Conservation science needs to engage the general public to ensure successful conservation interventions. Although online technologies such as Twitter and Facebook offer new opportunities to accelerate communication between conservation scientists and the online public, factors influencing the spread of conservation news in online media are not well understood. We explored transmission of conservation research through online news articles with generalized linear mixed-effects models and an information theoretic approach. In particular, we assessed differences in the frequency conservation research is featured on online news sites and the impact of online conservation news content and delivery on Facebook likes and shares and Twitter tweets. Five percent of articles in conservation journals are reported in online news, and the probability of reporting depended on the journal. There was weak evidence that articles on climate change and mammals were more likely to be featured. Online news articles about charismatic mammals with illustrations were more likely to be shared or liked on Facebook and Twitter, but the effect of news sites was much larger. These results suggest journals have the greatest impact on which conservation research is featured and that news site has the greatest impact on how popular an online article will be on Facebook and Twitter.

theory of island biogeography predicts that island species richness should increase with island area. This prediction generally holds among large islands, but among small islands species richness often varies independently of island area, producing the so-called 'small-island effect' and an overall biphasic species -area relationship (SAR). Here, we develop a unified theory that explains the biphasic island SAR. Our theory's key postulate is that as island area increases, the total number of immigrants increases faster than niche diversity. A parsimonious mechanistic model approximating these processes reproduces a biphasic SAR and provides excellent fits to 100 archipelago datasets. In the light of our theory, the biphasic island SAR can be interpreted as arising from a transition from a nichestructured regime on small islands to a colonization-extinction balance regime on large islands. The first regime is characteristic of classic deterministic niche theories; the second regime is characteristic of stochastic theories including the theory of island biogeography and neutral theory. The data furthermore confirm our theory's key prediction that the transition between the two SAR regimes should occur at smaller areas, where immigration is stronger (i.e. for taxa that are better dispersers and for archipelagos that are less isolated).

Conservation conflict is widespread, damaging, and has proved difficult to manage using conventional conservation approaches. Conflicts are often “wicked problems,” lacking clear solutions due to divergent values of stakeholders, and being embedded within wickedly complex environments. Drawing on the concept of wicked environmental problems could lead to management strategies better suited to tackling conflict. However, it is unclear whether managers are embracing ideas from the wicked problems concept. There is currently a lack of guidance for applying strategies to tackle particular wicked problems, such as conservation conflict. We explored the suitability of wicked problems‐inspired management, using eight contemporary conflict case studies. Conservation conflict was managed predominantly using conventional approaches suited to tackling single objectives in simple environments, rather than balancing competing objectives in complex environments. To deal with different characteristics of wickedness, we recommend that managers develop strategies combining distributed decision‐making, diverse opinions, pattern‐based predictions, trade‐off‐based objectives, and reporting of failures. Recent advances in conservation conflict research have focused on improving interactions among stakeholders. We believe that such stakeholder‐focused approaches would dovetail with the whole‐system focus of a wicked problems framework, allowing conservationists to move toward a holistic strategy for managing conservation conflict.

8Well-established scientists are expected to be more likely to have their work recognised than early-9 career individuals and thus receive more citations. Estimating the degree of inequality in citation 10 counts in environmental sciences can help identify the dynamics behind citation inequalities. 11Using the scientific profiles of researchers in the Google Scholar database, we estimated the 12 inequality in the distribution of citations in the disciplines of evolutionary biology, conservation 13 biology and ecology. The data were modelled using short-tailed (exponential) and long-tailed power-14 law (Pareto) distributions. The inequality in performance in each distribution was assessed using Gini 15 coefficients.

AimArtificial island habitats such as human‐made wetlands are emerging novel ecosystems. Understanding the drivers of diversity in such artificial systems is essential for balancing the goals of biodiversity conservation and human socio‐economic needs.LocationTelangana state, India.MethodsWe surveyed water birds in a network of 57 artificial wetlands and assessed four macroecological biodiversity patterns: spatial betadiversity, temporal betadiversity, species‐abundance distributions (SADs), and the species–area relationship (SAR). We employed a mix of phenomenological and mechanistic models to examine the four macroecological patterns. We hypothesized that the wetland bird communities are primarily structured by immigration–extinction dynamics and thus that spatial and temporal betadiversity would be high, the within‐wetland SADs would exhibit a large number of rare species and a monotonically declining overall shape, and that the SAR across wetlands would be strongly increasing.ResultsSpatial and temporal betadiversity were both high and mostly attributable to turnover rather than nestedness. While the pooled SAD exhibited an interior mode, the SAD for individual wetlands was generally log‐series distributed, consistent with a model in which immigration among wetlands is high. The SAR exhibited an increasing trend, with the ‘small‐island effect’, which reflects constraints on immigration and is often observed for true island archipelagos, being absent.Main ConclusionsWe tentatively conclude that bird diversity in this network of artificial wetlands is mainly structured by immigration–extinction dynamics, although we acknowledge that some of the patterns are also consistent with niche dynamics and future research should measure relevant biotic and abiotic variables in these wetlands. We encourage future work in which our rich dataset is used to fit dynamic models that permit more‐detailed quantitative inferences about mechanisms structuring diversity in this novel ecosystem, which can ultimately also inform conservation management.

Well-established scientists are expected to be more likely to have their work recognised than early-career individuals and thus receive more citations. Estimating the degree of inequality in citation counts in environmental sciences can help identify the dynamics behind citation inequalities. Using the scientific profiles of researchers in the Google Scholar database, we estimated the inequality in the distribution of citations in the disciplines of evolutionary biology, conservation biology and ecology. The data were modelled using short-tailed (exponential) and long-tailed power-law (Pareto) distributions. The inequality in performance in each distribution was assessed using Gini coefficients. Citations counts per researcher presented Gini coefficients of 0.83–0.84, indicating extreme inequality. The results suggest that the reinforcement in citation counts due to seniority and previous success might be very strong. To produce meaningful comparisons of actual research impact using citation counts, factors such as lab size, collaborations or role in articles should ideally be controlled for.