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Field survey data from 1,034 bird species worldwide are used to show that species’ sensitivities to habitat fragmentation are more strongly related to their dispersal ability than to latitude and past habitat disturbance, and that variation in dispersal ability is in turn strongly associated with climate.

A quasi-experimental impact evaluation quantifies reduced forest loss, avoided social cost of emissions and potential carbon-offset revenue associated with India’s designation of protected areas as tiger-conservation reserves with enhanced protection.

Determined and generous champion of protected-areas science and policy

SARS-CoV-2 lineages circulating in animal reservoirs may broaden the evolutionary potential of the virus and increase the risk of novel variants emerging. There is an urgent need for more-comprehensive surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in nonhuman hosts.

A synthetic control approach to model avoided forest loss shows that a protected-areas programme in India aimed at tiger conservation is associated with significant reductions in carbon emissions.

Insects rely on symbiotic microbes for nutrition and defence. Analysing a large dataset of microbe–insect symbioses, the authors show that symbiosis evolved in response to nutrient deficiencies but its impacts on insect diversification depend on their feeding niche.

Using geographical data for approximately 36,000 marine and terrestrial species and climate projections to 2100, the authors show that the area of each species’ geographical range at risk of thermal exposure will expand abruptly, highlighting the urgency of mitigation and adaptation actions.

Using DNA barcoding to analyse flying insect diversity of >225,000 specimens from five biogeographic regions, the authors show that more than half of local species diversity is represented by only 20 insect families, most of which suffer from taxonomic neglect.

A new genetic study provides strong support for the view that our species evolved from exchanges between several ancestral populations in different African regions.

Human genetic material can be inadvertently captured and enriched from environmental DNA samples. This has both legal and ethical implications for future research.

An inspirational advocate for adaptation, animal behaviour and natural history.

A new phylogenomic tree for butterflies is constructed using 391 genes from 2,300 species, representing 92% of genera. It suggests that butterflies originated around 100 million years ago in what is now the Americas and originally fed on Fabaceae.

The recovery of human genomic data from environmental DNA samples raises ethical questions regarding consent, privacy, surveillance and data ownership, which will need to be grappled with as the environmental DNA field moves forward.

A global field survey of 383 sites with different vegetation types spanning an environmental gradient reveals that soil biodiversity and functions exhibit pervasive nonlinear behaviours worldwide and are mainly governed by water availability.

Nature Ecology & Evolution is now open to submissions of Registered Reports, a format that aims to reduce publication bias by reviewing study design and results in two separate stages.

Gene–environment interactions have been found to shape ageing plasticity in the muscle tissue of migratory locusts through adaptive changes in lipid metabolic processes.

Interest in private financing of restoration is growing, but funding remains low. Semi-structured interviews with financial actors and restoration finance experts show that there are some market incentives for private actors to finance restoration, but policy mandates are needed to scale private finance and ensure it is steered towards ecologically sound and equitable objectives

Comparative transcriptomic analysis of flight muscles in migratory locusts reveals that plasticity in expression of the lipid metabolism gene PLIN2 regulates differences in ageing-related muscle degeneration between gregarious and solitary phases.