Farmland abandonment is changing rural landscapes worldwide, but its impacts on biodiversity are still being debated in the scientific literature. While some researchers see it as a threat to biodiversity, others view it as an opportunity for habitat regeneration. We reviewed 276 published studies describing various effects of farmland abandonment on biodiversity and found that a study's geographic region, selected metrics, assessed taxa, and conservation focus significantly affected how those impacts were reported. Countries in Eurasia and the New World reported mainly negative and positive effects of farmland abandonment on biodiversity, respectively. Notably, contrasting impacts were recorded in different agricultural regions of the world that were otherwise similar in land‐use and biodiversity characteristics. We showed that the conservation focus (pre‐ or post‐abandonment) in different regions is an important factor influencing how scientists address the abandonment issue, and this may affect how land‐use policies are defined in agricultural landscapes.

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There is urgency afoot to acknowledge the disconnection between ecological realities and the persistence of past ways of constructing the social, as if it is in isolation from the ecological. The urban is the common ground: an endlessly burgeoning, frequently contested home to spaces, institutions and people. 'Governing for urban resilience' brings together research that considers the meaningfulness and possibilities inherent in conceptualising and implementing social-ecological resilience as a process for radical social change and offering a lens for connecting these urban narratives. The urban is then acknowledged as a site of heightened complexity, harbouring diverse social and ecological realities and imaginative potential. The Special Issue challenges past ways of ordering and limiting the city, while building on more recent interpretations of it as interwoven processes associated with enhancing connectivity -whether ecosystems or social networks. Four themes emerge from the articles: locating action; using scale to interrogate and facilitate change; acknowledging the asymmetry of power relations in order to focus on social justice as critical to change; and incorporating local knowledge and the catalytic force of memory to assist that change. The papers have applied the ideas of resilience and social-ecological resilience to their existing urban research, asking, in the main, whether this lens assists us to know more about what has occurred in the case studies. Overall, the outcomes suggest the strengths and weaknesses of policies and projects and in some cases the potentially transformative processes that encourage a social-ecological resilience framing for future research.