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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.
Genetic evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens repeatedly interbred in Europe. Here the authors generate predictions for how this might manifest in the late Pleistocene fossil record of Europe, focusing on the skull, and analyse the available evidence.
Most ecological research does not reach its full potential, for reasons that range from poor design to publication bias to insufficient reporting. There are several straightforward steps that researchers, institutions, funders and publishers can take to cut the amount of wasted research.
Differences in a non-coding enhancer region of the HOXDB locus underlie the differences between stickleback species in dorsal spine length and number. These differences include single-nucleotide polymorphisms, deletions and transposable element insertions.
Studying all amino acid substitutions in the yeast cytosine deaminase Fcy1, the target of the antifungal 5-FC, the authors show a sharp trade-off between 5-FC resistance and growth sustained by cytosine deamination.
The authors develop a theoretical method to reduce the complex dynamics of a mutualistic system to a single dynamical equation, which is then used to estimate and compare the distances to a potential tipping point across systems with scaled recovery rates.
The timescale over which ecosystem functions rely on biodiversity is not well characterized. Analysing pollination of two different crops by wild bees, the authors show that a greater number of species are needed to provide the same threshold pollination service as temporal scale increases.