🚨Great experience at #ECCB2026! After an inspiring week of sharing research, exchanging ideas, and connecting with fellow conservationists, we want to thank everyone who made this event so memorable. Together, we continue to build collaborations for biodiversity conservation!

🌍 HELICS at #ECCB2026! 🌱 • Miquel: Large carnivores & online news media — 7 July, 15:10. • Federico: Biodiversity complexity — 8 July, 10:00. • @hzsi.bsky.social: Birds & conservation interest — 9 July, 11:30. 📍 Want to learn more about HELICS and our work? Come meet us at the conference!

We're thrilled to share that Federico has recently joined the #YSSP26 at #IIASA! Federico will be working on a network-based framework to simulate secondary losses through structural extinction cascades and identify species acting as ecological (de-)stabilizers. Follow along this summer!

🚨🚨New publication: “Community-level functional stability in East African herbivores amid major environmental change” Interdisciplinary work with contributions from #HELICS members, advancing understanding of ecosystem resilience and functional stability. 🐘🌿 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Community-level functional stability in East African herbivores amid major environmental change

Reconstructing past environments commonly relies on the assumption that ecological relationships observed today translate to the deep past. Although t…

sciencedirect.com

New research! Lab founder Enrico di Minin is an author on this paper exploring the cultural differences in attitudes towards wildlife and how these can originate from varying colonial histories. doi.org/10.1038/s418...

🌟Excited to share our new paper from HELICS!📄✨ Based on text and image data from the Chinese social media platform Weibo, we reveal how people emotionally respond to urban nature and how different parks contribute to diverse emotional well-being benefits.🌿 doi.org/10.34133/ehs...

Multimodal Social Media Analysis Reveals Emotional Diversity in Urban Green Spaces | Ecosystem Health and Sustainability

Urban green spaces (UGSs) are essential for human health and well-being. Data limitations in rapidly growing megacities such as China prevent assessing the mental benefits that nature can have on peop...

doi.org

Happy Biodiversity Day!🌎

UN Environment Programme@unep.org · 3mo ago

Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth—from plants & animals to tiny microorganisms—that keeps our ecosystems healthy and resilient. Yet habitat loss, pollution, & climate change are pushing nature to the brink. This #BiodiversityDay, find out how to take action: www.cbd.int/biodiversity...

Enjoyed this camera trap video, with one small step in the fight against habitat fragmentation 🦧

The Associated Press@apnews.com · 3mo ago

Conservations say a Sumatran orangutan has been filmed for the first time using a human-made canopy bridge to cross a public road on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Brilliant work from our Data Science MSc students today! New dashboard tracking online interest in species worldwide 📊🦎🌿 Discovering which species people search for—and what that tells us about conservation priorities. Stay tuned! #DataScience #BiodiversityConservation

🚨🚨New research alert: Spotted hyaena distribution in Kenya is shaped not just by prey or livestock, but by humans’ propensity to kill them. Understanding human behavior is key to carnivore #conservation. 🌍🍪 Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @helsinki.fi

The human propensity to kill carnivores is associated with the distribution of spotted hyaenas

Large carnivores are declining globally, making it crucial to understand the factors associated with their distribution for effective conservation. Mu…

sciencedirect.com

Online now: Toward a more effective ecological security pattern: why explicit integration of disservices and trade-offs matters

Toward a more effective ecological security pattern: why explicit integration of disservices and trade-offs matters

Faced with global biodiversity and ecosystem service losses, international frameworks—including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—set ambitious targets to safeguard and restore ecosystem integrity, connectivity, and resilience. Given limited financial resources, strategic cost-effective spatial planning is essential to maximise socio-environmental benefits while minimising unintended risks [1]. Peng et al. [2] reviewed ecological security pattern (ESP)—an emerging framework for landscape conservation and sustainability planning—and argued that ESP offers an actionable approach to strengthening ecological security by enhancing connectivity, biodiversity, and ecosystem services in real-world landscapes.

dlvr.it

Conservation planning experts in training ✨ The annual Spatial conservation planning course at #HelsinkiUni is well underway, led by HELICS members. Today is our second practical session on using the cutting-edge Zonation 5 conservation prioritization software. Exciting stuff! 🖥️🌍🌿

Great catch-up and celebrations for a new paper out! At today’s HELICS meeting, we had our regular catch-up, shared recent research progress, and celebrated Federico’s new paper out with oat cookies, macarons and bubbles. Cheers! 🍻

What causes biodiversity loss? Land- and sea-use change, overexploitation, invasive species, climate change, and pollution are the direct drivers pushing species towards extinction - but what are the indirect drivers behind them? 📉 (1/2)

Destroying wild ecosystems like these doesn't just reduce biodiversity but has repercussions for local communities losing ecosystem services as well as contributing to the climate disaster by eliminating these valuable carbon sinks. At HELICS we're examining the drivers behind trends like this.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences@pnas.org · 5mo ago

Deforestation gets all the attention, but wetlands and grasslands like Brazil’s Cerrado are being converted to agriculture at four times the rate of forests worldwide. Half of the converted land becomes pasture and 27% becomes food crops. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/WFwL50YmuQh

Focusing on the tawny coster 🦋 we show the power of social media data to help tracking species redistribution under anthropogenic climate change 🌳🌲🦔🦇🦅🦉🦎🐸🐝🐜🐠🐙 #SOTM 🧪🌐🌍🌏 doi.org/10.1111/cobi...

Harnessing social media data to track species range shifts

Biodiversity monitoring programs and citizen science data remain heavily biased toward the Global North. Especially in megadiverse countries with limited biodiversity records, incorporating social me...

doi.org

Happy #WorldWildlifeDay! Let's keep doing the work to bring more and more wild populations towards recovery.

UN Environment Programme@unep.org · 5mo ago

One million of the world’s estimated 8 million species are threatened with extinction. But hope is not lost. #GenerationRestoration is reviving habitats bringing back homes for threatened species. This #WorldWildlifeDay, discover six species making a comeback: www.unep.org/news-and-sto...

It’s the Saimaa ringed seal! 🦭 1️⃣ Population: <200 in Finland 2️⃣ Tracks: Oversized paw prints in snow 3️⃣ Habitat: Only in Lake Saimaa Want to know more?❄️ Take a look at: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... #SaimaaSeal #WildlifeConservation

Guess the endangered species 🌊 1️⃣ Fewer than 200 of us live in Finland 2️⃣ We leave oversized tracks in fresh snow 3️⃣ Our home is a freshwater lake in Saimaa Did you guess? 🤔 #EndangeredSpecies #Conservation

An exciting story in island conservation today; wishing these tortoises the best!

The Associated Press@apnews.com · 6mo ago

Giant tortoises have returned to Floreana Island in Ecuador's Galapagos archipelago as conservationists release 158 juvenile hybrids to restore the ecosystem.

Fuel for ideas and a taste of tradition 🍰 At today’s HELICS meeting, as we discussed upcoming teaching courses, we enjoyed a laskiaispulla a cardamom bun with cream, traditional for Laskiainen. Almond paste or jam, which do you prefer? #HELICS #Laskiainen #Finland @helsinki.fi

Great exchanges on network science & biodiversity complexity for Federico Grossi with Anne-Sophie Crépin and @daniel-iavor.bsky.social at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. Sharp feedback & perfect weather for a face-to-face encounter with Stockholm's nature (frozen lake dip included)!

No single method captures all impacts to biodiversity. 🌵🦏🪸 Same for conservation science: interdisciplinary, scale-dependent. Governance needs multi-method approaches—integrating ecological & socio-economic perspectives. Conservation challenges are systemic. Our methods must be as well.

IPBES@ipbes.net · 6mo ago

No single method fits all. 🧩 Table SPM.3 shows how tools, from site-based observations to economic models, fit specific needs. Whether screening priorities or tracking progress, the right approach is vital for accurate reporting. Explore the IPBES #BizBiodiversity SPM: https://bit.ly/IPBES12Media

Abigail Parker & Fedor Zolotarev presented two #BIOBANG posters at #SBDIDays in Stockholm. Tough crowd when you're competing with a life-size moose for attention, but the poster session brought great conversations! #BiodiversityInformatics #ComputerVision #AIforEcology

Check out this blog post by our postdoc Miquel Torrents-Ticó on a recent paper he-authored. This excellent, nuanced work relates people's perceptions of climate change impacts to their well-being. miqueltorrentstico.wordpress.com/2026/01/14/h...

How Lived Climate Change Shapes Well-Being: Insights from 14 Nature-Dependent Communities

Climate change is more than shifting temperatures and rainfall, it is something people experience in their daily lives. A new study by Reyes-García et al. (2025), published in People and Nature, sh…

miqueltorrentstico.wordpress.com

We're kicking off posting here to share our work on conservation science! We work especially with digital data to understand biodiversity loss, illegal wildlife trade, and human-nature interactions. Follow along for updates on the work of our interdisciplinary team here at @helsinki.fi