Anthropogenic disturbance has generated a significant loss of biodiversity worldwide and grazing by domestic herbivores is a contributing disturbance. Although the effects of grazing on plants are commonly explored, here we address the potential multi‐trophic effects on animal biodiversity (e.g. herbivores, pollinators and predators). We conducted a meta‐analysis on 109 independent studies that tested the response of animals or plants to livestock grazing relative to livestock excluded. Across all animals, livestock exclusion increased abundance and diversity, but these effects were greatest for trophic levels directly dependent on plants, such as herbivores and pollinators. Detritivores were the only trophic level whose abundance decreased with livestock exclusion. We also found that the number of years since livestock was excluded influenced the community and that the effects of grazer exclusion on animal diversity were strongest in temperate climates. These findings synthesise the effects of livestock grazing beyond plants and demonstrate the indirect impacts of livestock grazing on multiple trophic levels in the animal community. We identified the potentially long‐term impacts that livestock grazing can have on lower trophic levels and consequences for biological conservation. We also highlight the potentially inevitable cost to global biodiversity from livestock grazing that must be balanced against socio‐economic benefits.

The development of buildings and other infrastructure in cities is viewed as a threat to local biodiversity and ecosystem functioning because natural habitat is replaced. However, there is momentum for implementing green infrastructure (GI), such as green roofs, wetland detention basins and community gardens, that partially offset these impacts and that benefit human health. GI is often designed to explicitly support ecosystem services, including implied benefits to biodiversity. The effects of GI on biodiversity have been rarely quantified, but research on this topic has increased exponentially in the last decade and a synthesis of the literature is needed. Here, we examined 1,883 published manuscripts and conducted a meta‐analysis on 33 studies that were relevant. We determined whether GI provides additional benefits to biodiversity over conventional infrastructure or natural counterparts. We also highlighted research gaps and identified opportunities to improve future applications. We determined that GI significantly improves biodiversity over conventional infrastructure equivalents, and that in some cases GI had comparable measures of biodiversity to natural counterparts. Many studies were omitted from these analyses because we found GI research has generally neglected conventional experimental design frameworks, including controls, replication or adequate sampling effort. Synthesis and applications. Our synthesis identified that taxa specificity is an important consideration for green infrastructure (GI) design relative to the more common measurements at the community level. We also identified that ignoring multi‐trophic interactions and landscape‐level patterns can limit our understanding of GI effects on biodiversity. We recommend further examination of species‐specific differences among infrastructures (i.e. green, conventional or natural equivalents) or using functional traits to improve the efficacy of GI implementation on urban biodiversity. Furthermore, we encourage policy makers and practitioners to improve the design of GI to benefit urban ecosystems because of the potential benefits for both humans and global biodiversity.

Long‐term lake ice phenological records from around the Northern Hemisphere provide unique sensitive indicators of climatic variations, even prior to the existence of physical meteorological measurement stations. Here, we updated ice phenology records for 60 lakes with time‐series ranging from 107–204 years to provide the first re‐assessment of Northern Hemispheric ice trends since 2004 by adding 15 additional years of ice phenology records and 40 lakes to our study. We found that, on average, ice‐on was 11.0 days later, ice‐off was 6.8 days earlier, and ice duration was 17.0 days shorter per century over the entire record for each lake. Trends in ice‐on and ice duration were six times faster in the last 25‐year period (1992–2016) than previous quarter centuries. More extreme events in recent decades, including late ice‐on, early ice‐off, shorter periods of ice cover, or no ice cover at all, contribute to the increasing rate of lake ice loss. Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could limit increases in air temperature and abate losses in lake ice cover that would subsequently limit ecological, cultural, and socioeconomic consequences, such as increased evaporation rates, warmer water temperatures, degraded water quality, and the formation of toxic algal blooms.

Lakes around the world are sensitive to water quality degradation and eutrophication through increases in primary production. Understanding the drivers of primary production has been a fundamental question in limnology since its early days. Here, we conducted a systematic review to develop a dataset of water chemistry and lake morphometry for 3874 lakes distributed across 47 countries around the world to answer: (1) What is the global relationship between chlorophyll a (Chl a) and total phosphorus (TP) in lakes? (2) Are there inflection points at which the TP–Chl a relationship is no longer linear? and (3) What explains the inflection points and nonlinearities in the TP–Chl a relationship? We found that a sigmoidal relationship between TP and Chl a explained 44% of the variation. We also found physical characteristics of the lake mediated the TP–Chl a relationship such as mean depth, Secchi depth, and elevation. The nonlinear segments of this relationship best described lakes located in very cold (mean annual temperature = −10°C) and hot (> 25°C) climates, which also dominated the high and low ends of TP concentrations, respectively. A positive linear TP–Chl a relationship existed at intermediate concentrations of TP (0.004–0.23 mg L⁻¹). A high degree of variability in Chl a exists between lakes at similar TP levels, highlighting the difficulty in simply decreasing nutrient inputs to manage eutrophication in lakes worldwide. Moreover, as global temperatures continue to rise, the Chl a–TP relationship in lakes located in very cold or warm temperate regions of the world may shift in response to these warmer temperatures.