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The authors test whether spatial scale (plot, local and landscape) affects the supply of various ecosystem services in grasslands, finding that some services are predicted by plot-level properties while others depend more on landscape-level management.
Over the past seventy-five years, long-term population studies of individual organisms in their natural environments have been influential in illuminating how ecological and evolutionary processes operate, and the extent of variation and temporal change in these processes. As these studies have matured, the incorporation of new technologies has generated an ever-broadening perspective, from molecular and genomic to landscape-level analyses facilitated by remote-sensing.
Ecological syntheses are often assumed to identify generalities in effects, but this concept is rarely defined. Here, the authors review current practice in ecological synthesis and propose pathways to achieving generality.
Not all forest cover is of equal quality. Here, the authors ask whether forest cover or forest structural complexity influences extinction risk in tropical rainforest vertebrates, finding that forest structural conditions are more important than cover alone in terms of buffering species against extinction and population declines.
Three studies of disease-carrying mosquitoes in this issue illustrate the need for both interdisciplinary approaches and more research into fundamental biology.
Through analyses of ancient and modern human genomes, the authors show that previously reported Holocene-era admixture has masked more than 50 historic hard sweeps in modern European genomes.
Measurements of individual birds of 105 species across North America over almost twenty years reveal intraspecific trends of smaller body sizes towards the equator and of decreasing body size as average temperatures increase.
Plasmids are well known for transferring antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria. A study in the clinic shows that evolutionary dynamics within the gut microbiomes of hospitalized patients lead to rapid adaptive changes, balancing the level of resistance that plasmids provide against the fitness costs that they impose on bacteria.
A combination of analysis of plasmid diversity in the gut of hospitalized patients with experimental evolution shows that the evolution of plasmid-mediated antibiotic resistance involves a trade-off between antibiotic resistance levels and bacterial fitness.
In this Perspective, the authors demonstrate how concepts and models from landscape ecology and complex adaptive systems science can be used to explore the dynamics of mosquito-borne diseases in urban environments.
Analysis of a dataset of the morphology of more than 250,000 adult birds of 105 species over a 30 year period across North America reveals changes in body size and relative wing length over time and with relation to latitude, elevation and temperature variation.
Two Palaeolithic genomes from Britain provide the oldest currently available genetic data from the region and appear to map on to wider European patterns of genetic ancestry and associated archaeology. However, with sparse samples and wide temporal gaps between them, it might be premature to draw wider conclusions about the consistency of these patterns.
Social cues are known to be involved in the timing of animal migrations. In this Review, the authors outline a framework for understanding the roles of different cues across temporal scales, and how these match with ecosystem dynamics.
Multiple factors contribute to the independent evolution of the same adaptations in nature. This study quantifies parallel evolution among species of Timema stick insects and shows that the degree of parallelism is determined by shared ecology and genomic background.
The authors report genetic, archaeological and stable isotopic data from two late Palaeolithic individuals in Britain, from Gough's Cave and Kendrick's Cave. The individuals differ not only in their ancestry but also their diets, ecologies and mortuary practices, revealing diverse origins and lifeways among inhabitants of late Pleistocene Britain.
Analysis of genomes in a phylogenetic context reveals a 350-million-year-old homomorphic sex chromosome in molluscs, probably maintained by regulation of reversible sex-biased genes and sex chromosome turnover.