Articles in 2023

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 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 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.

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.

The late Middle Pleistocene site of Bargny, Senegal, documents stone tool trends seen across contemporary sites in Africa but which, in West Africa, remain uniquely stable into the Holocene. Palaeoenvironmental data suggest that persistently stable environments in West Africa through the Late Pleistocene, including estuarine refugia, may have supported consistent behavioural responses.

The authors use machine learning to characterize the splicing landscape of archaic hominins. Archaic-specific splice-altering variants might have contributed to phenotypic differences among hominins and were under negative selection.

Organisms living at high elevations are particularly vulnerable to climate warming. Here the authors combine hydrological and glacier modelling with species distribution models to show how glacier retreat in the European Alps could impact the biodiversity and distributions of invertebrates in alpine rivers.

An interrogation of almost 2 billion occurrence records for terrestrial plants and animals derived from either primary voucher specimens or direct observations, including citizen-science data, reveals differences in their coverage of global biodiversity patterns.

The authors report a highly diverse Middle Ordovician Burgess Shale-type fauna from Wales (UK) that compares with the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang biotas in palaeoenvironment and preservational style.

Shifts in species’ migration timing as a result of climate change can result in mismatched temporal overlap with their critical resources. Here the authors show that the magnitude and direction of shifts in juvenile Pacific salmon migration timing vary among species and populations, resulting in variable mismatch with marine productivity, which has implications for climate change vulnerability.

Using avian trait data and genomic data, the authors infer whether changes in net effective population size over time in response to climate change are correlated with multiple morphological and life history traits; they find that larger-bodied, slower-reproducing species with limited dispersal capacity are most sensitive to changes in warming and cooling climates.

Most comparative animal cognition studies assume that results are stable in individuals and groups, but this is not often tested. Here the authors assess repeatability of cognitive tasks in several species of captive great apes, finding that individual performance over time is stable and predicted by fixed differences among individuals rather than transient experimental conditions.

Using data from the BEF-China tree diversity experiment, the authors demonstrate that the diversity of arthropods is higher in plots with higher tree diversity and that the suppression of herbivores by enemy arthropods could be a potential mechanism through which higher tree diversity promotes productivity.

This study shows that environmental conditions promote multicellular group formation in green algae and that retention of daughter cells reliant on nitrogen availability promotes fitness in the lab and in natural lake systems in Sweden.