Biodiversity decline jeopardizes the foundation of natural ecosystems and human well-being, a concern that prompted major global agreements aiming to bend the curve towards a net positive biodiversity future. Still, the critical importance of safeguarding the diversity of life is far from receiving the attention it deserves, especially in marine settings. To understand (and overcome) the current limits of biodiversity mainstreaming, we integrate insights from the natural and social sciences to offer guidance on how to navigate the seemingly overwhelming complexity of this issue. We start by comparing biodiversity change to climate change to capture key distinctions in their multifaceted and context-dependent nature. Unlike climate change, the status and trends of biodiversity cannot be reduced to a single metric or target. Instead, effective biodiversity governance must focus on understanding how biodiversity is affected and how habitat extent, population size, or trends in composition capture these changes. The rise of molecular data promises to improve the representativeness of assessments and foster mechanistic understanding of the processes involved. Yet, it does not eliminate the need for effective communication of these issues to invoke meaningful action. Given its links to human well-being, biodiversity has a high chance of being engaging, but practitioners and scientists only marginally capitalize on the social, health, economic, and emotional values of their subject. Thus, we advocate for extending the assessment of biodiversity change and its functional consequences to include human values and emotions as an integral part of biodiversity reporting. Such a holistic framing, accounting for the complex spatial and temporal trajectories of biodiversity, will be vital in fostering more effective and inclusive conservation strategies.

As the global ecological crisis intensifies, international efforts to conserve biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) has become increasingly urgent. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement is widely regarded as a breakthrough in ocean governance, yet it enters a legal and conceptual landscape marked by fragmentation and contested definitions of biodiversity. This article examines how biodiversity is framed, interpreted, and operationalized in the Agreement, as an object of governance, and how this framing may affect its implementation and goals. Combining doctrinal legal analysis, treaty interpretation under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), ethnographic observation of negotiations, and interdisciplinary insights from science and technology studies (STS), political ecology, and the environmental humanities, we trace how biodiversity has been parsed across spatial, legal, and epistemic boundaries to make it governable. For example, the Agreement’s focus on Marine Genetic Resources (MGRs) reflects a pragmatic effort to address benefit-sharing, yet it also emphasizes extractive and commercial logics over more systemic or relational understandings of marine life. Key provisions are used to preserve existing institutional arrangements, offering governance stability yet also reinforcing legal fragmentation of biodiversity. While the Agreement embraces strategic ambiguity by not defining biodiversity to enable consensus and adaptability, it also leaves critical questions open about whose knowledge counts and what values guide biodiversity governance. By highlighting both the promise and limitations of the BBNJ framework, the article argues for more inclusive and ecologically attuned approaches to biodiversity governance beyond national jurisdiction.

In the currently escalating debates about restitution of Africa’s heritage, the question remains whether Africa’s museums have the capacity to host and maintain collections while continuing to use them for their intended purpose. This paper is based on a 5-months
survey in 2018 of 17 museums/collection institutions in East Africa; Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. Staff, citizens and other key stakeholders were interviewed on capacity of institutions as repositories, education centres as well as research infrastructures.
Institutions were compared against a range of indicators. Results indicate that all institutions assessed rate on average very low to moderate regarding collections, exhibitions, research, infrastructure and management. The institutions perform better with respect to representing national/regional identity, their usability in education and being repositories of biodiversity and cultural heritage. The low ratings are mainly attributed to
insufficient personnel and expertise to manage, research, curate and develop collections and exhibitions, to poor buildings and other infrastructure, and to a lack of money and political will to support museum activities in these countries. The paper further discusses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the museum sector in the region and provides recommendations for capacity building therein. For almost all the institutions assessed here, restitution does not seem a realistic option unless capacities for curation are vastly improved.

Background: The unique ecosystem of Uganda enables close interaction between humans and wildlife. This milieu creates a hot spot for emergence of infectious diseases. In the last decade bats were found to be a major reservoir of zoonotic pathogens and their proximity to humans provides direct or indirect conditions for spillover events.
Methods & Materials: Whole blood samples were collected from 4 different districts of Uganda (Bundibugyo, Buikwe, Kaabong, Lamwo). RNA from six pools of blood, consisting of 9-26 individual bats, each representing specific location, was extracted by Purelink RNA kit (Invitrogen, Thermo Fischer Scientific) and were subjected to NGS of the transcriptome. Sequencing of RNA samples was performed by Illumina Hiseq 2500 with single 60 bp reads. The results were analyzed using de novo assembly with Velvet, followed by BLAST analysis. Based on these analyses, reads were re-aligned to known virus and Plasmodium genomes using Bowtie and normalized per library by correcting for sequencing depth.
Results: Plasmodium spp. represents between 0.56%-0.74% of total reads. The top 10 normalized read counts obtained, were from Plasmodium berghei, P.falciparum, P. yoeli. and P. chabaudi, at this order. The highest number of reads were related to P. berghei gene and was found in a pool consisting of mixed frugivorous and insectivorous bats at Buikwe district. The highest number of reads related to P. falciparum was obtained from the northern part of Uganda. Noteworthy, the reads of all 4 Plasmodium serotypes were abundantly found in all sampling sites
Conclusion: Three species of Plasmodium primarily maintained in rodents and one species found in humans were found in four different ecosystems in Uganda. Two main points to be stressed include the ability to switch Plasmodium spp. between rodents and bats and the well tolerated and adapted immune responses of bats to newly introduced spp. No viruses have been found