Reviews & Analysis

A quasi-experimental impact evaluation quantifies reduced forest loss, avoided social cost of emissions and potential carbon-offset revenue associated with India’s designation of protected areas as tiger-conservation reserves with enhanced protection.

A new genetic study provides strong support for the view that our species evolved from exchanges between several ancestral populations in different African regions.

Human genetic material can be inadvertently captured and enriched from environmental DNA samples. This has both legal and ethical implications for future research.

Gene–environment interactions have been found to shape ageing plasticity in the muscle tissue of migratory locusts through adaptive changes in lipid metabolic processes.

Machine-learning-based prediction of splicing in extinct hominin species highlights the effect of natural selection on splice-altering variants and reveals phenotypic differences with modern humans.

For a long time, the ecological niche concept was less popular for microbes than for other organisms. A new proxy for the ecological niche breadth of a microorganism, based on the variability of the communities with which it associates, enables investigation of the correlates of being a social generalist or social specialist.

Unlike other North Pacific killer whales, Southern Resident killer whales have failed to thrive despite decades of conservation. Genomics combined with long-term observational records reveal inbreeding depression as a compelling explanation.

A mathematical model of eco-evolutionary dynamics estimates different birth rates of cells at the periphery of a tumour versus its centre, giving insight into locally stable evolutionary mechanisms that arise as a result of boundary-driven growth.

A large-scale field study finds that different bee species experience different levels of risk from pesticides, depending on how much land is farmed within their foraging range. For bumblebees and solitary bees, more seminatural habitat means less risk from pesticides, but this is not true for honeybees.

A study of plant–pollinator networks in a fragmented island landscape in China finds that habitat edges might not be bad for biodiversity.

Laboratory-quantified spatial memory and subsequent free-ranging movements show how learning about space and establishing familiar areas increase fitness in pheasants.

Analysis of regional-scale pollen data from southeast Australia that span the entire Holocene epoch reveals that plant functional diversity has been highly variable in time and space. A functional perspective on palaeoecological data helps us to better understand the current climate–biodiversity crisis and to predict future changes.

Comparative analysis of human and macaque brain transcripts together with experiments in mice and in a cortical organoid model show the de novo emergence of a hominoid-specific protein-coding gene implicated in brain development. The evolution of RNA nuclear export signals enabled a new protein to become translated from an ancestral long-noncoding RNA locus.