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International policy is focused on increasing the proportion of the Earth's surface that is protected for nature1,2. Although studies show that protected areas prevent habitat loss3-6, there is a lack of evidence for their effect on species' populations: existing studies are at local scale or use simple designs that lack appropriate controls7-13. Here we explore how 1,506 protected areas have affected the trajectories of 27,055 waterbird populations across the globe using a robust before-after control-intervention study design, which compares protected and unprotected populations in the years before and after protection. We show that the simpler study designs typically used to assess protected area effectiveness (before-after or control-intervention) incorrectly estimate effects for 37-50% of populations-for instance misclassifying positively impacted populations as negatively impacted, and vice versa. Using our robust study design, we find that protected areas have a mixed impact on waterbirds, with a strong signal that areas managed for waterbirds or their habitat are more likely to benefit populations, and a weak signal that larger areas are more beneficial than smaller ones. Calls to conserve 30% of the Earth's surface by 2030 are gathering pace14, but we show that protection alone does not guarantee good biodiversity outcomes. As countries gather to agree the new Global Biodiversity Framework, targets must focus on creating and supporting well-managed protected and conserved areas that measurably benefit populations.

International policy is focused on increasing the proportion of the Earth's surface that is protected for nature

Threats to Antarctic biodiversity are escalating, despite its remoteness and protection under the Antarctic Treaty. Increasing human activity, pollution, biological invasions and the omnipresent impacts of climate change all contribute, and often combine, to exert pressure on Antarctic ecosystems and environments. Here we present a continent-wide assessment of terrestrial biodiversity protection in Antarctica. Despite Antarctic Specially Protected Areas covering less than 2% of Antarctica, 44% of species (including seabirds, plants, lichens and invertebrates) are found in one or more protected areas. However, protection is regionally uneven and biased towards easily detectable and charismatic species like seabirds. Systematic processes to prioritize area protection using the best available data will maximize the likelihood of ensuring long-term protection and conservation of Antarctic biodiversity., Antarctic biodiversity is increasingly under threat. Here, Wauchope et al. provide a continent-wide assessment of its terrestrial biodiversity, and find biodiversity protection is regionally uneven and biased towards easily detectable and charismatic species.

Interactions between species generate the functions on which ecosystems and humans depend. However, we lack an understanding of the risk that interaction loss poses to ecological communities. Here, we quantify the risk of interaction loss for 4,330 species interactions from 41 empirical pollination and seed dispersal networks across 6 continents. We estimate risk as a function of interaction vulnerability to extinction (likelihood of loss) and contribution to network feasibility, a measure of how much an interaction helps a community tolerate environmental perturbations. Remarkably, we find that more vulnerable interactions have higher contributions to network feasibility. Furthermore, interactions tend to have more similar vulnerability and contribution to feasibility across networks than expected by chance, suggesting that vulnerability and feasibility contribution may be intrinsic properties of interactions, rather than only a function of ecological context. These results may provide a starting point for prioritising interactions for conservation in species interaction networks in the future., A study of 4,330 species interactions from 41 empirical pollination and seed dispersal networks across six continents reveals that species interactions which are most vulnerable to extinction are also the most important for ecological community stability; moreover, vulnerable interactions that are important for stability tend to be important and vulnerable wherever they occur.

Millions of birds migrate to and from the Arctic each year, but rapid climate change in the High North could strongly affect where species are able to breed, disrupting migratory connections globally. We modelled the climatically suitable breeding conditions of 24 Arctic specialist shorebirds and projected them to 2070 and to the mid-Holocene climatic optimum, the world's last major warming event ~6000 years ago. We show that climatically suitable breeding conditions could shift, contract and decline over the next 70 years, with 66–83% of species losing the majority of currently suitable area. This exceeds, in rate and magnitude, the impact of the mid-Holocene climatic optimum. Suitable climatic conditions are predicted to decline acutely in the most species rich region, Beringia (western Alaska and eastern Russia), and become concentrated in the Eurasian and Canadian Arctic islands. These predicted spatial shifts of breeding grounds could affect the species composition of the world's major flyways. Encouragingly, protected area coverage of current and future climatically suitable breeding conditions generally meets target levels; however, there is a lack of protected areas within the Canadian Arctic where resource exploitation is a growing threat. Given that already there are rapid declines of many populations of Arctic migratory birds, our results emphasize the urgency of mitigating climate change and protecting Arctic biodiversity.