Articles in 2022

The identification of 21 large inversion polymorphisms in populations of deer mice shows that they are widespread, important for patterns of recombination and likely to be involved in local adaptation.

Compiling data on floral introductions and European colonial history of regions worldwide, the authors find that compositional similarity of floras is higher than expected among regions once occupied by the same empire and similarity increases with the length of time the region was occupied by that empire.

Expert field palaeontologist who made many key discoveries about early human evolution in East Africa.

An innovative isotopic labelling strategy shows that malaria mosquitoes in the West-African Sahel region survive in dormancy over the prolonged dry season. These results have implications for efforts to suppress malaria transmission in Africa.

A theoretical model of a community of species under selection for compatibility between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes predicts patterns of species diversity, abundance, speciation and extinction, and also suggests a link between metabolic demands and latitudinal variation in diversity.

Analysing a compilation of planktonic foraminifera assemblage time series covering the past 24,000 years, from the last ice age to the current warm period, the authors find that responses to warming were highly heterogeneous leading to the emergence of novel assemblages and possibly new ecological interactions.

In the Sahel region of West Africa, An. coluzzii mosquitoes appear to survive the dry season locally, but the relative contribution of this subpopulation to the persistence of the species in the Sahel has remained unknown. Here the authors use stable isotope tracking to determine the fraction of mosquitoes that undergo aestivation, a state of dormancy that allows them to persist through the dry season and maintain yearly malaria transmission.

Analysing a long-term tracking dataset of migrating mule deer, the authors show that the expansion of natural gas energy infrastructure over 14 years along a migratory corridor changes deer behaviour and reduces by more than 38% their ability to keep pace with spring vegetation green-up.

There are many open questions about biogeochemical function in peatlands. Here, the authors investigate the nitrogen cycle of tropical peatlands, finding that a surprisingly high fraction of nitrous oxide production is abiotic and that denitrification is a coupled abiotic-biotic process.

Many academics move countries in pursuit of career opportunities. With every move, personal identities are renegotiated as people shift between belonging to majority and minority groups in different contexts. Institutes should consider people’s dynamic and intersectional identities in their diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

Using individual transcriptomes of two ant species, the authors show that caste differentiation is canalized from early development and identify key regulatory genes for the development of ant caste phenotypes.

A comparison of fish community data with reef coral and macroalgae cover at several sites around Polynesia over 11 years and spanning disturbance events suggests that fish community diversity has only minimal influence on coral dynamics, including recovery from disturbance.

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.