The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence. However, negative effects of lockdown on conservation also emerged, as confinement resulted in some park officials being unable to perform conservation, restoration and enforcement tasks, resulting in local increases in illegal activities such as hunting. Overall, there is a complex mixture of positive and negative effects of the pandemic lockdown on nature, all of which have the potential to lead to cascading responses which in turn impact wildlife and nature conservation. While the net effect of the lockdown will need to be assessed over years as data becomes available and persistent effects emerge, immediate responses were detected across the world. Thus, initial qualitative and quantitative data arising from this serendipitous global quasi-experimental perturbation highlights the dual role that humans play in threatening and protecting species and ecosystems. Pathways to favorably tilt this delicate balance include reducing impacts and increasing conservation effectiveness.

Highlights d An index to track vulnerability of global rainforests to climate and land use d Four decades of satellite data show widespread vulnerability across the tropics d Response of rainforests to heat and drying varies across the continents d Early warning from the index can identify regions for conservation and restoration

Article impact statement: Species population monitoring for conservation purposes remains strongly biased toward a few vertebrate taxa in wealthier countries.

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Biodiversity conservation in transformed landscapes is becoming increasingly important. However, most assessments of the value of modified habitats rely heavily on species presence and/or abundance, masking ecological processes such as habitat selection and phenomena like ecological traps, which may render species persistence uncertain. High species richness has been documented in tropical agroforestry systems, but comparisons with native habitat remnants generally lack detailed information on species demography and habitat use. We generated a multi‐species, multi‐measure framework to evaluate the role of habitat selection in the adaptation of species to transformed landscapes, and demonstrate that its use could affect how we value the contribution different land uses make to biodiversity conservation. We analysed 7 years of capture–mark–recapture and observation data for twelve species of resident birds present in native forest remnants and shade coffee plantations in a mega‐diverse region. We assessed whether species behaved adaptively by evaluating the correlation between measures of habitat preference (occurrence, abundance, fidelity, inter‐seasonal variance and age) and performance (body condition, muscle, primary moult, breeding and juveniles) in forest and coffee, and generated hypotheses about their role in species persistence. We documented adaptive habitat selection for seven species, non‐ideal selection for four and maladaptive selection for one. While many species showed equal preference and/or equal performance in many traits, in general we found more evidence for birds preferring and/or performing better in forest than coffee, although relationships between our indicators and population adaptation need to be studied further before our proposed framework can be applied to more species and landscapes. While shade coffee can act as a biodiversity‐friendly matrix providing complementary or supplementary habitat to a wide range of resident bird species, protecting remnants of native vegetation is still of paramount importance for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes.