It is not only the climate that is changing. We are now also observing a global biological change. Here we revise the overwhelming evidence that these changes affect not only individual species but also simplify the structure of entire food webs, threatening long-term community persistence. We must take urgent action to protect the integrity of natural food webs, or we might rapidly push entire ecosystems outside their safe zones.

In an era of environmental crises, conservation and management strategies need a new generation of applied ecologists. Here, we stimulate the next generation of applied ecologists to acquire a pragmatic mentality of problems solvers in real contexts, using the wide arsenal of concepts, approaches and techniques available in the project management (PM) arena and using a road map based on the main steps of the conservation project cycle.

This study determines the diversity of pollen morphotypes of Atriplex halimus (Amaranthaceae) along a large-scale climatic gradient. Occurrences of 10 pollen grain shapes were quantified at seven climates across a humid-to-hyperarid gradient. We discuss how the evolutionary effects of climate gradients on pollen morphology and variability in dryland induce a high level of specialization to maximize trade-offs between adaptation to severe ecological conditions and pollination efficiency.