This Progress discusses potential applications of artificial intelligence models that generate new data and how they can be used to advance ecology research.

Animal-borne electronic tags, or bio-loggers, are increasingly used for research and wildlife conservation. This Perspective discusses the importance of standardization, long-term archiving and sharing of bio-logging data, and outlines a roadmap to achieve these goals.

Semistructured interviews and focus groups with experts in biodiversity finance in Europe identify opportunities and barriers to upscaling private investment in biodiversity, and emphasize that public policy is the key to enabling progression.

The authors collate a meta-collection of ex situ living plant diversity held in 50 botanical collections worldwide, spanning a century of data and currently containing ~500,000 accessions. Their analyses examine the capacities and constraints within living plant collections, reveal the impact of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its consequences for material exchange and conservation, and call for the re-evaluation of strategic priorities.

A generalizable, functional-trait-based approach for quantifying the effects of disturbances to ecosystem services and economic outcomes, including under climate change, highlights the need for incorporating disturbances in ecosystem services assessments.

Analysis of the eukaryotic gene repertoires mediating central carbon metabolism identifies ancestral contributions from Alphaproteobacteria, Asgardarchaeota and other microbial taxa, followed by gene loss, transfer and subcellular retargeting, which have remodelled central carbon metabolism over time.

An analysis of genomic, molecular and neuroanatomical traits across extant primates reveals early divergence in visual and olfactory systems of major primate lineages consistent with lineage-specific shifts in diel activity and dietary niche, providing support for a sensory ‘reallocation’ hypothesis.

The structure of aquatic food webs does not fit standard allometric predictions. Here the authors explain the co-evolution of specialist and non-specialist predators in aquatic food webs and how this helps reconstruct food webs on the basis of a relatively small number of observations.

The authors find that male mosquitofish with greater inhibitory control and better spatial learning ability gain a significantly higher share of paternity than do more impulsive males, suggesting that these cognitive abilities are under direct sexual selection in male mosquitofish.

Estimating both current and future environmental impacts of global mariculture production on marine biodiversity, the authors show that, with strategic planning, it is possible to increase finfish and bivalve production to meet global demand while also achieving decreases in cumulative impacts to marine biodiversity by up to 30.5% in 2050.

Sweeping job losses and freezes to science funding in the USA have created a time of immense unease for researchers and are likely to result in costs to global health and innovation, and for the planet.