Ecological modelling articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study presents an approach to deal with spatial, temporal and phylogenetic non-independence in large-scale analyses of biodiversity change, improving trend estimation and inference across scales.

    • T. F. Johnson
    • , A. P. Beckerman
    •  & R. P. Freckleton

  • Article |

    Sea otters recolonizing an estuary in California indirectly reduce erosion by reducing burrowing crab abundance, suggesting that restoring predators could be a key mechanism to improve the stability of coastal wetlands and other ecosystems.

    • Brent B. Hughes
    • , Kathryn M. Beheshti
    •  & Brian R. Silliman

  • Article |

    Global inverse modelling of plant water acquisition depth and isotope-based plant water use estimates demonstrate globally prevalent use of precipitation from distant sources, and that water-stressed ecosystems are well suited to using past and remote precipitation.

    • Gonzalo Miguez-Macho
    •  & Ying Fan

  • Article |

    Absolute microbial abundances delineate longitudinal dynamics of bacteria, fungi and archaea in the infant gut microbiome, uncovering drivers of microbiome development masked by relative abundances and revealing notable parallels to macroscopic ecosystem assemblies.

    • Chitong Rao
    • , Katharine Z. Coyte
    •  & Seth Rakoff-Nahoum

  • Article |

    Tracking data from 17 marine predator species in the Southern Ocean are used to identify Areas of Ecological Significance, the protection of which could help to mitigate increasing pressures on Southern Ocean ecosystems.

    • Mark A. Hindell
    • , Ryan R. Reisinger
    •  & Ben Raymond

  • Article |

    Using a global molecular phylogenetic dataset of birds on islands, the sensitivity of island-specific rates of colonization, speciation and extinction to island features (area and isolation) is estimated.

    • Luis Valente
    • , Albert B. Phillimore
    •  & Rampal S. Etienne

  • Letter |

    Wilderness areas with minimal levels of human disturbance promote the persistence of biodiversity by acting as buffers against species loss, and therefore represent key targets for environmental protection.

    • Moreno Di Marco
    • , Simon Ferrier
    •  & James E. M. Watson

  • Article |

    High-resolution spatial maps of the global abundance of soil nematodes and the composition of functional groups show that soil nematodes are found in higher abundances in sub-Arctic regions, than in temperate or tropical regions.

    • Johan van den Hoogen
    • , Stefan Geisen
    •  & Thomas Ward Crowther

  • Article |

    A comprehensive assessment of the world’s rivers and their connectivity shows that only 37 per cent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing over their entire length.

    • G. Grill
    • , B. Lehner
    •  & C. Zarfl

  • Letter |

    Satellite data and modelling reveal that tropical forest fragments have similar size distributions across continents, and that forest fragmentation is close to a critical point, beyond which fragment numbers will strongly increase.

    • Franziska Taubert
    • , Rico Fischer
    •  & Andreas Huth

  • Letter |

    Nutrient amendment experiments at the boundary of the South Atlantic gyre reveal extensive regions in which nitrogen and iron are co-limiting, with other micronutrients also approaching co-deficiency; such limitations potentially increase phytoplankton community diversity.

    • Thomas J. Browning
    • , Eric P. Achterberg
    •  & C. Mark Moore

  • Article |

    Fragmentation of forest ecosystems produces forest edges, which affect the distribution of many analysed vertebrate species; smaller-bodied amphibians, larger reptiles and medium-sized mammals experience a larger reduction in suitable habitat than other forest-core species.

    • M. Pfeifer
    • , V. Lefebvre
    •  & R. M. Ewers

  • Article |

    The authors use modelling to show that the network of trading routes known as the Silk Road emerged from hundreds of years of interactions between pastoralists as they moved their herds and flocks between higher and lower elevations in generally mountainous regions.

    • Michael D. Frachetti
    • , C. Evan Smith
    •  & Tim Williams

  • Letter |

    Empirically validated mathematical models show that a combination of intraspecific competition between subterranean social-insect colonies and scale-dependent feedbacks between plants can explain the spatially periodic vegetation patterns observed in many landscapes, such as the Namib Desert ‘fairy circles’.

    • Corina E. Tarnita
    • , Juan A. Bonachela
    •  & Robert M. Pringle

  • Letter |

    A modelling study of the mechanisms of extinction within ecological networks reveals how even a small reduction in the population size of a species may lead to the loss of its ecological functionality—that is, to its functional extinction—by causing extinction of other organisms in the food web, often only indirectly connected to the focal species, revealing the value of conservation strategies that target a broader ecological network.

    • Torbjörn Säterberg
    • , Stefan Sellman
    •  & Bo Ebenman

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