Many global environmental agendas, including halting biodiversity loss, reversing land degradation, and limiting climate change, depend upon retaining forests with high ecological integrity, yet the scale and degree of forest modification remain poorly quantified and mapped. By integrating data on observed and inferred human pressures and an index of lost connectivity, we generate a globally consistent, continuous index of forest condition as determined by the degree of anthropogenic modification. Globally, only 17.4 million km2 of forest (40.5%) has high landscape-level integrity (mostly found in Canada, Russia, the Amazon, Central Africa, and New Guinea) and only 27% of this area is found in nationally designated protected areas. Of the forest inside protected areas, only 56% has high landscape-level integrity. Ambitious policies that prioritize the retention of forest integrity, especially in the most intact areas, are now urgently needed alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and restoring the integrity of forests globally.

Measurement of fish body‐size distributions is increasingly used as a management tool to assess fishery status. However, the effects of gear selection on observed fish size structure has not received sufficient attention. Four different gear types (experimental gill nets, fine mesh bag seine, and two different sized mesh trap nets), which are commonly employed in the study area for fisheries surveys, were used to fish in five small (< 200 ha) lakes to evaluate differential catch in terms of species composition and assemblage size distributions. Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests revealed that, out of the five lakes and six comparisons, the four gear types captured fish of statistically similar size distributions in only one instance. Non‐metric multi‐dimensional scaling followed by a multi‐response permutation procedure revealed that the species composition of fish captured by these gears also differs. These results support the notion that multiple gear types should be used to assess body‐size distributions as well as fish assemblage composition.

Aquatic community body size distributions are highly predictable with decreasing abundance and increasing body size. This basic relationship has led to significant increases in our understanding of the internal regulation processes of aquatic communities. However, most of our understanding of the patterns of community size structure is derived from large aquatic systems with little known about the dynamics of small lakes. Processes that promote predictable, or deterministic, community size structure likely differ with levels of biodiversity and disturbance patterns, both of which frequently co-vary with ecosystem size. Here we examine the influence of lake size, fish species richness, and natural disturbance regime on fish community size structure in six small lakes (<200 ha) on Beaver Island, Michigan, USA. Fish communities in three of the six lakes exhibited a deterministic size structure and it appears that disturbance regime is the most obvious barrier to developing and/or maintaining stable and predictable community size structure. In this study, lakes with less than 10 species and lakes experiencing periodic winterkills exhibited stochastic size structure. Lake size did not show any clear relation to fish community size structure. Collectively our results shed some light on the conditions that promote (or do not promote) deterministic size structure.