Carotenoid-based plumage ornaments in birds have long been acknowledged to yield honest signal of individual quality and play a role in intra- and inter-sexual interactions. However, much less scientific attention has been devoted to the role and evolution of non-plumage (bare-part) avian ornamentation. Here, we aimed to investigate processes that shaped the evolution of carotenoid-based ornamentation of bare parts (bill and legs) in Charadrii and Scolopaci shorebirds. Our phylogenetically-informed comparative analysis across all extant shorebirds revealed that both natural and sexual selection contributed to the evolution of carotenoid-based bare-part ornamentation. We found evolutionary associations between carotenoid pigmentation and habitat variation, climate, and body size, advocating for the importance of ecological, environment, and life history traits. Sexual selection (mating system bias and sexual size dimorphism) was also identified as an important driver in the evolution of carotenoid-based ornamentation. Underrepresentation of combinations of carotenoid- and melanin-based ornaments suggested overlapping functions of ornamental traits with different developmental origin or excessive costs associated with their simultaneous expression. Our study adds to the understanding of the complex and multi-faceted processes responsible for the evolution of remarkably diverse avian ornamentation.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the decolonisation of European empires influenced the origins and spread of environmentalism throughout the world in the 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates how many of the social movements and institutions associated with decolonistion – such as civil rights activism, the criticism of imperialism, and the growth of international nongovernmental and intergovernmental organisations – inspired and shaped environmentalism globally. The rich historical connections between decolonisation and environmentalism have been obscured because histories of American environmentalism, which predominantly shaped global histories of environmentalism, favoured ‘bottom-up’ grassroots activist viewpoints and downplayed both global influences and ‘top-down’ institutional variants of environmentalism. Adding decolonisation to the history of environmentalism, this article concludes, allows historians to integrate bottom-up social activism and top-down institutional dynamics in different parts of the world within their proper global context.

Harvesting naturally dynamic forests causes losses of habitat quality and functional connectivity. Focusing on Sweden as a case study of high-yield rotation forestry, we provide analyses supporting spatial prioritisation of protection, management and restoration of representative functional forest habitat networks. Habitat suitability index modelling of focal birdspecies was used to analyse how forest naturalness, habitat patch size and functional connectivity affect representative forest habitat networks in Sweden's five ecoregions. Habitat modelling for the least demanding bird species showed that of the mountain ecoregion 57-77% was functional, but in the other three boreal ecoregions only 8-9% were functional. For nemoral forests, the proportions of functional habitat networks were < 3%. More demanding species have even less functional habitat. We highlight the importance of the mountain ecoregion for forest biodiversity conservation, and the urgent need for landscape planning of protection, conservation management and nature restoration in Sweden.

The field of environmental history in India emerged as a response to movements against forest policies and large dams in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, anti-caste scholars and activists soon critiqued early environmental histories that portrayed colonialism as a watershed in the ecological history of South Asia without accounting for the violence of environmental exclusions along lines of caste. This review article surveys works in environmental history and engages interventions from Dalit studies to evaluate the role of caste in the colonial transformation of entangled subcontinental landscapes of forests and fields. Brahmanical and colonial demarcations of forests and fields simultaneously hinged upon oppressed caste labour while eliding Dalit and Adivasi claims to land. Taking landscape to encompass contingent webs of socio-ecological relations and contested spatial imaginaries, this article argues that the reproduction of landscapes of caste exclusion entailed material struggles over nature and the naturalisation of exclusionary landscapes. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Work history artifacts (Part 2): A private villa in Großhansdorf Numerous museums provide extensive insight into the history of work environment and occupational safety and health. Sometimes, however, historical work equipment can still be found at its original place. There, it usually remains hidden from visitors, even in popular tourist destinations. Three such very different “hidden places” will be presented in a series in the next issues of the ASU: The Königspesel on Hallig Hooge, a private villa in Großhansdorf and Cologne Cathedral.

ABSTRACT Megafauna in South America became extinct by the end of the Late Pleistocene and the relative role of human influence, climate, and other indirect factors in driving these population declines is still a matter of debate. The Campo Laborde archeological site (Pampas, Argentina) offers an exceptional opportunity to understand the complex interactions between climate, ecosystems, and human populations during that time. This study integrates biological proxies (pollen, diatoms, chrysophytes, silicophytoliths) within a stratigraphic framework (sedimentological and geochemical analyses) to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental conditions that prevailed before, during, and after the megamammal hunting and processing event. The results indicate a gradual environmental shift from a stable aquatic environment characterised by greater water availability to a more unstable, shallow and periodically desiccated aquatic environment. Particularly, during the human occupation of the site (∼12,600 cal years BP), the shallow and flooded areas acted as attractive zones due to the availability of vital resources such as water, vegetation, and fauna. This environmental evolution was primarily driven by local factors (e.g. topographic setting and hydrological dynamics) and secondarily by regional processes (seasonal precipitation). These results emphasise the importance of paleoecological studies to reconstruct detailed environmental histories at both local and regional scales.

Galaxy properties, such as stellar mass and star formation rate, correlate with their position within the cosmic web. Although galaxy properties can be correlated with a specific environment at a certain cosmic epoch, they may have experienced different environments at previous times. This `environmental history', which is closely linked to pre-processing, is bound to leave an imprint on the observable and physical properties of galaxies. In this work, we use the Galaxy Evolution and Assembly (GAEA) semi-analytic model and the magneto-hydrodynamic IllustrisTNG simulation to reconstruct the environmental histories of galaxies that today reside in filaments between z=0 and z=4. Our goal is to understand how galaxy properties are related to their past environments and to uncover the role of the cosmic web in shaping their present-day properties. This approach enables us to determine whether and when filamentary structures influence galaxy evolution. We find that filament galaxies at z=0 are a heterogeneous mix of populations with distinct environmental histories, and a clear dependency on the infall times into filaments. The vast majority of filament galaxies at z=0 have experienced group processing at some stage of their evolution, with only ∼20% of galaxies remaining centrals throughout their life. For low-mass filament galaxies (̊m 9 &lt; (M_ 10 star /M_ sun ) &lt; 10), both GAEA and TNG100 confirm that environmental effects are primarily driven by group processing: Satellite galaxies in this mass range stop growing stellar mass and exhibit elevated quenched fractions, whereas their central counterparts in filaments have properties that are similar to those of field galaxies. In contrast, massive galaxies (̊m (M_ 10 star /M_ sun ) &gt; 10) are affected by the filament environment, regardless of being centrals or satellites. Massive galaxies that have never been satellites and that entered filaments more than 9 Gyr ago show accelerated stellar mass assembly and higher quenched fractions relative to the field, due to a higher frequency of merger events inside filaments. Moreover, the most massive ̊m łog ((M_ star / M_ sun ) &gt; 11) galaxies typically accreted onto filaments over 9 Gyr ago and have never become satellites within a larger halo, highlighting the role of filaments in building up the high-mass end of the galaxy population.

Objective: Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a prevalent chronic skin disorder that manifests in early childhood. It is characterised by a heterogeneous clinical presentation and a multifactorial etiology. Early-onset and severe AD have been closely linked to loss-of-function mutations in the FLG gene, which codes for the epidermal barrier protein filaggrin. The therapeutic ramifications of these results are not yet fully understood, yet a significant proportion of individuals continue to be wild-type or to carry rare variations of undetermined significance (VUS). In addition to examining the distribution and phenotypic impact of FLG mutations, including both likely pathogenic and unclear alterations, the present study sought to assess the clinical characteristics of paediatric AD.Methods: The evaluation of 67 children (aged 0–5) with clinically confirmed AD was conducted using laboratory data, environmental history, and SCORAD severity levels. Utilising a targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS) technique, the FLG gene was comprehensively sequenced.Results: Amongst the sample of 28 patients (41.8%) who exhibited FLG variations, 10 cases were found to contain mutations with the potential to be deleterious, while 18 cases revealed Variants of Uncertain Significance (VUS). Elevated levels of immunoglobulin E (IgE) and moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis (AD) were more frequently associated with likely pathogenic allergen carriers. While wild-type patients also exhibited severe cases, individuals with VUS carriers demonstrated a range of phenotypes, thereby emphasising the significance of non-genetic variables.Conclusion: This study suggests that certain VUS may possess developing clinical significance and reinforces the role of FLG mutations in paediatric AD. A combined clinical and molecular evaluation may enhance illness stratification and facilitate the development of individualised treatment plans.

The article presents an attempt to systematize the modern and postmodern theoretical approaches to the geographical aspects of the Russian historical process. Immensity and complexity of the problem are emphasized. Understanding of the subject under study is provided through the analysis of “space” in the natural and social sciences, especially in the theory and philosophy of history. All the approaches to comprehending the influence of nature on the Russian territory development are grouped into six lines: namely, empirical (expansion and understanding of information about the country); historical geography; colonization theory and its variations; co-evolution theory, noosphere doctrine, environmental history; anthropogeography, cultural geography; political geography, geopolitics. Their genesis and continuity are revealed. It is concluded that Russian space was understood in three intersecting continuums: physical-geographical, (geo)political, and socio-cultural. Internal and external levels of space conceptualization are distinguished. The first group includes approaches reflecting the settlement and development of Eurasian North-East and territorial organization; the second one – the ideas about the international status of the country. State-forming role of space in Russian history is emphasized. Forecast for further development of the problem is given.

This study examined the effects of environmental conditions, behavioral history, management practices, and personality traits on the operational performance of search and rescue (SAR) dogs and dogs admitted to SAR certification testing. Thirty-two handlers completed a questionnaire collecting demographic data, as well as information on their dogs' behavioral history, management practices, and personality descriptors. Each dog-handler unit also undertook a search trial consisting of locating a hidden person in a wooded area, which was evaluated both by professional instructors and the handlers through ratings of critical behavioral indicators. Objective measurements were obtained through a weather station and GPS devices. Handlers described their dogs mainly in terms of work-relevant traits, such as socio-cognitive engagement, assertiveness, and arousal. The performance evaluation form was practical and efficient, though the Distraction parameter may require refinement, and handler ratings suggested a self-reporting bias. Temperature and wind speed were negatively associated with performance, whereas higher humidity was positively associated with it. Performance was also associated with litter size, age at adoption, dog experience, and management-related factors. Finally, speed, ground coverage, and a canine profile characterized by high arousal and reactivity were strong determinants of good search performance (|ρ| ≥ 0.3; p < 0.05). Although these findings require confirmation in larger samples, search performance appears to be a multifactorial construct shaped by the interplay of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Defining the contribution of each factor could help optimize performance and dogs' welfare.

This study presents a rigorous bibliometric and methodological investigation into the evolving landscape of environmental history research from 1968 through 2025. Using a multi-stage filtration of 6557 Scopus-indexed records, the dataset was refined to 2286 peer-reviewed research articles that reflect the field’s interdisciplinarity across environmental science, the humanities, and the social sciences. Bibliometric mapping, using advanced tools such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and the bibliometrix package in R, reveals patterns in scholarly production, international collaboration, and thematic diversification. The field exhibits robust annual growth (7.66%), sustained citation impact (average 21.44 citations per document), and a predominance of Anglophone scholarship alongside significant contributions in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Russian. Cluster and trend analyses uncover distinct intellectual subfields – from paleoenvironmental reconstructions and historical ecology to emergent posthumanist and socio-political critiques – while thematic evolution highlights transitions from foundational environmental historiography to specialized, methodologically pluralistic, and globally resonant concerns, including climate change, biodiversity, and environmental humanities. Citation analysis identifies seminal works that shape the field’s theoretical and methodological contours, underscoring its critical engagement with ecological temporality, agency, and global socio-environmental transformations. This study advances an empirically grounded, computationally robust framework for understanding the disciplinary maturation and transnational scope of environmental history, emphasizing its pivotal role in addressing contemporary environmental challenges through historically informed interdisciplinary inquiry.

This article analyzes Saudi Arabia's regreening efforts through Neom, a conglomeration of urban development currently being built in the northwestern corner of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As one of several subsidiary organizations under Neom, Neom Nature aims to regreen and rewild an area roughly the size of Belgium. The project will serve as both a recreational space for Neom's estimated population of several millions and part of a wider regreening strategy under the Saudi Green Initiative launched by in 2021, comprising environmental protection, energy transition and sustainability programs. Drawing on publicly available plans and public relations material from Neom Nature, as well as interviews with members, this article analyzes the sociotechnical imaginaries of man, nature, climate change and technology that underpin the project. In the context of Saudi reforms, climate change, and green technological transformation globally, the article's inquiry is twofold. First, it investigates how Saudi public/private environmental institutions interpret environmental history; and second, what role the past plays for their imaginaries of the environmental future in Saudi Arabia and globally.

Understanding the Holocene environmental history of desert landscapes in northern China contributes to elucidating the mechanisms driving desertification in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Based on a systematic and comparative analysis on integrated paleoclimatic data from both China and the international community, this paper reviews the environmental evolution history of the Alashan Plateau since the Holocene, drawing upon sedimentary and proxy records from three major sandy deserts on the plateau—the Badanjilin, Tenggeli, Wulanbuhe Deserts. The results indicate that the Alashan Plateau experienced generally humid conditions during the early and middle Holocene, characterized by the development of high-level lakes; in contrast, the late Holocene was marked by aridity and intensified aeolian activity. For the three deserts on the plateau, the environmental evolution of the Tenggeli Desert during the early Holocene diverges from that of the other two. Meanwhile, the mid-Holocene drought event in the Badanjilin Deserts remains debated, centering on whether its spatial scale was local or regional across the plateau. The driving mechanism of environmental evolution in the study area can be fundamentally understood through the atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems, combined with solar insolation in the middle latitudes of NH. This interplay is comprehensively reflected by the interactions between the westerlies and the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) across different periods. Responses of the Alashan Plateau’s climate to global change involve the combined effects of multiple factors, including the Westerlies, the EASM, the Atlantic-Pacific-Ocean (APO) circulation anomalies, the ‘third polar’ environmental effect of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, and the hydrological influence of the Yellow River, etc. The Holocene environmental evolution history of the study area was primarily shaped by climate patterns characterized by cold-dry and cold–wet (or temperate-moist) regimes. Understanding these patterns may provide insights for forecasting future climate trends in the Alashan Plateau under current global warming.

The sanitation infrastructure that was introduced in South Asia during the British colonial era was often viewed as an intervention in the sphere of public health to control epidemics and enhance urban hygiene. But, in addition to its professional and medical purposes, sanitation was also a tool with the help of which colonial governments could control the population of cities and restructure the social space. This paper discusses the role of colonial drainage and sewerage systems in Lahore as the tools of control and management between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The research uses the municipal documents, colonial administrative reports, urban planning documents, and historical maps to explore the ways in which the sanitation reforms reconfigured the space and strengthened the social hierarchies that existed in the colonial city. The discussion shows that the policies of sanitation were well connected to the colonial city control policies. The drainage systems, inspection systems, and sanitation laws provided colonial administrators with the ability to patrol the neighborhoods, provide hygiene standards, and categorize urban areas based on cleanliness. Such categories often overlapped with the socio-economic and professional boundaries, so the distribution of the sanitation facilities in Lahore was uneven. Elite local neighborhoods and residential zones in Europe were given a higher priority in terms of drainage systems and waste management systems, and the crowded native quarters and working areas were not uncommon in terms of being under increased surveillance and management control. In turn, the reforms in sanitation not only have a positive effect on the social health issues but also led to the spatial isolation and governmental control of the colonial urban populations. This analysis allows the development of a concept of sanitation as a variety of surveillance, which is why it contributes to a body of literature on colonial urban governance and environmental history. It emphasizes the role of infrastructural systems in the formation of the patterns of power, social differentiation, and urban control in colonial Punjab, which provides new perspectives on the political aspects of sanitation and public health policy in South Asian colonial cities.

Nonlinear dynamics readily occur in natural ecosystems and can drive irregular population fluctuations through oscillations, chaos and alternative stable states. However, the effects of anthropogenic changes, such as to demography and the climate, on nonlinearity of population fluctuations are unknown. We evaluated the extent and magnitude of nonlinearity and its environmental and life history correlates in 243 recruitment and 266 spawner time series of 143 marine fish species, worldwide. Here we show that temperature variation amplifies nonlinearity in recruitment and spawner biomass, while life history mediates the degree of nonlinearity for the latter, dampening it in slow-lived species. Nonlinearity was shown by 81% of populations and correlated with the magnitude of fluctuations. These nonlinear dynamics were low dimensional and causally forced by temperature in 69% of populations with the probability of forcing increasing for recruits in variable-temperature environments and fast-lived spawners. Our results challenge assumptions of stable dynamics and sustainable yield common to fisheries management, and suggest that nonlinear fluctuations of fish populations are magnified by size-selective fisheries and environmental variability from global climate change.

ABSTRACT The paper offers the first regular exploration of Poland’s State Agricultural Farms (pol. Państwowe Gospodarstwo Rolne, hereafter PGR) within critical heritage studies. Despite a growing interest in socialist heritage, current heritagization efforts prioritise artistic values and elite narratives, leaving rural and agricultural landscapes, such as PGRs, marginalised. By presenting an attempt at typology of contemporary PGRs – museum-adapted, repurposed and ruined – the paper introduces the concept of fallowed heritage – disturbing, unwanted and neglected within official heritage discourses, largely due to its associations with agriculture under the Soviet rule in East-Central Europe. This study combines critical heritage studies and critical animal studies to investigate PGRs not only as politicised material remnants but also as sites of multispecies entanglements involving human and non-human actors under Soviet-style agricultural production. Drawing from fieldwork, archival research and interviews, the study contextualises PGRs within Poland’s socio-economic transformation after 1989 and examines their erasure from memory, despite their rich potential to shed light on the complex history in the region. By tracing their transformation from collectivised agricultural estates to symbols of ineffectiveness and decay, this paper underscores the significance of PGRs as a critical, though neglected, element of East-Central European heritage landscape and calls for their re-examination within broader frameworks of social, cultural and environmental history.

ABSTRACT The way we narrate our industrial heritage and make its energy reliance visible or invisible matters. In this article, we examine how history of technology museums cultivate narratives of progress and what that might mean for rethinking cultural heritage. We ask what it would mean to expose the fossil fuels that power the engines of industrialisation and the environmental damage those fuels have wrought as part of our industrialisation cultural legacy. Using displays of the Industrial Revolution in the National Science Museum, Daejeon, South Korea, and the German Museum of Technology, Berlin, Germany, we demonstrate that the technological narrative of progress covers up the environmental cost of modern dependence on fossil fuels. These technological progress narratives are built on unseen carbon cultures, i.e. the cultural, social, economic and political systems of modern societies which have become dependent upon and imagined through fossil fuels in all aspects of society. We offer three alternative possibilities for the narration of these industrial revolution histories to incorporate environmental history: setting industrial revolution objects into an Anthropocene or climate change frame instead of an industrialisation narrative; reinterpreting objects as material legacies of carbon cultures; and making visible the power behind industrialisation.

Abstract Understanding the molecular mechanisms governing the crystallization of hydrated minerals is critical for advancing both fundamental crystallization theory and applications in geochemistry, materials science, and planetary research. Here, we present a multi-technique investigation that reveals unprecedented insights into the crystallization pathways of magnesium sulfate hydrates. We identify a previously unrecognized bond length inversion phenomenon that fundamentally challenges conventional crystallization models by integrating time-resolved Raman spectroscopy, X-ray pair distribution function (PDF) analysis, and density functional theory calculations. Contrary to common assumptions, we demonstrate that S-O bonds in magnesium sulfate are shorter in the liquid phase (1.43-1.44 Å) compared to crystalline phases (1.47 Å), indicating that crystal packing forces extend bond lengths beyond their solution-phase preferences. The systematic splitting of the SO4 ν1 symmetric stretch vibration into distinct components (ν1h and ν1w) correlates directly with measured S-O bond length distributions, providing spectroscopic fingerprints of the local coordination environments that evolve during crystallization. Our data reveal that crystallization proceeds through the progressive organization of hydrated clusters containing Mg(H2O)6 octahedra surrounded by SO4 tetrahedra, with water activity controlling the sequential formation of increasingly dehydrated phases. Significantly, we observe structural reorganization during crystal maturation, evidenced by an inversion point where bond length relationships between dissolved and crystalline species reverse after approximately 350 minutes. These findings provide experimental evidence supporting non-classical nucleation theories, including two-step nucleation and pre-nucleation cluster pathways, while offering molecular-level explanations for Ostwald’s rule of stages. Beyond advancing crystallization science, our results have important implications for interpreting the environmental history of magnesium sulfate deposits on Earth and Mars, and for developing strategies to control crystallization pathways in materials synthesis and processing in ancient and modern lacustrine environments.

Same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB) is widespread across animal species; however, its evolutionary origins and ecological underpinnings remain poorly understood. In social animals, SSB is probably shaped by both genetic and environmental factors. For instance, a recent study in rhesus macaques indicates that while SSB is partially heritable and genetically based, it is also strongly influenced by environmental and social conditions. Here we compiled species-level data on 491 non-human primate species, documenting SSB occurrence and prevalence in 59 species, and examined its associations with 15 environmental, life history and social traits using phylogenetic regression and structural equation modelling. SSB occurrence was more likely in species inhabiting drier environments with increased food scarcity and predation pressure, in species with greater size dimorphism and longer lifespans and in those with more complex social structures and hierarchies. Structural equation modelling further indicated that environmental and life history traits influence SSB mainly indirectly, whereas social complexity directly promotes its occurrence. Together, these findings highlight SSB as a context-dependent behaviour shaped by interactions among ecological, life history and social factors, offering insights into the sexual diversity and social evolution of primates.

The 2025 Bristol-Bern Prize in Public Environmental History