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.
Data from three citizen science programmes on the occurrence, abundance, community structure and demography of birds across the UK show that protected areas are associated with improved state for most species and provide the most benefit to specialist, rare and declining species.
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.
Bringing together multiple models and databases on nature’s contributions to people, the authors map these contributions globally and determine the critical areas where their magnitude is the highest and where they provide the highest potential human benefit.
Modelling reveals large swathes of land in tropical grassy and dry forest biomes that are climatically suitable for commercial plantations of oil palm and would comply with current zero-deforestation commitments, but where conversion to oil palm would, in many locations, cause loss of habitat and biodiversity.
The delayed UN Biodiversity COP15 follows closely on the heels of the Climate COP27. We look at what comparisons can valuably be made between the two summits.
Brachyury is an early mesoderm determinant and neural repressor in vertebrates. Comparative Brachyury target screens between a sea anemone and a sea urchin reveal an ancestral gene regulatory feedback loop involved in axial patterning, with conserved endodermal and neuronal, but not mesodermal, targets.
An actinopterygian fossil with unexpected anatomical features from 7 million years before the end-Devonian mass extinction suggests complex patterns of divergence and diversification around the Devonian/Carboniferous boundary for ray-finned fishes.
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.
Taphonomic and stable isotopic analysis of fish bone assemblages at the early Middle Pleistocene site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel suggest that fish were cooked before consumption by hominins.
The authors test whether spatial scale (plot, local and landscape) affects the supply of various ecosystem services in grasslands, finding that some services are predicted by plot-level properties while others depend more on landscape-level management.
Over the past seventy-five years, long-term population studies of individual organisms in their natural environments have been influential in illuminating how ecological and evolutionary processes operate, and the extent of variation and temporal change in these processes. As these studies have matured, the incorporation of new technologies has generated an ever-broadening perspective, from molecular and genomic to landscape-level analyses facilitated by remote-sensing.
Ecological syntheses are often assumed to identify generalities in effects, but this concept is rarely defined. Here, the authors review current practice in ecological synthesis and propose pathways to achieving generality.
Not all forest cover is of equal quality. Here, the authors ask whether forest cover or forest structural complexity influences extinction risk in tropical rainforest vertebrates, finding that forest structural conditions are more important than cover alone in terms of buffering species against extinction and population declines.
Three studies of disease-carrying mosquitoes in this issue illustrate the need for both interdisciplinary approaches and more research into fundamental biology.