Changes in the timings of seasonality as a result of anthropogenic climate change are predicted to occur over the coming decades. While this is expected to have widespread impacts on the dynamics of infectious disease through environmental forcing, empirical data are lacking. Here, we investigated whether seasonality, specifically the timing of spring ice-thaw, affected susceptibility to infection by the emerging pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) across a montane community of amphibians that are suffering declines and extirpations as a consequence of this infection.

Wildfire has been an important process affecting the Earth's surface and atmosphere for over 350 million years and human societies have coexisted with fire since their emergence. Yet many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses. However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.

Living with fire is a challenge for human communities because they are influenced by socio-economic, political, ecological and climatic processes at various spatial and temporal scales. Over the course of 2 days, the authors discussed how communities could live with fire challenges at local, national and transnational scales. Exploiting our diverse, international and interdisciplinary expertise, we outline generalizable properties of fire-adaptive communities in varied settings where cultural knowledge of fire is rich and diverse.

Human impacts on fire regimes accumulated slowly with the evolution of modern humans able to ignite fires and manipulate landscapes. Today, myriad voices aim to influence fire in grassy ecosystems to different ends, and this is complicated by a colonial past focused on suppressing fire and preventing human ignitions.

The frequency of cancer is postulated to be proportional to the number of cells an animal possesses, as each cell is similarly exposed to mutagens with every cell division. Larger animals result from more cell divisions with more mutagenic exposure, and hence are expected to have higher frequencies of cancer. Yet, as stipulated by Peto's paradox, larger animals do not have the higher rates of cancers seen in smaller animals despite the significant differences in cell numbers and a longer lifetime that would expose larger animals to more mutagens.

An evolutionary perspective can help unify disparate observations and make testable predictions. We consider an evolutionary model in relation to two mechanistic frameworks of cancer biology: multistage carcinogenesis and the hallmarks of cancer. The multistage model predicts that cancer risk increases with body size and longevity; however, this is not observed across species (Peto's paradox), but the paradox is resolved by invoking the evolution of additional genetic mechanisms to suppress cancer in large, long-lived species.

The livestock sector globally is highly dynamic. In developing countries, it is evolving in response to rapidly increasing demand for livestock products. In developed countries, demand for livestock products is stagnating, while many production systems are increasing their efficiency and environmental sustainability.

The introduction of payments for environmental services (PES) offers an opportunity for traditional and indigenous populations to be compensated for contributing to carbon sequestration in meeting the challenge of ameliorating global warming. As one mechanism among several for promoting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, pro-poor PES initiatives could eventually be incorporated into an international post-Koyoto framework to encourage reduced emissions from deforestation.

Some coupled land

Protected area systems and conservation corridors can help mitigate the impacts of climate change on Amazonian biodiversity. We propose conservation design criteria that will help species survive in situ or adjust range distributions in response to increased drought. The first priority is to protect the western Amazon, identified as the