Managing linguistic obstacles in multidisciplinary, multinational, and multilingual research projects.

Environmental challenges are rarely confined to national, disciplinary, or linguistic domains. Convergent solutions require international collaboration and equitable access to new technologies and practices. The ability of international, multidisciplinary and multilingual research teams to work effectively can be challenging.

The socioeconomic and environmental niche of protected areas reveals global conservation gaps and opportunities.

The global network of protected areas has rapidly expanded in the past decade and is expected to cover at least 30% of land and sea by 2030 to halt biodiversity erosion. Yet, the distribution of protected areas is highly heterogeneous on Earth and the social-environmental preconditions enabling or hindering protected area establishment remain poorly understood. Here, using fourteen socioeconomic and environmental factors, we characterize the multidimensional niche of terrestrial and marine protected areas, which we use to accurately establish, at the global scale, whether a particular location has preconditions favourable for paestablishment.

Exploring fine-scale urban landscapes using satellite data to predict the distribution of Aedes mosquito breeding sites.

Background: The spread of mosquito-transmitted diseases such as dengue is a major public health issue worldwide. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, a primary vector for dengue, thrives in urban environments and breeds mainly in artificial or natural water containers. While the relationship between urban landscapes and potential breeding sites remains poorly understood, such a knowledge could help mitigate the risks associated with these diseases.

The Marine Spatial Planning Index: a tool to guide and assess marine spatial planning.

Marine spatial planning (MSP) has the potential to balance demands for ocean space with environmental protection and is increasingly considered crucial for achieving global ocean goals. In theory, MSP should adhere to six principles, being: (1) ecosystem-based, (2) integrated, (3) place-based, (4) adaptive, (5) strategic, and (6) participatory. Despite nearly two decades of practice, MSP continues to face critical challenges to fully realize these principles, hindering its ability to deliver positive outcomes for people and nature.

Cumulative impact assessments highlight the benefits of integrating land-based management with marine spatial planning.

Cumulative impact assessments can inform ecosystem-based management by mapping human pressures and assessing their intensity on ecosystem components. However, its use to inform local management is scarce, largely due to the need for fine-grained spatial data representing ecosystem threats that can assess impacts at a local scale. Here, we applied the cumulative impact assessment framework to Moorea's coral reef, French Polynesia to inform the ongoing revision of the island-wide marine spatial management plan.

Generating higher resolution regional seafloor maps from crowd-sourced bathymetry.

Seafloor mapping can offer important insights for marine management, spatial planning, and research in marine geology, ecology, and oceanography. Here, we present a method for generating regional bathymetry and geomorphometry maps from crowd-sourced depth soundings (Olex AS) for a small fraction of the cost of multibeam data collection over the same area. Empirical Bayesian Kriging was used to generate a continuous bathymetric surface from incomplete and, in some areas, sparse Olex coverage on the Newfoundland and Labrador shelves of eastern Canada.

Noise exposure from commercial shipping for the southern resident killer whale population.

This study assesses vessel-noise exposure levels for Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW) in the Salish Sea. Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) was used to delineate SRKW summer core areas. Those areas were combined with the output of a regional cumulative noise model describing sound level variations generated by commercial vessels (1/3-octave-bands from 10 Hz to 63.

Comparing Selections of Environmental Variables for Ecological Studies: A Focus on Terrain Attributes.

Selecting appropriate environmental variables is a key step in ecology. Terrain attributes (e.g.