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In a widespread sampling campaign across urban soils, the authors find that soil biodiversity, but not plant diversity, is positively related to multiple ecosystem functions in urban environments.
Combining modelling of living human participants and chimpanzees with analysis of fossil hominin trackways, the authors distinguish between the earliest evidence of modern human-like bipedal kinematics and earlier hominin precursors.
In a replicated ecosystem-scale natural experiment across ten islands in the Indian Ocean, invasive black rats disrupted nutrients provided by seabirds, leading to a coral reef fish having larger territories and investing less time in aggression than on rat-free islands.
The authors develop a new metric to measure the error-corrected convergence rate of protein evolution, together with a heuristic algorithm to detect signals of adaptive protein convergence.
Using synthetic human gut communities and computational modelling, the authors show that increasing the complexity of dietary carbohydrates reduces microbial growth, balances positive and negative interspecies interactions, and reduces community sensitivity to perturbations.
Comparing the brain anatomy of fossil hominins and extant primates, the authors determine that strong covariation between different areas of the brain in Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis evolved under higher evolutionary rates than in any other primate. Strong covariation is present in juvenile and adult H. sapiens, and in juvenile but not adult great apes.
Studying human-specific de novo genes originated from long non-coding RNA, the authors reveal molecular mechanisms that facilitate nuclear export of these young genes, and show experimental evidence for the role of one such gene in brain development.
The authors resample a plant–pollinator network that was initially characterized by a naturalist in the late nineteenth century in Finland. They find that only 7% of the original interactions persisted; generally, specialist pollinators disproportionally declined while generalist muscoid flies increased as the abundant pollinators.
Barcode lineage tracking of a competitive mutualism between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii shows that selection favours yeast mutants that increase the yields of both species and strengthen the mutualism.
Cratonavis zhui, a bird from the Early Cretaceous of China, preserves a combination of non-avialan theropod skull features and a bird-like post-cranial skeleton.
An Indonesia-wide analysis identifies locations for potential mangrove restoration, ranked by scenarios of success likelihood according to biogeomorphology, current and past land use and land tenure, and estimates the restoration costs.
Data from three citizen science programmes on the occurrence, abundance, community structure and demography of birds across the UK show that protected areas are associated with improved state for most species and provide the most benefit to specialist, rare and declining species.
Bringing together multiple models and databases on nature’s contributions to people, the authors map these contributions globally and determine the critical areas where their magnitude is the highest and where they provide the highest potential human benefit.
Modelling reveals large swathes of land in tropical grassy and dry forest biomes that are climatically suitable for commercial plantations of oil palm and would comply with current zero-deforestation commitments, but where conversion to oil palm would, in many locations, cause loss of habitat and biodiversity.
Brachyury is an early mesoderm determinant and neural repressor in vertebrates. Comparative Brachyury target screens between a sea anemone and a sea urchin reveal an ancestral gene regulatory feedback loop involved in axial patterning, with conserved endodermal and neuronal, but not mesodermal, targets.
An actinopterygian fossil with unexpected anatomical features from 7 million years before the end-Devonian mass extinction suggests complex patterns of divergence and diversification around the Devonian/Carboniferous boundary for ray-finned fishes.
Taphonomic and stable isotopic analysis of fish bone assemblages at the early Middle Pleistocene site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel suggest that fish were cooked before consumption by hominins.
The authors test whether spatial scale (plot, local and landscape) affects the supply of various ecosystem services in grasslands, finding that some services are predicted by plot-level properties while others depend more on landscape-level management.
Not all forest cover is of equal quality. Here, the authors ask whether forest cover or forest structural complexity influences extinction risk in tropical rainforest vertebrates, finding that forest structural conditions are more important than cover alone in terms of buffering species against extinction and population declines.
Through analyses of ancient and modern human genomes, the authors show that previously reported Holocene-era admixture has masked more than 50 historic hard sweeps in modern European genomes.