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.
This Perspective discusses potential effects of ocean warming on human nutrition provision from coral reef fish, ranging from altered species compositions of fish populations through to changed fish nutrient profiles resulting from altered metabolism, microbiome composition and trophic interactions.
Fitness landscapes were described almost a century ago as smooth surfaces with peaks and valleys that are difficult to navigate. Now, more realistic high-dimensional genotype–phenotype maps show that fitness maxima can be reached from almost any other phenotype while avoiding fitness valleys, which are very rare.
Quantifying changing climatic effects on ecosystem productivity and human spatiotemporal distributions during the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Iberia, the authors find evidence that the hiatus between Neanderthal and modern human cultural complexes in North Atlantic Iberia and the longer persistence of Neanderthals in southern latitudes had an ecological cause.
Fossil calibrations, a relative clade age calibration (informed by horizontal gene transfer) and new phylogenomic methods for mapping gene family origins resolve tracheophytes (vascular plants) and bryophytes (non-vascular plants) as monophyletic sister groups that diverged during the Cambrian, 515–494 million years ago. The early evolution of both groups, but particularly that of bryophytes, was characterized by major gene content change.
In realistic high-dimensional fitness landscapes of RNA secondary structure, protein tertiary structure and protein complexes, fitness peaks can be easily reached from any starting point without traversing fitness valleys.
Harnessing big data and machine learning provides an assessment of the extinction risks of palm species worldwide, and illustrates an integrative conservation planning approach that incorporates evolutionary and ecological distinctiveness as well as human use.
Rachel Carson’s book has had lasting impacts on the global regulation of chemicals harmful to life. Six decades since its publication, however, novel threats to wildlife and human health are still emerging.
A model of how local relatedness changes with age fits empirical patterns from seven group-living mammal species and reveals that patterns differ between the sexes and the potential behavioural consequences of these changes.
The authors analyse hundreds of animal and human footprints spanning at least 8,000 years at Formby on the Irish Sea coast of Britain. In the absence of conventional faunal records, the footprints document long-term changes in large mammal diversity and human activity during the Holocene.
Machine learning is used to predict extinction risk for 1,381 palm species, allowing identification of priority regions for palm conservation and cases where substitution with non-threatened species could provide products for human use.
Many viruses evolve quickly, leading to the coexistence of multiple strains within the same host and population. In this Review, the authors synthesize ecological and evolutionary approaches to studying the dynamics of multi-strain RNA virus infections and suggest opportunities for future work.
Analysing >6,000 plant species from plots across the US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the authors show that plant diversity consistently stabilizes community abundance across spatial scales and broad ecoclimatic domains, with the strength of the stabilizing effect increasing with scale.
To facilitate evolutionary adaptation to climate change, we must protect networks of coral reefs that span a range of environmental conditions — not just apparent ‘refugia’.
An analysis of 199 journals in ecology and evolution finds no link between policies mandating data sharing and the rate of article retraction or correction. The authors position this finding in a broader discussion of open data and code.
Iron–sulfur (Fe–S) clusters are cofactors essential for life. Combining large-scale phylogenomic analyses with biochemical validation, the authors identify two ancestral minimal Fe–S cluster biogenesis systems and show that they originated before Earth oxygenation.
A series of behavioural, electrophysiological and chemical assays are used to attempt to detect long-range sex pheromones involved in species-specific male swarm recognition by Anopheles female mosquitoes, but no evidence is found.