strong compensatory dynamics maintaining community‐level properties. We suggest that ecologists consider using multiple metrics that measure composition and structure in biodiversity response studies.

Land-use change and forest biodiversity: Land-use change by humans, particularly forest loss, is influencing Earth's biodiversity through time. To assess the influence of forest loss on population and biodiversity change, Daskalova et al. integrated data from more than 6000 time series of species' abundance, richness, and composition in ecological assemblages around the world. Forest loss leads to both positive and negative responses of populations and biodiversity, and the temporal lags in population and biodiversity change after forest loss can extend up to half a century. Land-use change precipitates divergent population and biodiversity change. This analysis has consequences for projections of human impact, ongoing conservation, and assessments of biodiversity change. Science , this issue p. 1341

Nine simple ways to make it easier to (re)use your data

The scale and magnitude of complex and pressing environmental issues lend urgency to the need for integrative and reproducible analysis and synthesis, facilitated by data-intensive research approaches. However, the recent pace of technological change has been such that appropriate skills to accomplish data-intensive research are lacking among environmental scientists, who more than ever need greater access to training and mentorship in computational skills. Here, we provide a roadmap for raising data competencies of current and next-generation environmental researchers by describing the concepts and skills needed for effectively engaging with the heterogeneous, distributed, and rapidly growing volumes of available data. We articulate five key skills: (1) data management and processing, (2) analysis, (3) software skills for science, (4) visualization, and (5) communication methods for collaboration and dissemination. We provide an overview of the current suite of training initiatives available to environmental scientists and models for closing the skill-transfer gap.