Research articles

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  • Small-bodied faunivory has been proposed as the ancestral condition of most major synapsid clades, but here using a time-calibrated metatree of 1,888 fossil synapsids, the authors show that while faunivory is commonly ancestral, small body size in radiation forerunners is a relatively late innovation, arising in the Late Triassic.

    • Spencer M. Hellert
    • David M. Grossnickle
    • Kenneth D. Angielczyk
    Article
  • Landscapes of microbial community function inferred statistically from a broad range of datasets can predict community function on the basis on presence and absence data, without the need for abundance dynamics or interaction data.

    • Abigail Skwara
    • Karna Gowda
    • Seppe Kuehn
    Article
  • Using a deep learning approach, the authors outline a global canopy height map at 10-m resolution combining publicly available optical satellite images and space-borne LiDAR and show that only 5% of the global landmass is covered by trees taller than 30 m.

    • Nico Lang
    • Walter Jetz
    • Jan Dirk Wegner
    ArticleOpen Access
  • Analysis of tropical reef fish communities across 35 Pacific islands identifies predictable energetic resource-driven relationships between depth and biomass of different trophic groups of fish on reefs without local human impacts, but changes in these relationships for human-populated islands.

    • Laura E. Richardson
    • Adel Heenan
    • Gareth J. Williams
    ArticleOpen Access
  • Between 2000 and 2015, reclamation for cropland in China undermined gains in wildlife habitat and the ecosystem services of water retention, sandstorm prevention, carbon sequestration and soil retention by 113.8%, 63.4%, 52.5%, 29.0% and 10.2%, respectively.

    • Lingqiao Kong
    • Tong Wu
    • Zhiyun Ouyang
    Brief CommunicationOpen Access
  • Taphonomic experiments and analyses of fossil feathers reveal that while fossil keratins (formerly known as α-keratins) found in fossil feathers are likely artefacts of fossilization, corneous β-proteins (formerly β-keratins) can survive moderate thermal damage and persist over hundreds of millions of years to inform understanding of feather evolution.

    • Tiffany S. Slater
    • Nicholas P. Edwards
    • Maria E. McNamara
    Article
  • This study provides a cell atlas of the sea lamprey brain based on single-cell RNA-seq and in situ sequencing data and includes comparative analyses with other vertebrates that reveal key features of the ancestral vertebrate brain as well as traits that arose later in evolution.

    • Francesco Lamanna
    • Francisca Hervas-Sotomayor
    • Henrik Kaessmann
    ArticleOpen Access
  • Remote sensing often detects higher vegetation greenness for croplands than for forests, despite forests having a greater leaf area. This study shows that this is an artefact of shadows caused by forest structures and explores how to correct for this when interpreting global vegetation change data.

    • Yelu Zeng
    • Dalei Hao
    • Min Chen
    Article
  • Translocation of pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) females and eggs from the Netherlands to Sweden facilitates adaptation to changing phenological conditions, highlighting the importance of dispersal as well as plasticity and standing genetic variation in evolutionary responses to environmental change.

    • Koosje P. Lamers
    • Jan-Åke Nilsson
    • Christiaan Both
    Article
  • Sampling the viromes of vertebrates, arthropods and plants on an island ecosystem shows that viral transmission between species is strongly affected by phylogeny but less affected by predator–prey relationships and that generalist viruses pose the greatest zoonotic risk.

    • Rebecca K. French
    • Sandra H. Anderson
    • Edward C. Holmes
    ArticleOpen Access
  • Using aqueous microdroplets to study reactions in the reverse tricarboxylic acid cycle (rTCA), the authors show rapid carbon fixation through reductive carboxylation reactions at ambient temperature, without requiring enzymes or metal catalysts, suggesting that microdroplets might have facilitated a non-enzymatic version of the rTCA cycle in prebiotic carbon anabolism.

    • Yun Ju
    • Hong Zhang
    • Jie Jiang
    Article
  • Using occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the authors show that the global species abundance distribution of 39 taxonomic classes of eukaryotes is best fit by a Poisson log-normal distribution.

    • Corey T. Callaghan
    • Luís Borda-de-Água
    • Henrique M. Pereira
    ArticleOpen Access