Philippa Kaur

On arriving at work one day last October, ecologist Koen de Koning did what he often does first thing in the morning: he fired up the Crane Radar. The interactive web application showed a flock of cranes heading his way. Excitedly, he dashed outside, looked up and, sure enough, 60 or so birds flew past on their migration route south.The Crane Radar is a digital twin — a virtual representation of a real-world entity and a relatively new technology in ecology (see go.nature.com/46rbkg4). “I’ve definitely seen more of the migration because of the radar. And I’m learning more about the migration patterns as well,” says De Koning, who works at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and is a keen birder.In fields such as manufacturing, infrastructure and health care, the technology has been used to model objects from electronics components to UK hospital wards and even the nation of Singapore.How a vast digital twin of the Yangtze River could prevent flooding in ChinaTheir purposes vary. Digital twins can make life easier for individual users — Google Maps, for example, is continuously updated to help drivers to navigate traffic. Other programs can predict the effects of climate change on cities, plan architecture or simulate surgical procedures. HeartNavigator, a software package from the Dutch health-technology firm Philips, can be used to plan heart operations such as valve replacements, simulating surgery using various models and sizes of valve to find the best fit for a patient.NASA used what is often considered the first digital twin (then called a living model) in 1970 to work out why an oxygen tank exploded on the Apollo 13 lunar mission and to bring the astronauts home safely. The agency’s principal technologist, John Vickers, coined the term digital twin in 2010, a few years after US systems engineer Michael Grieves formalized the concept in a presentation to the manufacturing industry when he was co-director of the Project Lifecycle Management Development Consortium at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.Over the past decade, there has been a marked increase in the development of digital twins across a range of fields. This is mostly because of the increasing availability of data, the prevalence of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing. The global digital-twin market is forecast to grow by more than sevenfold over the next 5 years, according to one report — from US$21 billion this year to $150 billion in 2030 (see go.nature.com/4nctfu2). The fastest growth is anticipated in health care, the report says, owing to the technology’s potential for reducing errors and improving diagnoses and surgical outcomes.For ecologists, digital twins present unique opportunities. But there are limitations that need to be addressed, from ensuring adequate data access to sustainable funding.Ecological digital twinsDigital twins can be particularly useful for studying systems that are changing outside historical norms, says Anna Davison, who is researching digital twins in ecology at Wageningen University & Research. That includes how ecosystems react to anthropogenic climate change. So it’s perhaps no surprise that ecologists are increasingly using digital twins to tackle gaps in biodiversity research brought about by ecosystem complexities, ponderous government action and a lack of real-time monitoring.Launched in 2022, the Crane Radar is one of four digital twins developed by Wageningen University & Research as part of a €300,000 (US$352,000) project funded by the European Union, called Nature FIRST. It forecasts the migration of common cranes (Grus grus) across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, northern France and northwestern Germany, helping birdwatchers and ecologists to locate the flocks as they traverse the region.De Koning says he chose crane migration as the focus of his first digital twin because of the abundance of data and because it is a relatively simple process to model. He also had a personal motivation: “I was always in the wrong location or at the wrong place at the time” to see the cranes, De Koning jokes. “This model really helped me, personally, to see them more often.”Sims-style ‘digital twin’ models can tell us if food systems will weather crisesTo build a digital twin, scientists first need to collect the relevant data for the real-world entity, whether that be real-time data from IoT devices or historical records. Then they must develop algorithms to mimic the behaviour of the physical twin and test the model — for example, by fitting historical data sets to recent ones — before applying the trained model to real-time data.Created over the course of about a year and costing roughly €15,000–20,000, the Crane Radar uses migration data (sourced from Movebank, an online animal-tracking database), real-time sightings by birdwatchers and factors such as wind speed and direction of flight to estimate where the birds will be within the next four hours (K. De Koning Ecol. Inform. 85, 102938; 2025).Wageningen researchers partnered with Sensing Clues, a conservation technology non-profit organization in Amsterdam, to transform their models into platforms that can be easily accessed and understood by end users — members of the public, policymakers and other researchers.Birdwatchers can also log sightings (including the location, time, direction of flight and number of cranes) through Observation.org, a citizen-science platform for biodiversity. The crane digital twin updates every minute; the website has a slight lag, updating every five minutes with a four-hour forecast for each sighting.The Crane Radar has been well received by Dutch birders. It receives an average of 100,000 daily visits during peak migration season in late October and early November, dipping down to 1,000 on quieter days. After it was featured by Dutch national news, however, more than 300,000 users engaged with the app each day over the subsequent weekend, De Koning says.“It’s a really nice, completely closed loop where the end user is also the data provider,” says Davison, who has developed a digital twin for the migration of Beluga sturgeon (Huso huso) in the Danube River delta.Modelling ecosystemsA more complex digital twin is being built to mirror ecosystems in Doñana National Park in southern Spain.“The park is a key essential biodiversity area in Europe – however, it is threatened by multiple human activities,” says Maria Paniw, a researcher at Doñana Biological Station in Seville. Threats include overexploitation of water, agricultural development outside the park, tourism and climate change. “We wanted to understand how all these different factors affect the ecosystem in a real-time complex setting, not through simple approximations based on single species that we typically do in ecology.”The first effort by Paniw’s team models interactions between vegetation, rabbits and the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), a ‘keystone species’ in the park. Its conservation status has recently improved — it moved from endangered to vulnerable status last year, thanks to efforts to boost its numbers, including protection of habitat and translocations of the animals to expand its genetic diversity.Researchers set up digital-twin experiments in Spain’s Doñana National Park.Credit: Hanna Serediuk/Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC)Alongside a detailed database of lynx reproduction statistics and movements (all reintroduced lynx have GPS tracking collars) and rabbit data from hunting organizations and other national parks, the researchers use a metric called the normalized difference vegetation index. This measures the verdancy of landscapes and is constantly updated using satellite imagery to assess changes in plant density and health. The aim is to show how rabbits respond to changes in vegetation and weather, and how lynx, in turn, respond to changes in rabbit abundance. The findings will inform where lynx can be best reintroduced into the environment and where they might move from those release sites.“We basically started with part of the system that has the most data and the most urgent need to get something done,” explains Paniw. She hopes that this approach will convince park managers of the usefulness of digital twins before they build more complex models. “They need to see value in this.”Other researchers have built digital twins of river systems across Europe, Africa and Asia. A digital twin of the River Stiffkey in southeastern England was built by regional water company Anglian Water and partners including Microsoft and the University of Suffolk, UK. The aim is to model strategies to improve the health and biodiversity of the chalk-stream habitat — a rare type that is threatened by warming water and pollution. Digital twins of the Yangtze River in China and parts of the River Douro in Portugal are also in development, along with three twins of rivers in Kenya.Rivers are “a rich environment for demonstrating the viability of these models,” explains computer scientist Lawrence Nderu, chair of the Department of Computing at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology near Nairobi. “They are very dynamic.”Nderu is developing a twin of the Mara River basin in Narok County, southwestern Kenya, as part of a collaboration between his university and the Slovenian space technology organization Space-SI in Ljubljana, which builds applications to acquire satellite data.The Narok area is hit with periodic severe flooding that can be life-threatening. Nderu’s team is designing its digital twin to alert communities and authorities to predicted flooding events, integrating data from weather stations, soil sensors and satellites, together with information about the river system and surrounding landscape. That should allow vulnerable populations to plan ahead, he says. Nomadic herders, for example, can move their cattle to higher ground.“Otherwise, we will always be talking about what should have been done, which is always a very costly conversation,” Nderu adds.Twin challengesThat reliance on up-to-the-minute data, however, reveals a key challenge for digital twins: having sensors in the field is one thing, but they need to be connected to the Internet for the data to be useful. Data quality can be an issue, too – De Koning says citizen observations of cranes, for example, often include inaccurate time stamps, locations or identification, which can muddle the resulting models.For Nderu, there is also the issue of data storage. His digital twins require volumes of data — including about 2.5 terabytes of compressed video files per year — that can be costly to store in the cloud in Kenya (he estimates about US$800 annually). “We are trying to approach [cloud] companies like AWS to provide us with that,” he says.De Koning says that because digital twins are so new, people are often unaware of their potential. Scientists need to first explain possible outcomes before users can express how a digital twin could be helpful to them.The Internet of Things comes to the labAlso a challenge, Paniw and Davison say, is sustainability — specifically, balancing the short-term nature of research funding with the length of time it takes to build a digital twin and the cost of maintaining it.

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Vast expanses of coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have died as a result of extremely high water temperatures.Credit: David Gray/AFP/Getty Surging temperatures worldwide have pushed coral reef ecosystems into a state of widespread decline, marking the first time the planet has reached a climate ‘tipping point’, researchers announced today.They also say that without rapid action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, other systems on Earth will also soon reach planetary tipping points, thresholds for profound changes that cannot be rolled back.“We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” says Steve Smith, a social scientist at the University of Exeter, UK, and a lead author on a report released today about how close Earth is to reaching roughly 20 planetary tipping points. “This is our new reality.”Temperature spikeLed by Smith and other scientists at the University of Exeter, the report assesses the risk of breaching tipping points such as ice-sheet collapse, rising seas and dieback of the Amazon rainforest. The report also discusses progress towards various positive tipping points focused on social and economic change, such as the adoption of clean energy.The group’s first such assessment, released less than two years ago, raised alarms but did not officially declare that any climate tipping points had been reached. In the past few years, however, global temperatures have surged, sparking concerns among some scientists that global warming is accelerating and could lead to even more widespread impacts in the coming decades than the changes that have already been recorded.Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is ‘transforming’ because of repeated coral bleachingThe impact on coral reefs in the past two years has been particularly severe, pushing these ecosystems to their tipping point, the researchers say.The warming waters have caused corals across the globe to bleach, a process that occurs when corals expel the symbiotic algae that provide them with nutrients, oxygen and vibrant colours. The fourth global bleaching event in the past few decades began in January 2023, and researchers estimate that it has affected more than 84% of the planet’s coral ecosystems .The initial tipping point report talked about large-scale threats to corals in the future tense, but the latest global bleaching event has made it clear that the crisis is now, says Michael Studivan, a coral ecologist at the University of Miami in Florida. “We are there,” Studivan says, suggesting that coral reefs are facing massive disturbances that are both more severe and more frequent. “The period of recovery typically happens in between disturbance events is not really happening anymore, and that’s kind of the big problem for corals.”

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A corroboree frog is tested for chytrid fungus. Introducing genetic changes to these frogs could help to make them more resistant to infections.Credit: James Cook UniversityThe global conservation community is debating whether to ban the release of genetically modified organisms into the wild. Dozens of non-governmental organizations have called for a moratorium on field applications of synthetic biology — a technology being studied as a tool to fight diseases, control pests and help endangered species — saying that the approach has unpredictable consequences. But some researchers argue that an outright ban is too restrictive, and could have negative consequences for human health and biodiversity.How genetically modified mosquitoes could eradicate malariaA proposal for a ban will face a vote next week at a congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Abu Dhabi. The IUCN brings together governments and civil society organizations to guide global conservation policy. Although decisions made by its members are not legally binding, they do influence legislation in many countries, says biologist Piero Genovesi, head of the Wildlife Service at the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research in Rome.If members vote in favour of the proposed ban, it “could have stronger impacts in areas like Europe or Australia, where there are many lines of research focused on developing new tools based on synthetic biology for improving the efficacy of conservation action”, Genovesi says. He is among more than 240 scientists who have so far signed an open letter asking IUCN members to reject the moratorium.Ongoing debateThis is not the first time conservationists have debated whether the genetic engineering of wild species should be allowed. A moratorium on gene drives, a way of introducing engineered genes so that they spread rapidly through a population, was proposed at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in 2016, and again in 2018 — but was ultimately rejected.Those in favour of the latest proposal argue that the effects of genetic biotechnologies on nature — and on insects in particular — are hard to predict and could be irreversible. “These new technologies risk adding to the pressures already threatening pollinators,” said Joann Sy, scientific adviser at POLLINIS, a non-profit organization based in Paris that is focused on the conservation of bees and other pollinators, in a statement released by the organization. More than 80 researchers have signed an open letter in support of the moratorium, which says that the deployment of genetically modified organisms is “advancing faster than safety and risk assessment can keep pace” and that “no release should occur unless and until it can be demonstrated that there are no direct or indirect risks to pollinators, biodiversity or ecosystems”.Genetically modified apple reaches US stores, but will consumers bite?

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Marine protected areas (MPAs) are key to conservation at sea, yet fishing is allowed in more than 90% of them. Defining the types of fishing that are compatible with conservation goals is urgent, given that the United Nations high seas treaty — a global accord with a mechanism for creating MPAs — comes into force in early 2026.
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The authors declare no competing interests. More

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In the 1960s, scientists classed chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans as a distinct family (Pongidae), thinking that these great apes had long diverged from humans. Few scholars expected that, in nature, these apes would display strikingly human-like behaviour. Jane Goodall, who has died aged 91, overturned this view with her groundbreaking observations of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Jane Goodall’s legacy: three ways she changed scienceHer discoveries foreshadowed the genetic evidence showing that chimpanzees, bonobos (Pan paniscus) and humans are more closely related to one another than to gorillas (Gorilla spp.) and orangutans (Pongo spp.). The findings had a major role in shifting perceptions towards recognizing the importance of emotions, personalities and complex cognition, reshaping scientific and public understanding of human evolution. She was a tireless advocate for conservation, the welfare of captive chimpanzees and the protection of habitats — work now carried forwards through the Jane Goodall Institute in Washington, DC.Her fascination with animals began early. Born in north London in 1934, she famously disappeared during a Second World War air raid when she was around six years old, only to be found sitting quietly in a chicken coop, watching a hen lay an egg. She often told this story to illustrate the patience and curiosity that defined her life’s work.In 1957, after working as a secretary for some years, Goodall accepted a friend’s invitation to visit Kenya. In Nairobi, she sought out the renowned palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who invited her to join him and his wife Mary on a fossil-hunting expedition in Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, known as the Cradle of Humankind for its rich deposit of early hominid fossils and stone tools. During the trip, she committed to studying chimpanzees in what is now called Gombe National Park in Tanzania — a small, 35-square-kilometre patch of forest that Leakey had long hoped to investigate.Biggest ever study of primate genomes has surprises for humanityTo prepare, she persuaded John Napier, a leading anthropologist, to tutor her privately in primatology. She was dismayed to learn that the main chimpanzee study of the time, conducted in 1929–30, had lasted for only four months and had been done by a large, intrusive expedition operating in classic colonial excess. She was not surprised that it had produced few results.By contrast, when she arrived in Gombe in July 1960, she spent many months patiently tracking chimpanzees in the hills, sometimes sleeping alone in the park. By her fourth month, she had made her first world-shaking discoveries: chimpanzees not only ate and shared meat but also fashioned tools. The tools were modified grass stems that were then used to extract edible termites from their mounds (J. Goodall Nature 201, 1264–1266; 1964).Her findings earned her long-term support. In 1961, she began a PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, under zoologist Robert Hinde, who encouraged her to focus on social relationships, individual personalities and the expression of emotions. She gained intimate access to chimpanzees by providing them with bananas, which allowed her to document their lives in unprecedented detail. She observed their political manoeuvring, deception, coalitional aggression and cooperation outside family groups — behaviours that indicated previously unsuspected levels of social intelligence.

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Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism Thea Riofrancos W. W. Norton & Company (2025)It was meant to be the world’s grand fix for the climate crisis: nations would make their economies greener by transitioning to renewable-energy technologies, electrifying transport and digitalizing the global economy to reduce material use. After years of fraught negotiations, countries agreed to this global transition at a momentous summit in Paris in 2015. But the fix has proved to be more complex.In Extraction, an illuminating examination of the emerging renewable economy, political scientist Thea Riofrancos takes a close look at one crucial element: lithium, which is essential for producing batteries and other technologies. Drawing on fieldwork with affected communities and analyses of projections that anticipate a massive increase in mining to propel emerging green technologies, she argues that the narrow focus on emissions has fuelled the illusion of “capitalism without carbon”, exposing a moral dilemma at the core of the green transition.Why the green-technology race might not save the planetRiofrancos challenges these assumptions and, working with specialists, models alternatives: more public transport, cycling, walking, denser cities, fewer cars and higher recycling rates. Instead of chasing a single net-zero future, in which the amount of carbon emissions emitted is balanced against the amount removed, she suggests multiple zero-emissions worlds that balance climate goals against the protection of people and ecosystems.Throughout Extraction, the reader learns how treating carbon emissions as a purely technical problem has produced a race to procure lithium, opening up vulnerable regions to companies that often act like neo-colonial powers.Chile provides a strong case study. Riofrancos focuses on the country’s lithium-rich Atacama Desert, a high-altitude, bone-dry landscape of “dazzling days and spectacularly starry nights”. Humans have lived there for at least 12,000 years. In fact, for 1,500 years, trade networks across the plateau linked the mountains to the Pacific Coastal Plain. Yet, as early as the sixteenth century, those seeking the region’s minerals described the landscape as barren and lifeless — a claim used to justify Spanish colonial rule and mineral extraction. After independence in 1818, the Chilean government recast the region as having “economic potential”.Why the EU must reset its Green Deal — or be left behindRiofrancos’s fieldwork highlights the science and technology of extracting and processing key minerals. Through interviews with Indigenous communities, environmentalists, union members, scientists, lawyers, regulators and corporate actors, she reveals competing agendas and visions of green futures.It’s through these interviews that she first encounters her central dilemma: the clash between renewable energy and Indigenous rights and between climate action and biodiversity. She follows this tension from South America to decision-making centres in the European Union and the United States, where major powers are trying to ‘de-risk’ their economies by shifting supply chains — either towards allies or back home.These strategies are a result of wealthy industrial nations belatedly waking up to the fact that China has leapfrogged them and scaled up the production of electric vehicles and renewables and secured dominance across supply chains, from mine to market. Importantly, and driven mainly by competition between the United States and China, this re-ordering of industrial leadership has fuelled geopolitical tensions. It has unravelled ties of interdependence and sparked a race for crucial minerals, as well as a battle over who will control the technological imperium.Electric vehicles use lithium-powered batteries. Credit: Jade Gao/AFP/GettyRiofrancos’s close-up study of the lithium supply chain suggests that the worst is yet to come. Trade barriers and the growing reliance on transactional deals risk turning entire regions back into sites of exploitation, undermining hopes for a just transition to green energy.

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“In this photo, I’m examining some of the animals in my care. I work as an ecologist at the St John’s Island National Marine Laboratory, which is sited on a small island off the coast of mainland Singapore.The tank I’m leaning over contains sand-filtered seawater pumped directly from the ocean. The baskets are kept afloat by air-filled tubes and contain white short-spined sea urchins (Salmacis sphaeroides). We keep the urchins like this so we can keep track of individuals and reduce the spread of disease.My work aims to understand the ecology of the sea urchins and other marine invertebrates and promote their conservation. My colleagues and I want to gauge how the creatures react to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, salinity and the pH of the water.We also host threatened species to guard against extinction: if there was an event that hurt a wild population, I’m fairly confident we could renew the natural stock.Finally, we’re exploring how we can use aquaculture to combat damage caused by the wildlife trade. Some marine species in southeast Asia, including sea urchins, are harvested from the wild for aquariums. Perhaps the animal groups we keep here could be sold into the aquarium trade directly instead.

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