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.
Zero-deforestation policies are reducing the loss of tropical rainforest to oil palm expansion, but spatial analyses indicate that this may cause unintended large-scale loss of biodiverse grasslands and dry forests unless protections are extended under certification agreements.
An analysis of 16 ecosystem services measured across sites in Europe shows that the supply of some services is predicted by plot-scale diversity, whereas others rely on intact habitats at the landscape scale, highlighting the importance of cross-scale management efforts to maintain ecosystem services.
Measurements of individual birds of 105 species across North America over almost twenty years reveal intraspecific trends of smaller body sizes towards the equator and of decreasing body size as average temperatures increase.
Plasmids are well known for transferring antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria. A study in the clinic shows that evolutionary dynamics within the gut microbiomes of hospitalized patients lead to rapid adaptive changes, balancing the level of resistance that plasmids provide against the fitness costs that they impose on bacteria.
Two Palaeolithic genomes from Britain provide the oldest currently available genetic data from the region and appear to map on to wider European patterns of genetic ancestry and associated archaeology. However, with sparse samples and wide temporal gaps between them, it might be premature to draw wider conclusions about the consistency of these patterns.
A global comparison of plant trait patterns calculated using citizen science observations versus those calculated using traditional scientific data reveals remarkable congruence between the two approaches.
The effects of the redistribution of flora and fauna by European empires are still visible in global biodiversity today and can be traced through the distribution of introduced species. Attempts to solve today’s biodiversity crisis necessitates grappling these colonial legacies head on.
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.
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.
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.
Coevolutionary warfare between bacteria and phage results in the diversification of anti-phage CRISPR arrays among the most successful bacterial competitors
Cnidarians and ctenophores have morphologically simpler nervous systems than those of bilaterians. Discovery and characterization of neuropeptides in a comb jelly and a sea anemone support a common origin of animal peptidergic neurons from digestive cells that could sense their environment.
A large dataset of aquatic biodiversity across multiple trophic levels from several wetlands in Brazil reveals that biodiversity–multifunctionality relationships break down with human pressures.
A modelling study suggests that the proposed energetic barrier between prokaryotes and eukaryotes may not be relevant to the complexity gap between the two domains. The energetic advantage of early mitochondria was probably small, and eukaryotes likely emerged without the help of an endosymbiont.
Longitudinal data spanning 43 years from a wild ungulate population reveal changes in social connectedness as individuals age, and suggest that these changes may in part be driven by changes in spatial behaviour.
Mating in insects relies on pheromone production in just one of the sexes. A multidisciplinary study on the German cockroach identifies a gene that connects sex differentiation factors with the production of sexual pheromones in females only.
An experiment in secondary forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo finds that calcium, an overlooked soil nutrient, is scarcer than phosphorus, and represents a potentially greater limitation on tropical forest growth.
Pharaoh ants live in highly organized colonies with elaborate social structure. An atlas of the brain cells of the different sexes and social groups of this ant reveals cell compositions tailored to the tasks performed by each group.
Longitudinal data on gut microbiomes of wild baboons show that microbial communities are highly individualized, despite shared diet and environment within primate social groups.
