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Over a thousand rhinos were killed in 2013 and 2014 as the poaching crisis in Southern Africa reached massive proportions, with major consequences for conservation and other political dynamics in the region. The article documents these dynamics in the context of the ongoing development and establishment of \"peace parks\": large conservation areas that cross international state boundaries. The rhino-poaching crisis has affected peace parks in the region, especially the flagship Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In order to save both peace parks and rhinos, key actors such as the South African government, the Peace Parks Foundation, and the general public responded to the poaching crisis with increasingly desperate measures, including the deployment of a variety of violent tactics and instruments. The article critically examines these methods of 'green violence' and places them within the broader historical and contemporary contexts of violence in the region and in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. It concludes that attempting to save peace parks through 'green violence' represents a contradiction, but that this contradiction is no longer recognized as such, given the historical positioning of peace parks in the region and popular discourses of placing poachers in a 'space of exception'.

eLetter in response to D.E. Garrick, Dobson, Damania, Grafton, Hope, et all Valuing water for sustainable development Science 24 November 2017

Community engagement in public health policy is easier said than done. One reason is that public health policy is produced in a complex process resulting in policies that may appear not to link up to citizen perspectives. We therefore address the central question as to whether citizen engagement in knowledge production could enable inclusive health policy making. Building on non-health work fields, we describe different types of citizen engagement in scientific research, or ‘Citizen Science’. We describe the challenges that Citizen Science poses for public health, and how these could be addressed. Despite these challenges, we expect that Citizen Science or similar approaches such as participatory action research and ‘popular epidemiology’ may yield better knowledge, empowered communities, and improved community health. We provide a draft framework to enable evaluation of Citizen Science in practice, consisting of a descriptive typology of different kinds of Citizen Science and a causal framework that shows how Citizen Science in public health might benefit both the knowledge produced as well as the ‘Citizen Scientists’as active participants.

Ground-sourced tree density data is assembled to provide a global map of tree density, which reveals that there are three trillion trees (tenfold more than previous estimates); tree numbers have declined by nearly half since the start of human civilization and over 15 billion trees are lost on an annual basis. Three trillion trees and counting Until now, our understanding of global forest ecosystems has been generated from satellite information that can tell us about the area of forest. Policy makers and environmental scientists have relied heavily on this information when considering trees' involvement in patterns of biodiversity, biogeochemical cycles and their contribution to ecosystem services. Thomas Crowther et al . have extended the scope of this information by generating a map of global tree density that reveals what is going on below the canopy. The map, which was generated using more than 400,000 ground-sourced measurements of tree density, reveals patterns in tree numbers at regional and global scales. Using this map, the authors are able to estimate that the current global tree number stands at approximately 3 trillion. See also News by Ehrenberg The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.30 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.66 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well as the overwhelming effect of humans across most of the world. Based on our projected tree densities, we estimate that over 15 billion trees are cut down each year, and the global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the start of human civilization.

The Paris Agreement and Katowice Climate Package articulate a clear mandate for all parties to undertake and document adaptation progress. Yet persistent challenges have prevented substantive developments in tracking adaptation and the assessment of adaptation actions and their outcomes. Here, we provide an overview of the challenges of adaptation tracking and propose a comprehensive conceptual framework for assessing adaptation progress by governments that is scalable over time and across contexts. The framework addresses the core components of adaptation assessment (vulnerability, goals and targets, adaptation efforts, and adaptation results) and characterizes subcomponents focused on adaptation effort (leadership, organizations and policy). In particular, we highlight how critical insights can be uncovered by systematically tracking policy efforts over time, and discusses novel approaches to data collection.The Paris Agreement places new emphasis on the need to take stock of adaptation progress. This Perspective discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with monitoring adaptation and provides a comprehensive framework for tracking progress among governments.

The United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in June is an important opportunity to improve the institutional framework for sustainable development. Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earth's sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years ( 1 , 2 ). Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change ( 3 ). This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.

Melinda Mills, Nicola Barban, Harold Snieder, Marcel den Hoed and colleagues perform a meta-analysis of data from over 300,000 individuals for age at first birth and number of children ever born. They identify 12 significant loci that associate with these traits, providing insights into the genetic basis of human reproductive behavior. The genetic architecture of human reproductive behavior—age at first birth (AFB) and number of children ever born (NEB)—has a strong relationship with fitness, human development, infertility and risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. However, very few genetic loci have been identified, and the underlying mechanisms of AFB and NEB are poorly understood. We report a large genome-wide association study of both sexes including 251,151 individuals for AFB and 343,072 individuals for NEB. We identified 12 independent loci that are significantly associated with AFB and/or NEB in a SNP-based genome-wide association study and 4 additional loci associated in a gene-based effort. These loci harbor genes that are likely to have a role, either directly or by affecting non-local gene expression, in human reproduction and infertility, thereby increasing understanding of these complex traits.

Aaron Antonovsky advanced the concept of salutogenesis almost four decades ago (Antonovsky, Health, Stress and Coping. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1979; Unravelling the Mystery of Health. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1987). Salutogenesis posits that life experiences shape the sense of coherence (SOC) that helps to mobilize resources to cope with stressors and manage tension successfully (determining one’s movement on the health Ease/Dis-ease continuum). Antonovsky considered the three-dimensional SOC (i.e. comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness) as the key answer to his question about the origin of health. The field of health promotion has adopted the concept of salutogenesis as reflected in the international Handbook of Salutogenesis (Mittelmark et al., The Handbook of Salutogenesis. Springer, New York, 2016). However, health promotion mostly builds on the more vague, general salutogenic orientation that implies the need to foster resources and capacities to promote health and wellbeing. To strengthen the knowledge base of salutogenesis, the Global Working Group on Salutogenesis (GWG-Sal) of the International Union of Health Promotion and Education produced the Handbook of Salutogenesis. During the creation of the handbook and the regular meetings of the GWG-Sal, the working group identified four key conceptual issues to be advanced: (i) the overall salutogenic model of health; (ii) the SOC concept; (iii) the design of salutogenic interventions and change processes in complex systems; (iv) the application of salutogenesis beyond health sector. For each of these areas, we first highlight Antonovsky’s original contribution and then present suggestions for future development. These ideas will help guide GWG-Sal’s work to strengthen salutogenesis as a theory base for health promotion.

Digital technology is changing nature conservation in increasingly profound ways. We describe this impact and its significance through the concept of 'digital conservation', which we found to comprise five pivotal dimensions: data on nature, data on people, data integration and analysis, communication and experience, and participatory governance. Examining digital innovation in nature conservation and addressing how its development, implementation and diffusion may be steered, we warn against hypes, techno-fix thinking, good news narratives and unverified assumptions. We identify a need for rigorous evaluation, more comprehensive consideration of social exclusion, frameworks for regulation and increased multi-sector as well as multi-discipline awareness and cooperation. Along the way, digital technology may best be reconceptualised by conservationists from something that is either good or bad, to a dual-faced force in need of guidance.