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As the United Nations develops a post-2020 global biodiversity framework for the Convention on Biological Diversity, attention is focusing on how new goals and targets for ecosystem conservation might serve its vision of 'living in harmony with nature'1,2. Advancing dual imperatives to conserve biodiversity and sustain ecosystem services requires reliable and resilient generalizations and predictions about ecosystem responses to environmental change and management3. Ecosystems vary in their biota4, service provision5 and relative exposure to risks6, yet there is no globally consistent classification of ecosystems that reflects functional responses to change and management. This hampers progress on developing conservation targets and sustainability goals. Here we present the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Global Ecosystem Typology, a conceptually robust, scalable, spatially explicit approach for generalizations and predictions about functions, biota, risks and management remedies across the entire biosphere. The outcome of a major cross-disciplinary collaboration, this novel framework places all of Earth's ecosystems into a unifying theoretical context to guide the transformation of ecosystem policy and management from global to local scales. This new information infrastructure will support knowledge transfer for ecosystem-specific management and restoration, globally standardized ecosystem risk assessments, natural capital accounting and progress on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

Learned vocalizations play a key role in parrot social dynamics and vocal dialects have been documented for several mainland species, but to date no studies of geographically structured call variation in parrot species have examined the role of isolation on islands. In a study of the Brown-throated Parakeet (Eupsittula pertinax), which inhabits 5 small Caribbean islands as well as the adjacent mainland, we found that the contact calls of island and mainland parakeets show divergence in vocal characters as well as in call variability. We assessed call variation using 3 approaches: frequency measurements, spectrogram cross-correlation (SPCC) analyses, and call duration measurements. Island parakeets’ calls were longer and had lower mean frequencies, and calls from different islands were distinguishable from each other as well as from mainland calls using measures derived from the SPCCs. In addition, we measured call variability at 2 different levels—within-location and within-individual. We found calls to be more variable for island parakeets for SPCC and duration measures, but less variable for frequency measures. The observed call differentiation among locations may be due to drift, whereas the lower frequency of island calls could either be a response to the windy environment on the islands or a consequence of the island subspecies’ larger body sizes. We also hypothesize that the isolation of parakeet populations on small islands may have resulted in reduced selection for local call convergence, allowing island parakeets to produce more variable calls. We suggest that due to poor signal transmission in the windy island environment, selective pressures may favor variability in more easily perceived call features (like call duration) rather than more subtle features, like frequency shifts. Experimental tests are required to determine whether observed call patterns translate into similarly structured patterns in the responses to vocal variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]