May was a significant month in terms of biodiversity. The 20th of May is World Bee Day, the 22nd is International Day of Biological Diversity, and the 23rd is World Turtle Day. Today, we are continuing our #ExploreSDGs campaign with Sustainable Development Goal 15 to celebrate biodiversity and raise awareness about the importance of protecting all forms of life for a more sustainable future.

SDG15 aims to protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

Join our #ExploreSDGs social media campaign and let’s start learning about the importance of SDG15-related research and how it can help us achieve this goal by 2030.

Sustainable forest management and combating desertification

Pensoft Biodiversity is one of the most comprehensive collections on ScienceOpen covering SDG15-related topics, and it will accompany us on today’s blog post, with many titles covering topics under each SDG15 target. With an impressive number of 17,459 publications, Pensoft Biodiversity presents a collection that puts together the content of more than 20 biodiversity journals of Pensoft.

Many publications highlight the importance of the sustainable management of resources. Regarding Sustainable Forest Management and combating desertification, we recommend:

• Different forest cover and its impact on eco-hydrological traits, invertebrate fauna and biodiversity of spring habitats
• What is biological cultural heritage and why should we care about it? An example from Swedish rural landscapes and forests
• Landscape-level Biodiversity Assessment in Plantation Forests of Northern Portugal with the Fuzzy-logic Approach
• Relationship between anuran larvae occurrence and aquatic environment in septentrional east Palearctic landscapes
• ‘Back to the Future’—Oak wood-pasture for wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean
• Invasive alien plant species in unmanaged forest reserves, Austria

The Liverpool University Press Planning and Development is an interdisciplinary platform for the critical study of development-related practices, planning, and policy in the global South, including topics such as the negative impact of development on forests and threats to biodiversity.

• Corruption and illegal logging in Ghana
• Urban green spaces in growing oil cities: the case of Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis, Ghana
• The vacillating evolution of forestry policy in Nepal: Historically manipulated, internally mismanaged
• Delivering ecosystems services via spatial planning: reviewing the possibilities and implications of a green infrastructure approach

Forests provide employment, forest products, and contributions to livelihoods and income for 1.3 billion people – one-fifth of the global population.

World Bank

Researcher collections

Climate Change: Open Access, Coleoptera, and Hymenoptera are three researcher collections where you can gain access to many research titles from various publishers that cover specific aspects of sustainable forest management and desertification.

Below are some highlighted publications:

• Unravelling the gut bacteriome of Ips (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae): identifying core bacterial assemblage and their ecological relevance
• Non-Host Volatile Blend Optimization for Forest Protection against the European Spruce Bark Beetle, Ips typographus
• Bark Beetles (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytidae) Associated with Pinus brutia and Cupressus sempervirens in Northern Cyprus
• Extreme species density of bees (Apiformes, Hymenoptera) in the warm deserts of North America
• The economic value of tropical forests in meeting global climate stabilization goals

Sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems

Soil is a limited natural resource. According to the UN, agricultural land is being lost at a rate of 230,000 meters squared per minute, affecting 74 percent of the world’s poorest. Our users can choose from a wide range of publications on the subject on our collection by Pensoft Biodiversity.

Highlighted articles:

• Global guidelines for the sustainable use of non-native trees to prevent tree invasions and mitigate their negative impacts
• The Shenzhen Declaration on Plant Sciences – Uniting plant sciences and society to build a green, sustainable Earth
• What are the economic costs of biological invasions? A complex topic requiring international and interdisciplinary expertise
• Mapping Control of Erosion Rates: Comparing Model and Monitoring Data for Croplands in Northern Germany

ScienceOpen’s multidimensional search tools can help you narrow your search by filtering between records and export search results in EndNote, BibTex, and Reference Manager (RIS) formats for easy integration with any reference management systems. You can also save your search to find the most recent articles in your field with a single click, or bookmark articles you want to read later.

The Journal of Southern Agriculture is a comprehensive academic periodical dealing with agricultural science and technology, with a focus on crop genetics and breeding, germplasm, resources, biotechnology, farming, physiology and biochemistry, plant protection, soil & fertilizer, agroecology environment, and so on.  Some publications covering research on sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems include:

• Control efficacy of several fungicides on pepper phytophthora blight and effects on rhizosphere microorganism
• Effects of reduced fertilizer combined with carbon–based organic fertilizer on growth of cut rose and soil properties in greenhouse
• Effects of straw mulching on the change of soil moisture in sugarcane field of Guangxi

The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) is a collection dedicated to the global framework for monitoring and documenting the status of ecosystems, developed as part of the growing toolkit for biodiversity risk assessment. This collection provides access to numerous publications on the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems.

• Establishing IUCN Red List Criteria for Threatened Ecosystems
• Long-term loss in extent and current protection of terrestrial ecosystem diversity in the temperate and tropical Americas
• Myanmar’s terrestrial ecosystems: Status, threats and conservation opportunities

Halt land degradation and biodiversity loss

The Journal of Ecological Society offers important insights from research on biodiversity protection, as well as techniques and initiatives for reversing land degradation.

• Conservation of Coastal Biodiversity
• Restoration Templates for Sahyadri (Northern Western Ghats)
• Reverse Extraction – Resource Sharing; Participatory Planning in Kodagu, India
• Documentation of Riparian Biodiversity of an Urban River Stretch – A Citizen’s Initiative
• Unfolding the ’Raakhan Raan’ a Livelihood Based Conservation Tradition of Tribals around Kalsubai Harishchandragad Wildlife Sanctuary

A special mention goes to Jo Havemann’s Indigenous Knowledge Researcher Collection, which highlights articles covering and implementing indigenous knowledge regarding the protection of nature, biodiversity, and ecosystems.

• Understanding planetary health
• Indigenous knowledge and the shackles of wilderness
• Safeguarding marine life: conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems
• Indigenous knowledge and rangelands’ biodiversity conservation in Tanzania: success and failure

Other Highlighted Articles and Books on SDG15

Our #ExploreSDGs blog post would be incomplete without the most recent insights from UCL’s topical collection on SDG15, which lists all UCL contributed published content related to this Sustainable Development Goal. Explore the latest titles in the UCL collection and don’t forget to share and recommend with your peers.

Highlighted articles affiliated with University College London:

• Systematic review of situational prevention methods for crime against species
• Ecoacoustics as a novel tool for assessing pond restoration success: Results of a pilot study
• Extended Ecological Restoration of Bacterial Communities in the Godavari River During the COVID-19 Lockdown Period: a Spatiotemporal Meta-analysis
• Perennial crops can complement semi-natural habitats in enhancing ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) diversity in agricultural landscapes
• An Evaluation of the Factors Affecting ‘Poacher’ Detection with Drones and the Efficacy of Machine-Learning for Detection

Highlighted Books on SDG15

Are you looking for books on SDG15 topics? No problem at all. Here we’ve highlighted a couple of books by our main publishers:

• Wildlife Trafficking: the illicit trade in wildlife, animal parts, and derivatives – Carl Grossmann Books
• Scaling in Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation – Pensoft Biodiversity
• Environmental Movements of India: Chipko, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Navdanya – Amsterdam University Press Books
• Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe – Amsterdam University Press Books

Support SDGs on ScienceOpen!

With our #ExploreSDGs campaign, we will be promoting collections that we find relevant to the SDG of the week on a regular basis. Join our Twitter campaign and share your own ScienceOpen research using the hashtags #ExploreSDGs and #ScienceOpen.

Don’t forget to include the keyword SDG15 in any publications that are relevant to this topic, and get in touch with our team if you are interested in curating a topical collection around any of the SDGs as a researcher or publisher.