Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The Anthropocene has been rejected as a formal epoch by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Moving on and recognizing the deeper and more complex roots of human impacts on our planet will enable us to better, and more fairly, address them.
Analysing camera-trap data of 163 mammal species before and after the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns, the authors show that responses to human activity are dependent on the degree to which the landscape is modified by humans, with carnivores being especially sensitive.
Climate warming is triggering a steady increase in the mean thermal optimum of plant communities. We show that this increase reflects the dieback of cold-adapted species rather than the arrival of warmer-adapted species, with negative effects on local diversity and mutually cancelling effects on community heterogeneity.
Long-term experimental evolution and modelling show the evolution of small and large cluster-forming lineages of snowflake yeast that coexist over generations due to a trade-off between organismal size and competitiveness for dissolved oxygen.
Analysis of 1,673 sequenced Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates identifies 3,852 sequence blocks introgressed from Saccharomyces paradoxus, most of which are recent and clade-specific. By contrast, divergent Chinese strains of S. cerevisiae show little evidence of introgression but do share ancient polymorphisms with S. paradoxus due to incomplete lineage sorting.
Analysing >14,000 pairs of plots over 10 years, the authors show that forest understorey plant communities increase their average temperature affiliations by 0.1 °C each decade. This increase was caused by the extinction of cold-adapted species, but with no visible effect on community heterogeneity.
In this Perspective, the authors discuss current knowledge of deep-time protein preservation and how the chemical changes undergone by proteins affect taphonomic and palaeoproteomic analyses.
Analysing >1,700 inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network, the authors show that the majority of Amazon tree species can occupy floodplains and that patterns of species turnover are closely linked to regional flood patterns.
Using multiple remote-sensing datasets, the authors show that temporal and spatial scale influence the detection of tree-mortality events and explain why there has been a seemingly conflicting pattern of both overall greening but also extensive tree mortality in recent decades.
Combining species range-shift estimates with population trends for 146 marine species reveals that population abundances tend to decline as the velocity with which the species’ range is shifting poleward increases. The findings suggest widespread transient population dynamics rather than a simple dichotomy between climate-change ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.
Abundance data for marine fish populations show that those shifting poleward rapidly due to climate change experience substantial population declines, suggesting that rapid range shifts are not sufficient to maintain stable populations.
We evaluate the drivers of intensification traps — the combined loss of biodiversity and crop production that results from too-intensive agriculture. Our results reveal the conditions under which these lose–lose situations emerge and highlight the strong ramifications of disregarding biodiversity in agricultural management.
Conventional agricultural intensification can lead to ‘traps’ where production actually declines because of biodiversity loss. By integrating case study archetypes, literature review and simulations, the authors show what systems are at risk of traps and how these risks can be limited.
The authors analyse 8,790 prokaryotic pangenomes to identify the ecological variables associated with recent versus old horizontal gene transfer events, finding that gene transfers are more common among co-occurring, highly abundant or host-associated species.
In an analysis of forest edge-to-interior transects in Europe, the authors show that different facets of biodiversity and different types of ecosystem service are found in forest interiors versus edges, suggesting that both have a role to play in the provisioning of ecosystem services in landscapes.