Volume 1 Issue 12, December 2017

Adaptive certification is the best remaining option for the trophy hunting industry in Africa to demonstrate sustainable and ethical hunting practices that benefit local communities and wildlife conservation.

The application of a species-extinction model allows improved determination of the timing of phenological events, and increases the breadth of data types that can be mined and compared in phenology research.

Phylogenetic data infer temporal clustering of immigration and re-diversification of Australian lizards and snakes, suggesting that climatic and geological changes may have precipitated re-assemblies of this vertebrate group.

Biocultural approaches combining local values, knowledge, and needs with global ecological factors provide a fruitful indicator framework for assessing local and global well-being and sustainability, and help bridge the divide between them.

Intragenomic conflict arises when a gene functions for its own good to the detriment of the rest of the genome. Here, the authors propose a general theory of intragenomic conflict and discuss its implications to organismal maladaptation and human disease.

Niche modelling and aDNA reveal increasing prevalence of black horses in post-glacial forests, suggesting they became increasingly adapted to these habitats.

Nutrients important for plants were more abundant and evenly distributed in the Cretaceous period, probably due to the presence of large herbivorous dinosaurs, than in the Pennsylvanian subperiod, which had no tetrapod herbivores.

The structuring of soil into distinct aggregates is a key element in biogeochemical cycling. Here, a meta-analysis reveals a strong positive effect of soil biota on soil aggregation, with the largest influence coming from bacteria and fungi.

Accurate understanding of plant litter decomposition is vital to inform Earth system modelling. Here the dominant hierarchical model for plant litter decomposition is found to be wanting, and revisions are suggested.

Assessing the relationship between sea temperature and distributional range for 1,790 shallow-water marine species, the authors find that realized thermal niches increase with latitude, despite decreases in geographic range size.

Winter sea ice is thought to provide critical grazing habitat for overwintering Antarctic krill. In contrast, here the authors show that the pack-ice zone is a food-poor habitat, but does serve as an important sheltering ground for developing larvae.

Islands are thought to be an area of high concern in terms of invasive species impact. Here a global, network-oriented analysis of invasive species on islands characterizes this threat.

The stability of ecological networks depends on both inter- and intraspecific interactions. Here, the authors show that intraspecific self-regulation is a necessary feature for the stabilization of empirical and theoretical networks.

A statistical-estimators technique adapted from extinction research is shown to estimate accurately the timing of the onset and cessation of flowering, using sparsely sampled data from a variety of historical and contemporary sources.

Field, remote sensing and ecohydrological modelling estimates provide a framework to determine ecosystem sensitivity to climatic shifts, as well as expected patterns in the amount of precipitation that ecosystems can effectively use.

Phylogenetic analysis of behavioural data across all living mammalian orders suggests the earliest mammals were nocturnal, and other modes such as cathemerality and strict diurnality did not arise until the end of the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic.

Poor fossil records impede testing how Cenozoic climatic perturbations have affected the assembly of many regional biotas. Here, the authors use molecular phylogenetic data to show mid-Cenozoic restructuring of Australia’s lizards and snakes.

A global species-level phylogeny of palm fruit size and species distributions reveals that frugivory-related traits in combination with geography and the movement behaviour of frugivores can influence the speciation of fleshy-fruited plants.

Munias are small birds that underwent a rapid radiation in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Here, the authors show that the unique colouration of each species was generated by introgression and selection of ancestral genetic variation at a few relevant genes.

Simulations of protein evolution under purifying selection for thermodynamic stability show that amino-acid substitution rates can be predicted from biophysical dynamics and epistatic interactions that result in near neutrality.

Fungi of the genus Armillaria include devastating forest pathogens that cause root rot disease in many plants. Sequencing genomes and transcriptomes of several species, the authors reveal the genetic basis of dispersal, multicellular development and pathogenic mechanisms in Armillaria.

In spiralians (molluscs, annelids and platyhelminths), division of cells in the early embryo follows spiral geometry and cell fate is defined in early development. Here, the authors find spiralian-specific TALE genes that are essential for specifying cell fate.

Accessory loci are shown to have similar frequencies in diverse Streptococcus pneumoniae populations, suggesting negative frequency-dependent selection drives post-vaccination population restructuring.

Leishmania donovani is an important human pathogen. Here, the authors show that aneuploidy turnover and haplotype selection are two mechanisms by which L. donovani adapts to environmental fluctuations inside the mammalian host.