research topics for biodiversity

Nature’s Secrets: Top 200 Ecology Research Topics

Welcome to the world of Ecology, where the study of nature evolves like an interesting story. Ecology helps us solve the complex relationships between living organisms and their environments. In this fascinating journey, we will see ecology research topics that reveal the secrets of ecosystems, biodiversity, and the delicate balance of nature.

From understanding how different species react to the impact of human activities on our planet, Ecology offers insights that go beyond the ordinary.

So, whether you’re fascinated by the web of life in a forest, the dynamics of a coral reef, or the challenges of conservation, these research topics will guide you into the heart of ecological wonders. Let’s start this adventure of knowledge, discovering the hidden secrets that shape the world around us.

What Is Ecology?

Table of Contents

Ecology is the study of how living things interact with each other and their environment. It explores relationships between plants, animals, and their surroundings, helping us understand how nature works and how different elements in ecosystems connect.

What Are The 6 Topics Studied In Ecology?

Ecology studies the relationships between living things and their environment. Here are six topics studied in ecology:

Ecosystems: Examining how living organisms, like plants and animals, interact with each other and their non living surroundings, such as soil, water, and air.
Biodiversity: Analyzing the variety of life in different ecosystems, including the number and types of species present.
Population Dynamics: Understanding how the numbers of individuals in a species change over time, including factors like birth rates, death rates, and migration.
Community Interactions: Exploring how different species in a specific area interact with each other, such as through competition or cooperation.
Ecological Succession: Studying the increasing changes in ecosystems over time, including how new communities of plants and animals replace older ones.
Conservation Biology: Focusing on protecting and preserving ecosystems and species, especially those facing threats or endangerment.

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v.4(F1000 Faculty Rev); 2015

Hot topics in biodiversity and climate change research

Barry w. brook.

1 School of Biological Sciences, Private Bag 55, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 7001, Australia

Damien A. Fordham

2 The Environment Institute and School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia

Peer Review Summary

With scientific and societal interest in biodiversity impacts of climate change growing enormously over the last decade, we analysed directions and biases in the recent most highly cited data papers in this field of research (from 2012 to 2014). The majority of this work relied on leveraging large databases of already collected historical information (but not paleo- or genetic data), and coupled these to new methodologies for making forward projections of shifts in species’ geographical ranges, with a focus on temperate and montane plants. A consistent finding was that the pace of climate-driven habitat change, along with increased frequency of extreme events, is outpacing the capacity of species or ecological communities to respond and adapt.

Introduction

It is now halfway through the second decade of the 21 st century, and climate change impact has emerged as a “hot topic” in biodiversity research. In the early decades of the discipline of conservation biology (1970s and 1980s), effort was focused on studying and mitigating the four principal drivers of extinction risk since the turn of the 16 th century, colourfully framed by Diamond 1 as the “evil quartet”: habitat destruction, overhunting (or overexploitation of resources), introduced species, and chains of extinctions (including trophic cascades and co-extinctions). Recent work has also emphasised the importance of synergies among drivers of endangerment 2 . But the momentum to understand how other aspects of global change (such as a disrupted climate system and pollution) add to, and reinforce, these threats has built since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports 3 of 2001 and 2007 and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 4 in 2005.

Scientific studies on the effects of climate change on biodiversity have proliferated in recent decades. A Web of Science ( webofscience.com ) query on the term “biodiversity AND (climate change)”, covering the 14 complete years of the 21 st century, shows the peer-reviewed literature matching this search term has grown from just 87 papers in 2001 to 1,377 in 2014. Figure 1 illustrates that recent scientific interest in climate change-related aspects of biodiversity research has outpaced—in relative terms—the baseline trend of interest in other areas of biodiversity research (i.e., matching the query “biodiversity NOT (climate change)”), with climate-related research rising from 5.5% of biodiversity papers in 2001 to 16.8% in 2014.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
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Number of refereed papers listed in the Web of Science database that were published between 2001 and 2014 on the specific topic “biodiversity AND (climate change)” (blue line, secondary y-axis) compared to the more general search term “biodiversity NOT (climate change)”.

Interest in this field of research seems to have been driven by a number of concerns. First, there is an increasing societal and scientific consensus on the need to measure, predict (and, ultimately, mitigate) the impact of anthropogenic climate change 5 , linked to the rise of industrial fossil-fuel combustion and land-use change 6 . Biodiversity loss and ecosystem transformations, in particular, have been highlighted as possibly being amongst the most sensitive of Earth’s systems to global change 7 , 8 . Second, there is increasing attention given to quantifying the reinforcing (or occasionally stabilising) feedbacks between climate change and other impacts of human development, such as agricultural activities and land clearing, invasive species, exploitation of natural resources, and biotic interactions 2 , 9 . Third, there has been a trend towards increased accessibility of climate change data and predictions at finer spatio-temporal resolutions, making it more feasible to do biodiversity climate research 10 , 11 .

What are the major directions being taken by the field of climate change and biodiversity research in recent years? Are there particular focal topics, or methods, that have drawn most attention? Here we summarise major trends in the recent highly cited literature of this field.

Filtering and categorising the publications

To select papers, we used the Web of Science indexing service maintained by Thomson Reuters, using the term “biodiversity AND (climate change)” to search within article titles, abstracts, and keywords. This revealed 3,691 matching papers spanning the 3-year period 2012 to 2014. Of these, 116 were categorised by Essential Science Indicators ( esi.incites.thomsonreuters.com ) as being “Highly Cited Papers” (definition: “As of November/December 2014, this highly cited paper received enough citations to place it in the top 1% of [its] academic field based on a highly cited threshold for the field and publication year”), with five also being classed as “Hot Papers” (definition: “Published in the past two years and received enough citations in November/December 2014 to place it in the top 0.1% of papers in [its] academic field”). The two academic fields most commonly associated with these selected papers were “Plant & Animal Science” and “Environment/Ecology”.

Next we ranked each highly cited paper by year, according to its total accumulated citations through to April 1 2015, and then selected the top ten papers from each year (2012, 2013 and 2014) for detailed assessment. We wished to focus on data-oriented research papers, so only those labelled “Article” (Document Type) were considered, with “Review”, “Editorial”, or other non-research papers being excluded from our final list. Systematic reviews that included a formal meta-analysis were, however, included. We then further vetted each potential paper based on a detailed examination of its content, and rejected those articles for which the topics of biodiversity or climate change constituted only a minor component, or where these were only mentioned in passing (despite appearing in the abstract or key words).

The final list of 30 qualifying highly cited papers is shown in Table 1 , ordered by year and first author. The full bibliographic details are given, along with a short description of the key message of the research (a subjective summary, based on our interpretation of the paper). Each paper was categorised by methodological type, the aspect of climate change that was the principal focus, the spatial and biodiversity scale of the study units, the realm, biome and taxa under study, the main ecological focus, and the research type and application (the first row of Table 1 lists possible choices that might be allocated within a given categorisation). Note that our choice of categories for the selected papers was unavoidably idiosyncratic, in this case being dictated largely by the most common topics that appeared in the reviewed papers. Other emphases, such as non-temperature-related drivers of global change, evolutionary responses, and so on, might have been more suitable for other bodies of literature. We also did not attempt to undertake any rigorous quantification of effect sizes in reported responses of biodiversity to climate change; such an approach would have required a systematic review and meta-analysis, which was beyond the scope of this overview of highly cited papers.

Summary of the ten most highly cited research papers based on the search term: “biodiversity AND (climate change)”, for each of 2012 9 , 13 , 14 , 23 , 26 , 32 , 34 , 36 , 40 , 45 , 2013 15 – 17 , 21 , 27 , 30 , 31 , 33 , 37 , 39 and 2014 18 – 20 , 22 , 24 , 25 , 28 , 29 , 35 , 38 , as determined in the ISI Web of Science database. Filters : Reviews, commentaries, and opinion pieces were excluded, as were papers for which climate change was not among the focal topics of the research. The first row of the Table is a key that shows the possible categorisations that were open to selection (more than one description might be selected for a given paper); n is the number of times a category term was allocated.

Analysis of trends, biases and gaps

Based on the categorisation frequencies in Table 1 (counts are given in the n columns adjacent to each category), the “archetypal” highly cited paper in biodiversity and climate change research relies on a database of previously collated information, makes an assessment based on future forecasts of shifts in geographical distributions, is regional in scope, emphasises applied-management outcomes, and uses terrestrial plant species in temperate zones as the study unit.

Many papers also introduced new methodological developments, studied montane communities, took a theoretical-fundamental perspective, and considered physiological, population dynamics, and migration-dispersal aspects of ecological change. Plants were by far the dominant taxonomic group under investigation. By contrast, relatively few of the highly cited paper studies used experimental manipulations or network analysis; lake, river, island and marine systems were rarely treated; nor did they focus on behavioural or biotic interactions. Crucially, none of the highly cited papers relied on paleoclimate reconstructions or genetic information, despite the potential value of such data for model validation and contextualisation 12 . Such data are crucial in providing evidence for species responses to past environmental changes, specifying possible limits of adaptation (rate and extent) and fundamental niches, and testing theories of biogeography and macroecology.

At the time of writing, 5 of the 30 highly cited papers listed in Table 1 (16%) also received article recommendations from Faculty of 1000 experts ( f1000.com/prime/recommendations ) 9 , 13 – 16 with none of the most recent (2014) highly cited papers having yet received an F1000 Prime endorsement.

Key findings of the highly cited paper collection for 2012–2014

A broad conclusion of the highly cited papers for 2012–2014 (drawn from the “main message” summaries described in Table 1 ) is that the pace of climate change-forced habitat change, coupled with the increased frequency of extreme events 15 , 17 and synergisms that arise with other threat drivers 9 , 18 and physical barriers 19 , is typically outpacing or constraining the capacity of species, communities, and ecosystems to respond and adapt 20 , 21 . The combination of these factors leads to accumulated physiological stresses 13 , 15 , 22 , might have already induced an “extinction debt” in many apparently viable resident populations 14 , 23 – 25 , and is leading to changing community compositions as thermophilic species displace their more climate-sensitive competitors 13 , 26 . In addition to atmospheric problems caused by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions, there is mounting interest in the resilience of marine organisms to ocean acidification 27 , 28 and altered nutrient flows 16 .

Although models used to underpin the forecasts of climate-driven changes to biotic populations and communities have seen major advances in recent years, as a whole the field still draws from a limited suite of methods, such as ecological niche models, matrix population projections and simple measures of change in metrics of ecological diversity 7 , 12 , 29 . However, new work is pushing the field in innovative directions, including a focus on advancements in dynamic habitat-vegetation models 30 – 32 , improved frameworks for projecting shifts in species distributions 29 , 33 , 34 and how this might be influenced by competition or predation 35 , 36 , and analyses that seek to identify ecological traits that can better predict the relative vulnerability of different taxa to climate change 37 , 38 .

In terms of application of the research to conservation and policy, some offer local or region-specific advice on ecosystem management and its integration with other human activities (e.g., agriculture, fisheries) under a changing climate 18 , 24 , 35 , 39 . However, the majority of the highly cited papers used some form of forecasting to predict the consequences of different climate-mitigation scenarios (or business-as-usual) on biodiversity responses and extinctions 20 – 22 , 33 , 40 , so as to illustrate the potentially dire consequences of inaction.

Future directions

The current emphasis on leveraging large databases for evidence of species responses to observed (recent) climate change is likely to wane as existing datasets are scrutinised repeatedly. This suggests to us that future research will be forced to move increasingly towards the logistically more challenging experimental manipulations (laboratory, mesocosm, and field-based). The likelihood of this shift in emphasis is reinforced by the recent trend towards mechanistic models in preference to correlative approaches 41 . Such approaches arguably offer the greatest potential to yield highly novel insights, especially for predicting and managing the outcomes of future climate-ecosystem interactions that have no contemporary or historical analogue. Along with this work would come an increasing need for systematic reviews and associated meta-analysis, to summarise these individual studies quantitatively and use the body of experiments to test hypotheses.

Technological advances will also drive this field forward. This includes the development of open-source software and function libraries that facilitate and standardise routine tasks like validation and sensitivity analysis of projection or statistical models 42 , 43 , as well as improved access to data layers from large spatio-temporal datasets like ensemble climate forecasts 10 and palaeoclimatic hindcasts 44 . An increasing emphasis on cloud-based storage and use of off-site high-performance parallel computing infrastructure will make it realistic for researchers to undertake computationally intensive tasks 31 from their desktop.

These approaches are beginning to emerge, and a few papers on these topics already appear in the highly cited paper list ( Table 1 ). This includes the innovative exposure of coral populations to varying carbon dioxide concentrations, and the meta-analyses of tundra plant response to experimental warming 45 and marine organisms to ocean chemistry 27 . Such work must also be underpinned by improved models of the underlying mechanisms and dynamic processes, ideally using multi-species frameworks that make use of ensemble forecasting methods for improved incorporation of scenario and climate model uncertainty 10 . Such an approach can account better for biotic interactions 41 via individual-based and physiologically explicit “bottom-up” models of adaptive responses 31 . Lastly, there must be a greater emphasis on using genetic information to integrate eco-evolutionary processes into biodiversity models 46 , and on improving methods for making the best use of retrospective knowledge from palaeoecological data 12 .

[version 1; referees: 2 approved]

Funding Statement

This work was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP120101019 (Brook) and Future Fellowship FT140101192 (Fordham).

Referee response for version 1

Bernhard schmid.

1 Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, CH-8057, Switzerland

I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

Jonathan Rhodes

1 Landscape Ecology and Conversation Group, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, Australia

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19 January 2022

Biodiversity faces its make-or-break year, and research will be key

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Targeted measures can help to stop extinctions, including of Père David’s deer ( Elaphurus davidianus ), but conserving biodiversity will also require combating climate change, cutting pollution and enhancing sustainable food systems. Credit: Staffan Widstrand/Wild Wonders of China/Nature Picture Library

Biodiversity is being lost at a rate not seen since the last mass extinction. But the United Nations decade-old plan to slow down and eventually stop the decline of species and ecosystems by 2020 has failed. Most of the plan’s 20 targets — known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets — have not been met .

The Aichi targets are part of an international agreement called the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and member states are now finalizing replacements for them. Currently referred to as the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF), the new targets are expected to be agreed this summer at the second part of the convention’s Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Kunming, China. The meeting was due to be held in May, but is likely to be delayed by a few months. Finalizing the framework will be down to government representatives working with the world’s leading biodiversity specialists. But input from social-science researchers, especially those who study how organizations and governments work, would improve its chances of success.

A draft of the GBF was published last July. It aims to slow down the rate of biodiversity loss by 2030. And by 2050, biodiversity will be “valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people”. The plan comprises 4 broad goals and 21 associated targets. The headline targets include conserving 30% of land and sea areas by 2030, and reducing government subsidies that harm biodiversity by US$500 billion per year. Overall, the goals and targets are designed to tackle each of the main contributors to biodiversity loss, which include agriculture and food systems, climate change, invasive species, pollution and unsustainable production and consumption.

Fewer than 20 extinctions a year: does the world need a single target for biodiversity?

The biodiversity convention’s science advisory body is reviewing the GBF and helping governments to decide how the targets are to be monitored . But researchers and policymakers have been writing biodiversity action plans since the 1990s, and most of these strategies have failed to make a lasting impact on two of the three key demands: that global biodiversity be conserved and that natural resources be used sustainably.

Some of these failures are to do with governance, which is why it is important to involve not just researchers in the biological sciences, but also people who study organizations and how governments work. This knowledge, when allied to conservation science, will help policymakers to obtain a fuller picture of both the science gaps and the organizational challenges in implementing biodiversity plans.

The GBF is a comprehensive plan. But success will require systemic change across public policy. That is both a strength and a weakness. If systemic change can be implemented, it will lead to real change. But if it cannot, there’s no plan B. This has led some researchers to argue that one target or number should be prioritized, and defined in a way that is clear to the public and to policymakers. It would be biodiversity’s equivalent of the 2 °C climate target. The researchers’ “rallying point for policy action and agreements” is to keep species extinction to well below 20 per year across all major groups ( M. D. A. Rounsevell et al. Science 368 , 1193–1195; 2020 ). Such focus does yield results. A study published in Conservation Letters found a high probability that targeted action has prevented 21–32 bird and 7–16 mammal extinctions since 1993 ( F. C. Bolam et al. Conserv. Lett. 14 , e12762; 2021 ). Extinction rates would have been around three to four times greater without conservation action, the researchers found.

But not all agree that just one target should be given priority. A group of more than 50 biodiversity researchers from 23 countries point out in a policy report this week (see go.nature.com/3fv8oiv ) that data on species are distributed unequally: 10, mostly high-income, countries account for 82% of records.

The United Nations must get its new biodiversity targets right

The researchers also modelled how different scenarios would affect the GBF’s 21 targets. They found that achieving the targets would require action in all of the target areas — not just a few. Focusing strongly on just one or two targets — such as expanding protected areas — will have, at best, a modest impact on achieving the UN convention’s goals and targets.

The difficulty in getting governments to adopt such an integrated approach is that they (as well as non-governmental organizations and businesses) tend to tackle sustainability challenges piecemeal. Actions from last November’s climate COP in Glasgow, UK, will be implemented separately from those decided at the biodiversity COP because, in most countries, different government departments deal with climate change and biodiversity.

The science advisers for the biodiversity convention will meet in Geneva, Switzerland, in March to finalize their advice. They are not advocating reform of how governments organize themselves to implement policies in sustainable development — partly (and rightly) because this is generally beyond their fields of expertise. But it’s not too late to consult those with the relevant knowledge.

In the past, the UN has commissioned social scientists, for example in the UN Intellectual History Project, a series of 17 studies summarizing the experience of UN agencies spanning gender equality, diplomacy, development, trade and official statistics. However, this work, which ended in 2010, did not assess what has and hasn’t worked in science and environmental policy. Unless these perspectives are incorporated into biodiversity-research advice, any future plans risk going the way of their predecessors.

Nature 601 , 298 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00110-w

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Trends and gaps in biodiversity and ecosystem services research: A text mining approach

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Published: 03 September 2022
Volume 52 , pages 81–94, ( 2023 )

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Viktoria Takacs ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6340-0253 1 &
C. David O’Brien 2 , 3

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Understanding the relationship between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services concepts is essential for evidence-based policy development. We used text mining augmented by topic modelling to analyse abstracts of 15 310 peer-reviewed papers (from 2000 to 2020). We identified nine major topics; “Research & Policy”, “Urban and Spatial Planning”, “Economics & Conservation”, “Diversity & Plants”, “Species & Climate change”, “Agriculture”, “Conservation and Distribution”, “Carbon & Soil & Forestry”, “Hydro-& Microbiology”. The topic “Research & Policy” performed highly, considering number of publications and citation rate, while in the case of other topics, the “best” performances varied, depending on the indicator applied. Topics with human, policy or economic dimensions had higher performances than the ones with ‘pure’ biodiversity and science. Agriculture dominated over forestry and fishery sectors, while some elements of biodiversity and ecosystem services were under-represented. Text mining is a powerful tool to identify relations between research supply and policy demand.

An Innovative Methodological Framework for Analyzing Existing Scientific Research on Land-Use Change and Associated Environmental Impacts

Research trends in biodiversity loss: a bibliometric analysis

Yan-Ling Tan, Thian-Hee Yiew, … Nur Adilah Saud

Textual Analysis of Published Research Articles on the Environmental Impacts of Land-Use Change

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

The adverse impacts of human activity on nature are being increasingly recognised, with some authors referring to a biodiversity crisis (Western 1992 ; Eldredge 2000 ; IPBES 2019 ). There has also been a greater understanding of the importance of biodiversity for people as an asset that should be protected and maintained for our needs and those of future generations. This linkage has been acknowledged in both scientific publications and in policy at national and international levels. The term ‘biodiversity’ first attained prominence in the international policy agenda at the Earth Summit (CBD 1992 ), which listed three components: species, ecosystems and genetic diversity. The vital role of biodiversity for humanity was further expounded in the Millennium Ecosystem Services report (MEA 2005 ), which has led to a growth in research in the ecosystem services (ES) that biodiversity provides.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD 1992 ) is a major driver of policy with 196 signatories. Twenty targets were set when the parties met at Nagoya, Aichi prefecture, Japan in 2010 and ecosystem services feature prominently in the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity (CBD 2010 ; United Nations 2011 ). However, few countries have been able to meet even half of the targets and at a global level, none were fully met (CBD 2020 ). Other assessments such as the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019 ) and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) (Sukhdev et al. 2014 ) also link the two concepts and have come to similar conclusions regarding the ineffectiveness of actions to date. In response, the CBD parties are working to produce new targets that will track progress to 2030 and beyond (CBD 2021a ). A key point in early discussions has been understanding the benefits humanity gains from ecosystem services (CBD 2021b ). While these policy documents highlight a need for evidence, the link between evidence needs and recent publications is not clear. Better understanding of what research has been carried out, and what opportunities and gaps exist will help funding agencies to direct resources where they can have the greatest impact for biodiversity and the benefits it provides.

Biodiversity conservation and the concept of ecosystem services are not always complementary. Thus, enhancing ecosystem service provision does not necessarily lead to biodiversity conservation or sustainable resource management (Oguh et al. 2021 ). In general, there are three ways of treating biodiversity within the ecosystems services framework (Mace et al. 2012 ); (i) biodiversity and ecosystems services are treated as synonyms; (ii) the “conservationist perspective” includes biodiversity as an ecosystem service by itself; or (iii) biodiversity can sometimes be a final ecosystem service—e.g. wild relatives of cultivated crops, which can be a source of improvement for domesticated species, or medicines from wild plants (Mace et al. 2012 ).

During the evolution of the ecosystem services concept, the role of biodiversity in the ecosystem service categories has changed. At the beginning of ES theory summarised in the MEA (MEA 2005 highlighted earlier by Constanza et al. in 1997 ), biodiversity was mentioned as a category of ES (within the category of “supporting” services). Later, “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB) assessment changed the name of the category to “habitat and supporting services”. In an effort to avoid redundancy and counting supporting services (such as biodiversity itself) twice, the hierarchical scheme of ecosystem services devised by the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES 5.1.) (Haines-Young and Potschin 2018 ) does not treat biodiversity as a separate Ecosystem Service itself and does not mention it directly among the ES categories. The category most directly related to biodiversity is within Cultural ES, category 3.2.2.1 “Characteristics of living systems that has an existence value”. In addition, biodiversity is included in 2.2.2.3. “Maintaining nursery populations and habitats (Including gene pool protection)”. However, it has been argued that nature’s contribution to people, and thus ES, cannot be understood without considering biodiversity (Maes et al. 2016 ).

The need to base policy on sound evidence and the need for robust indicators to underpin this evidence is becoming increasingly recognised by policy-makers (e.g. Wentworth and Henly 2021 ). This is particularly important as nations negotiate the framework for global biodiversity (CBD 2021a , b ). There are additional links that should be explored in the field of biodiversity indicators of sustainability (Hillebrand et al. 2018 ) and biodiversity’s links to ecosystem functioning (Balvanera et al. 2006 , 2012 ; IPBES 2018 ). As a result of the urgent need for scientific evidence on nature’s contribution to people as well as on the state and trends of biodiversity, the quantity of scientific publication in these fields has increased rapidly (McDonough et al 2017 ; IPBES 2018 , 2019 ). This process is reflected in the increased frequency of these words in policy documents as well as in peer-reviewed publications (McDonough et al. 2017 ; Czucz et al. 2018 , 2021 ). As a result of the extremely large amount of material, it is not practical to perform a “traditional” systematic review in order to identify trends, and ‘hot and cold’ topics. We propose a method that is novel for this scientific field: text mining with a topic modelling approach.

Bibliometric analyses have been incorporated into reviews (research weaving) as supporting material to systematic reviews (Nakagawa et al. 2019 ). Text mining techniques have gained popularity in summarizing trends and giving guidelines in fields where published information is too great to review all publications. Text mining as a technique has become particularly popular in fields where a rapid increase in published material has occurred, such as information technology and computing, mathematical sciences, linguistics, medical and educational sciences (Nakagawa et al. 2019 ; Westgate et al. 2020 ). However, in the fields of biology, ecology and behavioural sciences, there are relatively few publications based on this technique (Jung and Lee 2020 ).

The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of how biodiversity and ecosystem services have been considered together in peer-reviewed papers from 2000 to 2020. By doing so, we seek to provide evidence of interest and, potentially, gaps in research. We believe this will be of value in the development of research to support policy in these two key topics. Our research question is: which are the most frequent research fields, and how have they evolved in time. This is the first time that the topic modelling technique has been applied for ecosystem services and biodiversity, allowing us a first comprehensive analysis of the development of scientific interest on these topics.

Materials and methods

In our article’s search and research question formulation, we partially followed the ROSES protocol (RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses; Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2013 ) as a basic guideline for systematic reviews and systematic mapping). The protocol contains “research search”, “article screening and appraisal”, “critical appraisal”, “data extraction” and “data synthesis and presentation”. We followed the ROSES protocol for systematic mapping concerning literature search; however, we diverged from the protocol in the phases of “article screening and study appraisal” as no further screening strategy, or reduction of the basic collection of the articles was applied. Our method does not allow for data extraction, while presentation and synthesis of the data also contained elements of the protocol, “narrative synthesis” and identifying “knowledge gaps”.

Using Web of Science (WOS) on the 9th of March 2021, we simultaneously collected all entries where abstract, article title or keywords contained (ecosystem AND service*) AND [biodiversity OR (biological AND diversity)]. Our analysis focussed on peer-reviewed original research papers and reviews, published in the English language. Book chapters, book reviews, conference materials, as well as grey literature, were excluded from the analyses. We restricted our analyses to the period 2000–2020. Altogether, 15 310 publications were included in the corpus of our analyses.

All analyses were performed in R 3.0.3. (R core team 2021 ). First, we exported all articles found in WOS into a single table (a maximum of 500 articles can be exported at once so we combined several tables into one). We then removed duplicated documents that were present in the WOS dataset. Abstracts were converted into a “tidy” format; a table with one token per row (Silge and Robinson 2016 : a token is a meaningful unit of text, such as a word, that we are interested in using for analysis). To achieve this, we first converted the dataset with the help of packages dplyr (Wickham et al. 2020 ) and tidytext (Silge and Robinson 2016 ). After this, we cleansed the dataset for common words such as articles, “the” “of” ‘a”, so that only the meaningful words remained (stopwords function in tm package Feinerer et al. 2008 ). Additionally, we removed the keywords for which the literature search was conducted and commonly added tags (e.g. Elsevier Rights Reserved) via filtering the word matrix.

We obtained the main research topics with the help of topic modelling. This technique is equivalent to clustering in text analyses (reviewed by Westgate et al. 2015 ). Topic modelling reduces a corpus of scientific documents to a set of topics, and makes it possible to compare them and analyse temporal changes of these topics as a means of gaining insight into the development of scientific fields (Griffiths and Steyvers 2004 ). Topic modelling was conducted via Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with the help of R package “topicmodels” (Grün and Hornik 2011 ). LDA is a machine learning based method for allocating the documents to “topics” (Blei et al. 2003 ; Siege and Robinson 2017 ). “Topics” are mixtures of words that occur together in one document with higher probability than they do with others. Each document is a mixture of topics, and a single word might belong to several topics. As a result, LDA is a sort of “fuzzy clustering”. LDA finds the group of words that are associated with each topic and also determines the mixture of topics that describe a document. As a result, we obtain the probability of a document belonging to each of k topics ( γ or prevalence) and the probability of each word belonging to a topic ( β ) (Murakami et al. 2017 ; Perry and McGlone 2021 ). Thus, LDA is a mathematical method for finding the mixture of words that is associated with each topic, while also determining the mixture of topics that describes each document (Silge and Robinson 2017 ).

The number of clusters (topics) is typically pre-defined by the user as based on an ‘optimal’ number of topics for a given set, and is unambiguous (Silge and Robinson 2017 ). In order to define this optimal number we ran the programme with several pre-defined initial numbers of topics ( k = 5, 9, 10, 20, 30) and we chose the largest number of categories that grouped articles such that they belonged nearly exclusively (maximal level of gamma over 0.999) to one topic. In this way, we obtained nine main topics, which gave us meaningful segregation of the published material. For all publications, we assigned the topic that best fitted (highest gamma scores). This allowed us to test the temporal patterns in publication number and citations.

Our analyses were based on abstracts only as it was not practical to obtain the full texts for over 15 000 articles. To bias check the assignment of documents based on abstracts, we downloaded full texts of the 20 best fitting articles for each topic (180 articles). We completed topic modelling on these full texts, and compared the division of articles with the results to the analyses based on the abstracts. After topic assignment (each article to the topic), we were able to observe temporal changes in publication numbers, topic specifics (average gamma values), citation metrics, and temporal changes. The significances of temporal trends, and relations between the amounts of citations and articles were tested by linear regression models (annual mean values of number of articles (gamma), number of citations as a function of time, and annual mean number of citation as a function of annual mean number of articles). All these metrics served for comparing topics and identifying the “hot” fields as well as temporal changes. “Hot topics” are of two types: those topics that occur most frequently and those that appear in the articles that have the highest number of citations. “Cold topics” have the opposite characteristics, appearing infrequently or being cited less often than the other topics considered.

Finally, to be able to achieve a narrative synthesis of the topics, we applied a novel approach (a quantitative tool for comparing the content of the nine topics). We inspected the occurrences of certain pre-defined fields (of interest to us) within the most frequent word matrices in the nine topics. We searched terms among the first hundred most frequent words (according to beta values) within the nine topics. Our chosen fields of interest were as follows: economically important sectors (agriculture, forestry and fishery), policy, nature conservation, economics, taxonomic representation and ecosystem service types (using CICES categories). We compared the sum of beta values (probabilities of belonging to the given topic) of words belonging to those pre-defined fields. This approach gave us further insight into important fields as well as allowing us to identify some knowledge gaps.

A summary of the methods applied is presented on Fig. 1 .

A summary of applied methods and obtained information

Our search found 15 451 peer-reviewed scientific articles that contain the terms “biodiversity” and “ecosystem services”. Of these articles, 141 did not have abstracts that were available in the WOS database: as a result, we analysed 15 310 documents. These documents contained 47 754 distinct terms, which served as a base of the topic modelling.

Topic modelling revealed nine distinct topics. The top 10 most frequent words from each topics are presented in Fig. 2 . [for the top 100 most commonly occurring terms, see Supplementary Material ( S1 )]. The full texts of the twenty best fitting articles from each topic were analysed, applying the same methods. We compared clusters and article divisions in both abstract and full-text analyses. Out of the “top 20 best fitting full texts” (174 full-text documents as six of the “top bests” were not available), only 10 were not assigned into the same group as the abstract had been. This means that topic modelling based on abstracts gave a 94% identical assignment (in the case of the best fitting articles).

Top ten most frequently occurring words in the nine main topics (the highest β values from the topic modelling,). All topics are defined by the matrix of frequencies of word occurrences. Each document can be characterised by its probabilities of belonging to certain topics. Consequently, topics are not exclusive, rather they are matrices of co-occurring words

Topics are ordered according to the number of articles, after assigning the articles to the topic to which it has the highest probability of belonging, based on the article abstract word matrix (Table 1 ).

In case of three topics (“Research & Policy”, “Urban & Spat. Plan”, “Hydro- & Microbiology”), characteristic words ( β values) are evenly distributed. For the remaining topics (“Diversity & Plants”, “Species & Climate change”, “Agriculture”, “Carbon & Soil & Forestry”), the group is characterised by a dominance of the titular words (Fig. 2 ).

Overall number of publications in all topics increased after the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 (annual numbers 2000–2021 are presented as a function of number of published articles).

There was an increase of publications in every topic (Fig. 3 ); however, this was most rapid in the case of topics” Research & Policy” and “Urban & Spat. plan.”.

Temporal changes in the number of articles in the nine topics. Points show the annual sum of articles. Regression lines are drawn in cases with significance at p < 0.05 level

The annual changes of topic prevalence (Fig. 4 ) show a significant decrease in the case of the “Agriculture” and “Species & Climate change” topics and a slight increase in the case of “Economics and conservation”. F and p values are presented in Supplementary Material S2 .

Changing topic prevalence over time. Each article was assigned to the topic with the highest gamma (prevalence) value. Gamma value shows how “well” the articles fit into the given topic. Points show the annual mean gamma values, with point ranges showing standard errors. Regression lines are drawn in cases with significance at p < 0.05 level

The annual total of citation scores for articles in most topics show a nonlinear pattern in time, with a peak around 2015. This peak may in part reflect a lag before the most recent articles are cited.

The number of citations significantly increases in time in the case of five topics, (at p < 0.05 level) (presented in Fig. 5 a): “Cons. & Distribution”, “Diversity & Plants”, “Hydro- & Microbiology”, “Research & Policy” and “Urban & Spat. Plan.”. Of these topics, in the case of first three, there was an increase in citations reflected in an increase in articles (Fig. 5 b); “Diversity & Plants”, “Research & Policy” and “Hydro- & Microbiology” F and p values are presented in Supplementary Material S2 . This suggests that in the case of “Cons. & Distribution”, the increasing trend in citations is probably due to a small number of highly influential articles.

a Changing number of citations over time. The points indicate the annual sum of citations and number of articles in a given topic. Regression lines are drawn in cases of significant trend at p < 0.05 level. b Changing number of citations as a function of article numbers ( b ). The points indicate the annual sum of citations and number of articles in a given topic. Regression lines are drawn in cases of significant trend at p < 0.05 level

The highest number of articles belongs to the topic “Research & Policy” followed by “Urban & Spat. Plan” and “Economics and conservation” (see also Table 1 ) with the first two topics showing the highest increase rate over time. Average topic prevalence (gamma) is the highest in “Agriculture” and “Research and Policy” topics, and lowest in “Species & Climate change” and “Carbon & Soil & Forestry”, though both “Agriculture” and “Species & Climate change” show a decrease over time. As by definition, gamma is the probability of words belonging to the topic, a decreasing gamma value means a decreasing trend in topic specificity.

The highest overall number of citations per publication was shown by articles from the group “Species & Climate change” ( n = 80.5), followed by “Research & Policy” ( n = 41.1) and “Agriculture” ( n = 37.0). In the cases of topics “Species & Climate change” and “Agriculture”, high citation numbers are not in conjunction with temporal changes or with article numbers, suggesting that there are few very influential articles in these topics with many citations.

All the metrics we investigated might contribute to identifying “hot topics”. The topic which performs best or close to best in most metrics is “Research and Policy”. In all other cases, however, different metrics favour different topics. This suggests that for these other cases, there may be a mismatch between what topics are preferred by authors at a given time (i.e. number of articles) compared with those which have the most influence, as recognised by number of citations.

Within the top 100 words from each topic (Supplementary material S1 ), we checked the frequencies of certain terms related to chosen topics; these frequencies are presented in Table 2 .

Agriculture and forestry-related terms appear with a relatively high frequency (Sum β%) compared to fishery sectors.

A high frequency was attributed to terms related to nature conservation and species protection. These words were among the most frequent 100 terms in the case of six topics, with the highest frequently in “Econ. & Cons.” and “Cons. & Distribution”, and to a smaller extent in topics “Research & Policy”, “Urban & Spat. plan.” and with low frequency in “Diversity & Plants” and “Agriculture”.

“Policy” and related terms were characterised by a high overall frequency. These words were frequent mainly in topics “Science & Policy”, “Econ. & Cons.”, “Urban & Spat. plan” and to a lesser extent “Cons & Distribution”.

Terms related to Economics appear somewhat less frequently overall: mainly in topics “Econ. and Cons.” and to a lesser extent in two other topics “Urban and Spat. plan” and “Research & Policy”.

Ecosystem service categories appeared (based on the terminology of CICES) with a relatively high frequency (Sum β = 12.463%). However, in this case, we have certain limitations as our categorisation is based on single words, while ES categories are more complex. On the other hand, parts of these ES terms might be in other contexts. As a result, in our matrix, certain terms might be an over-represented—e.g. soil organic carbon might appear with 3 different beta values, and some other terms might be not detected in the word matrix. Nevertheless, the appearance of these terms in certain topics is indicative of their prevalence, particularly in contrast to the low frequency of certain services (wind shelter, nursery populations).

Taxonomic names of biota appeared in two topics only: “Hydro- & Microbiology” and “Agriculture”, with summarised β value of 4.011%. Only birds, fish, insects, invertebrates, bacteria and microbiota and flowers were mentioned.

Over the past 20 years, the increasing number of publications in the fields of ecosystem services and biodiversity makes it impossible to summarise them using the traditional methods of meta-analyses or systematic reviews. The presented method, which allows analysis of trends and temporal patterns related to certain topics, is proposed for overcoming this problem. In our analysis, we have contributed to knowledge on the relationship between ecosystem services and biodiversity research, showing publication trends and hot topics within this field. This is of particular importance when we consider the need to match research with wider societal needs and pressure for policy to be evidence-based (Sutherland et al. 2004 ). We discuss the advantages and limitations of the applied method, and following this, we compare and suggest interpretations of the topics’ performances.

While topic modelling has already proved to be of value in other areas of science and technology, its potential is yet to be exploited in ecology (Jung and Lee 2020 ). We believe our paper shows it can be a useful tool to help understand trends, highlight gaps in research and thereby better align research with policy priorities. It is able to handle large numbers of articles: in this case over 15 000. Our analyses were based on abstracts and included all documents containing the search terms. A traditional review or text mining of full articles could be more accurate; however, in the case of more than ten thousand documents, the review process necessarily would end up with a subjective choice in order to decrease the number of articles at some point. Abstracts can be easily downloaded and analysed in large numbers as well, allowing us to analyse a large number of documents at the same time. There was only a 6% difference in classification result between abstracts and full texts, therefore, we consider abstracts as good representative material for reviews. However, we should keep in mind that our bias test is based on analyses of the most characteristic articles from each topic; it may well be that other sets of full-text articles would not give such a good fit. We propose that any future analyses should also consider the differences between topic model results based on abstracts and full-text documents. A further area of investigation might be grey literature (including technical reports and project findings), which may be a better reflection of how practitioners are responding to research and be a means of understanding the “research—implementation gap” (Cadotte et al. 2020 . This analysis might be aided by repositories such as Applied Ecology Resources (Cadotte et al. 2020 ). At the same time, we note that there will be challenges to analysing documents that may not have summaries or abstracts, or that may contain duplicates of work published elsewhere. Generally, Topic modelling has many advantages in reviewing published materials on given topics; however, there is a difficulty in interpretation of such wide material. We proposed comparing representation of certain fields in the topics based on the frequency of appearance as a simple way to objectively summarise the results.

In our case, topic modelling of abstracts suggested a minimum of nine distinct “topics” at the interface of biodiversity and ecosystems services research. At the moment, there is no standardised method for choosing the numbers of clusters. In this study, the number of the topics was the largest number of clusters where at least one article showed above 99% fit; this is slightly different from other authors (e.g. the approach of Westgate et al. 2015 , 2020 ), where a higher number of clusters was chosen. We recognise that there may be advantages to a standard method for choosing the number of topics in topic modelling but also note that authors may prefer to set a number of topics based on the planned uses of their analyses.

The number of publications in all topics showed a strong increase after the publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005; e.g. “species and climate change” and “agriculture”), and in the CBD Aichi conference in 2010 (e.g. “research and policy” and “cons. and distribution”), which suggests an effort by researchers to make papers that are policy-relevant. This impression is further supported by the finding that “Research & Policy” was generally the “hottest” topic in terms of applied metrics (number of publications, number of citations and a constant, relatively high level of topic prevalence). It will be instructive to see if there are similar upturns or changes in “hot topics” following the Kunming CBD conference in 2022. Policy and related terms appeared among the most frequent words in the case of three other topics, two of which also showed a high performance based on the applied metrics. These results reflect recognition by the research community of the increasing need for considering biodiversity and ecosystem services in policymaking development and practice, as stated in several recent documents (IPBES 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ; CBD 2021b ). Outside of the topic “Research & Policy”, it was not so straightforward to assign “hot topics” as different metrics gave differing results.

The increasing tendency to include economic and human dimensions into ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation issues has been reflected in recent policies such as CBD (CBD 2021b ), EU biodiversity strategy 2030 (EC 2020 ) or the Green Deal (EC 2019 ). These policies demonstrate a shift from nature conservation aiming at nature’s intrinsic value (stated in EU habitat directives as an example) towards a “natural capital” approach (Buijs et al. 2022 ; Hermoso et al. 2022 ). This shift in perception led from a protective conservation strategy towards treating nature as an asset—a practical development of the ecosystem services approach (Hermoso et al. 2022 ). The fact that the first three most published topics “Research & Policy”, “Urban & Spat. plan.” and “Economics & Cons.” are those with the dominance of human dimensions rather than traditional or pure biodiversity may be a reflection of this process.

The second most published topic “Urban & Spat.plan.” reflects the increasing recognition of the importance of spatial planning in influencing biodiversity and ecosystems services (Albert et al. 2020 ; Van der Biest et al. 2020 ). The topic “Economics & Cons.” is characterised by a high citation rate and this is the only topic with an increasing prevalence, reflecting that economic dimensions of conservation are crucial to its integration into policy priorities.

Climate change has been identified as a key pressure on biodiversity (summarised in Dìaz et al. 2019), and this is also reflected in policies (e.g. The European Green Deal EC 2019 ). There have been repeated calls to better integrate climate-related issues into science and policy (e.g. Pettorelli et al. 2021 ). The “Species & Climate change” topic gained the highest citations rates per article; twice as much as any of other topics, although the annual citations show a decreasing tendency. This may be a result of some articles with exceptionally high influences during the climate debate. The term “climate” appears among the top 100 common terms in five other topics as well. Our analysis thus provides some evidence of an integrated approach to climate change, biodiversity and ecosystems services, in particular the interactions between climate and species distribution.

Agriculture is one of the main pressures on ecosystem services and biodiversity (e.g. Diaz et al. 2019). Agriculture is also one of the main beneficiaries of nature’s contribution to people, and therefore sustainable production is one of the key issues and opportunities for biodiversity (IPBES 2018 , 2019 ). This is reflected in major policies e.g. Common Agricultural Policy (2021–2027) and The European Green Deal (EC 2019 ). The topic “Agriculture” showed the highest prevalence among all topics (although with a decreasing relative frequency over time); moreover, this topic had a relatively high citation per article.

The shift towards a “natural capital” approach might be a reason why the second topic with conservation among the ten most common words, “Cons. & Distributions”, was a far less “hot topic” compared to “Economics & conservation” (although nature conservation-related terms appeared in four more topics among the top 100). “Cons. & Distributions” and “Diversity & Plants” are two topics that might be considered closer to the core of pure biodiversity research and had fewer human implications than other topics, and we conjecture that this may be a reason why these topics were less “hot”.

The topics “Carbon & Soil & Forestry” and “Hydro- & Microbiology” showed a relatively low performance according to our metrics (low number of articles, coupled with low prevalence although accompanied by a relatively high citation score). Despite the clear importance of soil biology in carbon capture, flood mitigation and agricultural productivity (Pereira et al. 2018 ), as well as the wider role of microbial diversity (Antwis et al. 2017 ), this finding suggests that soil is under-researched. Soil has been somewhat neglected in the biodiversity policy sphere: it is barely mentioned in the Aichi targets and has only begun to gain prominence within CBD reporting in the 2021 first draft (CBD 2010 , 2021a , b ). In contrast, we found “Hydro- and Microbiology” is slightly more cited, and citation increases with the number of publications. This topic is distinct from the previous topic, despite the overlap of some properties between soil and water such as soil sealing and runoff. Given the increased prevalence and intensity of flood events in Europe and North America, there may well be greater policy-led demand for research on the interface of soil biology, hydrology and hydrobiology. This has been represented in a recent debate over the concept of Nature-based Solutions; a potential win–win situation for biodiversity and flood management (Opperman et al. 2009 ; Turkelboom et al. 2021 ). Considering the fact that many of the current emerging topics in the field of global conservation issues, identified by Sutherland et al. ( 2021 ) fit topics “Hydro- and Microbiology”, one would expect a higher future performance of this topic, in comparison with others.

In addition to the topics that came out of our analysis, it is interesting to note some potential topics that did not. The lack of representation of genetic diversity among the top 10 terms is perhaps unsurprising given its relative neglect in policy frameworks such as the CBD (Hoban et al. 2020 ). Co-development and co-production were likewise absent: the need for more co-development in biodiversity research has been highlighted by other authors (Mupepele et al. 2021 ; O'Brien et al. 2021 ). More unexpected was the lack of the words ‘animal’ (lacking even from the top 100 terms) though this may be an artefact resulting from a tendency of zoologists to use finer taxonomic scales (e.g. bird, insect or bee, rather than animal). On the contrary, ‘plant’ appeared amongst the most common words in the topic “Diversity & Plants”. Although clearly a key part of biodiversity, plants are sometimes reported upon separately (e.g. Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, reviewed by Sharrock 2020 ) and this approach may in part account for the status of botany we observed. Among the top 100 terms, only some of the main taxonomic groups, mainly those with importance for Ecosystem Services as “invertebrate”, “bird”, “insects”, ” fish”, “reef”, “bee”, “flower” and “bacteria” appear, while other groups such as “fungi”, “mammals”, “amphibians” and “herpetofauna” are missing.

Within the ecosystem service categories mentioned in CICES 5.1., only “pest control”, “pollination”, “agricultural and forest and aquaculture production” and “nutrient cycling” appear among the top “terms”. Other categories such as “wind protection”, “nursery” or “cultural services” are not present among the most frequent words. This suggests something of a disconnect between the terminology of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The only topic where recognisable ecosystem service terms (CICES 5.1. categories) are completely missing among the top 100 terms is in the topic “Conservation and Distribution”.

It would be interesting to rerun these analyses in the future to see if such topics and others highlighted in horizon scanning exercises based on expert interviews using the Delphi method (e.g. Sutherland et al. 2021 ) emerge. Post hoc testing of horizon scanning using text mining would help to quantify its effectiveness, potentially identify biases and ultimately improve their predictive power. We note, however, that there are biases inherent in our approach, not least of which is its limitation to publications in English (Amano et al. 2021 ). While English may be the lingua franca of science, many policy-makers understandably prefer to read texts in their native language and thus the influence of papers in these languages may well be important.

We have shown that text mining can provide insights into trends in research. When a research field includes tens of thousands of papers, applying automated analyses is an alternative of subjective shortening the document list. We applied this technique to the documents containing ecosystem service and biodiversity research. However, as there is no generally accepted protocol for text mining techniques yet, further research is needed in defining the least number of eligible topics (number of meaningful clusters), and also for a standardised bias testing between full-text and abstract-based analyses. As we had an ambitious goal reviewing a large amount of research, we faced difficulties in interpretation, which we tried to overcome with the help of a novel method. However, this would have been challenging without referring to our knowledge of events such as publication of key policy documents. Additionally, should the technique achieve wider use, a summarised indicator could be developed for comparison of “hot” and “cold” topics.

Our analysis found a marked increase in the number of publications bringing together biodiversity and ecosystem services. Out of the nine identified topics, “Science & Policy” is among the most numerous, best cited and the fastest growing topics, which might reflect demand from policy-makers and stakeholders for a rigorous evidence base. All other topics show differing performances in each of the indicators we used (number of articles, beta and gamma values, number of citations, temporal dynamics) and while it is not easy to give a comprehensive answer to the question of which topics are the “hot” and “cold” ones, it does offer insights into recent trends. “Hot topics” cover two concepts: frequency of papers which refer to that topic and the frequently with which they are cited. Both of these metrics offer insight into the research priorities of at the time. Number of articles may be the better reflection of research output but it is the number of citations that shows research influence.

The applied metrics showed a slightly better performance in the topics that had applied or human implications, compared to those topics with mainly pure scientific terms. Among the main ES production sectors, agriculture overwhelms the others (forestry and fishery). There were missing categories found in both taxonomic groups and ES categories.

As demonstrated in the case of biodiversity and ecosystems services, we believe text mining can suggest relationships between policy development and research agendas and perhaps crucially identify gaps where more knowledge may be needed to provide an evidence base. The technique, among others, can also be used to test horizon scanning and improve the quality of any literature review.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their helpful comments. We are grateful to Piotr Cichocki, for introducing the methodology of topic modelling and to Danny O’Brien for helpful comments on the draft. V. Takacs partially was founded by project Ecoserv-Pol Services provided by main types of ecosystems in Poland—an applied approach; Iceland Lichtenstein Norway Grant (“Environment, Energy and Climate Change” EOG 2014-2021).

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Takacs, V., O’Brien, C.D. Trends and gaps in biodiversity and ecosystem services research: A text mining approach. Ambio 52 , 81–94 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01776-2

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133 Biodiversity Topics & Examples

🔝 top-10 biodiversity topics for presentation, 🏆 best biodiversity project topics, 💡 most interesting biodiversity assignment topics, 📌 simple & easy biodiversity related topics, 👍 good biodiversity title ideas, ❓ biodiversity research topics.

Biodiversity loss.
Global biodiversity conservation.
The Amazon rainforest.
Animal ecology research.
Sub Saharan Africa.
Marine biodiversity.
Threats to ecosystems.
Plant ecology.
Importance of environmental conservation.
Evolution of animal species.
Biodiversity Hotspots: The Philippines The International Conservation has classified the Philippines as one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world. Additionally, the country is said to be one of the areas that are endangered in the world.
Aspects, Importance and Issues of Biodiversity Genetic diversity is a term used to refer to the dissimilitude of organisms of the same species. Species diversity is used to refer to dissimilitude of organisms in a given region.
Biodiversity Benefits for Ecology This variation of species in the ecosystem is a very important concept and factor that indeed is the basis for sustaining life on our planet. Moreover, the most important supporter of life, which is soil […]
Biodiversity Conservation: Tropical Rainforest The forest is not a threat to many species and that, therefore, helps in showing that conserving this forest will be of great benefit to many species. The disadvantage of conserving the Mangrove Forest is […]
Habitat Destruction and Biodiversity Extinctions The instance of extinction is by and large regarded as the demise of the very last character of the genus. Habitat obliteration has played a major part in wiping out of species, and it is […]
How Biodiversity Is Threatened by Human Activity Most of the marine biodiversity is found in the tropics, especially coral reefs that support the growth of organisms. Overexploitation in the oceans is caused by overfishing and fishing practices that cause destruction of biodiversity.
Loss of Biodiversity and Extinctions It is estimated that the number of species that have become extinct is greater than the number of species that are currently found on earth.
Natural Sciences: Biodiversity and Human Civilisation The author in conjunction with a team of other researchers used a modelling study to illustrate the fact approximately 2 percent of global energy is currently being deployed in the generation of wind and solar […]
How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity The disturbance of the ecosystem has some effects on the dynamics of vectors and infectious diseases. Change of climate is a contributing factor in the emergence of new species and infectious diseases.
Biodiversity, Its Importance and Benefits Apart from that, the paper is going to speculate on the most and least diverse species in the local area. The biodiversity can be measured in terms of the number of different species in the […]
Biodiversity: Aspects Within the Sphere of Biology Finally, living objects consist of cells, which are the basic units of their function and structure. The viruses’ structure depends on which nucleic acid is included, which denotes that there are DNA and RNA viruses.
Coral Reef and Biodiversity in Ecosystems Coral reefs are formed only in the tropical zone of the ocean; the temperature limits their life – are from +18 to +29oS, and at the slightest deviation from the boundaries of the coral die.
Biodiversity and the Health of Ecosystems Various opinions are revealed concerning biodiversity, including the human impact, reversal of biodiversity loss, the impact of overpopulation, the future of biodiversity, and the rate of extinction.
Wild Crops and Biodiversity Threats However, out of millions of existing types of wild crop cultures, the vast majority have been abandoned and eradicated, as the agricultural companies placed major emphasis on the breeding of domesticated cultures that are easy […]
Biology Lab Report: Biodiversity Study of Lichens As a consequence of these results, the variety of foods found in forest flora that include lichens may be linked to varying optimum conditions for establishment and development.
Biodiversity, Interdependency: Threatened and Endhangered Species In the above table, humans rely on bees to facilitate pollination among food crops and use their honey as food. Concurrently, lichens break down rocks to provide nutrient-rich soil in the relationship.
Invasive Processes’ Impact on Ecosystem’s Biodiversity If the invasive ones prove to be more adaptive, this will bring about the oppression of the native species and radical changes in the ecosystem.
Conserving Biodiversity: The Loggerhead Turtle The loggerhead sea turtle is the species of oceanic turtle which is spread all over the world and belongs to the Cheloniidae family.
Biodiversity and Dynamics of Mountainous Area Near the House It should be emphasized that the term ecosystem used in this paper is considered a natural community characterized by a constant cycle of energy and resources, the presence of consumers, producers, and decomposers, as well […]
National Biodiversity Strategy By this decision, the UN seeks to draw the attention of the world community and the leaders of all countries to the protection and rational use of natural resources.
Rewilding Our Cities: Beauty, Biodiversity and the Biophilic Cities Movement What is the source of your news item? The Guardian.
Biodiversity and Food Production This paper will analyze the importance of biodiversity in food production and the implications for human existence. Edible organisms are few as compared to the total number of organisms in the ecosystem.
Restoring the Everglades Wetlands: Biodiversity The Act lays out the functions and roles of the Department of Environmental Protection and the South Florida Water Management District in restoration of the Everglades.
Biodiversity: Importance and Benefits This is due to the fact that man is evolving from the tendency of valuing long term benefits to a tendency of valuing short terms benefits.
A Benchmarking Biodiversity Survey of the Inter-Tidal Zone at Goat Island Bay, Leigh Marine Laboratory Within each quadrant, the common species were counted or, in the case of seaweed and moss, proliferation estimated as a percentage of the quadrant occupied.
Ecological Consequences Due to Changes in Biodiversity The author is an ecologist whose main area of interest is in the field of biodiversity and composition of the ecosystem.
Biodiversity: Population Versus Ecosystem Diversity by David Tilman How is the variability of the plant species year to year in the community biomass? What is the rate of the plant productivity in the ecosystem?
Biodiversity Hotspots and Environmental Ethics The magnitude of the problem of losing biodiversity hotspots is too great, to the extend of extinction of various species from the face of the earth.
The Importance of Biodiversity in Ecosystem The most urgent problem right now is to maintain the level of biodiversity in this world but it has to begin with a more in-depth understanding of how different species of flora and fauna can […]
Natural Selection and Biodiversity These are featured by the ways in which the inhabiting organisms adapt to them and it is the existence of these organisms on which the ecosystems depend and therefore it is evident that this diversity […]
Scientific Taxonomy and Earth’s Biodiversity A duck is a domestic bird that is reared for food in most parts of the world. It is associated with food in the household and is smaller than a bee.
Global Warming: Causes and Impact on Health, Environment and the Biodiversity Global warming is defined in simple terms as the increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s surface including the air and oceans in recent decades and if the causes of global warming are not […]
Loss of Biodiversity in the Amazon Ecosystem The growth of the human population and the expansion of global economies have contributed to the significant loss of biodiversity despite the initial belief that the increase of resources can halt the adverse consequences of […]
California’s Coastal Biodiversity Initiative The considered threat to California biodiversity is a relevant topic in the face of climate change. To prevent this outcome, it is necessary to involve the competent authorities and plan a possible mode of operation […]
Biodiversity: American Museum of Natural History While staying at the museum, I took a chance to visit the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life and the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians.
Biodiversity and Animal Population in Micronesia This means that in the future, the people living in Micronesia will have to move to other parts of the world when their homes get submerged in the water.
Urban Plants’ Role in Insects’ Biodiversity The plants provide food, shelter and promote the defensive mechanisms of the insects. The observation was also an instrumental method that was used to assess the behavior and the existence of insects in relation to […]
Earth’s Biodiversity: Extinction Rates Exaggerated This is because most animals and plants have been projected to be extinct by the end of this century yet the method that is used to forecast this can exaggerate by more than 160%.
Biodiversity Markets and Bolsa Floresta Program Environmentalists and scholars of the time led by Lord Monboddo put forward the significance of nature conservation which was followed by implementation of conservation policies in the British Indian forests.
Brazilian Amazonia: Biodiversity and Deforestation Secondly, the mayor persuaded the people to stop deforestation to save the Amazon. Additionally, deforestation leads to displacement of indigenous people living in the Amazonia.
Defining and Measuring Biodiversity Biodiversity is measured in terms of attributes that explore the quality of nature; richness and evenness of the living organisms within an ecological niche.
Biodiversity, Its Evolutionary and Genetic Reasons The occurrence of natural selection is hinged on the hypothesis that offspring inherit their characteristics from their parents in the form of genes and that members of any particular population must have some inconsiderable disparity […]
Climate Change’s Negative Impact on Biodiversity This essay’s primary objective is to trace and evaluate the impact of climate change on biological diversity through the lens of transformations in the marine and forest ecosystems and evaluation of the agricultural sector both […]
Biodiversity Hotspots: Evaluation and Analysis The region also boasts with the endangered freshwater turtle species, which are under a threat of extinction due to over-harvesting and destroyed habitat.
Marine Biodiversity Conservation and Impure Public Goods The fact that the issue concerning the global marine biodiversity and the effects that impure public goods may possibly have on these rates can lead to the development of a range of externalities that should […]
Biodiversity and Business Risk In conclusion, biodiversity risk affects businesses since the loss of biodiversity leads to: coastal flooding, desertification and food insecurity, all of which have impacts on business organizations.
Measurement of Biodiversity It is the “sum total of all biotic variation from the level of genes to ecosystems” according to Andy Purvus and Andy Hector in their article entitled “Getting the Measure of Diversity” which appeared in […]
Introduced Species and Biodiversity Rhymer and Simberloff explain that the seriousness of the phenomenon may not be very evident from direct observation of the morphological traits of the species.
Ecosystems: Biodiversity and Habitat Loss The review of the topic shows that the relationship between urban developmental patterns and the dynamics of ecosystem are concepts that are still not clearly understood in the scholarly world as well as in general.
When Human Diet Costs Too Much: Biodiversity as the Ultimate Answer to the Global Problems Because of the unreasonable use of the natural resources, environmental pollution and inadequate protection, people have led a number of species to extinction; moreover, due to the increasing rates of consumerist approach towards the food […]
The Impact of Burmese Pythons on Florida’s Native Biodiversity Scientists from the South Florida Natural Resource Center, the Smithsonian institute and the University of Florida have undertaken studies to assess the predation behavior of the Burmese pythons on birds in the area.
Essentials of Biodiversity At the same time, the knowledge and a more informed understanding of the whole concept of biodiversity gives us the power to intervene in the event that we are faced by the loss of biodiversity, […]
Threat to Biodiversity Is Just as Important as Climate Change This paper shall articulate the truth of this statement by demonstrating that threats to biodiversity pose significant threat to the sustainability of human life on earth and are therefore the protection of biodiversity is as […]
Cold Water Coral Ecosystems and Their Biodiversity: A Review of Their Economic and Social Value
Benchmarking DNA Metabarcoding for Biodiversity-Based Monitoring and Assessment
Prospects for Integrating Disturbances, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Using Microbial Systems
Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics
Institutional Economics and the Behaviour of Conservation Organizations: Implications for Biodiversity Conservation
Fisheries, Fish Pollution and Biodiversity: Choice Experiments With Fishermen, Traders and Consumers
Last Stand: Protected Areas and the Defense of Tropical Biodiversity
Hardwiring Green: How Banks Account For Biodiversity Risks and Opportunities
Governance Criteria for Effective Transboundary Biodiversity Conservation
Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for Penguins in Antarctica: Targets for Conservation Action
Ecological and Economic Assessment of Forests Biodiversity: Formation of Theoretical and Methodological Instruments
Environment and Biodiversity Impacts of Organic and Conventional Agriculture
Food From the Water: How the Fish Production Revolution Affects Aquatic Biodiversity and Food Security
Biodiversity and World Food Security: Nourishing the Planet and Its People
Climate Change and Energy Economics: Key Indicators and Approaches to Measuring Biodiversity
Conflicts Between Biodiversity and Carbon Sequestration Programs: Economic and Legal Implications
Models for Sample Selection Bias in Contingent Valuation: Application to Forest Biodiversity
Optimal Land Conversion and Growth With Uncertain Biodiversity Costs
Internalizing Global Externalities From Biodiversity: Protected Areas and Multilateral Mechanisms of Transfer
Combining Internal and External Motivations in Multi-Actor Governance Arrangements for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
Balancing State and Volunteer Investment in Biodiversity Monitoring for the Implementation of CBD Indicators
Differences and Similarities Between Ecological and Economic Models for Biodiversity Conservation
Globalization and the Connection of Remote Communities: Household Effects and Their Biodiversity Implications
Shaded Coffee and Cocoa – Double Dividend for Biodiversity and Small-Scale Farmers
Spatial Priorities for Marine Biodiversity Conservation in the Coral Triangle
One World, One Experiment: Addressing the Biodiversity and Economics Conflict
Alternative Targets and Economic Efficiency of Selecting Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation in Boreal Forest
Analysing Multi Level Water and Biodiversity Governance in Their Context
Agricultural Biotechnology: Productivity, Biodiversity, and Intellectual Property Rights
Renewable Energy and Biodiversity: Implications for Transitioning to a Green Economy
Agricultural Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of Major Farming Systems
Integrated Land Use Modelling of Agri-Environmental Measures to Maintain Biodiversity at Landscape Level
Changing Business Perceptions Regarding Biodiversity: From Impact Mitigation Towards New Strategies and Practices
Forest Biodiversity and Timber Extraction: An Analysis of the Interaction of Market and Non-market Mechanisms
Poverty and Biodiversity: Measuring the Overlap of Human Poverty and the Biodiversity Hotspots
Protecting Agro-Biodiversity by Promoting Rural Livelihoods
Maintaining Biodiversity and Environmental Sustainability
Landscape, Legal, and Biodiversity Threats That Windows Pose to Birds: A Review of an Important Conservation Issue
Variable Mating Behaviors and the Maintenance of Tropical Biodiversity
Species Preservation and Biodiversity Value: A Real Options Approach
What Is Being Done to Preserve Biodiversity and Its Hotspots?
How Are Argentina and Chile Facing Shared Biodiversity Loss?
Are Diverse Ecosystems More Valuable?
How Can Biodiversity Loss Be Prevented?
Can Payments for Watershed Services Help Save Biodiversity?
How Can Business Reduce Impacts on the World’s Biodiversity?
Are National Biodiversity Strategies Appropriate for Building Responsibilities for Mainstreaming Biodiversity Across Policy Sectors?
How Does Agriculture Effect Biodiversity?
Are There Income Effects on Global Willingness to Pay For Biodiversity Conservation?
How Does the Economic Risk Aversion Affect Biodiversity?
What Are the Threats of Biodiversity?
How Has the Increased Usage of Synthetic Pesticides Impacted Biodiversity?
What Does Drive Biodiversity Conservation Effort in the Developing World?
How Does the Plantation Affect Biodiversity?
What Does Drive Long-Run Biodiversity Change?
How Does the United Nations Deal With Biodiversity?
What Factors Affect Biodiversity?
How Are Timber Harvesting and Biodiversity Managed in Uneven-Aged Forests?
When Should Biodiversity Tenders Contract on Outcomes?
Who Cares About Biodiversity?
Why Can Financial Incentives Destroy Economically Valuable Biodiversity in Ethiopia?
What Factors Affect an Area’s Biodiversity?
In What Ways Is Biodiversity Economically Valuable?
Which Human Activities Threaten Biodiversity?
How Can Biodiversity Be Protected?
In What Ways Is Biodiversity Ecologically Value?
In Which Countries Is Biodiversity Economically Valuable?
Does Species Diversity Follow Any Patterns?
How Is Biodiversity Measured?
What Is a Biodiversity Hotspot?
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Biodiversity Mapping in Ecology and Conservation: Pitfalls, Uncertainties, and Creative Ways Forward

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In the face of rapid biodiversity loss, attention has been increasingly focused on the application of maps towards the challenges of protecting biodiversity. Either in their predictive or monitoring applications, biodiversity maps have proven effective at describing some spatial and temporal phenomena ...

Keywords : Maps of biodiversity, data uncertainties, alternative mapping, critical mapping, counter maps

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Changing landscapes: From forests to food

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Forests sustaining agriculture: A systematic review of multi-functional landscapes for food security and biodiversity conservation

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COMMENTS

Biodiversity
Biodiversity articles from across Nature Portfolio. Biodiversity is the variation in living forms and can be measured in ways that include the number of species, functional variety of species ...
Biodiversity & Conservation
The word "conservation" can evoke many powerful images. For some, it involves protecting forests and national parks. Some picture rescuing endangered species from extinction, and others envision harvesting food, energy, or water in a way that conserves them for future generations. Conservation at its core encompasses all these aspects and several others. For many ecologists, conserving ...
Nature's Secrets: Top 200 Ecology Research Topics
Top 10 Ecology Research Topics On Forest Ecology. Old-Growth Forest Ecology and Conservation. Forest Fragmentation and its Impact on Biodiversity. Fire Ecology: Natural Processes and Human Intervention. Forest Carbon Sequestration and Climate Change Mitigation. Dynamics of Tree-Soil Interactions in Forest Ecosystems.
Biodiversity Studies
Experimental manipulations complement observational studies to allow rapid assessment of environmental change on plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria in our forests. Examples of species inventories and experimental investigations of biodiversity studies include. The Harvard Forest Flora and Herbarium. Microbial ecology of soils.
Biodiversity
Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities. Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that ...
Top 100 research questions for biodiversity conservation in Southeast
Discussion. Our identification of the top 100 questions for biodiversity conservation in SE Asia and the themes that emerged give an overview of research areas that experts commonly identified as priorities for SE Asia. Of those considered biodiversity-loss drivers, the most "populous" ones, i.e., with the most questions, are (1) wildlife ...
Hot topics in biodiversity and climate change research
Relative growth of refereed studies on climate change and biodiversity, compared to non-climate-related biodiversity research. Number of refereed papers listed in the Web of Science database that were published between 2001 and 2014 on the specific topic "biodiversity AND (climate change)" (blue line, secondary y-axis) compared to the more general search term "biodiversity NOT (climate ...
Biodiversity faces its make-or-break year, and research will be key
It aims to slow down the rate of biodiversity loss by 2030. And by 2050, biodiversity will be "valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy ...
Frontiers in Conservation Science
Measuring and Monitoring Human-Wildlife Conflict Locally, Nationally and Globally. Alexandra Zimmermann. 664 views. This multidisciplinary journal explores ecology, biology and social sciences to advance conservation and management. It advances the knowledge required to meet or surpass global biodiversity and c...
234 questions with answers in BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH
Biodiversity Research - Science topic. Explore the latest questions and answers in Biodiversity Research, and find Biodiversity Research experts. Questions (234) Publications (71,110)
Biodiversity Assessment
Biodiversity Assessment. Different species occupy different niches in the web of life. Knowing what species inhabit an ecosystem, and how many of each kind there are, is critical to understanding that ecosystem's structure and function, and predicting future changes. Scientists who look at the variation of life in a forest, a stream or a patch ...
Restoration Ecology
Restoration ecology seeks to restore the health, integrity and sustainability of ecosystems that have been degraded by human activities. Research on methods, application of active interventions and evaluations are important tools used to restore ecosystems for their inherent value and the ecosystem services they provide humans. Restoration ecology draws on concepts related to disturbance ...
Freshwater Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Novel ...
Freshwater ecosystems, including streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, ponds, etc., support disproportionately abundant biodiversity. However, the population of freshwater species has declined more than 80% since the 1970s due to intensive human disturbance, which invokes study interest in freshwater biodiversity. Two scientific issues are generally concerned: (1) understanding spatiotemporal ...
Top 15 Conservation Issues of 2021 Include Big Threats—and Potential
As 2021 dawns, people, ecosystems, and wildlife worldwide are facing a panoply of environmental issues. In an effort to help experts and policymakers determine where they might focus research, a panel of 25 scientists and practitioners—including me—from around the globe held discussions in the fall to identify emerging issues that deserve increased attention.
Research Topics
Since 1907, the Harvard Forest has served as a center for research and education in forest biology and conservation. The Forest's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, established in 1988 and funded by the National Science Foundation, provides a framework for much of this activity.. Browse the topics below for an overview of Harvard Forest research by category, or explore abstracts of ...
Biodiversity
Priority research topics. Biodiversity. Biodiversity. Biodiversity is a vital part of all agricultural production, but farming systems centring on homogenizing practices and landscapes shrink that biodiversity and often pose a threat to ecosystems . To foster the emergence or productive, sustainable and resilient systems, agricultural research ...
BiodiversiTREE
May 7, 2021. Statement on Data Ownership & Authorship Policies for Research at BiodiversiTREE. BiodiversiTREE@SERC is a large-scale, long-term experimental research forest designed to test whether tree diversity impacts ecosystem function at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, MD. It is the largest tree diversity-ecosystem function experiment in North America ...
(PDF) Biodiversity: Concept, Threats and Conservation
Biodiversity is the variety of different forms of life on earth, including the different plants, animals, micro-organisms, the. genes they contain and the ecosystem they form. It refers to genetic ...
Trends and gaps in biodiversity and ecosystem services research: A text
The topic "Research & Policy" performed highly, considering number of publications and citation rate, while in the case of other topics, the "best" performances varied, depending on the indicator applied. Topics with human, policy or economic dimensions had higher performances than the ones with 'pure' biodiversity and science.
133 Biodiversity Essay Topics & Samples
Biodiversity Research Topics; We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts. 808 writers online . Learn More . 🔝 Top-10 Biodiversity Topics for Presentation. Biodiversity loss. Global biodiversity conservation. The Amazon rainforest. Animal ecology research.
Terrestrial Ecology
We try to answer these questions by integrating field experiments with behavioral ecology, natural products chemistry, phylogenetics, quantitative genetics, and synthetic analyses. Recent research themes include: Impacts of herbivores on plant community structure. Plant invasions. Effects of biodiversity on populations, communities, and ecosystems.
Biodiversity Mapping in Ecology and Conservation: Pitfalls ...
Keywords: Maps of biodiversity, data uncertainties, alternative mapping, critical mapping, counter maps . Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements.Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any ...
Presentations of Biodiversity
The Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) harnesses the power of trees, forests and agroforestry landscapes to address the most pressing global challenges of our time - biodiversity loss, climate change, food security, livelihoods and inequity. CIFOR and ICRAF are CGIAR Research Centers.

Nature’s Secrets: Top 200 Ecology Research Topics

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Top 200 Ecology Research Topics

Top 10 Ecology Research Topics On Biodiversity Conservation

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