A dataset of 16 plant traits sampled from 2,461 individual trees from 74 tropical forest sites around the world is used to show a strong link between climate and plant functional diversity and redundancy, with drier tropical forests likely being less able to respond to declines in water availability.

This paper examines the main approaches for studying gene expression evolution, tests their inherent biases and discusses open questions about the evolution of the transcriptome.

Seagrass meadows are important carbon sinks. Here, the authors show that organic carbon in the form of simple sugars can accumulate at high concentrations in seagrass rhizospheres because plant phenolic compounds inhibit their consumption by microorganisms.

Life emerged from and amidst non-living phenomena that already possessed some of the hallmarks now used four billion years later to recognize fossil organisms. It may be next to impossible to distinguish the earliest signs of life against this background. What can we still learn from fossil-like materials on the early Earth and elsewhere?

Mammals host a diversity of parasites including lice. Using cophylogenetics and phylogenetic comparative methods, the authors show that the main lineages of placental mammal lice had a single common ancestor and find that all parasitic lice had an avian ancestral host.

A multidisciplinary approach, including genetics and behavioural assays, identifies a single gene, CYP4PC1, which integrates both sex differentiation and hormone signalling with sexual attractiveness in the German cockroach.

Biogeochemical analysis of a chronosequence of secondary forest succession in lowland Central Africa suggests that calcium becomes an increasingly scarce and potentially limiting resource with stand age and ecosystem calcium storage shifts from soil to woody biomass.

Competition among species in the coral microbiome has important outcomes in terms of coral health, but little is known about the mechanisms allowing pathogens to gain a competitive advantage. Here the authors show that the pathogen Vibrio coralliilyticus outcompetes commensal bacteria by inducing prophages.

Governments around the world are too slow and too weak in their commitments to stop deforestation. And promises of restoration will not make up for the loss of old forests.

Archaeologist who emphasized the importance of chronology in understanding Palaeolithic Europe, and laid the framework for the archaeology of modern human origins.

Josefa Cariño Tauli is an Ibaloi-Kankanaey Igorot Indigenous person from the Cordillera Region in the Northern Philippines. She is currently the policy co-coordinator for the Global Youth Biodiversity Network, the international coordination platform for youth participation in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).