Volume 1 Issue 4, April 2017

Editorial

  • Editorial |

    Exploring the challenges and opportunities for research and policy afforded by South America's extraordinary biodiversity.

Correspondence

Comment & Opinion

  • Comment |

    As peace consolidates in Colombia, can biodiversity survive development? We discuss challenges and opportunities for integrating forest biodiversity conservation into developing, war-dilapidated economies of post-conflict regions, paving the way for a green economy and climate resilient society.

    • Brigitte Baptiste
    • , Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez
    • , Victor H. Gutierrez-Velez
    • , Germán I. Andrade
    • , Pablo Vieira
    • , Lina M. Estupiñán-Suárez
    • , Maria C. Londoño
    • , William Laurance
    •  & Tien Ming Lee

    Collection:

  • Comment |

    Despite projections of a severe extinction event, a window of opportunity is now open for a mix of policies to avoid biodiversity collapse in the Cerrado hotspot.

    • Bernardo B. N. Strassburg
    • , Thomas Brooks
    • , Rafael Feltran-Barbieri
    • , Alvaro Iribarrem
    • , Renato Crouzeilles
    • , Rafael Loyola
    • , Agnieszka E. Latawiec
    • , Francisco J. B. Oliveira Filho
    • , Carlos A. de M. Scaramuzza
    • , Fabio R. Scarano
    • , Britaldo Soares-Filho
    •  & Andrew Balmford

    Focus:

Features

  • Feature |

    As the line dividing human and wild habitats becomes thinner, we might be brewing the world's next big pandemic. Zoonoses are diseases that are naturally transmitted between animals and humans, and a new project aims to predict their occurrence.

    • Karl Gruber

News & Views

  • News & Views |

    Physical complementarity among trees in the use of vertical space increases productivity due to species-specific differences and plasticity in crown architecture.

    • Bernhard Schmid
    •  & Pascal A. Niklaus

  • News & Views |

    Cost–benefit analysis suggests that the costs of de-extinction could imperil conservation of extant biodiversity in many cases. But there is also an ethical dimension to this debate that cannot be ignored.

    • Ronald Sandler

  • News & Views |

    A global analysis finds that tectonics, climate and mountains have jointly shaped the evolution of the world's terrestrial biodiversity into distinct biogeographical regions.

    • Alexandre Antonelli

Reviews

  • Perspective |

    Ecological interactions typically vary across both space and time. Here, the authors outline a framework for incorporating multiple layers of complexity into ecological networks, and discuss their potential applications and future challenges.

    • Shai Pilosof
    • , Mason A. Porter
    • , Mercedes Pascual
    •  & Sonia Kéfi

    Collection:

  • Review Article |

    A full understanding of speciation requires the integration of knowledge at the macro and micro evolutionary scales. Here, the authors discuss the developmental processes associated with variation within plant species and morphological innovations that promote speciation in plants.

    • Mario Fernández-Mazuecos
    •  & Beverley J. Glover

    Collection:

Research

  • Article |

    Genomic data from over 100 populations of Timema stick insects are used to show the transition from an early phase of speciation involving localized genetic regions to later stages involving genome-wide differentiation.

    • Rüdiger Riesch
    • , Moritz Muschick
    • , Dorothea Lindtke
    • , Romain Villoutreix
    • , Aaron A. Comeault
    • , Timothy E. Farkas
    • , Kay Lucek
    • , Elizabeth Hellen
    • , Víctor Soria-Carrasco
    • , Stuart R. Dennis
    • , Clarissa F. de Carvalho
    • , Rebecca J. Safran
    • , Cristina P. Sandoval
    • , Jeff Feder
    • , Regine Gries
    • , Bernard J. Crespi
    • , Gerhard Gries
    • , Zach Gompert
    •  & Patrik Nosil

  • Article |

    As populations evolve in a constant environment, the rate of adaptation decreases. Here, experimental E. coli populations are used to show that global epistasis reduces the effect size of beneficial mutations as evolution proceeds.

    • Andrea Wünsche
    • , Duy M. Dinh
    • , Rebecca S. Satterwhite
    • , Carolina Diaz Arenas
    • , Daniel M. Stoebel
    •  & Tim F. Cooper

  • Article |

    Restoring degraded food webs is a major conservation challenge and different approaches have been used. Here, modelling is used to show that restoring species together rather than sequentially leads to faster and less variable ecosystem recovery.

    • Jameal F. Samhouri
    • , Adrian C. Stier
    • , Shannon M. Hennessey
    • , Mark Novak
    • , Benjamin S. Halpern
    •  & Phillip S. Levin

  • Article |

    Tracking vegetation change in sub-Saharan Africa between 1992 and 2011, the authors reveal contrasting patterns in woody cover between drylands and humid zones, with decreases in both areas associated with high human population growth.

    • Martin Brandt
    • , Kjeld Rasmussen
    • , Josep Peñuelas
    • , Feng Tian
    • , Guy Schurgers
    • , Aleixandre Verger
    • , Ole Mertz
    • , John R. B. Palmer
    •  & Rasmus Fensholt

  • Article |

    Terrestrial animals can be classified into distinct biogeographic regions, but less is known about what shapes these global boundaries. Here, the authors identify geological and climatic factors that determine the separation of realms through time.

    • Gentile Francesco Ficetola
    • , Florent Mazel
    •  & Wilfried Thuiller

    Focus:

  • Article |

    The distinctive mammalian middle ear evolved by separation of the primary jaw joint from the mandible, requiring breakdown of Meckel’s cartilage. Here, genetic and pharmacological manipulation of mice and opossums is used to mimic transitional forms found in Mesozoic mammals and gain insights into middle ear evolution.

    • Neal Anthwal
    • , Daniel J. Urban
    • , Zhe-Xi Luo
    • , Karen E. Sears
    •  & Abigail S. Tucker

  • Analysis |

    Marine species distributed along environmental gradients may experience large-scale heterogeneity in ocean physicochemical conditions. Here, the authors develop an index to account for this variability in studies of responses to ocean acidification.

    • Cristian A. Vargas
    • , Nelson A. Lagos
    • , Marco A. Lardies
    • , Cristian Duarte
    • , Patricio H. Manríquez
    • , Victor M. Aguilera
    • , Bernardo Broitman
    • , Steve Widdicombe
    •  & Sam Dupont

  • Article |

    Comparative transcriptomic analysis of mitochondria-related organelles across Metamonada, a group of anaerobic microbial parasites, identifies a potentially new class of organelle in which ATP and hydrogen production are decoupled.

    • Michelle M. Leger
    • , Martin Kolisko
    • , Ryoma Kamikawa
    • , Courtney W. Stairs
    • , Keitaro Kume
    • , Ivan Čepička
    • , Jeffrey D. Silberman
    • , Jan O. Andersson
    • , Feifei Xu
    • , Akinori Yabuki
    • , Laura Eme
    • , Qianqian Zhang
    • , Kiyotaka Takishita
    • , Yuji Inagaki
    • , Alastair G. B. Simpson
    • , Tetsuo Hashimoto
    •  & Andrew J. Roger

  • Article |

    Domesticated animals are great models to understand how diversity is generated. Here, the authors show that patterns of cranial shape variation in domestic pigeons mirror cranial variation in birds in general, suggesting that selection on conserved developmental mechanisms can generate tremendous diversity.

    • Nathan M. Young
    • , Marta Linde-Medina
    • , John W. Fondon
    • , Benedikt Hallgrímsson
    •  & Ralph S. Marcucio

    Collection:

  • Article |

    Environmental metabarcoding of soil samples suggests that protists comprise the greatest eukaryotic diversity in tropical rainforests, and are dominated by phyla that parasitise arthropods and other animals.

    • Frédéric Mahé
    • , Colomban de Vargas
    • , David Bass
    • , Lucas Czech
    • , Alexandros Stamatakis
    • , Enrique Lara
    • , David Singer
    • , Jordan Mayor
    • , John Bunge
    • , Sarah Sernaker
    • , Tobias Siemensmeyer
    • , Isabelle Trautmann
    • , Sarah Romac
    • , Cédric Berney
    • , Alexey Kozlov
    • , Edward A. D. Mitchell
    • , Christophe V. W. Seppey
    • , Elianne Egge
    • , Guillaume Lentendu
    • , Rainer Wirth
    • , Gabriel Trueba
    •  & Micah Dunthorn

  • Article |

    Isolates of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii adapted to a decade of chronic warming in outdoor mesocosms have higher competitive fitness than ambient controls, due to greater photosynthetic capacity and reduced susceptibility to photoinhibition

    • C.-Elisa Schaum
    • , Samuel Barton
    • , Elvire Bestion
    • , Angus Buckling
    • , Bernardo Garcia-Carreras
    • , Paula Lopez
    • , Chris Lowe
    • , Samraat Pawar
    • , Nicholas Smirnoff
    • , Mark Trimmer
    •  & Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

  • Article |

    Analysis of multiple species of sponge-dwelling, snapping shrimp reveals pair-forming, communal and eusocial species, suggestive of evolution of eusociality via a ‘family-centred model’, paralleling insects and vertebrates.

    • Solomon Tin Chi Chak
    • , J. Emmett Duffy
    • , Kristin M. Hultgren
    •  & Dustin R. Rubenstein

    Focus:

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