Growing global demands for food, energy, and resources drive competition for space while increasing pressure on natural systems, highlighting the need to balance sustainable resource use with biodiversity conservation. While multiple-use spatial planning provides a pathway to balance this trade-off, there is limited guidance for selecting appropriate optimization approaches and their integration into terrestrial, freshwater, and marine planning processes. Here we explore the current state of multiple-use spatial planning and the challenges that hinder its adoption, including the timing of interventions, economic impacts of planning decisions, capacity building, and alignment with development priorities. We aim to make multiple-use planning more accessible to researchers and practitioners and stimulate its wider uptake to help meet international ecological, economic, and social goals.

In this TrendsTalk series 'Disability in ecology and evolution' in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, we will be hearing from people about their experiences being disabled in ecology and evolution. We are asking ecologists and evolutionary biologists with disabilities what the community could do to make our field more inclusive – these changes can be very practical things (e.g., large fonts), they could be institutional, or involve people’s attitudes and beliefs. We hope you enjoy the series.

Soil microbes act as below-ground defenders against desertification by several mechanisms, such as rhizosheath formation, necromass accumulation, biological soil crusts, exopolysaccharide (EPS) produc...

Soil microbes act as below-ground defenders against desertification by several mechanisms, such as rhizosheath formation, necromass accumulation, biological soil crusts, exopolysaccharide (EPS) production, hyphal networks, and calcium carbonate precipitation. Here, we discuss how soil microbes drive ecosystem recovery in drylands, offering promising, nature-based strategies for restoring soils in the face of desertification.

The literature on domestication commonly calls the association between human domesticators and their plant and animal domesticates mutualistic, yet this designation is rarely examined critically. Here, we assess its validity based on the long-accepted ecological definition of mutualism and current evidence for origins, subsequent evolution, and present features of domesticator–domesticate interactions. We argue that it is difficult to wholly align these associations with standard concepts of mutualism. Instead, domesticator–domesticate interactions vary across domestication pathways and have changed throughout domestication timelines, spanning antagonism to commensalism to mutualism. We argue that the later stages of domestication in some intensively domesticated species form exploitative rather than mutualistic interactions. Moving away from conceptualizing domestication as mutualistic raises new questions regarding its ecology and evolution.

Cell size shapes how organisms interact with their environment, yet our understanding of these effects remains fragmented. We synthesise these effects into a Theory of Optimal Cell Size (TOCS), predicting that the size of single-cell organisms, as well as the number and size of cells in multicellular organisms, is subject to strong selection. At the heart of TOCS lies a trade-off between power and energy conservation: cell size acts as a ‘double-edged sword’, influencing both resource acquisition and maintenance costs. Major evolutionary transitions across the tree of life are connected with innovations in cellular organisation. A unified framework for cell size adaptation is essential for revealing the fundamental principles governing the ecology and evolution of life.

Human or ‘social’ dimensions are increasingly prominent in the conservation translocation literature yet in practice they tend to be infrequently or narrowly applied. To assist biophysical scientists and practitioners to act upon social dimensions, we distinguish four ways of thinking about the social dynamics of translocations: identified stakeholders, processes of decision-making, visions of nature, and values in science. We use three case studies to show how working through these four social dimensions together can help to illuminate the multiple meanings and effects of translocations. We discuss how biophysical scientists and practitioners can take responsibility for each social dimension and thus make better choices for people and nature.

Affiliative social relationships have clear links to fitness in many species, yet exactly why that is the case remains elusive. We unify theory from socioecology and network science to set forth testable predictions of how individuals should invest in their social relationships given the relative benefits of different social strategies across environmental contexts. We propose that relationship quality provides access to social support, which can help animals faced with local pressures such as contest competition, while relationship quantity provides access to social tolerance, which can help with global pressures such as predation. The Adaptive Relationships Framework sets the foundation for the systematic study of how social and ecological pressures drive adaptive variation in the quality and quantity of social relationships.

The spread of millet and rice agriculture has significantly impacted human societies in Asia and the Pacific. Recent ancient genomic studies by Xiong et al. and Wang et al. uncover three East Asian farmer ancestries and their migrations during the Middle Neolithic. These underscore interactions between diverse ancestries and update the farming/language dispersal hypothesis.

In this TrendsTalk series, ‘Disability in ecology and evolution,’ in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, we will be hearing from people about their experiences being disabled in ecology and evolution. We...

Science is a human activity, and humans are biased. When we study biology, we do not leave our cultural values at home. Instead, we allow them to color the way we see the world. The Western tradition of separating humans from nature, for example, has long blinded scientists to the abilities of animals. It took scholars taught in Shintoism and Buddhism to discover that non-human animals have culture and medicine [1,2].

Understanding the role of humans as ‘ecosystem engineers’ requires a deep-time perspective rooted in evolutionary history and the fossil record. However, no conceptual framework exists for studying the rise of ecosystem engineering in deep time, requiring us to consider effects that fall outside the scope of traditional definitions. Here, we present a new framework applicable to both modern and ancient engineering-type effects. We propose a new term – ‘Earth system engineering’ – to describe biological processes that alter the structure and function of planetary spheres, and which combines core tenets of ecosystem engineering, niche construction, and legacy effects. We illustrate this framework using the fossil record, and show how it can be applied across the tree of life, and throughout Earth history.

This letter is in response to the article 'What is animal venom? Rethinking a manipulative weapon' by Jenner, Casewell, and Undheim (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2025.05.009).

Invasive species management traditionally distinguishes states of eradication from suppression but an intermediary 'elimination' also exists. Whereas eradication is removal of both residents and reinvaders, elimination removes residents but non-breeding reinvaders remain. By contrast, 'suppression' is only a reduction in the number of residents and does not distinguish reinvaders.