Nature Ecology & Evolution’s 2nd Anniversary

Although plant functional trait combinations reflect ecological trade-offs at the species level, little is known about how this translates to whole communities. Here, the authors show that global trait composition is captured by two main dimensions that are only weakly related to macro-environmental drivers.

Female common cuckoos often make a hawk-like call after parasitizing a host’s clutch. Here, field experiments show that this call increases the chances of parasitic success by diverting host parents’ attention.

Host–microbiome interactions may have unique characteristics that are not completely captured by existing ecological and evolutionary theories. Here, the authors highlight potential pitfalls in applying these frameworks to the human microbiome.

Open data is increasing rapidly, but data sets may be scattered among many repositories. Here, the authors present an overview of the open data landscape in ecology and evolutionary biology, and highlight key points to consider when reusing data.

Accurate understanding of plant litter decomposition is vital to inform Earth system modelling. Here the dominant hierarchical model for plant litter decomposition is found to be wanting, and revisions are suggested.

A meta-analysis comparing the ecological effects of variation within a species with the effects of species replacement or renewal shows that intraspecific effects may be comparable to, or sometimes stronger than, species effects.

A field study of young trees shows that complementarity among tree crowns in canopy space is a mechanism linking biodiversity with ecosystem productivity, and as such may contribute to diversity-enhanced productivity in forests.

Survival of competing microbial species pairs predicts competition outcome between a greater number of species: species that coexist with each other in pairs will survive, species that are excluded by any of the surviving species will go extinct.

Maximum speed could scale with body mass, but the largest animals are not actually the fastest. A general scaling law explains this with a hump-shaped relationship due to a finite limit on acceleration time.

High-throughput metabarcoding of coral reef fish larvae from the Red Sea enables species-level reconstruction of the highly biodiverse larval community, and their spatio-temporal distribution and abundance.

Analysing the spatial and temporal extents of 348 ecological studies published between 2004 and 2014, the authors show that although the average study interval and extent has increased, resolution and duration have remained largely unchanged.

Testing widely known biodiversity models on a dataset of >20,000 microbial community samples from a wide variety of ecosystems, the authors find that microbial abundance and diversity across scales is best predicted by a model of lognormal dynamics.