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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Through analyses of ancient and modern human genomes, the authors show that previously reported Holocene-era admixture has masked more than 50 historic hard sweeps in modern European genomes.
A combination of analysis of plasmid diversity in the gut of hospitalized patients with experimental evolution shows that the evolution of plasmid-mediated antibiotic resistance involves a trade-off between antibiotic resistance levels and bacterial fitness.
Analysis of a dataset of the morphology of more than 250,000 adult birds of 105 species over a 30 year period across North America reveals changes in body size and relative wing length over time and with relation to latitude, elevation and temperature variation.
Multiple factors contribute to the independent evolution of the same adaptations in nature. This study quantifies parallel evolution among species of Timema stick insects and shows that the degree of parallelism is determined by shared ecology and genomic background.
The authors report genetic, archaeological and stable isotopic data from two late Palaeolithic individuals in Britain, from Gough's Cave and Kendrick's Cave. The individuals differ not only in their ancestry but also their diets, ecologies and mortuary practices, revealing diverse origins and lifeways among inhabitants of late Pleistocene Britain.
Analysis of genomes in a phylogenetic context reveals a 350-million-year-old homomorphic sex chromosome in molluscs, probably maintained by regulation of reversible sex-biased genes and sex chromosome turnover.