Articles in 2021

The authors assess the risks to global biodiversity and Indigenous lands arising from projects financed by China’s policy banks between 2008 and 2019, and compare that with the risks associated with similar projects financed by the World Bank.

The authors construct a process-based hunter-gatherer population model embedded within a global terrestrial biosphere model that reveals a strong effect of growing season length on population density via diet composition.

Some Drosophila species have cryptic sex-ratio drive systems. Here, the authors show rapid expansion of a driver gene family, Distorter on the X, in three closely related Drosophila species on the X chromosome and suppressors on the autosomes.

Geology and climate affect speciation. A combination of path analysis applied to palaeo-reconstructions of mammals and birds with analysis of palaeoclimatic data shows that uplift over the last 3 million years explains more spatial variation in speciation than the direct effects of palaeoclimate change or present-day elevation and temperature.

Red List information is used to generate global maps of the likelihood of impacts on terrestrial vertebrates exerted by agriculture, hunting and trapping, logging, pollution, invasive species and climate change.

The authors use Bayesian morphological clock modelling and combined trace and body fossil data to examine the evolutionary dynamics of early tetrapodomorphs.

Global spatial data for terrestrial vertebrate and vascular plant diversity, above- and below-ground biomass carbon, and potential clean freshwater volume are combined in a joint optimization study to identify potential synergies for conservation management.

Arabidopsis suecica is an allotetraploid derived from Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis arenosa. Analysis of resynthesized and natural allotetraploid A. suecica shows balanced genomic variation accompanied by convergent and concerted changes in DNA methylation and gene expression between two subgenomes that probably contributed to genome stability during polyploid evolution.

Experimental evolution shows that sexually antagonistic selection promotes sexual body size dimorphism in the seed beetle. Dimorphism is largely explained by Y-linked genetic variance with contribution from sex-specific dominance, X-linkage and sex differences in autosomal variance.

The authors conduct experiments with soil microbes grown in communities with increasing numbers of available carbon sources, each of which can support variable numbers of species. The results show that each additional resource enables only one to two additional species to grow, lower than expectations.

Arabidopsis suecica is a natural allotetraploid species formed via hybridization of Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis arenosa. Comparative analysis of genome and transcriptome data shows no evidence for major genomic changes linked to structural and functional alterations in A. suecica but reveals changes to the meiotic machinery and cyto-nuclear processes.

The predominant threats to pollinators vary across locations, as do perceptions of the consequences of pollinator loss. Here, the authors use formal expert elicitation methods to identify how pollination conservation experts rank the various drivers of pollinator decline and the range of risks to humans if pollination activity is lost.

Collective movements such as flocking or schooling can benefit a single species, but there may also be wider implications of such behaviour. The authors use a theoretical model to show that collective movement of consumer species can promote species coexistence and ecosystem stability.

Dogs exhibit remarkable variation in colour patterns. Here, the authors identify structural variants of independent regulatory modules for ventral and hair cycle expression of the ASIP gene that explain five distinctive dog colour patterns and trace back the origin of one colour pattern to an extinct canid.

Strong population bottlenecks in combination with weak antibiotic selection consistently favours the evolution of resistance across independently performed Pseudomonas aeruginosa evolution experiments.

Analysis of dental characters reveals an early burst in the evolution of the amniote feeding apparatus, but subsequently, variation in the mode of evolution became important as phenotypic diversification became disassociated from increased evolutionary rates.

The authors model likely outcomes for the 33 isolated populations reported in the Fourth National Giant Panda Census under multiple RCP scenarios and with the provision of the planned Giant Panda National Park. They find that, although the National Park may connect some fragmented habitats, most of the populations with high extinction risk fall outside the current plans.

The seeding of native species is critical to the success of dryland restoration efforts. Here the authors evaluate success of seeding establishment at 174 sites on six continents, finding that some sites had nearly 100% of species successfully recruit, while 17% of sites had zero seedling success.

Diversification does not vary consistently across elevations, but highland species are more likely to migrate than lowland species, setting up species pumps that are particularly strong in the tropics.

A collation of data on North American monarch butterfly summer breeding and overwintering populations from 1994 to 2018, combined with seasonal covariate data, suggests an increasing role of climate change as a driver of butterfly dynamics.