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Abstract In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes.

Beacon is a basic data discovery protocol issued by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). The main goal addressed by version 1 of the Beacon protocol was to test the feasibility of broadly sharing human genomic data, through providing simple "yes" or "no" responses to queries about the presence of a given variant in datasets hosted by Beacon providers. The popularity of this concept has fostered the design of a version 2, that better serves real-world requirements and addresses the needs of clinical genomics research and healthcare, as assessed by several contributing projects and organizations. Particularly, rare disease genetics and cancer research will benefit from new case level and genomic variant level requests and the enabling of richer phenotype and clinical queries as well as support for fuzzy searches. Beacon is designed as a "lingua franca" to bridge data collections hosted in software solutions with different and rich interfaces. Beacon version 2 works alongside popular standards like Phenopackets, OMOP, or FHIR, allowing implementing consortia to return matches in beacon responses and provide a handover to their preferred data exchange format. The protocol is being explored by other research domains and is being tested in several international projects. ; This study was funded by ELIXIR, the research infrastructure for life-science data and also by LaCaixa Foundation (grant number 004745/008034). Tim Beck was supported by a UKRI Innovation Fellowship at Health Data Research UK (MR/S003703/1). Anthony J. Brookes and Jordi Rambla were supported, in part, by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the EJP RD COFUND-EJP #825575. Michael Baudis acknowledges funding under the BioMedIT Network project of Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN). ; Peer reviewed

In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes.

Mangrove forests are found on sheltered coastlines in tropical, subtropical, and some warm temperate regions. These forests support unique biodiversity and provide a range of benefits to coastal communities, but as a result of large-scale conversion for aquaculture, agriculture, and urbanization, mangroves are considered increasingly threatened ecosystems. Scientific advances have led to accurate and comprehensive global datasets on mangrove extent, structure, and condition, and these can support evaluation of ecosystem services and stimulate greater conservation and rehabilitation efforts. To increase the utility and uptake of these products, in this Perspective we provide an overview of these recent and forthcoming global datasets and explore the challenges of translating these new analyses into policy action and on-the-ground conservation. We describe a new platform for visualizing and disseminating these datasets to the global science community, non-governmental organizations, government officials, and rehabilitation practitioners and highlight future directions and collaborations to increase the uptake and impact of large-scale mangrove research. This Perspective reviews the role of global-scale research in stimulating policy action and on-the-ground conservation for mangrove ecosystems. We outline the current state of knowledge in terms of global analyses and examine the challenge of translating this research in action.

In this horizon scan, we highlight 15 emerging issues of potential relevance to global conservation in 2020. Seven relate to potentially extensive changes in vegetation or ecological systems. These changes are either relatively new, for example, conversion of kelp forests to simpler macroalgal systems, or may occur in the future, for example, as a result of the derivation of nanocelluose from wood or the rapid expansion of small hydropower schemes. Other topics highlight potential changes in national legislation that may have global effect on international agreements. Our panel of 23 scientists and practitioners selected these issues using a modified version of the Delphi technique from a long-list of 89 potential topics.

In this horizon scan, we highlight 15 emerging issues of potential relevance to global conservation in 2020. Seven relate to potentially extensive changes in vegetation or ecological systems. These changes are either relatively new, for example, conversion of kelp forests to simpler macroalgal systems, or may occur in the future, for example, as a result of the derivation of nanocelluose from wood or the rapid expansion of small hydropower schemes. Other topics highlight potential changes in national legislation that may have global effect on international agreements. Our panel of 23 scientists and practitioners selected these issues using a modified version of the Delphi technique from a long-list of 89 potential topics. ; NERC and RSPB funding

This paper presents the results of our seventh annual horizon scan, in which we aimed to identify issues that could have substantial effects on global biological diversity in the future, but are not currently widely well known or understood within the conservation community. Fifteen issues were identified by a team that included researchers, practitioners, professional horizon scanners, and journalists. The topics include use of managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China.

This paper presents the results of our seventh annual horizon scan, in which we aimed to identify issues that could have substantial effects on global biological diversity in the future, but are not currently widely well known or understood within the conservation community. Fifteen issues were identified by a team that included researchers, practitioners, professional horizon scanners, and journalists. The topics include use of managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China. This is the seventh annual horizon scan. A team of 24 horizon scanners, researchers, practitioners, and journalists identified 15 issues following widespread consultation and a Delphi-like process to select the most suitable.The issues were wide ranging but included artificial superintelligence, changing costs of energy storage and consumptive models, and ecological civilization policies in China.