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It is time to acknowledge and overcome conservation's deep-seated systemic racism, which has historically marginalized Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities and continues to do so. We describe how the mutually reinforcing ‘twin spheres’ of conservation science and conservation practice perpetuate this systemic racism. We trace how institutional structures in conservation science (e.g. degree programmes, support and advancement opportunities, course syllabuses) can systematically produce conservation graduates with partial and problematic conceptions of conservation's history and contemporary purposes. Many of these graduates go on to work in conservation practice, reproducing conservation's colonial history by contributing to programmes based on outmoded conservation models that disproportionately harm rural BIPOC communities and further restrict access and inclusion for BIPOC conservationists. We provide practical, actionable proposals for breaking vicious cycles of racism in the system of conservation we have with virtuous cycles of inclusion, equality, equity and participation in the system of conservation we want.

Not all people conform to what is socially construed as the norm and divergences should be expected. Neurodiversity is fundamental to the understanding of human behaviour and cognition. However, neurodivergent individuals are often stigmatised, devalued, and objectified. This position statement presents the perspectives of neurodivergent authors, the majority of whom have personal lived experiences of neurodivergence(s), and discusses how research and academia can and should be improved in terms of research integrity, inclusivity and diversity. The authors describe future directions that relate to lived experience and systematic barriers, disclosure, directions on prevalence, stigma, intersection of neurodiversity and open scholarship, and provide recommendations that can lead to personal and systematic changes to improve acceptance of neurodivergent individuals’ lived experiences within academia.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Grasslands comprise 40% of terrestrial ecosystems and are globally important for food production, carbon storage, and other ecosystem services. However, grasslands in many areas are becoming increasingly exposed to extreme wet and dry periods resulting from global temperature increases. Therefore, understanding how grasslands will respond to climate change is a pressing issue for managing changes to biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Here, we use experimental manipulations of precipitation (50% increase and 50% decrease of growing-season precipitation) to investigate the resistance of the diversity and productivity of a calcareous grassland community recovering from historical agricultural conversion. We found that decreasing growing season precipitation led to reductions of mean productivity (25 % decrease in peak above-ground biomass) and its temporal stability (54 % increase in biomass variance across years). However, the grassland community composition was resistant to the precipitation manipulations, with no clear difference in community compositional turnover, dissimilarity, or biodiversity indices. Furthermore, the precipitation manipulations had no effect on the path of ongoing (30 year) recovery of grassland plant diversity from the period of previous agricultural conversion. While the diversity of this calcareous grassland was resistant to precipitation extremes (at least in the short term), sustained reductions in growing-season precipitation reduced productivity and its temporal stability demonstrating that different properties of grasslands can vary in their responses to changes in precipitation.