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Forests provide essential ecosystem services and carry deep cultural significance for many societies, historically and presently, and they always have a history. In this perspective paper, we discuss the relevance of studying this history of forests particularly through interdisciplinary studies and we provide an overview on the main and most valuable historical source types and methods, crosscutting the humanities and the natural sciences. We propose a culture of interdisciplinary exchange between scholars interested in the "cultural forest history" and those interested in "ecological forest history" which has the potential to provide a deeper understanding of the interrelationship between ecosystems and humans. We therefore recommend including some of the retrospective methods listed in broader ecological studies and contextualizing ecological research by adding a historical analysis as a separate entity for important forest landscapes.

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is an expanding environmental pressure in urban areas, yet effective mitigation depends on public support. We investigated how residents of two Chilean coastal cities perceive ALAN, its impacts and potential mitigation measures. Respondents demonstrated asymmetric environmental literacy, recognising the societal benefits of lighting while showing limited awareness of its ecological consequences, particularly for coastal-marine ecosystems. Support for mitigation depended on preserving valued social benefits, with greater environmental literacy associated with stronger acceptance of mitigation measures. Findings suggest that perceptions of safety, aesthetic value and institutional responsibility shape policy acceptance, highlighting the need to balance nature conservation with societal objectives. Rather than viewing ALAN as a technical lighting issue, we frame it as a social-ecological governance challenge. We argue that successful ALAN mitigation will require integrating environmental education, participatory decision-making and collaborative governance to achieve lighting policies that are both publicly acceptable and ecologically effective.

Our study examines the diversity of values within a superficially homogeneous recreational fishery and its relationship to angler diversity. We collected data on fishing preferences, behaviors, catch usage, and sociodemographics from 443 shore anglers across 10 cities in the lower Great Lakes. We identified five coherent dimensions, including food, cultural, leisure, challenge/performance, and social-financial centrality, consistent with multidimensional value structuring in recreational fisheries. Based on these patterns, anglers were classified into three data-driven groups along a food provisioning-leisure/sport continuum: provisioning/food-oriented, cultural/community-oriented, and leisure/sport-oriented. We further characterized these groups by differences in their fishing preferences and sociodemographics. These findings provide empirical support that recreational and non-recreational values coexist and jointly characterize angler diversity in urban shore fisheries. Our study highlights the need for future research and management to treat food provisioning and cultural practices as core dimensions of recreational fisheries that reflect anglers' diverse values and needs.

This paper examines how water, people, and governance are designed to coexist in Tacloban City's post-Yolanda recovery, focusing on the contested Cancabato Causeway. Using public sector design and policy assemblage theory, we ask how actors assemble infrastructures, documents, and practices to materialize futures for Cancabato Bay. Combining in-depth interviews, document analysis, and participant observation, we identified three policy assemblages. A technocratic assemblage organizes the bay as a corridor for mobility and investment, proceduralizing participation and equating resilience with new infrastructure. An environmental advocacy assemblage challenges this vision through law, evidence, and environmental justice, yet remains partly constrained by anthropocentric ways of knowing. A fisherfolk-bay assemblage foregrounds everyday practices of living-with-water and hopes for futures shared with the bay. We draw three lessons for public design: it is inherently relational, it must work with multiplicity, and it must treat participation as future-making rather than an end in itself.

Human attitudes toward large carnivores are shaped by multiple interrelated socio-psychological factors, yet conservation interventions often focus on reducing material impacts while paying less attention to underlying attitude drivers. We investigated attitudes towards three large carnivore species: Persian leopard (Panthera pardus), grey wolf (Canis lupus), and brown bear (Ursus arctos) among communities around Golestan National Park, Iran. Using interview data from 292 participants across 30 villages, we applied Bayesian structural equation modelling to examine how cognitive beliefs, social beliefs, perceived management responsibility, and livestock loss relate to attitudes towards each species. Cognitive beliefs emerged as the strongest predictor across all three species, whereas social beliefs, management responsibility, and livestock loss varied in influence. The limited role of livestock loss suggests that reducing carnivore impacts alone is insufficient to promote coexistence. Instead, conservation efforts should combine practical conflict-mitigation measures with strategies engaging local beliefs, social norms, and expectations of wildlife management.

Successful outcomes of community-based conservation, both ecological and social, rely on local actors being motivated to engage at the outset of the programme and to sustain their motivation over time. Using semi-structured interviews, we explore the motivations of 22 community Conservation Officers who have participated in marine turtle conservation in Tanzania for more than two decades. We focus on factors that motivated initial participation, as well as those that contributed to sustaining their participation over the past 20 years. Our study reveals the intricate dynamics of motivational processes, including the influence of values, identities, autonomy, agency, and power, which are shaped by relationships between nature, people, and place. With these findings, we challenge dominant assumptions about economic motivations and highlight the risk of over-reliance on monetary incentives to drive participation in community-based conservation.

Sustainability research routinely treats inertia as the obstacle that explains why interventions fail to embed in everyday life. This Perspective argues that what is labelled as inertia is often patterned persistence-signal rather than noise-carrying moral commitments, ecological knowledge and potentially protective strategies. I define social inertia (SI) as the patterned continuation of social trajectories shaped by historical pathways, embodied routines, institutional arrangements and cultural attachments, and propose a five-part typology (institutional, embodied, narrative, ritual and infrapolitical) giving the concept analytical depth beyond the mechanistic vocabularies of lock-in, regime stability and behavioural habit. A methodological orientation drawn from the humanities and interpretive social sciences-archival reading against the grain, oral history, and Future Design-reads SI across past, present and imagined-future registers. The reconceptualisation reframes the field's diagnostic starting point: not "why does change fail" but what the patterning of continuity reveals about the lives interventions seek to alter.

As biodiversity decline continues, there is a critical need to document, monitor, and protect species equitably across the tree of life. However, both scientific research and societal perceptions of biodiversity are often biased toward large, colorful, charismatic, familiar, or otherwise "useful" species. We conducted a global meta-analysis encompassing 905 effect sizes from 78 studies across three decades of research assessing drivers of taxonomic bias. Positive biases were widespread across study designs, regions, and taxonomic scopes, with plants and invertebrates typically receiving disproportionately less attention than vertebrates. However, the magnitude of bias was generally small (Pearson's r < 0.5), suggesting mild impacts on research agendas. Concerningly, conservation priority emerged as the only dimension not consistently associated with positive bias, suggesting a misalignment between research attention, funding, public interest, and conservation needs. We conclude that while biases are pervasive across taxonomic groups, they are subtle-but their conservation consequences warrant urgent correction.

Human-wildlife coexistence increasingly requires approaches that make diverse value perspectives explicit. We introduce the Beaver Futures Framework (BFF), which integrates intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values, as well as instrumental damages of beavers, to support more inclusive discussions on beaver management in the Netherlands. We applied the BFF in a workshop with beaver professionals to examine how participants valued beavers and how these values related to their self-placement within the framework. The BFF proved effective for systematically exploring and collecting beaver values, stimulating mutual understanding among participants, and revealing both shared and divergent perspectives within the group. These findings demonstrate the framework's potential to support inclusive stakeholder engagement and to map value plurality in ways that inform coexistence strategies. Because of its generic structure, the BFF can be adapted to other species or ecosystems, offering a promising tool for navigating complex human-wildlife interactions in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes.

The seafood sector faces multiple challenges that threaten its contribution to food security. For developing effective governance strategies in response to those transformations, this study proposes a theoretical framework grounded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT), applied to the construction of a Social-Ecological Network (SEN), to better understand the structural complexity of the seafood sector SES in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Europe's leading seafood processing hub. Through semi-structured interviews, direct observations, and participatory workshops, we identified 227 nodes and 595 links across environmental, economic, productive, and social categories framing the seafood sector. The descriptive analysis of the network reveals that operational production entities constitute the network's core, shaping how environmental resources, economic support, and social regulations are organized. By making visible the diversity of components, their multi-layer interactions, and interdependencies within this system, our approach provides decision-makers with evidence-based insights for developing strategies that align with the seafood sector's systemic reality and sustainability challenges.