There is growing recognition that environmental management decisions taken by key conservation stakeholders such as farmers are underpinned by both economic and psycho-social factors. However, conservation psychology is still in infancy and there are few validated tools suitable for measuring psycho-social constructs in the Global South. Subjective connection with nature (CWN) is considered to be the basis for pro-conservation attitudes and behaviours but has so far received only scant attention from research into farmers’ decision-making. Here, we introduce a new scale of affective CWN tailored for use in rural areas of the Global South and provide the first field assessment of cognitive and affective CWN in the rural tropics. Our survey found high levels of CWN among non-indigenous farmers living at a major Amazonian deforestation frontier in Brazil. This suggests that CWN has the potential to positively influence farmers’ environmental views and decisions. We also highlight the importance of understanding what kind of “nature” people feel most connected to when responding to CWN measures.

Geographic gradients in species richness, including latitudinal gradients, can arise from geographic variation in any of three mechanisms: the geologic age of habitats, net rates of evolutionary diversification, or rates of sympatry among diversifying lineages. Here we show that variation in rates of sympatry is a dominant force structuring geographic richness gradients in birds. Species-rich sites contain disproportionately high numbers of recently diverged sympatric species but contain lineages with slower-than-average diversification rates. The positive sympatry-diversity relationship consistently overwhelms the negative diversification-diversity relationship, particularly among high-diversity sites (>250 species). These patterns repeat across biomes and continents with striking regularity, and remain consistent across multiple timescales, including the recent evolutionary past. Biogeographic and evolutionary patterns in birds are consistent with a role for ecological conditions in promoting species coexistence, which allows sister species to co-occur and potentially lowers extinction rates.